Cop seminar: Auteurship and avant-garde

In this seminar we talked about authorship and avant- garde. To be honest i do not remember that much from it, because it did not find it interesting and it was bit cofusing. We talked about how we can define and understand auteurship and what makes an auteur. Te Auteur Theory Developed in response to Hollywood cinema and the criticism that American films are anonymous products of the studio system and the culture industry. Truffaut – ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’ (1954) – attacks French tradition in which director is seen as simply adding images to a preexisting literary scenario

Auteur = author

Film theory associated with French critic Andre Bazin and writers for Cahiers du Cinema in 1950s

Suggests that great film directors are artists in their own right on a par with great novelists

Films made by a true auteur display thematic consistency and artistic development through time.

An auteurist director was recognised as having a unique signatory imprimature across a canon of work, that marked out an aesthetic and thematic terrain, and offered a coherent view of the discourses fundamental to its understanding and “art”’ Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship.

And then we talked about avant-garde. 

‘The French term originally designated that section 

of an army which marched into battle ahead of the 

main body of troops (the ‘van’) but has come to be 

used in both French and English to describe 

pioneering or innovatory trends in the arts, and 

especially music and the visual arts.  It originates in 

the work of utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon 

(1760 – 1825) who applies it to the elite of artists, 

scientists and industrialists who will be the leaders 

of the new social order’ Macey, D. (2000), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London, Penguin Books. The idea of avant-gardism implies that progress is always the result of a rebellion against an entrenched establishment.