ABSTRACT
Authorship seems to involve a degree of creative control over the project. In cinema, auteur-theory postulates that the director is the author of a film, since they are in control of most aspects of production and are therefore responsible for the film’s aesthetic properties. A useful place to start looking for authors is by focusing on whoever it is who deliberately endows the work with its aesthetic properties. Perhaps another way of putting it is that to be a co-author is to be partly responsible for making something a work of the art-kind that it is. What it is to be an author of a work in a given art-kind is determined by the appreciative and creative practices that characterize that art-kind, so that authorship in cinema may not look much like authorship in literature or theatre.
