AUTEUR

Any reference to female auteurs – especially those perceived to be working within the so-called ‘mainstream’, whether in terms of the financial parameters or use of more ‘conservative’ forms – runs the risk of reproducing a prestructuralist, romantic discourse, according to which the auteur is an empirical being able to transcend industrial, commercial or even collective limitations, in order to individually ‘author’ her films in transgressive and innovative ways. This conceptualisation of film authorship, along with the category ‘auteur cinema’, is mainly associated with a series of publications that appeared in the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, according to which a film director is an individual agent who controls the entire creation process of the film. Referring to this concept of film authorship, John Caughie remarks that the intervention and critical revolution of the politique des auteurs ironically involved the simple installation of a figure that had dominated the other arts for a long time: the romantic artist, who is individual and self-expressive (1981: 10). According to Caughie:

It is no surprise that feminist film theorists, much as the literary critics before them, did not readily adopt these tenets. The defenders of the avant-garde film practice criticised auteur theory for its almost exclusive focus on commercial cinema, which left little space for the exploration of experimental filmmaking – the field that boasted the highest number of female directors from the 1970s onwards.