An Explanation of Auteur House for “Nexus” Readers

It’s now six issues into the Nexus print run for 2010.  Time for some unashamed self promotion.  Have any of you been wondering why completely out of context articles on various film stars of yesteryear crop up on a weekly basis in this magazine?  Does the name Auteur House resonate with you at all?  Who the hell is an auteur when he’s at home, anyway? 

This is the column that I probably should have penned in the first week of term, a retrospective explanation of what’s been going on for all those puzzled by what Louise Rainer, Loretta Young, James Cagney, Bill Murray and Frank Sinatra have in common.

The answer is that they all feature in movies stocked by Auteur House, an independent DVD rental store located at 555 Victoria St.  We are small, specialist players that turn the conventional wisdom practised by the franchises on its head.  Those guys spend lots of money buying multiple copies of the latest Hollywood pap.  We spend what little cash we have on a diverse array of classics, silent movies and world cinema.  They and their staff have never heard of Rainer, Young and Cagney; we champion them.

The word auteur is a French term meaning author.  The auteur theory was invented by some Gallic critics and aspiring filmmakers to justify their love of particular directors.  It claims these folk are the authors of a film in the same way as a novelist is the sole creator of a book.

We at Auteur House are literally named.  Well, perhaps we don’t house the auteurs themselves - most of them, like the ‘decomposing composers’ in Michael Palin’s most underrated Monty Python song, are dead - but we do have an awful lot of their art. Over 4,000 titles at last count.

One of the rationales for our existence is that Hamilton has two tertiary institutions that teach media studies.  The University of Waikato is one of them.  So, to misquote Mae West like everybody else, why don’t you come us and see us some time?