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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I think it may be worth looking into some film history: how did the director come to be the face of the movie in the first place, and the person whose creative vision is considered to be paramount, rather than an unremarkable administrator who simply got a bunch of people pointed in mostly the same direction for a while?

This is not at all my field so I can’t deliver an impromptu lecture on it; the back of my head is saying it largely changed in the US in the seventies, with a lot of influence from French New Wave films, which were very much seen to be strongly shaped by the director, rather than simply managed. I might be wrong here!

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No, you're right. Early on, the producers were considered the most important people of the film. In the early-mid 50s, French critics and filmmakers came up with the idea of ‘auterism’, saying that directors can do their own material however they see fit, instead of only adapting screenplays. Specifically André Bazin and François Truffaut were the first in this, afaict. Fellini's ‘8½’ was important in that the director decided that since the last word is his, he might as well himself be the subject of the film.

Hollywood was clued in on this in the 70s with the ‘New Hollywood’, and people like Coppola, Spielberg, Scorcese, etc. Notably though, ‘New Hollywood’ still was way more mainstream than French New Wave, IMO.

What about Hitchcock? Lang? Sturges? Von Sternberg? Welles?

Directors enjoyed top-billing prior to the articles and films by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics. While they made a huge contribution to the form of cinema, how many people really saw Breathless or read Hitchcock/Truffaut?

New Hollywood was mostly egged on by whip-smart critics with a wide circulation like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, who further elevated the director as artist in the public mind. The studios followed suit and thought they could make a buck with these prestige films, until there were too many self-indulgent flops.

> ‘Breathless’ opened in Paris ... not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters, selling 259,046 tickets in four weeks. The eventual profit was substantial, rumored to be fifty times the investment. The film's success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception ... ‘Breathless’, as a result of its extraordinary and calculated congruence with the moment, and of the fusion of its attributes with the story of its production and with the public persona of its director, was singularly identified with the media responses it generated. (Richard Brody)

Sure, but what is your point? I never said the early French New Wave films didn't do well in their native homeland.

My point stands that there were 'name' directors that excited the public long before the auteur theory.

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