Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Notes On The Politics Of The Auteur: Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, And The Spectator, Michael Perreault

Honors Theses

What is an author, and what does it matter? Questions about authority in the cinema have been the subject of debate since the late 1940s, when Alexandre Astruc posited the notion of the camera-stylo in France. A slightly reductive understanding of the term “auteur”—a term that Cahiers du Cinéma would later adopt—states that, with the shadow of the World War II era of censorship still looming in the 1950s, the many individual voices of the cinema needed to be both heard and promoted. Namely, the director should be regarded as (and should consider his or her primary objective to …