What accounts for auteurism’s longevity? Well, for starters, it does have some practical use, helping viewers to zero in on films they might want to watch.

Anyone who has ever seen a film by Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Cocteau or Tim Burton knows this. Their oeuvres are not only highly consistent but also highly idiosyncratic in look, in sound, and in theme, among other things. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with Hitchcock’s style, identifying his films is as easy as spotting a Vermeer or an El Greco, a phenomenon The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane has actually sought to measure: “I once asked a friend who had never seen Marnie to guess the director. Skipping the opening credits, I started a stopwatch on the first shot—Tippi Hedren’s clutch bag under her arm as she walks along a station platform. ‘Hitchcock,’ he said, and I checked the watch. Twelve seconds.”

AUTERISM BY GRAHAM DASELER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 30

In January 1954, a little-known twenty-one-year-old film critic named Francois Truffaut published a very important article with a very plain title, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema. The author’s primary objective was to …