Over the course of the disciplines history, there have been many debates on the status of the "cinema". From the beginning, cinema was subjected to a high-art prejudice of literary tradition since it addresses the masses and is broadly considered simple entertainment. The prevailing belief of filmmakers and cinema-writers up to the 1950s was that both the quality and art-status of cinema were supposed to be provided by the films content. Auteurism was born in France in resistance to such a belief. Rather than being grounded in a full-fledged theory, auteurism has been simply defined as an...