ABSTRACT
As a result the question becomes the extent to which it is desirable to foreground the director and to privilege his or her contribution over and above the other participants in the production process, including those involved in its financing, its distribution and, crucially, in its reception. Further, the longevity of films outside the immediate contexts of their production and their subsequent translation into other media requires something more than a theory of authorship if such shifts and changes are to be adequately accounted for. The proposition is that while not without its strengths, the auteur theory fails to account fully for the new ways we have of interacting with films and other media, be these questions of distribution (DVD, on-demand services, Web-based distribution etc.), or the relationship of the original film to related ancillary artefacts such as computer games, fan media, websites and so forth. Finally, while the auteur theory is productive in the ways it establishes connections within a director’s body of work, it is less successful in establishing links with other related films from other directors. The danger is that the intricacies of the ways in which meanings are circulated in culture along with the complexities of media consumption are marginalised by a view of films that is predominantly concerned with the question of authorship.
