PopMatters review of The New Ponorgraphers' 2005 album Twin Cinema (which is an excellent album, by the way):
Regardless of the fact that he works in an entirely different medium, Newman appears to be settling into the parameters set forth by Sarris's 1962 "auteur theory". Sarris's thesis (itself an extension of François Truffaut's politiques des auteurs, published in a 1954 edition of Cahiers du Cinéma) argues "over a group of films a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature". Later, in his book The American Cinema, Sarris would offer further clarification: "Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully."
Like Alfred Hitchcock's storyboarded mise en scène or John Ford's pitting of solitary figures against the expansive backdrop of Monument Valley, Newman's giddy music, drunk on its own effervescence, is such a stylized idealization of pop's possibilities that it can't be anything but auteurism.
Keep in mind this is about an album. Apparently, because it's called Twin Cinema, that's a license to go wandering into French cinema.
