Studying the auteur

In the first paragraph of the article, “making films asian american” Projasky and Ono state, “few continue to write of the auteur as the originary and privileged location of a text’s meaning.” They continue, saying that, “film studies scholars now avoid modernist auteurship studies”. I had not previously connected the idea of the death of the author to films before, but looking back, it seems odd I took an entire class on the autuer and not once did the problem of the author arise. The class was titled “American Film Directors: Kubrick, Cassavetes, and Altman” and revered the three. The class asked us to become familiar with the tropes they were using and the ideas were putting into their films. We became very aware of the mark of the director. Despite this, the idea that the author is actually somewhat of a troubling idea did not occur to me, my classmates, or our professor from what I could tell. In a way, dealing with the author became as straight forward as Kubrick is a genius, just look at his use of the Steadicam tracking shot... As KF talked about in class today, pretty much all of the authors of, “Authorship and Film” agree that the author is important, but given the ideas of Barthes and Foucault, they all write about the author with some degree of confusion. Looking back on the class on Film Directors, I wonder how much richer our understanding of the topic would have been if we had thought about some of the more subtle aspects of the idea of the “auteur”.