ABSTRACT
Few in contemporary film studies continue to write of the auteur, or filmmaker, as the originary and privileged location of a text’s meaning. The advent of poststructuralism, the publication of key essays in film studies and in critical theory generally about the death of the author, and the emergence of spectatorship, reader-response, and audience studies have rendered it difficult (for some), if not impossible (for many), to emphasize (or even include) the author in any discussion of an author–text–reader triad. Despite the fact that film studies scholars, for the most part, now avoid modernist auteurship studies, in this chapter we study the author-function in relation to one film as a way of questioning the complete abandonment of the study of the author. Through analysis of media discourse about an independent film [Shopping for Fangs (1997)] and about the film’s writers/directors (Quentin Lee and Justin Lin), and through analysis of our own unpublished interviews with Lee, we argue that the study of cinema profitably includes an understanding of the filmmaker’s role as social subject. We also argue, however, that this critical focus makes sense only if it 264includes an examination of the author-function, or the production of the auteur in various public discourses about a particular filmmaker and her or his film, including discourses produced by the filmmaker herself or himself.
