ABSTRACT
Who is the author of a television or cinematographic work? When talking about authorship in cinema and television, three main theories can be identified, named for this research as: solo authorship, the “death of the author” and joint authorship. After disproving the plausibility of the two first theories, the purpose of this research is to bring to light the possibility that cinema and television are joint works. Moreover, it is of interest to show that nowadays there is a possibility of this vision being the most indicated for the authorship of works made by several people. For this, two case studies were directed, one in television and another in cinema, that could show that the professions and departments more readily associated with technical work, connected to bureaucracy and financial issues, also have a significant artistic contribution to the point of influencing the work’s language, aesthetics, narrative and diegesis. As such, for the television case study, the production department was chosen and, for the cinema one, the producer and executive producer. A summary will provide a historical review about authorship, from Plato to postmodernist theories, to find the best notion of what an “author” is for this study.
