When the Distributor Became the Flag
The line of this map called "the flag of the auteur" is made of the question of who raises the flag. In 1951, auteurism made the director the flag. The auteurs of 1994 onwards are people you go to see by name. What happened in the 2010s is that the flag moved to the company's side.\n\nA24 was born in New York in August 2012. The name comes from its founder, Daniel Katz, deciding to start the company while driving the Autostrada A24 on a trip through Italy. This map contains a good many stories about how things get named; this may be the most offhand of them. It is a motorway number.\n\nIt began in distribution and came in time to produce. Moonlight was the first film A24 produced itself, and it took Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 89th Academy Awards. In 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once took seven — the most of the night. Both sit in this map under Auteurs Now, because what is worth writing here is not the films but the change that happened on the audience's side.\n\n"That's very A24" became a sentence people understood. There are viewers who choose what to watch by the name of the distributor without knowing the director's. This resembles what MGM or Warner held during the studio system, and yet it is the inverse. Those house styles came out of the mould of mass production; A24's comes out of the accumulated residue of leaving things to the filmmakers. The one who delegates becomes the flag — a first, in this line of the map.