The Film Auteur: Angles of Vision

An accessible introduction to the concept of the auteur (author) in film theory.

Robert Kolker and David Wyatt provide readers with a history of auteur theory, from its initial origins in France in the late 1940s as an outgrowth of the cinematic theories of the French film critics and theorists André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, to the canonizing work of American film critic Andrew Sarris in the 1960s. After a streamlined account of the various postwar renaissances in film - the shock of ＂Neorealism＂, the ＂New Wave,＂ and ＂New American Cinema＂ - the book features detailed examinations of the work of forty-eight auteurs, including F.W. Murnau, Jean-Luc Godard, Ida Lupino, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujirō Ozu, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Pedro Almodóvar, and Jane Campion. In its focus on a limited number of auteurs, this book aims to offer a map of representative figures rather than an exhaustive or comprehensive list, providing an informative entry point to the study of the auteur.

Essential reading for any students of film theory and film studies, particularly those taking classes on the auteur.

Robert P. Kolker is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is the author/editor of several books on film including The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), The Cultures of American Film (2014), The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016), Film, Form, and Culture, 5th edition, with Marsha Gordon (2024), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of his Final Film, with Nathan Abrams (2019) and Kubrick: An Odyssey, with Nathan Abrams (2025).

David Wyatt is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is author of several books, including, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (1999), Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (2010), Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion (2015), and Afterlife: The Strange Fate of Literary Remains (2025).