Louis CK is the world's first auteur filmmaker
reddit.com
reddit.com
> In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through studio interference and the collective process.
The American Heritage Dictionary describes 'auteur' as:
> A filmmaker, usually a director, who exercises creative control over his or her works and has a strong personal style.
The author acknowledges that "filmmaking is where auteur theory first got developed and still where it feels the most comfortable and dominant", so knows there are already auteur filmmakers, which makes it impossible to accept the qualifier "first".
Sticking "auteur filmmaker" into Google newspaper search shows that Woody Allen, Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Cronenberg, Yahoo Serious and others have all been given that label. These all fit the above description.
Thus, this piece only makes sense if 'auteur' is being used with some alternate definition. But that was never given. Nor does it make sense to re-use a well-known term. Nor is there any reason why these filmmakers should not deserve the term 'auteur'.
For that matter, there are any number of films which were made completely free of the studio system. "El Mariachi" comes to mine, which "helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s." Or Andy Warhol's films, which were avant-garde films completely outside of the film industry. "Sleep", for example, was created as an "anti-film."
The author uses the waiver "I am far from a film historian", but I am likely even less of a film historian, and still know enough to refrain from saying "world's first auteur filmmaker", so can only assume it's meant as clickbait, and the waiver disingenuous.