To begin, I’m going to quote from the Wikipedia entry about auteurs, in order to establish what I mean when I call David Lynch an auteur.

The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers, or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable style, because they (a) repeatedly return to the same subject matter, (b) habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme, (c) employ a recurring visual and aesthetic style, or (d) demonstrate any combination of the above. In theory, an auteur’s films are identifiable regardless of their genre. The term was first applied in its cinematic sense in François Truffaut’s 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.”

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