What accounts for auteurism’s longevity?

Anyone who has ever seen a film by Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Cocteau or Tim Burton knows 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.

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 criticize the commercial (that is the popular) filmmakers who then dominated the French film industry. He laid into Jean Delannoy, poked fun at Jacques Sigurd, and absolutely excoriated Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, the writing team who penned such hits as La Symphonie pastorale (1947) and Jeux interdits (1952). Buried within the article, however, in a sentence that w…