Auteur Essay

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Auteur, a word originating in France in the 1940’s is a director who is the major creative force in producing a film. Auteur translates from author in French meaning the director has the same impact to a film as a writer does to a book. An auteur was not something looked at seriously until attention was brought to in the film magazine Cahiers Du Cinéma, written by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valroze. Other film makers and critics such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol all included and wrote their own articles on what an auteur is. Film critic Alexandre Astrucs thought of the principle camera stylo, which is the idea that a director uses a camera in the same way an author uses a pen. As a director oversees all visual and …show more content…

05:14 Taxi driver
39:00 Taxi Driver
38:00 Goodfella’s
94:00 Goodfella’s
00:40 The Departed
In the making of Goodfella’s, originally titled Wise Guys Scorsese worked with the author, Nick Pileggi of the book it was adapted from.
Scorsese and Nick decided to choose their favourite parts of the book to put into the movie, Scorsese says that this was the easy part, it was the voice over that was a struggle. He says that to show Pileggi an example of what he was going for he used the film Jules et Jim.
So he understood when I started pulling lines out from here and there and mixing voice-over and using stills – really all the basic tricks of the New Wave from around 1961. What I loved about those Truffaut and Godard techniques from the early sixties was that the narrative was not that important. You could stop the picture and say: ‘Listen, this is what we’re going to do right now – oh and by the way, that guy got killed – and we’ll see you later.’ (pg 151)
Some great examples of freeze frames that also use narration over the top are the shots from Goodfella’s such as:
The opening scene when the audience is introduced to the protagonist. 1:00
The scene when the main character is beaten as a child.

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