The Student Auteur: A Remote Learning Retrospective
Published January 7, 2022
Emma Thomas
Whether you are a student of filmmaking or just a fan of cinema, it’s likely you have come across the hotly-debated term auteur at one point or another. It’s usually used in reference to film directors. It’s not only a fancy-sounding word — the actual word used to describe an artist carries a lot of weight. The title of auteur means that someone’s work carries an original artistic signature. But the subjective stamp of originality is not the only controversial aspect of auteurism; this title also credits creative success to an individual over a collaborative collective.
This is problematic in the context of filmmaking because it contradicts the concept of production as an inherently collaborative process. But all discourse aside, I am here to give a postmodern interpretation of auteurism and apply the concept to our current generation of student filmmakers — how we have been forced to create work independently during remote learning, and how this has empowered us to think in the spirit of an auteur. This mindset is being cultivated at UC San Diego, and I want to examine how working under the pandemic informed new approaches to student filmmaking and hypothesize how we can keep this emerging spirit of auteurism alive as we reintegrate back into collaborative production moving foward.
Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Unlimited (2007) exhibits his unique visual style of monochromatic mise-en-scene and one-point perspective.
Let's start by getting familiar with the basics of auteurism and the legacy it carries. Literally, auteur is the French word for author. In the context of film, this is not the writer of the film but the director. François Truffaut, a French filmmaker who helped spark French New Wave Cinema in the mid-20th century, was the first to critically raise the question of potential authorship in filmmaking, beyond the writing of a script. He argued that film directors can impart their own authorship in their films through the creative control they exercise in all stages of production. By making consistent choices in visual technique or recurring explorations of specific themes and motifs, a director can create a recognizable thread throughout their body of work that can unmistakably identify a film as their own. For reference, think of contemporary directors who show distinct personalities in their films, such as Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, or Sofia Coppola.
How does this relate to us as student filmmakers? I want to abstract the concept of the auteur’s independent authorship and creative control and relate it to my personal experience in student filmmaking during the era of enforced remote learning. For the 2020-21 school year, I loaded nearly all of my required upper-division production-based coursework into three quarters. As a Visual Arts Media major, this means taking two to three production courses concurrently each quarter. Typically media production courses at UCSD require between four to eight projects throughout the quarter. In total, I made more than twenty short film projects that year. The sheer quantity of the work is not what I remember to be the most challenging, though; instead, it was the limitations placed on my creative process that proved to be the most challenging. By this, I mean the nature of what was accessible and inaccessible.
Because of remote learning, the components of collaboration and external resources were severely limited. As a result, I was left to my own devices, and I became the sole author of my work. In retrospect, I have become aware of how this shaped me into the artist I am today. I know I was not alone in this journey, as I watched my fellow peers experience the same kind of artistic awakening. Over the compounding process of independent creation, my peers and I naturally developed our own signature styles. Ultimately, I believe that due to the pandemic’s restrictions on our coursework, we were forced to streamline the process of finding our own unique voices. The result was that our films were recognizably our own.
I wanted to bring in another point of view to retrospect on this unique experience of remote learning by interviewing someone who was actively involved in guiding students through this territory of independent work. I chose a prominent lecturer in the UCSD Visual Arts department, Professor Dmitri Zurita. I believe his teaching style was imperative in helping us think outside the box to confidently create independent work. In my discussion with him, I asked him to compare and contrast the nature of student work pre-pandemic and during the pandemic.
Professor Dmitri Zurita.
“Pre-pandemic, there was a lot more focus on collaborative student work. And with collaboration, there is a lot more sharing of hierarchical values on what needs to be accomplished. And at this stage, it is really important for this type of learning to be done. With that being said, it's also important that you know how to work through all of the steps on your own, and with the nature of independent work during the pandemic, you are going through the creative and production process alone. So in a sense, it forces you to become the master of your future, because there are very few things and resources you have to rely on, so you have to put that much more thought into everything you are doing.”
I asked him to further elaborate on how this impacted our growth as filmmakers in relation to auteurism. He said:
“If we take the concept of an auteur and consider it as one individual having complete control over a work of art, that was much more present during the pandemic. My classes are guided to help you find your voice and who you want to be as an artist, and the pandemic did force that goal even more so onto a lot of you.”
I asked him to give his perspective on the unique culture of learning at UCSD; how the Visual Arts program focuses on teaching critical thinking over technicality, and how that relates to developing our own artistic voices.
“You're at a UC, which prioritizes thought experimentation over technicalities. Having a great concept and knowing how to navigate these concepts in their complexity is what takes you further as an artist, and also just as a human being moving through life. In these production classes, it’s more about critical and creative thinking, which is just as much a technique and skill in its own right.”
I feel proud to be part of a generation of filmmakers who blossomed in an unconventional mode of making art. I believe the timing of this unique situation during a critical artistic development stage will champion novel results, and I look forward to seeing the resulting legacy in myself and my peers. Perhaps it will shape the confidence we carry in our pursuit of filmmaking, and will continue to give our work an auteur quality. As we return to in-person learning and increased access to collaboration, I urge my peers not to forget what they learned during the pandemic, but rather to synthesize the power of their unique artistry by sharing and exploring it with others.