47 | FILM AUTHORSHIP
Auteurs and Other Myths
C. Paul Sellors
Few topics in the study of film produce controversy like authorship. Critics, historians and theoreticians have debated the most important film authors, argued vociferously about the nature of film authorship, and even questioned whether films have authors at all. Film Authorship evaluates these debates in a rigorous and accessible manner. Generously illustrated, it analyses the historical development and theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of film authorship and the auteur. It then examines recent theories of film authorship and proposes a reconceptualisation of film authorship that grounds it firmly in empirical analyses of film production.
June 2010
144 pages
June 2010
144 pages
| 978-1-906660-24-6 (pbk) | £12.99 |
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about the author
C. Paul Sellors is Lecturer in Photography and Film at Napier University, Edinburgh. His essays on film theory and philosophy have appeared in Screen, Film and Philosophy and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
reviews
'Paul Sellors not only resurrects the issue of authorship within Film Studies, he places it at the centre of a number of debates around intentionality, narrative voice and expression which are central not only to Film Studies but also to critical theory itself. He draws on traditions of debate in linguistic theory, literary criticism and philosophy in a way which is both rigorous and readable. But, for Film Studies, what makes his work distinctive within that framework is, firstly, his broadening of the horizon beyond the usual suspects of auteurism to include the avant garde and early cinema, and, secondly, his insistence that ‘any theory of film authorship must be able to account for actual production conditions and inform historical research into filmmaking'. In this way, the book poses a challenge to the rather fruitless division between ‘grand theory' and empirical scholarship.'
– John Caughie, Glasgow University
– John Caughie, Glasgow University