Friday 6 November 2015

FM3 - Small-scale Research Project

Here is an excellent resource for understanding the surrealist films of David Lynch plus links and discussion on auteur theory.

Extract
Andrew Sarris, in "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962", demanded a more detailed definition of the term, transforming "la politique des auteurs" into an auteur "theory". He proposes three premises to spot an auteur, the first is "the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value", he says "a great director has to be at least a good director". The second premise is "the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature". The third premise is a more mystic interior meaning:

"Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director's personality and his material. This conception of interior meaning comes close to what Astruc defines as mise-en-scene, but not quite. It is not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude to life. It is ambiguous, in any literary sense, because part of it is imbedded in the stuff of cinema and cannot be rendered in non-cinematic terms."

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