Organizing for the auteur: a dual case study of debut filmmaking

AbstractIn this article, the question of the auteur is transferred from film criticism to filmmaking processes in order to analyze how production practices are organized. By doing so, the article shifts the focus from understanding the concept of the auteur from a textual perspective to a sociological analysis, where the concept is understood as a social resource that enables and structures certain kinds of interactions. Accordingly, the article investigates how the ideal of the auteur is invoked in a dual case study of the making of two Danish debut films. In both projects, the directors embody the motif of the project and the auteur notion thereby comes to be activated as an organizing device. The analysis shows that putting the auteur notion to use to organize the making of films has various consequences, not all of which are intended and beneficial.