Global Auteur

Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

As we plunge into the second century of cinema, this terrific collection of essays reckons with not only the persistence of auteurism but its resurgence in the context of global cinema. Framed by the editors’ superb introduction, The Global Auteur features a brilliant roster of scholars whose essays, ranging across an admirably broad range of filmmakers, finally helps us to understand the work of art cinema in our era of digital reproduction., Once a dramatic new critical perspective and later declared a moribund leftover of romanticism, auteurs and auteurism today have become—as this outstanding and wide-ranging collection reminds us—more vibrant and complex than ever before., This ambitious collection fills a glaring gap in studies of cinematic authorship in the twentieth-first century. It was about time for the creative contribution of the film director to be reassessed from a global perspective, away from hierarchical canons and in light of the radical changes entailed to film production by the widespread use of the digital technology. In the age of social media, where the individual merges into the general and anyone can ‘author’ a film, the role of the battered but resilient auteur may be, as the editors rightly say, more crucial and relevant than ever.

Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media and co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature into Korean (both 2013). Jeremi Szaniawski is the editor of Directory of World Cinema: Belgium and the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (both 2014), as well as the translator, into French, of Thomas Elsaesser’s and Malte Hagener’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2011) and Alexander Sokurov’s V tsentre okeana (2015).