Narrative Theory - Intertextuality & Auteur Theory

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INLFUENCE

- If following these theories means it will be impossible by the time I finish my film opening that there are no intertextual references to other texts, not just to films but TV or literature
- Also it will be incredibly helpful for my production skills, and it is important to apply research for my evaluation on conventions
- While I am going to be doing all the tasks, I won't be the only author of my text 

The term was first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva. 

Two definitions, mainly focusing on literature

The website Cambridge Authors' definition:

At its most basic level intertextuality acknowledges the fact that no text is an island. All texts are intertexts in so far as they refer to, recycle and draw from other pre-existing texts. The term was coined by the French critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva in 1969. By inventing it, Kristeva was proposing a new theory of reading in which meaning is not communicated between the writer and reader directly but is instead produced when the reader recognises the text as a 'mosaic of quotations' of previous texts, which she then decodes in order to make sense of the work. This means that the production of meaning in a text takes place on both horizontal and vertical axes:

The Cambridge Introduction To Narrative's definition :
(mainly focusing on literature)

The condition of all texts, including narratives, as composed of preexisting texts. Intertextuality can be distinguished from "allusion" and "imitation" as an inevitable, rather than a necessary selective, condition of texts. It is based on the assumption that we can only express ourselves through words and forms that are already available to us. In this view, the work of even the most original artists draws throughout from the work of predecessors. The power of such work must lay in the way 

From the website The Electronic Labyrinth a lengthier definition, also mentioning Kristeva and mentioning Barthes

Derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. In essays such as "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," Kristeva broke with traditional notions of the author's "influences" and the text's "sources," positing that all signifying systems, from table settings to poems, are constituted by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems. A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. "[A]ny text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (66). 
Intertextuality is, thus, a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. It subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient, hermetic totality, foregrounding, in its stead, the fact that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts; they are, in effect, palimpsests. For Roland Barthes, who proclaimed the death of the author, it is the fact of intertexuality that allows the text to come into being:

Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. ("Theory of the Text" 39).

Thus writing is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.
Intertexts need not be simply "literary"--historical and social determinants are themselves signifying practices which transform and inflect literary practices. (Consider, for example, the influence of the capitalist mode of production upon the rise of the novel.) Moreover, a text is constituted, strictly speaking, only in the moment of its reading. Thus the reader's own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation also form crucial intertexts.
The concept of intertexuality thus dramatically blurs the outlines of the book, dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts. For many hypertext authors and theorists, intertextuality provides an apt description of the kind of textual space which they, like the figures in Remedio Varo's famous "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," find themselves weaving:

a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (Pynchon 10)

The same website's definition of Barthes's "Death of the Author" concept.

So there are no true authors of texts, it's all one interlinked collective. This can be compared to criticism against the auteur theory, which state that saying a director has all the control of the production of a film is taking away the credit from the rest of the crew, particular the editor, improvisations that can be made by actors and the influence that distributors have due to their financial monopoly.