Homay King a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Jeffrey Berg Fellow at the Townsend Center, addresses in her dissertation, Effaced Figures: A Reconsideration of Authorship in the American Cinema, 1930- 1970, a frequently asked (and sometimes unanswerable) question: “who is the real author of a film?” With a focus on the work of five directors –Alfred Hitchcock, Josef Von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Andy Warhol, and Robert Frank–King undertakes a reconceptualization of the category of author within film studies, arguing that what she calls, with Jacques Lacan, “full authorship” is a “creative act in the field of vision that is attuned to the social, performative dimensions of moving images."