Five Directors

This new appraisal of the continuing relevance of the auteur to film-making in French will reinvigorate debate about the historic place of auteurism in French and European cinema. Auteurism - the idea that a director of a film is its source of meaning and should retain creative control over the finished product - has been one of film studies' most important paradigms ever since the French Nouveau Vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the adoption of the term auteur by Andrew Sarris. Through the work of five important contemporary directors working in the French language, this book looks into how the meaning of 'auteur' has changed over this half-century, and assesses the current state of Francophone auteur cinema. Its five dense and wide-ranging introductory essays to the films of Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke and Francois Ozon combine French philosophical and sociological approaches with methodologies from the Anglo-American fields of gender studies, queer theory and postmodernism. This volume will be of interest to researchers working in French and European cinema and to students of film studies, European cinema and French and Francophone studies, as well as to film enthusiasts.