However in the late 1940s Lindsay Anderson and others wrote that "films were an artistic expression of the director" in a magazine called sequence. None-the-less, this new wave of thinking was proposed in an effort to improve French cinema, yet its thesis spread throughout the cinematic world, bringing about numerous debates between different critics from around the world. The original meaning of authorship in film theory is that the director must portray a reoccurring style throughout a vast body of work, thus proving that the director is the sole author of the finished product, which in turn has created a pantheon of best directors. This kind of thinking, (the artist being the sole author of their work), has only been thought of since the renaissance period, where artist would gain full credit for their foresight and ingenuity. Previously to this God was the soul creative source of all beauty, and the artist was merely a craftsman to God.
The notion of authorship was not applied to Hollywood at first, as it was well known that directors were grossly overshadowed by the producers and stars of this time. Famously the feud between the classic auteur (as he was referred to by the Cahier critics themselves), Alfred Hitchcock, and the producer David Selznick, portrays the tight leash that directors in Hollywood where under at the time. Although prestige productions where made, they where usually literary adaptations, such as "Romeo and Julliet" (1936), directed by George Cukor, thus the creative source of the film was attributed to the writer, who in this case was William Shakespeare. Ian Cameron wrote in the journal Movie, "Hollywood films are not so much custom-built as manufactured. The responsibility for them is shared, and the final quality is no more the fault of the director than of such parties as the producer, the set designer, the cameraman or the hairdresser. Only by happy accident can anything good escape from this industrial complex." This again portrays how some critics felt about Hollywood, seeing it as in industry, rather than a place where true art could be created. This would suggest that if a film does not have an autonomous leader than ultimately it will lose its consistencies in recurring characteristics of style which act as the director's (the auteur) signature (Andrew Sarris).
The importance of authorship in film theory is evident, yet the concept has been appropriated, attacked and reformulated in many different ways. Andrew Sarris, an American critic who wrote for a radical journal of the avant-garde, Film Culture, was one to reformulate the ideals within film authorship. He thereby developed the auteur theory, which built upon the ideals of film authorship devised by the Cahier critics, and his fundamental notion throughout his work in auteur theory was the refusal to separate the artist and their work, which led to a search for a "meaning coherence" of the two.
This development on authorship coincided with the wave of "new cinema" found in Hollywood and the collapse in popularity in the world of art cinema, which was restricted to a small group of art houses. Sarris wrote, "The auteur theory values the personality of a director precisely because of the barriers to its expression. It is as if a few brave spirits had managed to overcome the gravitational pull of the mass of movies. The fascination of Hollywood movies lies in their performance under pressure. Actually no artist is ever completely free, and art does not necessarily thrive as it becomes less constrained". This is to say that if a director can still be impressionable under such strict constraints, then this director is more influential than a director who is under no constraints at all.
Incidentally, due to the unfashionable depreciation of art cinema, it could be argued that this was a turning point in Hollywood cinema, thus described as "new cinema", where directors would have much more control over their films in the mainstream market of Hollywood. Interestingly and significantly, the director's name was hereby used to help market the film exhibitions, i.e. Samuel Fuller's "The Big Red One" (1980) and John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962). However, one director who stood out from the rest was Alfred Hitchcock, who not only created impressionable films but concentrated on shaping the film's exhibition. He gained control of the release dates to five of his films. As well as this rare privilege, he had a say on how his films would be exhibited. Notions such as no one being allowed to enter the cinema after the film had started, critics having to watch the film along side the audiences. He even showed exhibitors a short training film on how to exhibit the film, which in the times of the "classic Hollywood era" would have been laughed upon by producers.
