Auteur

An auteur (; French: [otœ?], lit. 'author') is an artist, such as a film director, who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work; in other words, a person equivalent to an author of a novel or a play. The term is commonly referenced to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation. Auteurism originated in the French film criticism of the late 1940s as a value system that derives from the film criticism approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc—dubbed auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris. The concept was invented to distinguish French New Wave filmmakers from studio-system directors that were part of the Hollywood establishment, and has since been applied to producers of popular music as well as to video-game creators.