Auteur Theory

The word Auteur comes from the french word for author and in film criticism, the Auteur theory states that a director's film reflects his/her personal creative vision. The theory was brought about by Francois Truffaut in 1954, and has been influencing film criticism ever since. However the film the theory was more famously developed a few years later through the writings of 'The Village Voice' by Andrew Sarris. Sarris used auteur theory as a way to further the analysis of what defines serious work through the study of respected directors and their film.

When the auteur theory was being developed, Alfred Hitchcock was frequently acknowledged as the exemplar for the theory. Hitchcock's film are mark by is mastery in mystery and suspense, with his use of camera views, elaborate editing and us of music to build suspense. Other key elements of his style are: cameo appearances in his films, elongated suspense scenes and representations of the psychological.




Clip from Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (1960)

The Auteur theory now appears to apply to music 
videos as well as films:

Harold/Hype Williams born 1970 in Queens New York is a music video director.

Hype Williams has created many music video's for artist within the R'n'B community such as Jay-Z, 2Pac and Missy Elliott.

A signature style used by Williams throughout the vast majority of his videos (shot mostly with cinematographer John Perez) was the Fisheye lens which distorted the camera view around the central focus.

Another "signature style" involves placing shots in regular widescreen ratio, while a second shot is split and placed in the upper and lower bars.

Since 2003, Williams has adopted a signature style combining a center camera focus on the artist or actor's body from the torso upward and a solid color background with a soft different-color light being shown in the center of the background, so as to give a sense of illumination of the background by the foreground subject.

Examples of Hype Williams work...
1:' I Wonna Know What Love Is' Mariah Carey 2009

2: 'So Sick' Ne-Yo 2006

3:'Getting Jiggy Wit It' 1997 - Example of early work.