Is the auteur dead?

is the auteur dead?

what do you think guys?

Never existed in the first place. You can't create a movie by yourself. Not a good one, anyway. And all of those who are upheld as "auters" literally utilized thousands of people to make their movies, and also utliized the judgment of those people without exercising direct control on every person involved. Autuer theory is nonsense! There is no defending it.

blockbusters keep bombing the same money grabbing tricks dont work anymore. there's a change coming

They were killed off after Star Wars and every studio was like "HEY WAIT A SECOND WE HAVE TO FIND OUT HOW THAT WORKS AND NEVER DEVIATE FOR MAXIMUM MONIES"

There's no such thing as a big budget movie being made by actual filmmakers with vision outside of Luc, Bay and Snyder

Auteur theory literally advocates for fascism. Let that sink in. If you like auteur theory you are LITERALLY a fascist.

that one is

what I am talking about is the essay "The Death of the Author" (written by the man in the OP pic) and whether the concepts in it apply to film.
The essay basically claims that when analyzing a book the intentions of the writer do not matter.
Does/Should it apply to film?

No, that's fucking retarded

OP doesn't even grok auteur theory to the point where he can discuss it without referring to the text. Doesn't that kind of put the nail in the coffin of auteur theory? OP is the auteur of this thread and cannot manage to do anything without the help of both the text, and other participants. This is amazing. Screencapped this shit.

There are certain auteur filmmakers that studios won't fuck with. I think Inherent Vice, in all its confusing glory proves that Paul Thomas Anderson has carte blanche to do whatever the fuck he wants, same with the Coens, Tarantino, Linklater and a few others but it's certainly a dying art.

please elaborate
please read this:

IT does apply, but Roland Barthes has had numerous rebuttals in critical theory.

You can never completely remove the author function -- even when you completely deconstruct it, it's still necessary on some level.


I won't go into detail but the end result is basically that historical-biographical still has no place in critical theory, and the authour has a diminshed role... but we still use the authour function to organize compare works with the same original.

So it's less about the authour or auteur himself, and more about cross-textual analysis.

Embarrassing.

I thought this place was full of knowledgeable experts but it seems it's only chock-full of surface-level morons at best. Fuck you all.

Maybe you should've clarified that in the OP you dope

It applies to everything but its rubbish.
The feelings that you get are real but if they are different from what author wanted to achieve then its either your misinterpretation or author was a fucking hack.

Barthes, just like many french fags is simply trying to destroy the notion of order, authority, creation, transform stable world into a flow.

I thought that having this OP image combined with calling something dead would be enough for non brainlets

Let me give an example:

When analysing the plays, no one really gives a damn who William Shakespeare actually was, or what the details of his life were or if he even really wrote the plays.

The authour (BIll Shakespeare) doesn't matter, but the Authour FUNCTION (the collection of works attributed to the same origin) does.
Auteur theory only applies indirectly. It doesn't claim that the Auteur is the sole person responsible for the work, only that the authour function can be applied to all of his works as having the same origin.

You've gone too far. Calm your analysis.

>I thought being as laconic as possible would be conducive to discussion

Why would you invoke Shakespeare for this hypothetical when there is a legitimate question of authorship? Are you having a laugh??

>I need people to spoonfeed me sentences

>I am only capable of 4 word sentences to start a discussion

THe author's intent doesn't matter because either

A) He communicated sucessfully and his intent is apparent from textual analysis

or

B) He did not communicate successfully and therefore his intents have no relation to the text that you actually end up reading.
The most important point is that the only source you need is the text itself, and that any other considerations are irrelevant.


So we shouldn't be combing through his notes, biography, history, interviews, overhead conversations, the making of DVD --- all of that is irrelevant. IF you're analysing a text or a film, the only thing you look at is the text or film.


The rebuttal to this is that works grouped together under the same author function can possibly constitute a larger overall work and it's therefore fair game to analyse them in relation to each other.

I am if he's not.

>I am not capable of understanding 4 letter sentences. I need everything to be explained to me in as many simple words as possible.

I'm calm.
With the death of author comes the death of a craft, technique and of the artists experience.
Basically its a cry against rules.

SPecifically because we know pretty much nothing about shakespeare the man him and yet the authour function (shakespeare the authour) still exists.

If there were no authour function separate from the man, then that would not be possible.

>"derp. discuss."
>omg why are you asking me to be more specific

I tend to agree with you

>I think a full sentence with context is equal to the word "derp"

Then you agree with Roland Barthes. That was his whole point.

Roland Barthes was the vanguard of new criticism in the early 20th century. His entire project was to tear down all the bullshit of 19th century victorian historical-biographical criticism.

In Victorian universities, they'd spend more time reading about the authour's life than reading the literature itself and Barthes thought that was abject fucking bullshit.

if you kill the author, then all you have is the shallow text itself. you lose all the context spanning through his work. you should always consider the author, anything else would be selfish.

Not him but I think it's a decent point, Shakespeare's intentions don't really matter to most that enjoy his work.
While I don't fully agree with Death of the Author I think that's a strong argument for it.

>context spanning through his work
That's generally available through structuralist criticism rather than historical-biographical criticism.


Look. Barthes was important, and so was New Criticism, but we've taken what we need from his work and moved on to structuralist, post structuralist and postmodern criticism now. Come on, it;s 2017, not 1917.

but what if there are things derrived from textual analysis that seem well thought out but are otherwise implausible if you take the creator into account?

if the Star Wars 'Ring Theory' was actually intended then it might've been an impressive display of recurring themes, but the reality of the matter is that anyone with half a brain knows that George Lucas is too much of a hack to have done that on purpose.

Ahh, you're talking about accidental artistry. Where a jackass just happens to walk into some kind of thematic unity. The truth is, it's actually pretty rare, and happens in outsider art more often than not.

Usually it's a half-competent or incompetent artist unknowingly acting out his subconscious obsessions (See Manos: The Hand of Fate) but just as often it's just wishful thinking and over-eager scholars stretching a pet theory to make it work without adequate support.


At the end of the day though, even an incompetent hack still has meaning baked into his text. Maybe it's not what he intended. Maybe it's not very good... but it's there, and a real scholar knows that text is text is text and it's all worth analysis -- eventhe backs of ceral boxes. It's all fair game -- but you don't go outside the text.


Not going outside the text itself is still a pretty cornerstone piece of critical theory. The only trick we've played in recent years is expanding what we consider to be part of 'the text'

Surely that way of critical thinking is flawed if value can be accidentally ascribed without considering the creator?
The prequel trilogy would justifiably be considered to be better than it actually is because of it.

You're engaging in some magical thinking here regarding creators.


Here's an important rule to hold yourself to when looking metaphysics or epistemology: Never confuse and object with its origin.


We do this because an object is NOT its origins. It's not anything but itself. If the wind and rain eroded a rock face into the shape of a human face and upon analysis of this authour-less sculpture I found it meaningful and beautiful... where is authorial intent here? It simply doesn't matter.

Also, your comment about making it "better than it actually is" irks me.


It can't be better or worse than itself -- it is what it is.

Death of the author is post modernist hogwash. If you're a post modernist kys desu

Actually it's modernism and predates post-modernism by about 30 years. Thanks for trying though.

it doesn't even apply to books, as a rule of thumb discard anything said by a french writer in the last century.

It's retarded and you should kys for falling for such stupid nihilistic philosophies.

It's post-modernist thinking either way. The intent of the author is critical when analyzing any literary work. Death of the Auteur crap is literally HEADCANON.

Kieslowski died like 30 years ago

Wow, accrued a lot of (You)s here. Not going to respond to any of them, but this might just be my personal best.

Sure but in this scenario it would be more like a god used the wind and rain to create the rock face, you'd be able to see beauty in it but you'd be unable to determine if this god even meant for it to look like it did.
The value of art lies partially in the ability of the artist to create such art in the first place, it makes the piece of work and the artist more respectable knowing that the artist knowingly and intentionally created a great work of art.
To me the value in something like Ring Theory is completely lost because George Lucas is not the kind of person to have done that intentionally. I think the reason we speculate meaning and subtext in scenes and stories is because we are trying to figure out what the author was trying to communicate

>I think the reason we speculate meaning and subtext in scenes and stories is because we are trying to figure out what the author was trying to communicate


Is and was that the motivation for some? Sure. But the real question is whether that *ought* to be our motivation.

There's a flip side to this: we can't and shouldn't ignore what a text actually means in deference to what someone *wants* it to mean -- even if that person is the author that made it.

But can it even mean anything if there will most likely always be multiple interpretations? That way there will never be consensus.
It's the author's intention that guides us to the [correct] meaning.

>16 authors
>49 works

There's also the theory that the reader constructs both an author and a reader, and that the psychic construct of what the reader believes of the author's intent is more important than their actual intent itself.

>3 (You)s is his personal best

>But can it even mean anything if there will most likely always be multiple interpretations?
That's a regressive argument. We can say the same thing about what we agree the authour's intentions to be.

Either way it still doesn't connect the two distinct things:

A)What the actually authour intends

B)What actually got written on the page.

You can study A all you want but you can't pretend that it's B. As an avenue of study, it's certainly not invalid in its own right -- but it doesn't tell us anything about the text. -- which is the thing that Death of the Author is mainly concerned with.