The Global Auteur ─ The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema

Once heralded and defined by the likes of Francois Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism and politically isolated, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy, even as they seem to have vanished from the mainstream altogether, are still present in the works of these important filmmakers, in a matrix of sorts. Therein the filmmakers under scrutiny can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Including world-renowned scholars, such as Fredric Jameson and Thomas Elsaesser, covering a range of global auteurs, such as Lars von Trier, West Anderson, Lee Chang-dong and Claire Denis,The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the figure of the film auteur for the global age.

Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE. He has worked and published on theoretical issues in diverse modes, areas, and periods of cinema. His current research on global cinema explores a variety of global phenomena around cosmopolitanism, terrorism, network, ecology, and catastrophe. Jeong received Korea's Cine21 Film Criticism Award (2003), a Domitor Essay Award on early cinema (2007), and the SCMS Dissertation Award (2012). He wroteCinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (2013), co-translated Jacques Derrida'sActs of Literature in Korean (2013), and is co-editing A Companion to Korean Cinema.

Jeremi Szaniawski received his PhD in Film and Slavic Studies from Yale University, USA. He currently teaches in the department of film and visual studies at Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, Republic of Korea. He is the editor ofDirectory of World Cinema: Belgium and the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox(both 2014), as well as the translator, into French, of Thomas Elsaesser's and Malte Hagener's Cinema and the Senses (from the English, 2011) and Alexander Sokurov'sV tsentre okeana (from Russian, 2015). His current research interests include contemporary Polish cinema as well as an updating of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of/through cinema to the 21st century. Szaniawski is also an independent, award-winning filmmaker.