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So we all reflect on our own personal experience and we all experienced our auteur presentation and genre pleasures and expectations are a daily experience for us all.
So do we really find auteur theory useful in our experiences of film?
well, being clever film studies dudes we know the names of the directors of the movies we watch, but what does that mean?
Is it simply boy's train spotting data or does it have some function or use?

Do we go" OOOoo this is not like the last Coen Brothers' film"

Does Richard go "Scorcese's lost the plot" as he winces through "Aviator"
remembering the glories of "Goodfellas"

Does Paddy drool when he hears that Almodovar has got a new film out, is he still trying to see the developmental links 'twixt "All about My Mother" and "Talk to her"

Do bears have balconys?

More questions?

Have we got used to directors commentaries and interviews as DVD extras and has it changed our perception of their position in the industry?

or

Is it just them wanting to be auteurs?
self promotion?
enlarging the brand?

Is Spielberg a brand? Scorcese? Lucas? Woody Allen?

Is Nathan Nunthorpe a brand? never heard of him? then he isn't.

Or

Is it about Film Studies as a discipline, a subject as worthy of study as English Lit is?
Is it just about upping the cultural capital of film by making connections with practices common in the world of literature and the visual arts. Shakespeare is an author and Picasso, Leonardo, Beethoven even Damien Hirst are the authors of their works and are accorded immense status and after all we have to study something if we are to be a proper academic subject.
We therefore need history and as many theories as we can get and auteur theory will do nicely and then we can develop a canon, a top ten,of undoubted "greats" and argue about it fiercely and draw up criteria and argue about them fiercely too. And then we can argue about whether auteur theory has any validity.

So.
It's about marketing certainly, it's about cultural capital and it's about power and potential independence for the director.

But

Do all these director dudes have signatures or do they simply have skills?
Is Titanic the work of an auteur? many would argue so, but then the parameters, the criteria, are not exactly hard and fast in this post-modernist age.

Is Auteur really a rather silly term used rather glibly by some French dudes to make a point and increase their potency in an industry which is essentially collaborative?
'cos if they are authors they are not the same sort of author as Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters or James Joyce 'cos they actually sat down on their lonesome and wrote the books what they wrote.........

Would William Shakespeare have taken literary advice from an intellectual giant like Tom Cruise?
well Spielberg and the other authors have to pretend to listen....
Is this relevant?
But don't get me started abusing film theory though abusing film theory .is quite respectable too.
what did the fella say?

Cinema needs theory like film negative needs scratches...
No but,yes but, no but....

Well Paddy has got that off his chest and he feels better for it..........

Does he feel any rosier about genre theory?

He is resigned to man the classifier, man the taxonomist, he suspects it's gender hardwired and little can be done about it therefore.
It can be a guide to mild or extreme autism in men and as such it is a useful signifier even index.
In the case of men like Charles Darwin it can lead to greatness of thought but then he was about connections too and that makes all the difference.
Arguments about whether Cool Hand Tom was really a western bring on his extreme need to leave the building. He knows that such discussions, like the that was never a penalty discourse, are futile attempts at male bonding at best.
But he would concede that classification systems can be revealing as long as the train spotting urge can be controlled and the connective imagination brought into play.

Shakespeare's Polonious is the man to fear with his tedium of genre classification:

tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.....

and let us not forget Monsieur Voltaire who found Shakespeare inadequate because he did not follow strictly the generic rules of tragedy.

My uncle John,God rest him, had a classification system for eejits, most of us were "prime" eejits, some only "sad" eejits and all politicians were "feckin" eejits so the urge can afflict sound men too, but with him it attained real subtlety.

Were I conversing with him in the spirit world and spoke of westerns he would say ,"Jaysus Pat if you mean cowboy fillums say so, what class of a smart arsed term is western?"

So in the exam ?

You talk about:

Your fascination with certain directors, how it affects your cinema going decisions, your DVD buying decision, the choice of the films you pick up off television.

Directors are a sort of guarantee for you of both style and enjoyment.

As your DVD collection has grown director's commentaries and interviews have become more important to you as part of the DVD package.

I invariably watch a full director's commentary across a whole film and often find his interpretations push my own aside or significantly modify them. However I find also that with some director's commentaries and interviews a strong bullshit detector should be switched on.
Here,of course, you should supply examples....

This, in turn, has lead you into greater insights into what a director does and how he/she shapes a movie; it also offers access to directorial decision making and meaning making.

You refer to your auteur study and say it offered an opportunity to review and look closely at a large body of directorial output which tended to convince you that in the collaborative effort which is movie making the director's input is paramount.
Here,of course, you should supply examples....

It also revealed how despite directorial intentions some times films just don't "go where the director intended" and end up compromised.

Lately you are finding that, in choosing your viewing, the director is becoming more of a factor than genre, subject matter or stars but not in every instance...you still watch junk occasionally and there are still films where you do not know or care who the director is....

Jane Feuer identified three approaches to Genre

Aesthetic, Ritual and Ideological

The aesthetic includes all attempts to look at genre as systems that permit artistic expression (here genre theory meets auteur theory) The aesthetic approach also includes attempts to ascribe relative values to the merits of films be looking at whether they fulfil or transcend the conventions of their genres.

The ritual approach looks at the relationship between producers and audiences and sees genre as an exchange whereby a culture speaks to itself. (through cycles perhaps)

An Ideological approach is more concerned with genre at the level of text and see genres as instruments for perpetuating and disseminating the dominant ideologies of a society. (Hegemony) So this approach might look at the way some crime films, while seeming to celebrate anti-establishment behaviours, (such as drug trafficking, stealing) actually peddle conventional, capitalist values i.e. Make money it will make you happy. Being rich makes you respected, being poor makes you dispensable.
One could also argue perhaps that such films would have a cathartic effect on audiences enabling them to deal with anti-social impulses (enjoy witnessing violence for example) in a way that is safe both to the individual but also, and perhaps more importantly, to society at large. Any discussion of ideology and genre must perforce consider whether the messages and values inherent in genres are therapeutic or indoctrinating in their effects.

All fat chimps use rusty spoons happily devouring earthy nutritious meat balls.

The problems associated with Genre Theory

Films do not need all the characteristics of a genre to be placed in the category – which leads to definitions being rather fuzzy. If a film involves a monster is that enough to make it a horror film or does it have to be deployed in a particular way within the narrative framework? If the characters in a musical sing but don’t dance is it still a musical? What if they dance but don’t sing?

Genres change over time does that mean we can’t make valid comparisons between films from different periods? And what about if the users (audiences) have changed over time? Can we compare horror made for adults and horror made for teens? Certainly when the critics have done it they have sometimes been dismissive of teen films (the slasher/body-count movies don’t hold up to a comparison with Psycho or Jaws they say) So we see how genres may gain or lose relative status over time. Is it fair to compare a crime film which was made as a B movie to a big budget heist movie? If genre doesn’t allow comparisons then what is its critical value? So a film’s place in history is important, genre is historically specific. We can’t easily compare a film from one era with a film from another because not only have methods of production and audiences changed, but the definitions of genre itself have changed over time.

An ideological perspective on genre might encourage one to look for a society’s dominant values being expressed through film. This concentration on genre as a tool of hegemony may mean that some theorists dismiss some films as irrelevant because they don’t support this approach. Such films may however have been important to audiences. (“Cherry Falls” for example toys with the notion that slasher films are concerned with punishing their teen-characters’ sexual activity) This area of debate raises issues around whether genres have a therapeutic effect (enabling audiences to work through the social issues of the time) or an indoctrinating effect (reproducing and re-enforcing the dominant values of society.)

Regardless of all the above, there remains a problem of ‘extension’ when we define a genre –just how far should that definition extend? At what point (if ever) does a sub-genre become a genre in its own right? The breadth or narrowness of taxonomies/labels isn’t just a ‘one off’ issue but it continues to be a fluid issue as genres change over time.

Normativism too is a problem. It is at the heart of the aesthetic approach to genre i.e. Critics might determine how ‘good’ a film is based on its relationship to the genre norms e.g. ‘Goodfellas’ might be viewed as a worthy Gangster film because it challenges the genre norms by using a dual perspective, or The ‘Godfather’ films may be seen as classics because they do exactly the reverse and offer the stylish, some might say definitive presentation of generic conventions. Either way the normative approach to genre is essentially paradoxical it requires that one knows what a genre is and which films fit into that genre before the study can begin and this necessarily limits one’s research.

The myth that has most consistently dogged genre theory is that a film fits into one genre. This monolithic approach is clearly a nonsense and audiences and producers instinctively known it, but it remains implicit in a lot of genre based criticism. (Largely one suspects because making valid comparisons with other films within one genre is difficult enough without trying to juggle the many variables and try to find valid insights with multi-genre movies. It is simpler to work on the premise that genres are monolithic!) Likewise one suspects it is perhaps a simplification of actuality that has led to the biologism of genre. Certainly the premise that genres have (life) cycles and its implicit assumptions that those cycles will operate in similar and inevitable ways is misleading. Genre cycles are as diverse as the social and economic periods in history that bring them about.