Calligraphy of the Image reflects on the figure of the director-author in cinema: how the transformations of this concept function as a seismograph that registers the ups and downs of theory and criticism between the 1950s and 1970s.

At the time, the "politics of the auteurs" of Cahiers du cinéma was a typically avant-garde strategy of rupture that defined a modern perspective for approaching films. It was arbitrary, contradictory and bellicose. Always passionate, often enriching, sometimes unfair. However, very quickly, this provocative attitude was caught by conventions until it ended up accommodating itself in that genre of "cultured and tasteful films" called "auteur cinema".

But if the "politics of the authors" retains any value, it is because it established the basis for an alternative way of conceiving the practice itself: it pointed out a divergent path towards another type of cinema that, in some way, it itself came to found. It should be admitted that our thinking about films is still moving in the wake of that commotion.