Author cinema

The author's cinema is the cinema in which the director has a preponderant role, giving an exclusively his own vision to his own or someone else's script; he carries out his work regardless of the pressures and limitations that the cinema of the big commercial studios implies, which allows him greater freedom when it comes to capturing his feelings and concerns in the film. In auteur cinema, the author is normally identifiable or recognizable by some typical traits in his work.

Auteur cinema is one in which the director expresses his particular vision, not only of the seventh art, but of the world in which he lives, or the one he wants to criticize or praise; or, it gives a sui generis treatment to other works or topics widely used or in fashion in the mass media (television, internet, cinema, theatre...). They are almost always films that only a few understand, accept and like, but they always invite reflection and criticism; In addition, many other authors use them as a paradigm and endure over time in the collective consciousness of the viewer.

In the 1960s, a group of French film critics, belonging to the magazine Cahiers du cinéma and inspired, among other things, by the 1948 text "The Feather Camera& #3. 4; (Stylo Camera) by Alexandre Astruc, questions begin to be raised about the role of the "auteur" ("director") within a film. These critics opposed the ideas of Italian neorealism, which proposed that the cinematographic author par excellence was one capable of capturing reality as it was, without manipulation of any kind, allowing the viewer to interpret this "reality"; and to fix his own conclusions. However, for this group of critics, among whom were Jean-Luc Godard, with At the end of the escape (1960); François Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959); Alain Resnais, with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and Claude Chabrol, among others, cinema had to propose a vision reality and reveal the presence of an author-director responsible for the projected images. In this sense, the filmmakers of the so-called French nouvelle vague used the cinematographic medium to express opinions and ideas in each of their works.

These authors would later move from text to action, filming short and feature films, within the current called nouvelle vague. His interest in films by directors living in the United States (whether they were American or not, since a large part of them were European or of European origin), especially Alfred Hitchcock, who despite being British, made a good part of his filmography in the USA; allow them to support their thoughts about what for them was "author cinema" reconsidering his despised cinematic talent and creativity.

However, the expression "author cinema" brings with it multiple problems of interpretation. On the one hand it invites the historicist thought that the cinematographic author has a linear development of his career, which makes him predictable in relation to his previous works (this is not necessarily true) and on the other hand the expression "cinema of author" brings together a series of filmmakers outside the system of large American film production companies, immediately becoming an "author" to anyone belonging to this "external" group.

He had an important influence on Asian cinema, consolidating figures such as Nagisa Oshima with films such as Violence at Sunset (1966), Cruel Youth Stories (1960) and The Empire of the Senses (1976).