What’s conveyed by the writing, cinematography, editing, and cultural context > authorial intent.
I feel like I’ve 180’d completely very quickly on this. Storytelling is a form of communication, and taking messages from a someone that they didn’t intend to convey would be considered dishonesty, or at the very least unfair. I think Death of the Author is a useful tool, especially in cases where an author doesn’t really get the appeal of their own work (e.g. George Lucas, JK Rowling) which go to show that treating authorial intent as objective truth misses very important aspects of a work of art. But I think placing authorial intent on such a low pedestal also misses very important aspects of a work of ar. I don’t know how useful of an analytical tool this is, but if disagreement between the author and audience is a miscommunication, then we should analytically look at a work both for its intended message and its received message, which are coequal.