Film theorist Tom Gunning suggests that, influenced by poststructuralist ideas of textuality, film studies abandoned the concept of authorship before its possible critical applications had been thoroughly investigated or exhausted. Gunning’s book on Fritz Lang’s films uses authorship to think about modernity, textuality, and technology in cinema in ways that had not been sufficiently resolved. If his statement could be true for a canonical European director, it is most certainly true for the work of Arab filmmakers, whose own relationships to modernity have often been left opaque. This paper uses the examples of Moroccan artists Moumen Smihi (b. 1945) and Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) to address the paradoxical situation of film authorship in Arab cinema scholarship. While auteur studies (along with national cinemas approaches) have driven many chapters in English-language collections on Arab cinema, there are nevertheless few extensive treatments of Arab filmmakers’ work in critical and theoretical frames that exceed the biographical. Yet there are compelling ways in which author-based studies might yield insight into Arab cinematic and intellectual traditions of modernism and their relation to projects of modernity in the Arab world. Smihi’s films, mostly produced outside the predominant national production context of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM), are part of an artistic oeuvre that also includes essays and translations of international film theory; in his case, authorship is closely connected to the development of an artistic avant-garde that refuses dominant nationalisms. Bouanani’s work, which spans feature films, documentary and short films, poetry, novels, film historical writing, and drawing, is receiving belated recognition after his death. The critical deployment of an auteur focus allows an historically nuanced study of Bouanani’s development of a “vernacular modernism” that combined Moroccan popular traditions with international modernist principles. In a production environment where co-funding is the norm, much contemporary Arab cinema depends for its very existence on financial incentives that reward the individual over the collective. Yet the examples of these filmmakers demonstrate that not all such work need be theorized as a capitulation to overseas norms. Balancing theoretical and historical arguments, the paper theorizes how some aspects of Arab film history might benefit from a critical auteurist approach. Gunning, Thomas. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London:BFI, 2000. Saghie, Hakim. The Predicament of the Individual in the Middle East. Saqi, 2000. Smihi, Moumen. Ecrire sur le cinema. Paris: Slaïki Frères, 2006.