Pros And Cons Of Steven Spielberg

WHY STEVEN SPIELBERG DESERVES
TO BE CALLED AN AUTEUR

Steven Spielberg is an American movie director and producer. He is the director of multiple hugely succesful hollywood blockbuster movies like “Jurassic Park” and Jaws. He also directed science fiction movies like Close Encounters of the “Third Kind” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” . These are only some of his over 40 movies of which some are mentioned by film critics among the best movies ever made, for example “Schindler’s List” is rated number 9/10 on “The Best Movies of All Time” list by the American Film Institute. In this essay, I am going to argue if Steven Spielberg deserves to be regarded an auteur. Not all directors are auteurs in my opinion. An auteur is a director who has

In 1954, Francois Truffaut a french film critic published an article entitled “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”. His article was about his concern of the current state of French cinema. Truffaut stated that French cinema was suffering from a “tradition of quality”. In 1957 another French film critic, André Bazin, wrote an article called “La Politique des Auteurs.” According to Staples, it was in this article that auteur theory was first discussed. Bazin said that auteurism involves “choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference” (Caughie). What he was trying to say was that he believed that a director’s personal perception should be seen in more than a few of their films. He also stated that the basis of the auteur theory was that the director must be the author of the film. As referred before, a film should display a director’s own vision. In order to be seen as an auteur, a vision needs to be seen in more than a few films. As Caughie clarifies, an auteur director’s films are “likely to be the expression of their individual personality. This personality can be traced in a thematic or stylistic consistency over all or most the director’s films”. What Caughie states here is that auteur directors have personal styles and themes that can be identified through analyzing the form of their films. A director’s films need to be persistent in this sense and their

There is no rule that something popular can not have artistic value but due to the mass production world that we live in. There is the impression of if something is widely known or widely owned, it loses its value. Spielberg in some sense suffers from his own popularity, he is most likely the most known director worldwide and one of the few who the average movie audience can identify by name and face but still he has no word that describes his work like other directors have like Hitchcockian or Kubrickian. Spielberg is too popular for his own good he is so influential that his critics do not grasp why he does not make high art movies that are only watched and understood by a small group of people. Some of his critics state that he does not use enough of the cinematic power and influence he holds in his hands. I argue that some movie crtitics who have negative thoughts about his work have an issue with his popularity in the sense that everybody has a comment. Spielberg’s movies are so widely prominent that the critics who usually just appeal to artistic movie watchers, suddenly lose their rareness. Even the average moviegoer has most likely some view about a Spielberg movie because his movies are so extensively