I'm reading up on the actual history of auteur theory and some of the debates in the early 60s about it, and it's almost completely incomprehensible from a modern perspective. I don't know how much of this will make it in cause it's sort of a tangent but like... you've got Pauline Kael, a posting queen if there ever was one, just unleashing this barrage of invective against Auteur Theory as... commercial and anti-art because it's incapable of recognizing the talents of writer-directors working on personally motivated projects. it's genuinely bewildering and only makes sense when you put it in the context of the then-sclerotic French film industry, so her debates with American and British auteur theorists are ALREADY removed from their original context.

all of which is gonna pose a real problem for me, since I'm trying to engage with people using a definition of "auteur" which seems to mean "any director or creative generally we're mad at for saying marvel films are a bit crap"