Alex Brannan considers the current state of independence and auteurism in American cinema.

We could begin by saying that the auteur theory is, always has been, flimsy. This is to say: the question of whether a film contains a singular author is never certainly answered, yet it has been long debated, even decades before the French critics gave the theory a name. During the first three decades of the 20th century, writers bemoaned the corporatism of the new medium of motion pictures. One major impediment to film being considered an art was the perception of early Hollywood as a factory system of assembly-line production. In most cases, the studios putting on the picture were a bigger name than the screenwriters or directors. The stars had some draw, of course, but even here the studio exerted influence — the formation of United Artists in 1919 was a direct attempt to circumnavigate this influence and give stars greater autonomy by allowing them to produce their own pictures.

Even as the likes of MGM and Paramount were known entities whose pictures were driven by house styles and the direction of executives, individual filmmakers like D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin were also household names. As Rudolf Arnheim illustrated in 1935, films were “fabricated by manufacturers as commodities which are supposed to make much more money, if possible, than they cost …. Nevertheless, there used to be frequent cases in which the manufacturer left the artist in his employ a certain freedom in the selection of material and execution” (108). Here, Arnheim argues that the tension between commerce and art, at least on occasion, struck a balance in which the studio and the director formed a creative alliance: the director could carry out their original vision, and this was done in the hopes that a profit could be turned. Tim Bywater and Thomas Sobchack, in their account of the history of film criticism, concur that the silent era saw critics “conced[ing] film authorship to directors like Griffith, Chaplin, and [Buster] Keaton because of their control over every stage of film production” (56).