Image courtesy of eMoviePoster.
Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
In the late 1950s, French film theorists argued that the director was the most important
influence on a movie. Adopting these ideas, Andrew Sarris introduced the “auteur”
theory to the United States in his seminal book The American Cinema: Directors and
Directions in 1968, wherein Sarris respectfully placed the film director Cecil B. DeMille at
the second-highest rank. What the French theorists and Sarris did not mention was that
the central idea of the director as the driving force of the film was one that DeMille had
developed consciously about himself fifty years earlier – well before the term “auteur”
became a more common term.
The full article can be found at: Brianton, Kevin.Film & History; Cleveland, OK Vol. 50, Iss. 2, (Winter 2020): 20-36.
