Auteur Theory was originally proposed in 1954 by then film theorist, later to be French New Wave filmmaker, François Truffaut. “Auteur” is the French word for author, and Truffaut’s proposition was that in order for filmmaking to thrive as an artform, the director should be seen as the creative driving force of a movie, its true author. Truffaut argued that it was the director’s singular vision that brought the film to the screen, and therefore they bore ultimate responsibility for its artistic success or failure. Examples cited included Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and the theory proved hugely influential on Truffaut’s contemporaries in both Europe and America. Fellini, Kubrick, Bergman, Cassavetes, and of course Truffaut’s closest friend and contemporary Jean-Luc Godard, all took Auteur theory to heart, and the result was some of the finest, most influential and memorable films ever made, films that continue to influence and inspire filmmakers and audiences to this day. Prior to Truffaut’s argument, it was largely perceived in Hollywood that the producers and studios were responsible for getting movies made, and there was some truth to this. The eventual collapse of the studio system was spearheaded by the audience’s desire for a deeper and more emotionally invested cinematic experience, a need which had been growing since Citizen Kane, and in 1960 they got it when Godard’s independently funded Breathless revolutionized how movies were made. All of the “traditional” ways of filmmaking, from the form to the storytelling to the technical approach to the acting and the business model, was thrown out with Breathless, and cinema was never the same again.The Jean Seberg Academy auteur film school would be the first of its kind anywhere in the world. The films of Godard, Françoise Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Alain Renais and others of this movement will provide many of the study materials for the film school, alongside other great European auteurs, such as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Polanski, Sergio Leone, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Costa-Gavras, Tony Richardson, Andrezj Wajda, Andrzej Zulawski, Mike Leigh and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The American auteurs and masters of their craft will also be included, of course, notably Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and others, as well as renowned international auteurs such as Akira Kurosawa, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Kaneto Shindo.

There will also be a critical study of the early mavericks of world cinema, including DW Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, GW Pabst, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz, John Ford and Frank Capra, as well as current notable auteurs Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Gillian Armstrong, Jonathan Glazer, Lynne Ramsey, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Carol Morley. Additional study materials will include the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Alexander Mackendrick, Maya Deren, Joan Littlewood, and Derek Jarman. 

The school will not teach three-act storytelling, genre or established screenwriting techniques. Instead, students will be encouraged to study philosophy, anthropology and transactional analysis, and to learn about human behavior and interactions, thereby becoming able to better create interesting and believable characters. (As all writers should know, a well-crafted character will virtually write its own response to any dramatic situation you place them in, and each character will be distinguished by its own voice, instead of merely becoming the proxy voice of the writer.) There will be a mandatory reading list of literary works to help encourage and develop students’ individual relationships with the written word; this will include studying the stream-of-consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus.

All students will be encouraged to listen to music of all styles and eras and will undergo immersive training in sound recording and production to a professional level that far exceeds current filmmaking standards and would qualify each of them to work in world-class recording studios. They will learn cinematography using cameras specially adapted to mount vintage M42 stills lenses, meaning that they will have to learn about focal lengths and apertures and not rely on automatic camera settings. They will learn how different lenses can be employed to affect the mood of any shot, and they will learn photography to a professional standard. They will study the work of photographers Bill Brandt, Cindy Sherman, and Anton Corbjin. They will learn about lighting, how to work with actors, how to organize a set, how to set up an LLC; they will learn about payroll, insurance, copyright clearance, work permits, film permits, budgeting, funding models, grant writing, share structuring, rights management... and catering.

The film school would be a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, enabling it to offer fiscal sponsorship services to students’ projects.

Students would work as film crew on actual movie productions. Endowments would enable low-income applicants aged 18-40, with the intention to eventually open up to intake nationally and even globally.

Marshalltown

Marshalltown is in the middle of Iowa, which in turn is centered in the United States. It is just 45 minutes from Des Moines airport and one hour from Cedar Rapids airport. It is situated close to Interstates 35 and 80, making it just a few hours drive from both Minneapolis and Chicago. It has an historic link to European cinema through the work of Marshalltown-born actress Jean Seberg, whose appearance in the legendary movie Breathless kick-started the French New Wave of the 1960s, as well as launching the careers of director Jean-Luc Godard and co-star Jean Paul Belmondo.

The low cost and abundance of resources and talent in Iowa make it the perfect location for learning one’s filmmaking craft away from the glare and the pressures of the mainstream movie industry, instead providing for an immersive creative experience. As a “Right to Work” state, and relatively permit-free, students will be able to experiment with filmmaking without the crippling administrative bureaucracy that often breaks independent film productions. This will give them a more direct and hands-on work experience situation as part of a working film crew with the freedom to change roles and positions as needed in order to learn something about every key job in the filmmaking process.

Even though Iowa does not offer tax incentives to filmmakers at this present time, we have discovered through the process of actually making a feature film here that the costs of doing so are a fraction of that of even the most generously incentivized US states.