ABSTRACT
In film studies and culture at large, there is an area of discussion typically labelled ‘authorship’. In recent decades, the increasingly diverse and complex collaborations in artwork, and particularly in commercial cinema, have raised fundamental issues about the theoretical validity of any straightforward notion of ‘the author’ of a text. Within film theory, discussions of authorship became particularly prominent with the advent of auteur theory, which claimed that particular directors were to be likened to literary authors by virtue of their distinctive styles and vision (cf. discussion and introduction in Livingston, 1997). Whereas the notion of literary authors has certainly been subject to critique, the situation for film is in many ways even more complex. Debates surrounding this concept have been engendered by considerations such as the following.
