The 100 Essential Directors Part 1: Chantal Akerman Bernardo Bertolucci

Neurotic New Yorkers, Queer Mavericks, Swedish close-ups and the art of putting a microphone on every person on set are but a few of the themes explored in PopMatters first group of ten essential directors, Chantal Akerman through Bernardo Bertolucci

Chantal Akerman (1950present)

Three Key Films: La Chambre (1970), News from Home (1971), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Underrated: Je Tu Il Elle (1972)

Unforgettable: Jeanne finds herself alone in her apartment with no chores to do, so she sits and sits and sits and stares and we sit and sit and sit and stare.

The Legend: If Laura Mulvey is the queen of feminist film theory, Chantal Akerman is its messiah figure: the one to make its theories compelling and cinematic and accessible and powerful and hot rather than cold and counter cinematic. The importance of Mulveys films is in their complete dismissal of a misogynist film form in an attempt to create a specifically female gaze, as in her unwatchable masterpiece Riddles of the Sphinx, but in the same year, Akerman took it a step further with Jeanne

Dielman. In the film, made when she was just 25, Akerman co-opted the cinematic techniques of the Hollywood gaze and manipulated them to serve a female narrative, and ended up making one of the most important works in the European Cinema.

Jeanne Dielman is a widow who spends her days doing her chores, looking after her teenage son, and turning daily tricks, and halfway through the three days we spend watching her, everything falls apart methodically, building up unbearable suspense before its shocking climax. The film is about watching Jeanne as an object of the cameras gaze, and also as an object of a patriarchal society, in which her every movement is made to serve the domestic space, her clients, or her son. In the films entirely fixed shots that meander on for as long as it takes for her to complete her tasks, we watch Jeanne as she moves throughout her tiny world. Akerman creates claustrophobic suspense along with boredom, and our unconsummated desire for visual action forces us to empathize with Jeanne as her madness and our frustrated detachment elevate side-by-side. It is an overwhelming work that goes beyond feminist film theory and emerges on the other side; that is, it creates a compulsively watchable film as visually thrilling as Hitchcock and as textually complex as Godard.

Though Akerman reached her peak with Jeanne Dielman, her other works from the 1970s lend us our understanding of her intentions. During her stay in New York, Akerman exposed herself to the Anthology Film Archives and its screenings of the structural films of Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and Joyce Weiland, all of whom inspired her singular presentation of narratives in manipulated real time, best exemplified by her short La Chambre, which, like Snows best films, used real time, a fixed camera technique (here, the 360-degree pan) to present a detached viewership of a space and the actions of its inhabitants. And in her first feature, Je Tu Il Elle, Akerman adheres to a strict three-act Hollywood structure to present a young womans feminist dilemma. It is in her simplification of the familiarin both subject and techniquethat Akerman reaches the profound and unspoken. Dale Austin

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Woody Allen (1935 - present)

Three Key Films: Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters(1986), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Underrated: Stardust Memories (1980) This reimagining of8 has been unfairly maligned for everything from pretentiousness to navel-gazing. But, the thing is, even if it is guilty on both counts,

this is also among Allens most personal, and most intellectually satisfying films. And the look Charlotte Rampling gives while lying on the floor listening to an old jazz record is his second most unforgettable moment.

Unforgettable: The final scene of Manhattan (1979) The devastating ending to Allens best out and out romance is so effective because almost nothing can prepare us for the rawness of the scene. In a lengthy back and forth, we watch as Allens love affair comes to an end, and we watch as he realizes that it is entirely his fault. Nothing is sentimentalized, and nothing is stylized. The immediacy is simply riveting. As he comes to understand just what he is about to lose, he begins to beg, to plead. Why couldnt you have brought this up last week? is her heartbreaking response. The Legend: Allen Stewart Konigsberg was born in New York City in 1933. Though a rabid sports fan as a kid, and apparently a pretty good baseball player too, Allen was drawn to performing magic and comedy as a way to overcome his troubled home life. His folks fought incessantly, and he had a hard time getting his head around the idea of why anyone would ever stay in a bad marriageanyone whos seen any of his films probably guessed this? By his late teens he was writing gags for money under the handle Heywood Allen, and had become pretty successful. It wasnt, however, until he began studies in the film program at New York University that he began to develop the signature Woody Allen style that has come to animate so much of his best work: that ineffable tangle of high-art references and low-brow vaudevillia, like Ingmar Bergman by way of Groucho Marx.

By the mid-1960s, Allen was among the most successful comics on the Greenwich Village scene, had found some success as a playwright, and was busily working toward a career as a screenwriter. But, his ambition was to get behind the camera, to free himself from the influence and meddling of others. Following a few collaborate efforts in Hollywood with mixed results, by 1971, Woody Allen the writerdirector auteur had arrived. The most prolific major American filmmaker still in the business, the diminutive Allen has since crafted an astoundingly broad body of work. A student of human nature, and an obsessive chronicler of the neuroses that complicate our relationships (both to others and to ourselves), Allen has always been at his best when he could find the sweet spot where philosophy, psychology, and existential absurdity intersect.

In his most affecting filmsincluding his nearly uninterrupted run of masterworks from 1977-1992 Allen could limn the contours of a failing love affair with a humour, grace, and intelligence that remains the envy of urban auteurs the world over. Though prone to the criticism that many of his films are mere re-stagings of the same story with new titlesor, that his filmmaking style is really just a vast homage to Fellini, Bergman and other giants he admired in his formative yearsthis has

always seemed to be a misapprehension of the degree to which his films have always been, unavoidably, his own.

Allens playfulness, his audacity, and his unfailingly goofy sense of humour, lent an urbane American wit to those sometimes stilted European approaches. Indeed, few filmmakers of the past 50 years have developed such an immediately identifiable signature. Allens Midnight in Paris, now in theaters and his all-time biggest financial success, is further proof of the directors command of the medium. Stuart Henderson

Annie Hall (1977)

Pedro Almodvar

Pedro Almodvar (1949 - present)

Three Key Films: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) Underrated: The Flower of My Secret (1995). Coming on the heels of his controversial Kika (1993), The Flower of My Secret is almost its antithesis in theme and tone. Where much of Almodvars previous work pushed the envelope, particularly sexually, this film is more focused on family relationships and their complexities.These relationships are especially centered on those amongst women, a theme Almodvar would go on to explore to great acclaim in later films. Here the story follows Leo, a romance writer, whose relationship has recently ended, throwing her into a deep depression that leads her to seek out the comfort of her mother and sister. The film serves as one that would lead to more mature films focused on women and the complicated relationships they have with one another, as well as offers a more restrained film palette and style. Unforgettable: Agrados impromptu monologue in the theater when Huma Rojo is unable to perform may be one of Almodvars most unexpectedly moving moments in all his films. It is a scene that has Agrado, a transsexual prostitute, dissect herself and her choices with such matter-of-fact poignancy that is stands out in a film that is already filled with Almodvars best work. It is a striking moment that only Almodvar could pull off.

All About My Mother (1999)

The Legend: Pedro Almodvars films have ranged widely from his early outrageous stories and flashy cinematic choices to his more recent more mature stories focused primarily on women. He has run the gamut between shocking audiences to moving them in surprising moments. He is a gifted storyteller who uses film in bold, unexpected wayshis use of color is especially strikingand one whos themes of romantic entanglement and obsession, as well as the complex relationships between women, has grown increasingly more nuanced and affecting.

Almodvars reactionary early style has more recently given way to a more thoughtful approach in his stories and characters.The beginning of his film career was marked by the newfound freedoms in the arts for a post-Franco Spain and in turn, Almodvar took full advantage by creating films that went to the extremes. The director has worked in comedy and melodrama, oftentimes combining the two with ridiculous, over the top plots that somehow still manage to delve into deeper themes and relationships (notably in Law of Desire [1987] and Bad Education [2004]). All the while, he has always stayed true to his own unique vision and approach.

As not only the director, but the writer or co-writer of all of his films, Almodvar has an especially meaningful connection to the material. His films have played with sexuality, religion, love, and family

in ways that highlight his affection for outsiders and the fringes where they exist. His characters never shy away from actions that shock or offend simply because they shock or offend. There is a realness to the outlandishness that makes his work more universal than one would expect. Films such as Talk to Her (2002) and Broken Embraces (2009) simply highlight this.

It is Almodvars All About My Mother that stands as his greatest film precisely because it is a culmination of much of what he had been exploring in all his previous films. The relationships between women, particularly the ways in which they function as mothers or nurturers, are at the heart of the film, but in a way that rejects Hollywood tropes and clichs. Instead, it establishes an unlikely group of women who come together through various strange and unforeseen ways to create a wholly believable story and Almodvars most affecting film to date (the director even daringly challenges the category of woman itself). The film would go on to win the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, as well as a slew of other awards, ensuring international attention to his future work on such essential films as Volver and Broken Embraces.

Almodvars next film, The Skin I Live In, starring regular players Antonio Banderas and Marisa Parades, bowed at Cannes to great acclaim this year and will premiere stateside Fall 2011. Needless to say we wait breathlessly J.M. Suarez

Robert Altman (1925 - 2006)

Three Key Films: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville(1975), Short Cuts (1993)

Underrated: The Long Goodbye (1973) The classic Phillip Marlow character of film noir lore was resurrected in this early 70s gem, but not everyone was happy about it. In Altmans hands, the wisecracking gumshoe of classics likeMurder, My Sweet became a mumbling, paranoid, chain-smoking Elliot Gould in need of a shave, while the complex plotting took backseat to a series of increasingly surreal and unlikely scenarios. A woozy, very post-counterculture experiment in reimagining a familiar genre, The Long Goodbye is not for purists, but it remains endlessly entertaining in its subversive approach to the expected grammar of noir, like a proto Big Lebowski or, perhaps Altmans own The Player. Featuring a standout performance from old noir stalwart Sterling Hayden as a drunken Hemmingway-esque blowhard, and a very young Arnold Schwarzenegger as a blonde guy with lots of muscles.

Unforgettable: The opening shot of The Player (1995) Lasting seven minutes and 47 seconds without a single edit or any other post-production trickery, making respectful reference to both Hitchcocks Rope and Welles Touch of Evil (both of which had employed absurdly long shots), introducing the whole studio-artist-capitalist complex of Hollywood into which we are about to be tossed, and featuring an astoundingly complex degree of choreography, comic timing, lighting magic, and general technical wizardry, its hard not to be impressed by this most overtly bravura moment in Altmans oeuvre. The Legend: Robert Altmans strict Catholic upbringing and military service (he flew bombing missions in Asia during World War II) would have powerful and lasting influences over his life, and his art. Following the war, Altman dabbled in film, working on industrial documentaries and other such projects before stumbling into a feature film teensploitation picture in the mid-1950s. Eventually catching the attention of no less an authority than Alfred Hitchcock, Altman did some work on the old masters television program in the early 1960s before heading back to Hollywood for a string of mostly forgettable pictures. It wasnt until the tail end of the 1960s that Altman discovered his gift for subversion, and his unmistakable knack for capturing effortless, naturalistic dialogue.

In fact, the story goes, part of the reason he was able to harness these gifts was that few were really paying much attention to what he was doing with a little-loved script (it had been passed over by a dozen other directors) for a film called M*A*S*H (1970). So, Altman decided to throw everything he had at the story of a few zany, disaffected, and profoundly frustrated Army medical officers in a long-

ago Korean War that looked unmistakably like the then-raging American War in Vietnam. From this moment, Robert Altman can be said to have finally arrived. Indeed, he largely reinvented the genre picture in his first run of films in the early 1970s. From M*A*S*H (war) toMcCabe and Mrs. Miller (western) to The Long Goodbye (noir) to Nashville (musical), Altman was the greatest iconoclast in a generation of iconoclasts. His re-imaginings of these revered genres were almost never reverent in any obvious way. They didnt look back for inspiration, but rather for idols to tear down, to reconstruct. His genius was frustrating and sporadic, however, and he spent a solid decade in the wilderness through the 1980s, releasing few worthy pictures. It wasnt until a string of near masterworks (and one unimpeachable work of perfection, Short Cuts) in the 1990s that Altman regained his form.

Often referred to as a filmmakers filmmaker (one of those phrases that appears to mean something, but no one can be sure what), Altman has frequently puzzled audiences and annoyed critics. But, his singular style and persistent attention to the paranoid American conscience marks him as among the most important voices of both his best periods in the 1970s and the 1990s. Stuart Henderson

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)

Paul Thomas Anderson (1970 - present)

Three Key Films: Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999),There Will Be Blood (2007)

Underrated: Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Single-handedly reinventing the romantic comedy with outbursts of anger, pudding snacks and a dramatic Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love was an exercise in restraint from a director whose two previous films averaged a 172-minute running time. In a subtle nod to Kubricks 2001: A Space Oddysey, Anderson employs a discarded harmonium as his obelisk, a device to signify transition for Sandlers emotionally-stunted Barry Egan. The rest of the film is spent learning how to make music from what hes been given. For a movie so comparatively small in scale to his other offerings, Punch-Drunk Love nonetheless captures the essence of all Andersons work: emotion.

Unforgettable: Frogs fall from the sky in Magnolia. In conveying the literal extension of Exodus 8:2, Anderson rains a plague of frogs on his beloved San Fernando Valley, and in the process gives us a visual equal to his filmmaking ambition. The unexplained phenomena is a reflection of the everyday cataclysms we create in our own lives when we refuse to let go of that which holds us down. Its also a moment that indicates Andersons storytelling ethos at the time: relationships are messy and answers hard to come by. In a movie that throws any sense of tradition out the window with urban legends, cast sing-alongs (Save Me) and a ribald Tom Cruise, Andersons use of frogs takes the cake for pure audacity. Its as if he decided to throw in every trick in the bag before turning to the economic filmmaking of Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

The Legend: I really do have love to give. I just dont know where to put it. This line fromMagnolias Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) sums up the rationale for Paul Thomas Andersons work. Though theres an astounding amount of technique at play in all his films, the heart of Anderson is truly on display in the unchecked emotion of the seekers that populate his screen; here is a director who feels on film.

Much has been made of the parent/child relationships that permeate his screenplays. In fact, Andersons father was a mini-celebrity in his own right. Ernie Anderson was an actor and voiceover artist that played a vital role in Pauls filmmaking beginnings, introducing him to the world of Hollywood and his first video camera. To this day, Andersons own production company is named after one of his fathers characters, Ghoulardi. Regardless of his affection for his fathers work, the fictional parents in his films often play destructive parts. From Dirk Digglers spiteful mother to Daniel Plainviews clinical stewardship of young H.W., sons and daughters are often left to find a surrogate family. Whether Anderson is commenting on his own parents is an open question, but there can be no doubt that the exploration of that core relationship remains a pervasive theme.

What defined Anderson as a filmmaker early in his career was his ability and ambition at such a young age. Upon the release of Hard Eight in 1996, a 26-year-old Anderson was already preparing his

breakthrough opus, Boogie Nights, a film that would see him immediately and often compared to his idols, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese. Instead of flaming out like Orson Welles, Anderson has developed from a mere wunderkind to a singular voice playing in the sandbox big themes: love, selfdestruction, family and death.

Perhaps most astounding is his recent creation of Daniel Plainview, a man who stands alone inThere Will Be Blood but also in the larger context of Andersons oeuvre. His misanthropic use of Manifest Destiny ends up eating him alive. Plainview embodies the direct consequence of not finding an outlet for love, a vacant man left only to gasp, Im finished. If Blood is any indication, Anderson is only at the beginning of a new phase in his career, exploring scope through the use of restraint. Slowikowski Tim

Kenneth Anger (1927 - present)

Three Key Films: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954),Scorpio Rising (1963), Lucifer Rising (1970-80)

Underrated: Rabbits Moon (1950). Combining classic fairy tale images (a fake forest filled with paper foliage), elements of mime, a harlequin and a ballerina, and enough doo-wop songs to send PBS directly into telethon mode, what we have here is one of Kenneth Angers most gorgeous jokes. Using

a single series of images to illustrate his title objecta cartoon moon coming closer and closer to the cameraand a series of mannered turns from his foreign cast, there is commentary on the cruelty of nature and the incompleteness of emotional bonds. There is not much storytelling. All we see are costumed statues playing dress up in a place that recalls friend and mentor Jean Cocteau at his most fascinatingly flamboyant. As the 50s music melds with the images, we wind up with a tale told by inference. The lyrics seem to describe the action, but the overall experience is gradual and fragmented. No one can deny Angers way with a lens, his camera creating a stream of unconsciousness quality that sells the dream theater extremes present.

Unforgettable: The chrome and crotch adoration/idolatry in Scorpio Rising. Along with the often indescribable Kuchar Brothers, Kenneth Anger was at the forefront of bringing gay ideals, sensibilities, and aesthetics to the emerging post-modern cinema. He fetishized the male form, took elements of the growing subculture (bikes and leather) and gave them a formidable flashiness. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the various motor boy montages that fill up the majority of Scorpios running time. Like a wake-up call to a still slumbering suburbia, these scenes challenged the conventional conservative wisdom and laid the foundation for the experimentalism (individually and artistically) of the 60s.

Scorpio Rising (1963)

The Legend: There are really two Kenneth Angers running around in the new millenniumthree if you add in his current crusade as a certified pagan, supporter of the works of Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey, and advocate of Wicca. Many might know him from his famous show biz tellalls,Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, terrific pre-tabloid tomes that exposed many of Tinsel Towns tawdriest secrets. But for the chosen few who have followed the careers of such motion picture mavericks as John Waters and David Lynch, Anger is an idol, an experimental underground filmmaker who forged a specific celluloid identity out of his experience with old school studio films, a complicated childhood, and his emerging homosexuality. By the time the 80s rolled around, he had contributed more to the fringes of the full blown independent movie scene than any other artist from his time.

From the obvious name change to a youth surrounded by conflicting influences, Anger would never be an easy individual to pin down. He once claimed to be friends with famous child stars like Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple and long insisted he was the Changeling Prince in the 1937 film version of A Midsummer Nights Dream (1935). During these tender years, he was doted over by his mother and grandmother, each one dominated and driving his love of performance. With his familys camera and some leftover film, he made his first feature, a take on the classic fairy taleFerdinand the Bull (1937). Along with several other efforts he helmed in his teens, it is now considered lost (though it has been reported that in 1967, Anger destroyed most of his early work in a fit of rage). It was also in his adolescence where he would discover two things that would forever change himhis love of the occult and his love of men.

While attending USC and experimenting with drugs, he made his first major film, Fireworks (1947). It got him arrested for its blatant gay content. It also caught the interest of sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who Anger befriended and aided over the years. Throughout the 50 and 60s, he continued to indulge his passions, living in Paris and Rome, meeting up with mentor Jean Cocteau, and eventually penning the first of his sizzling, scandal filled books. The 1961s Scorpio Rising, he found a modicum of mainstream notoriety, the movie being banned, and challenged, all over the country.

From then on, he continued to combine his love of ancient mythology, Golden Era Hollywood, the supernatural, alternative culture, and the hallucinogenic effects of his newfound passionLSD. With the counterculture came celebrity and acceptance, something that seemed to drive Anger further into

himself. As his expressionsInvocation to My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising(1970) became more fragmented and indebted to Satanism, he decided to retire. In the late 90s, however, he announced a kind of comeback, hitting the lecture circuit and even dabbling in directing again. Yet it is his early work that remains a celluloid cornerstone, linking the past to the present in a way that was both prescient and very personal indeed. Bill Gibron

Michaelangelo Antonioni

Michaelangelo Antonioni (1912 - 2007)

Three Key Films: LAvventura (1960), Blow-Up (1966), The Passenger (1975)

Underrated: Zabriskie Point (1970): Legend has it that when Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni came to America to make his second English language film (after the monster success of Blow-Up), he was shocked by the backlash his production received. There was never any doubting of his idealsthe filmmaker was as left leaning as the turbulent times allowedand his planned film was to take on all aspects of the debauched Western (read: US) culture. But with local law enforcement accusing Antonioni of everything from inciting riots to corrupting the morals of youth, the countercultures latest auteur was heading for a faceoff with the most conservative of stateside Establishmentsand it

really wasnt a fair fight. As a result, many consider Zabriskie Point to be a failure. They see it as a kind of compromise, a version of Antonionis philosophies foiled by a time when the 60s was dying and no one was around to eulogize the corpse. Antonioni wanted his ethereal encapsulation of the entire Peace Generation to be a strong and unswerving statement. What he got instead was a tantalizing tone poem, a masterpiece that makes its point in symbols so obvious and complaints so calculated that one just cant imagine his message would be so simple.

Unforgettable: Thomas the photographer discovers a crime or does he? Though director Brian DePalma would rip it off (and then refine it) for his narrative copycat Blow Out, the moment when David Hemmings discovers that he may have captured a murder in his otherwise giddy glamour shots of London remains Blow-Ups most powerful statement. Along with the openness toward sex and the final bit of mime madness, Antonionis desire to push perspective (and perception) to the forefront of his narrative turns an otherwise story of casual pop cool into a study in angst and personal sanity. Thomas takes the discovery in his pictures to obsessive ends, leading the entire narrative to question what it real, what is fake, and where the fine line between both concepts endor merge.

Blow-Up (1966)

The Legend: As with many Italian filmmakers of his era, Michelangelo Antonioni got his start in journalism. After a childhood of privilege and precocious talents (it is said he was a marvelous violinist by age nine), he fell in love with cinema. Indulged by his overprotective parents, he has free reign to

explore all aspects of his impending muse. It was during his time at the University of Bologna when he first developed an affinity for the lower classes. He found them more alive and vibrant than the staid and stiff members of the pre-War bourgeoisie. After graduation he struggled as a film journalist, went back to school to study the artform, and eventually found a job with the official fascist publication of the subject (run by dictator Benito Mussolinis son, Vittorio). After a stint in the army (where he helped other future filmmakers with their efforts), he fell back in to his favorite form, using his time in the military to create documentary style neo-realistic takes on everyday Italian life.

For his first feature film, however, he avoided such truth to experiment with form and style.Cronaca di un amore (1950) and efforts like Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) and Il Grido (The Outcry, 1957) would balance a working class mentality with his newfound obsessionsocial alienation. It was this socio-psychological malady that made up most of Antonionis seminal work. From Lavventura (1960), and through the rest of the so-called trilogy it begatLa Notte (1961), and LEclisse (1962)he attempted to match his directing approach to the subject matter he was exploring. Long takessoon to be an Antonioni trademarkand compositional complexities took over, as did a desire to allow character and situation determine pace and the needs of the production. After switching over to color with Red Desert (1964), he made the great leap to English with the classic 60s statement Blowup (1966). In the West, the rise in respect for foreign filmmaking turned Antonioni into an instant icon.

From there, the rest of his output was spotty, if still sensational. Zabriskie Point (1970) was dismissed as a ode to hippy hedonism (wrongfully, one might add) while his work with post-modern method superstar Jack Nicholson The Passenger (1975) was equally critiqued (again, unfairly). By the time the 80s rolled around, Antonioni was playing around with the technical aspects of the medium, making movies in collaboration with new formats (video, as in The Mystery of Oberwald, 1981) and other filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh). While his output was severely diminished, his importance to the artform continued to grow. Today, many look at Antonioni as the artist who lifted Italian cinema out of the poverty and decay of Di Sica and early Rossellini and toward a more open and aesthetically complex conceit. With his openness to try anything and his experiences on both sides of the social structure, Antonioni became a filmmaker for everyoneand the ages. Bill Gibron

Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas (1955 - present)

Three Key Films: Irma Vep (1996), Clean (2004), Carlos(2010)

Underrated: Summer Hours (2008) Subtlety, especially in terms of subject matter, isnt really Assayas bag, so Summer Hours was probably fated to be deemed a minor work before anyone even saw it. Charting the emotional trajectories of a French family as they determine what to do with the possessions of a recently-deceased matriarch, the film sounds a bit like an art history lesson: numerous scenes of wealthy people sitting around discussing the relative value of furniture and other artifacts, their emotional contours sketched slowly and discreetly thats a far cry from corporate moles gunning each other down to get their hands on 3D porn. But Summer Hours quietness and humility is also its charm: Assayas focus on intimacy allows the viewer to empathize with every member of this fictional clan, from apathetic grandson to dutiful and laconic maid, and their confrontations and reconciliations glow with realism and compassion. For a film about death, aging, and transience, Summer Hours is shockingly non-condescending, and its disarmingly moving coda is a staggering piece of art unto itself, a nearly-perfect sketch of the relationship between youth and age, persons and objects, permanence and impermanence.

Unforgettable: The film-within-a-film that closes Irma Vep (1996), Assayas loopy meta-narrative breakthrough feature, has an untraceable power and depth; it is a missile of pure cinema that both

heightens and extinguishes the entire feature that came before it. Silent except for an occasional soundtrack of static, filmed in shaky antique blank-and-white to resemble the 1915 series it is allegedly based on, the sequence pares the art of filmmaking down to its basest elements: shape, sound, rhythm, movement; a beautiful and mysterious figure in danger. Maggie Cheung, surely one of the screens greatest icons, dons a black leather jumpsuit and jumps from rooftop to rooftop, chased by (or perhaps dancing with) circles, lines, crosses, squares. You cannot turn your eyes away, though youre not quite sure why. When the film ends on a zoom into Cheungs eyes, you feel different than you did when it began. Such is cinema.

Carlos (2010)

The Legend: With an oeuvre of thematically disparate films and a serpentine career trajectory beginning in the 1970s and still shaping itself today, Olivier Assayas is a tricky figure to discuss on a broad scale. His work situates itself between highbrow and genre, academic and artfully hip, linear and experimental, Paris and Hong Kong; he seems equally indebted to influences as diverse as Cahiers du cinema (for which he wrote in the early 80s), the Chinese new wave, and punk rock.

His forays into filmmaking began with a series of shorts made in tandem with his critical writing forCahiers du Cinema. These projects show an early synergy with music and indeed seem to function as music video prototypes; later feature works like Disorder (1986) and Clean (2004), which are

concerned with the personal and professional lives of struggling rock stars, continue this thematic trend.

Pop psychology at large has consistently shaped Assayas output: his breakthrough film of sorts, 1996s Irma Vep, concerns the struggles of an aging director, a Chinese actress, and various crew members to create a film of the same name. This film marks the first of two important collaborations with Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, whom Assayas will marry and divorce between Irma Vep and their later collaboration Clean. Cheung, playing herself in Irma Vep, is explicitly exoticized by both onand off-screen filmmakers, and yet she is clearly the most sympathetic character in the film, perhaps the only one with whom the audience can actually identify. This duality of representation is another significant and slippery trope in Assayas greater oeuvre: the issue of subjectivity, linearity, and narrative legibility, especially vis--vis the world of media at large, dominates our relationship with the protagonists of Demonlover (2002) and Carlos(2010), and even infiltrates the more straightforward narratives of projects like Clean and Summer Hours (2008).

Demonlover is a hyper-kinetic, globe-trotting neo-noir revolving around Diane (Connie Nielsen), a ruthless corporate spy navigating a bizarre and dangerous pornography underworld. Scored by Sonic Youth, featuring an eccentric troupe of performers including Gina Gershon and Chloe Sevigny, Demonlover is pulp at its most disorienting and damning, and a mlange of Assayas most off-the-wall motifs: rock n roll, the toxic glamour of media, the prickly relationship between Europe and Asia, narrative disorientation and eventual annihilation. Its less a movie than a blueprint, an extended dreamscape we are invited to wander through alongside its conniving criminal protagonists. Other efforts like Summer Hours have a warmer, less chaotic quality, but show similar concern for fluidity of time and space, explored through the clashing perspectives and agendas of multiple characters. His latest project, Carlos, takes these topics and posits them on a grander, more historical scale, which allows his themes to expand beyond the realm of fiction and into an even stranger nomans-land between real and unreal. Assayas quick turnaround ratecineastes can look forward to a new release around every two yearsensures that his thematic universe will only keep growing in the coming decade.

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman (1918 - 2007)

Three Key Films: Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers(1972), Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Underrated: Shame (1968) In North America one could say that most of Bergmans films are underrated. Ask the average film fan to name five of his movies and they will be able to do it comfortably. But ask them to name another five and itll get tough. Which, as any Bergman fanatic knows, is proof positive that as famous and revered as the Swedish auteur might be, much of his best work is still under-seen, underexplored, and underappreciated. And its in that tier of films below the world-famous ones that well find films like Shame, Bergmans extraordinary treatise on the unimaginable suffering and destruction endured by civilians in war zones. Using a fictionalized civil war on an isolated island as a stand in for any of the global conflicts then raging (though I have always imagined this as a statement on the American War in Vietnam in particular), we watch as locals struggle to figure out who is the enemy. No one knows why the war is being fought. No one knows how it will end, or what it will have accomplished. Bergman ends the film with among his most uncomfortable, searing, and unforgettable images, survivors in a boat adrift on a fog-enclosed sea, bumping into bodies, bodies floating everywhere.

Unforgettable: The chess scene from Seventh Seal (1957) As a metaphor for our always futile but nevertheless persistent battle against the inevitability of death, few moments in film history have been so effective. A medieval knight, alone on a windswept beach, looks up and sees Death who tells him it is his time to die. Refusing this as absurd (for what is more absurd than a sudden death sentence?), the knight challenges Death to a game of chess for his life. He will lose. We know it, Death knows it, and maybe the Knight knows it too. But, he has to try. Thats all we can ever do.

The Legend: Ingmar Bergman was famously described by his acolyte Woody Allen as probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera. Though almost equally revered in his native country as a theatre director, Bergmans work behind the camera remains his greatest contribution, though his work remains criminally under-viewed by a global cinema audience that remains uncomfortable with his refusal to sentimentalize the darker aspects of human experience. A tireless artist with a truly frighteningly efficient work ethic, Bergman produced dozens of extraordinary films over his career (from 1946-1982 he would make a film most every winter, before spending the summer producing and directing (and sometimes acting in theatre!).

From his early chamber dramas in the 1940s through to his elaborate, ornate, and utterly enchanting Fanny and Alexander in 1982, Bergman explored every facet of the emotional, spiritual, physical, and psychic complex that makes us human. Through an astonishing string of harrowing masterpieces between 1957s The Seventh Seal and 1973s Scenes From a Marriagea period which includes such stone classics as Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1973), Through A Glass Darkly (1961), Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960)Bergman redefined the art film, and set the template for the thoughtful, penetrating drama of a generation (or two, or three) of high-minded filmmakers to come. His unflinching attention to the harshest realities of existencepain, disease, death, fear, anxiety, dread, depression, and loss were his favoured (overlapping) themes was only matched by his careful cinematic focus and vision.

An inspiration to scores of artists of every description, and the basic premise behind every foreign film course at every film school you can think of, his films are impeccably constructed, and frequently boast some of the finest performances one might ever hope to see. How Bergman was able to so consistently achieve such vertiginous heights remains one of the great mysteries of film. He died in

2007, at the not-so-tender age of 89, the same day as fellow cinema luminary Michelangelo Antonioni. Stuart Henderson

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci (1940 - present)

Three Key Films: The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris(1972), The Last Emperor (1987).

Underrated: Partner (1968). Although neither as visually stunning or politically incisive as his later films, Partner is the most explicit example of Bertoluccis debt to the French New Wavemost specifically to Godards more political filmswhich he would maintain a relationship with even after this film (Agnes Varda wrote the French dialogue for Last Tango in Paris). A loose adaptation of Dostoevskys The Double, the film follows Giacobbe, who returns home one day to discover his double sitting in his room. The double, though, proves to be a much more assertive and charismatic version of Giacobbe and together they set about various political activities, including a large avant-garde theatre performance with Giaccobes theatre class.

The political content and visual style are both more stated and less precise than in Bertoluccis later films. This makes Partner a particularly interesting part of Bertoluccis catalogue, though, not solely because of how it differs visually from his later films, but also because the politics that would be central to almost all of Bertoluccis films are present here in a never-again-seen undiluted form.

Unforgettable: The climactic, forest-set scene in The Conformist. With little but the sound of the wind blowing in the background, and scarce dialogue throughout, Bertolucci creates tension and drama almost solely through proficient yet gorgeous camera work and incredible editing. Featuring the use of every tool at their disposalfrom close-ups to handheld camera workthe sequence is the best example of what Bertolucci and his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, were capable of with the camera.

The Last Emperor (1987)

The Legend: Bernardo Bertolucci emerged in the 1970s as a strong figure in Italian cinema. Starting with Spiders Stratagem (1970) and, in particular, The Conformist, Bertolucci set himself apart with a thematic and visual style of his own.

The beginning of Bertoluccis career is marked by a sustained interest in the rise and fall of Fascism in Italy. Not happy to simply demarcate those who cooperated with Mussolini as evil, Bertolucci repeatedly used his films to explore why so many ordinary people were willing to stand by and often aid a manifestly unjust government. His pivotal movie in this respect is The Conformist, in which the

main character is a government official who, merely because of his desire to fit in and his unwillingness to fight against the status quo, becomes an agent for the Fascist regime.

Bertolucci never failed to recognize that those acting in concert with the fascists were acting unethically. His films, though, bravely confront the unfortunate truth that, in too many cases, there was no conscious desire to do wrong, and that the human tendency to conform, whether it be to a jobs requirements in The Conformist or to social and class expectations in 1900 (1976), makes the Italian case not an anomaly but a warning of what any society is capable of turning into.

In these same films, Bertolucci became equally famous for his visual style as for the politics of his films (which, in the case of 1900, sometimes brought him controversy instead). All his filmsand particularly those featuring cinematographer Vittorio Storarofeature an unmistakably theatrical and grand visual style. Bertolucci was as capable of perfectly choreographed long takes with graceful camera movement as he was of gorgeous, meticulously framed still shots. The Conformistastounds for how each frame looks like a painting that should be hung on your wall.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Bertoluccis films increasingly focused less on Italy. Last Tango in Parisexplores the free love mantra of the 1960s through the affair between a older widower and younger woman. The Last Emperor, for which Bertolucci won an Oscar, details the life of Chinas last emperor as the country turns into a Republic and then a Communist dictatorship. Then, beginning in the late 1980s, Bertoluccis films began to reflect a conscious turn from overt political messages. Due to the nature of his past films, though, this absence in his later work in the end makes its own political point. Nevertheless, regardless of the topic or locale, Bertoluccis films remain unmistakably his: poignant, nuanced, critical, and majestic. Tomas Hachard

The 100 Essential Directors Part 2: Robert Bresson to David Cronenberg

Our second day of 100 Essential Directors could loosely be described as one that defines influential. Each of the auteurs sandwiched in between Robert Bresson and David Cronenberg has left a lasting mark on cinema, each employing a signature style that is unmistakable.

Robert Bresson (1901? - 1999)

Three Key Films: The Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A Man Escaped (1956), Au Hasard Balthazar(1966)

Underrated: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) It would be hard to find a Bresson film that has not been the subject of superlative praise at one point or another, but Bressons elegant adaptation of the Diderot novel Jacques le fataliste was certainly underrated upon its release; despite, and perhaps because of, its premature date in Bressons oeuvre, its a charming mixture of pathos, subtlety and melodrama rarely found in the purism of his later films. With a script by Jean Cocteau, the movie follows the jilted lover Helene (Maria Casars) as she exacts revenge from her coy betrayer Jean (Paul Bernard) in an intricate manipulative plot worthy of the darkest film noir.

Unforgettable: The young priests confrontation with the local countess in The Diary of a Country Priest. The countess (Marie-Monique Arkell) has hardened her heart against resignation to the will of God, but in this scene, the priest (Claude Laylu) carries out his own prediction that God will break you, instilling in her a profound spiritual peace. Bresson orchestrates her transformation with his most reliable and well-loved techniquesan advancing camera, musical crescendos and closeups of the handsand Laylus performance is as powerful as it is vulnerable.

A Man Escaped (1956)

The Legend: In an industry haunted by the individualistic expectations of auteur theory and often hobbled by the overbearing ministrations of government intervention, Robert Bresson stands out as an unmistakable independent with a formidable personal vision. Justified by the principles and philosophy outlined in his personal notes, Notes on the Cinematographer, written from 1950 to 1974 and published in English in 1997, Bresson set about fashioning a new kind of cinematic language. He rejected traditional film elements such as professional actors and commissioned scores, which he described as filmed theater, and limited himself to the essentials, striving to create in his films an organic synthesis of music and painting.

Bresson put his beliefs to work most effectively in the 50s and 60s, when he established himself as a master director with such astonishingly stark and original works as Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket (1959) and Au Hasard Balthazar, but he continued to have international success until his retirement with 1983s LArgent, itself widely praised as a masterwork. Bressons almost fanatical essentialism served him well, for his films stood aloof from the dominant trends of his long

career. From the tradition of quality of the post-war period to the rebelliousness of theCahiers du cinma circle to the professional realism of the early 70s, Bressons style maintained its uncompromising rigor. His movies remain testaments to his genius, full of poetry, drama and mystery.

In his most celebrated and accomplished works, Bresson applies his radical minimalism to questions of sin, crime and redemption, drawing on literary and personal sources: the stories of Dostoyevsky and the trial of Joan of Arc; his experiences as a POW in a German camp in 1939 and his intense, probing engagement with the Catholic faith. His vision of the world is violent and bleak, to the point that many find his later, more pessimistic movies unpalatable. For Bresson, however, there is always the possibility of redemption, though sometimes it remains unrealized. Even in such a bloody work as LArgent, the story of a mass murderers slow descent into amorality, the sensitive viewer may find hope that, as the young priest declares at the end of The Diary of a Country Priest, All is grace.

Luis Buuel

Luis Buuel (1900 - 1983)

Three Key Films: Un Chien Andalou (1929), Los Olvidados(1950), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972)

Underrated: Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1954). Not revelatory by any means, Illusion flattens out in sections and admittedly doesnt live up to that fantastic title. But its quite fun nonetheless, and despite the noticeable detachment that Buuel seems to have with the material, the film is refreshingly cheerful. Plot? Two friends romp through Mexico City as they take a streetcar for a last ride. Foibles and satire ensue.

Unforgettable: The eyeball-slicing is the one that everyone remembers, and the gorgeous tones of Belle de Jour shouldnt be overlooked. But its a later image in Un Chien Andalou thats just as striking: the girl left alone with her shadow as all the other shadows scatter away, and that same girl soon lying limp on the street like a fly caught in a concrete spider web.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972)

The Legend: That crotchety old man shouldnt fool anyone: Spains finest filmmaker was farcicallycompelled by humanitys blemishes and particularshe just filtered them through stinging humor and outlandish narrative. And while Luis Buuel is remembered for the lingering threats of violence or frank sexual encounter in his films, his aesthetic was so loosely-confined that he was never exploitative; theres a casual sensuality to even his most seemingly-mundane scenes.

Born at the start of the 20th century, Buuel was able to witness (and take part in) the changes that were carried through that centurys premier art form. Un Chien Andalou, needs little explanation to cinephiles: made with one Salvador Dal, it remains a quintessential example of 1920s Parisian decadence, standing as the first great cinematic immersion into full-blown surrealism.

Buuel cast satiric barbs toward the European class structure and particularly toward Catholicism, an understandable result of being an artist in pre-WWII Spain. Yet his films never lost their astute sense of pace, compounded through strangely mesmerizing imagery (a mountain goat tumbling to its death in Tierra Sin Pan, the disturbingly direct framing of a merry-go-round in Los Olvidados). The people in his films behave both fluidly and mechanically, which is beneficial: as in dreams, subjects function through a playful ambience of de-tuned normality.

This oeuvre peaked (in my view) with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise. Released as Americas films entered their last golden age, Bourgeoise was an eccentric comedown from the turbulent France of the late 60s, providing characters who seem culled from past work and somehow managing to warmly espouse their quirks and cleverly jibe them simultaneously. Like an engrossing dream, you accept it against your better judgment, left with images and scenes that you recall with the fondness of an old friend.

Buuel embraced counterculturalism with a knowing, satisfied ease, and his run from 1961 through his breezy farewell in 1977 stands as a high point for both surrealism and for the rejectioncinematic or otherwiseof established systems and aesthetics. Rigidity and perversity were still present, but used expansively, exuding an assured love of filmand, crucially, of filmmaking.

Its a shame that the eyeball scene in Un Chien Andalou has been trivialized as a depraved passalong phrase (thanks, Frank Black). Sure, its visceral, but Buuel compels us to look beyond repulsion or confusion, to ask ourselves if these are truly our only reactions; he was a subverter of form who stands for any mediums boundary-breaking. Ones accepted view of the world stands on the edge of being warpedor evisceratedat any point. Lart pour le bien de lart, as Im sure the man said.

Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett (1944 - present)

Three Key Films: Killer of Sheep (1977), My Brothers Wedding (1983), To Sleep with Anger (1990)

Underrated: The Glass Shield (1994). In some respects, weve seen this film before. A Los Angeles police station is assigned their first black officer. Guess what happens next? But the predictability of the set-up is also the point. This is not some esoteric art film. This is your classic police procedural. Good cops, bad cops, courtroom drama and city corruption. Get Ice Cube to play the suspect and there you go. Finally, a Burnett film everyone will see. Unfortunately someone at Miramax decided to feature Ice Cubes giant mug on the poster, disappointing audiences who expected a more significant role (and a different movie) than Cubes small part would deliver. Time has treated this film well though. Avoiding the simplistic values and early 90s anachronisms that have aged so many of its contemporaries so early, The Glass Shield succeeds as an indictment of both the system and the individual, bravely scathing the sympathetic protagonist for his own poor decisions.

Unforgettable: Stan dancing with his wife in Killer of Sheep. Desensitized by his work in the slaughterhouse, stunned by his inability to support his family, and perennially shirtless, weve come to know Stan as a distant, desirable and drowning man. His wife wants desperately to pull him to the surface. As they dance in the darkened room, framed before a window, she kneads his skin, her mouth tracing his neck and chest. The song (Dinah Washingtons plaintive and aching This Bitter

Earth) and the sustained mid-shot accentuate the sense of longing and hopelessness. We know that Stan will pull away.

Killer of Sheep (1977)

The Legend: Born in Jim Crow Mississippi and raised in riot-era Watts, the early years of Charles Burnett were typical of the people living in his neighborhood and atypical of the people making or being represented in film at the time. And while cinema has since aspired to capture some aspects of the South Central neighborhood where Burnett grew upmostly the gangs, cops, and Korean grocerieswe remain frighteningly unfamiliar with the lives of the people who live there. Burnetts films are necessary because they confront this reluctance. But this is not what makes them great.

What makes Burnett great is that he is far more interested in the poetic mundanity of everyday life than he is in polemics. His early work especially relies on this quiet, observational style. Ditching plotdriven narrative for a series of loosely connected vignettes, Burnetts seminal Killer of Sheep and his assured first short Several Friends (1969) can feel more like cultural artifacts than movies. Kids pummel a passing train with rocks; men wrestle a washing machine through a tight doorframe; a woman rubs lotion on her leg. Its easy to forget theres a camera in the room.

The events may seem incidental, but the effect of their accumulation is devastating. Simultaneously heartbreaking and beautiful, Killer of Sheep is a deeply effective filmedited, written, and filmed by Burnett as his master thesis for UCLA film school. The film cost less than ten grand and was made on weekends over the course of a year and what emerges is a remarkable and lasting response to the Blaxploitation flicks that ruled the day. Employing a contemporary soundtrack of pop songs and blues, the film manages that rare feat of feeling both timeless and immediate, eventually propelling the Little Master Thesis That Could to win the Critics Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1981. Unfortunately, copyright issues concerning the songs relegated the film to private screening and film festivals, but word of the unseeable picture spread. The Library of Congress placed it among the first 50 films in the National Film Registry. The National Society of Film Critics named it one of the 100 essential films of all time. Burnett had made a masterpiece. Now he had to make a career.

The path that follows is tough to navigate. There are documentaries and shorts and several features. Many of them are difficult to find, though most reward the effort. And in them all, you can find the visionary behind Killer of Sheep. To Sleep With Anger (1990), for instance, is another knockout that took home a slew of awards but was seen by far too few people. Also notable isThe Final Insult (1997), a strange and resonating pseudo-documentary on L.A. homelessness. Burnett continues to work today, mostly making documentaries and films-for-television that are better than their budgets suggest, forever intertwining his deep sense of morality with a satisfying unwillingness to lean on moral judgments. Ultimately, Burnetts great talent lies in his ability to ask the toughest questions, and then mesmerizingly refuse to answer them

Tim Burton

Three Key Films: Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands(1990), Ed Wood (1994) Underrated: Frankenweenie (1984). This charming short (soon to be remade by Burton as an animated feature) about a boy who resurrects his dead dog is a humorous homage to both Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein and the 1931 James Whale movie of the same name. Burton spins the concept into a tale of childhood loss and adult prejudice that unfolds in a seemingly innocent slice of suburbia. This movie never seems to receive much attention and is often forgotten in the midst of Burtons more famous films, but it remains an engaging example of Burtons imagination run adoringly amok. Stuffed with clever nods to the imagery and design of Whales classic picture (the incorporation of a windmill into the narrative is particularly smart),Frankenweenie offers an early look at Burtons careful ability to transform parody into something uniquely refreshing. Unforgettable: When titular hero Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) crafts his ultimate masterpiece, an ice sculpture of love interest Kim (Winona Ryder), his sharp appendages rain ice chips down from the sky and fabricate a sense of snow finally falling in the perpetually warm suburban town. Kim takes this gentle, unique moment to dance in the snow as Danny Elfmans score soars effortlessly. It is a magically romantic moment in a story of forbidden love.

The Legend: Born in Burbank, California Tim Burton began his career as an animator and artist at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he developed an interest in exploring dark, personal projects. His big break came when he was selected by Paul Reubens to direct a big-screen Pee-Wee Herman movie titled Pee-Wees Big Adventure (1985). The financial success of that movie opened the doors to large-scale projects such as Beetlejuice (1988) and Batman. These first three features (and nearly every movie to follow) allowed Burton to explore many of his favourite themes (innocence, loneliness, social awkwardness, heroic responsibility in the face of unusual obstacles) and then reconcile the pain of these themes into something dramatically meaningful and visually fascinating, mixing art with commerce.

The look of a Burton movie is unmistakable and he has managed to define a unique style (a sort of decrepit, fantastical exaggeration of something recognizable) in nearly all facets of his cinematic designs. He tends to favour a polarizing colour palette, with dark blues and greys being offset by splashes of red or a rainbow of pastels. He did employ a black-and-white approach for his biopic about cult classic filmmaker and tragic figure Ed Wood (his most grounded film to date and quite possibly his best, too), but he rarely strays from his iconic blend of gothic darkness and whimsical brightness (see the deceptively dark summer blockbuster Batman Returns [1992] for one of the best examples of this). Burtons strict adherence to a singular style may feel repetitive in later movies, but his overall filmography reveals a gifted storyteller with a slightly dementedWilly Wonka-esque flavor all his own.

Burton has a grand ability to gather all of his inspirations (Vincent Price movies, Hammer horror, fairy tales) and then employ them to populate a very personal vision. But such employment only occurs once the inspirations have been internalized and reshaped to emerge with Burtons specific stamp. Even when tackling a biopic about a specific inspiration (Ed Wood) or directing Vincent Price in a small role (Edward Scissorhands) or paying tribute to Hammers fright flicks (Sleepy Hollow [1999]), Burtons imagination always shines through. His style and dedication to whimsical weirdness is impossible to eclipse. When he marries that style to a story filled with heart and humour, the result is often something magical, an emotionally poignant flirtation of loneliness and acceptance. In a triumph of personal passion, Burtons best movies play like immersive odes to the outsider, viewing from the fringes and felt deeply from within

John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes (1929 - 1989)

Three Key Films: Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) Underrated: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Cassavetes free-form neo-noir is an oddity even in hisfilmography, yet its also an essential, exemplary work. Ben Gazzara plays sleazy strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli, whose gambling debts lead to do a favor for the mob by killing a Chinese bookie. At turns pensive, desperate, and absurd,The Killing of a Chinese Bookie profits from Gazzaras nothing-to-lose performance, its hellish urban milieu, and the appearance of unhinged character actor Timothy Carey.Unforgettable: The welcome home party for housewife Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) in A Woman Under the Influence. Having just been institutionalized for six months, Mabel is surrounded by friends and familyas well as her domineering husband, Nick (Peter Falk), who demands normal conversation. The scene is unbearably tense, and one of Cassavetes most painfully sustained views of a broken marriage. A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

The Legend: Its easy to throw around the phrase godfather of independent cinema, but actorturned-director John Cassavetes earned it with his sweat and blood. His move out of the Hollywood system is the stuff of film history legend, and he set a powerful example, showing just how much a rogue, impassioned filmmaker could accomplish. Between Faces in 1968 and his death from cirrhosis in 1989, Cassavetes directly a series of visceral, highly personal dramas that still feel caustic, and fresh. Forged through sacrifice and suffering, his films contain some of the greatest performances youre likely to see. Cassavetes made several attempts to break away from the mainstream before it finally stuck; his first was the groundbreaking Shadows. Shot in New York across two difficult years, using money raised however possible, its very creation was an aggressively independent gesture. But still Cassavetes found himself financially bound to the mainstream film industry, playing roles that increased in prominence across the 1960s, like the doomed racecar driver in The Killers (1964) and the husband in Rosemarys Baby (1968). The paychecks for these jobs went to fund his passion projects, like the Oscar-nominated Faces and Husbands, an arduous slog through ruined masculinity.

Over the course of the 1970s, Cassavetes made one brutal landmark film after another. Formally loose and narratively shaggy, they present love and loss from the perspectives of dysfunctional characters like the title couple in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and the traumatized actress inOpening Night (1977). Cassavetes collaborated on these films with a tight-knit group of recurring actors: Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Ben Gazzara, his wife Gena Rowlands, and himself, each of whom did revelatory work under Cassavetes direction. The palpable rapport between cast members was matched by the evolving relationships between characters, leading Cassavetes films to feel organic and all too real.

Before his tragically early death, Cassavetes only made three more films, but his imprint on filmmaking goes far beyond his relatively small output. In Minnie and Moskowitz, Rowlands remarks, You know, I think the movies are a conspiracy. In his films, John Cassavetes unraveled that conspiracy, inverting Hollywood clichs and digging deep (maybe too deep) into everything his actors had to offer. Films like A Woman Under the Influence arent just impressive in the short-term; theyre lasting, haunting, and even for all their little imperfections, great.

Ethan & Joel Coen

Ethan & Joel Coen (1957 - present; 1954 - present)

Three Key Films: Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), No Country For Old Men (2007) Underrated: The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Working with big studio money for the first time, the Coens delivered exactly what should have been expected of them when handed the resources necessary to realize their singular vision: a big, splashy, broadly appealing, old fashioned screwball comedy. Yet, the film was swiftly deemed a bomb and, to this day, rarely comes up in discussion of the brothers filmography. That neither critics nor audiences went for it is disappointing, but not at all surprising; for the critics accustomed to the eccentricities of Raising Arizona and Barton Fink, the films loving, blatant homage to Capra, Hawks and Sturges must have registered as painfully unhip, while to audiences, the films debut only a month after Jim Carreys runaway hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was still tearing up the box office put the film at odds with what the public had come to demand (or, more accurately, accept) from film comedy. A shame given what a marvel the film is both in its dazzling visuals1950s New York as imagined via Art Deco expressionand in the gentle, goodhumored whimsy of its sharp-as-a-tack script (co-written by the Coens with Sam Raimi) and noteperfect performances from Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman.

Unforgettable: Tempting as it is to go with the famous wood chipper scene from Fargo, the emblem of the Coens twisted sense of humor, nothing encapsulates their appeal more than the scene that immediately follows it, as folksy police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) lectures criminal Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) upon his arrest. Theres more to life than a little money,

you know. Dontcha know that? And here ya are, and its a beautiful day. Well. I just dont understand it. Her sweetly plainspoken way of cutting through the vicious cynicism running rampant through most of the Coens films reveals the genuine, if frequently muted beating heart present at the center of all of them.

Fargo (1996)

The Legend: Beginning with the acclaimed 1984 thriller Blood Simple, the Minnesota born and NYU educated Ethan and Joel Coen have had one of the most fiercely idiosyncratic careers in the last 25 years of American film, jointly writing, producing, directing and even (under the alias Roderick Jaynes) editing their films, even when the credits may have misleadingly suggested a division of labor. Often working in a small handful of chosen genres, the brothers body of work nevertheless suggests some crazed mashup of classic film styles like film noir, screwball comedy and period dramas, all shot through with the post-modern irreverence of film lovers who have absorbed far too rich an array of cinematic history to ever properly color inside the genre lines.

If the hilarious surrealism of The Big Lebowski and the stark landscapes of No Country For Old Menseem far too disparate to have come from the same set of authors, find the links between the two, and well beyond (to the oppressively decorative atmosphere of Millers Crossing, the paranoid claustrophobia of Barton Fink, the antic romps of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the classic storytelling virtues of True Grit) in the ways in which the brothers continue to use film, and specifically genre, as a means of desperately hoping to make sense of a world thrust into chaos. In a world in which the

distinct possibilities for love (Intolerable Cruelty) and family (Raising Arizona) to flourish must exist alongside the constant threat of violence, whether at the hands of betrayal (Blood Simple), avarice (The Ladykillers) or simple human frailty leading us far astray (The Man Who Wasnt There), the Coens offer up their own form of cinematic lawlessness as a correlation to our crazy human condition. Its what makes even their bleakest resolutionsthe government cover-up in Burn After Reading, the coin toss in No Country For Old Men, the Job-like procession of events in A Serious Manfeel like hopeful grasps at something resembling a meaning in it all, and even their happiest endingsMarge offering her husband some words of encouragement in Fargo, the stopping of time to give a good man a chance at redemption in The Hudsucker Proxy, the lasting dream of domestic bliss in Raising Arizonaa series of events only arrived at by sheer accident.

Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola (1939 - present)

Three Key Films: The Godfather Trilogy (1972-1990), The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979)

Underrated: Rumble Fish (1983). Widely known as the artsy cousin to Coppolas previous film, The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish should be recognized as another superior sequel (sort of) from the commander of continuation (lest we forget the astounding achievement that is The Godfather Part II). Starring a never better Matt Dillon and a never better looking Mickey Rourke, the black and white teen noir carries a wallop of fierce nostalgia like nothing else Coppola has done. Perhaps the directors most experimental film, Rumble Fish shows the directors inclinations towards pushing the boundaries of Hollywood productions, a penchant he has recently resumed with his last few films.

Unforgettable: The complete first two Godfather films. Ok, ok, fine. If it has to be a shorter moment, Ill take Don Corleones near-death outside the fruit stand. Though the horror scene from Apocalypse Now is certainly up there in terms of cinematic relevance, reverence, and parody, its hard to top Coppolas grandly orchestrated assassination scene where Vito Corleone, while casually shopping for those ominous oranges, is shot 10 times in the back. Oranges spill. Fredo fumbles the gun. Papa! It is so brief, but so powerful.

Apocalypse Now (1979) The Legend: Francis Coppola is a mainstay on lists like these. A member of the Hollwood elite, the 72-year-old director earned his spot during the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. Obviously, helming The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now in the same decade would cement anyones legacy in film, but the man just kept going.

Though some would argue he fell off a bit in the 1980s and 90s, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club(1984). The Godfather: Part III, and The Rainmaker (1997) are enduring pictures that lesser directors would likely put at the top of their resumes. Although Bram Stokers Dracula was not entirely embraced by critics, the artistic bravadoincluding Eiko Ishiokas stunning work on the films costumesis in every frame, popping with vibrancy, just as it was with One From the Heart(1982).

Most recently, Coppola has gone back to what he calls his film school roots. Youth Without Youth(2007) received mixed reviews, but Tetro (2009) was a solid critical success. Both productions were small and each earned less than half a million dollars, but its clear the five-time Oscar winner hasnt run out of inspiration just yet. Modern critics may have seen Coppola as a little more hit and

miss than the gangbusters 70s, but nevertheless, he continues to push his avant-garde ideas on a wide audience, keeping the maverick spirit of his earlier work, like The Rain People (1969), alive and well in films he produces for his Oscar-winning daughter Sofia. Last yearsSomewhere is a prime example of this dedication.

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg (1943 - present)

Three Key Films: Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), A History of Violence (2005)

Underrated: Shivers a.k.a They Came From Within (1975). Starting out in art films and television, David Cronenberg decided to work in horror because it was a genre where on could work on a low budget with few content restrictions and still gain attention and commercial success. Shivers got its share of both, being given hearings in The Canadian House of Commons over its subsidized financing and becoming Canadas most successful taxpayer-funded film to date. The film (produced by Ivan Reitman, of all people) concerns a disease that is a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease, which spreads through an insular high-rise housing complex via a phallic, parasitic worm that turns all the buildings inhabitants into depraved sex-starved lunatics. This marks the inaugural entry into Cronenbergs obsessive catalogue of films about the decay of social order, but the ideas and techniques at play are just as fresh, subversive, and unsettling as those in his later, more-acclaimed works. Unlike many other controversial movies of this period, Shivers is just as disturbing as at was upon its initial release, not least of all because of the ways in which the parasite (the storys protagonist) seems to have a liberating effect on its hosts.

Unforgettable: Theres little that says it better than the exploding head in the beginning ofScanners (1981). Weapons manufacturer ConSec holds a press conference to unleash the power of their latest biological technology, drugged telepaths called scanners. The ConSec scanner representative asks the audience for a volunteer to demonstrate his psychic capabilities and is ambushed by a rogue scanner named Darryl Revok, who overpowers the ConSec scanner and detonates the poor bastards brain from deep inside of it. The sequence reads like the official Cronenberg calling card; a moment of shocking, unexpected, visceral violence that is ontological and psychic in nature, framed by an atmosphere of Ballardian clinicalism and Burroughsian corporate control, and involving intense body disfigurement enacted by figures with a unique evolutionary trait. Ejaculatory blood splatter cements the Freudian connection between eroticism and violence. That this violence is realized in the mind- indeed, the physical brain- serves as an elegant demonstration of the way Cronenberg has repeatedly studied the connections between mind and body, two impermanent objects on a constant path of deterioration. Few directors get to pick their most memorable imagery, but its fitting that Cronenberg, a man so perceptive about the power of images, is rewarded with one with so many active signifiers of his entire oeuvre.

Dead Ringers (1988)

The Legend: One of the most established voices in cinema, Canadian-born David Cronenberg is perhaps best known as the father of body horror. Its this that will always define Cronenberg the adjective (though it has yet to be established whether this is Cronenbergian or Cronenbergesque), despite the fact that much of his work deviates wildly from the narrow constraints of what these

descriptors commonly mean. Even his most mainstream films though involve troubled relationships between humans and their bodies, whether by masking sexual transgression through fantasy (M. Butterfly [1993]), brandishing tattoos as an underworld code (Eastern Promises[2008]), or using disfigurement to signify a history of violence (A History of Violence).

Cronenbergs thoroughly atheistic view of biology as destiny (and technology as a potential mitigating factor) has lead him to conduct some of the most provocative and challenging works of art in the modern age. Like Dick, Ballard, and Burroughs, Cronenberg began his career filtered through the lens of pulp genre fiction (horror), but he eventually gained commercial and critical acceptance through The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers. Yet, Cronenberg did not use his cultural capital to cash in. Instead, he made films that were increasingly challenging:Naked Lunch (1991),Spider (2002), eXistenZ (1999); the controversial Crash even received a rare NC-17 rating amidst a cacophony of ire and kudos from various film critics.

As difficult as Cronenberg got though, his films were never difficult to follow. Their demand comes not from abstraction, but from the contortion of expectation. The plots of his films are unhinged and impossible to predict, the audience thrust out of their comfort zone and forced to submit to disarming alternative systems of control. Therein, Cronenberg shows how liberation can be hideous and moribund and how repression can be masked and perfunctory. The only hope, if there is any at all, is in aberration, experimentation- which often proves just as disastrous as the status quo being defied (witness the liberated protagonists of Crash, The Fly, Videodrome, and A History of Violence).

Cronenberg, has been repeatedly criticized for being clinical and cold, with little concern for the morality and ethics of his invented worlds. Much of these accusations stem from the popular conceit that a director must always underline a clear position, which Cronenberg would dismiss as a ridiculous notion in a late capitalist world of ambivalence and uncertainty, where mankind does not exist alone, but rather operates in relation to the social and technological world that surrounds him.

At times though, Cronenberg can appear to be more sympathetic to disease, perversion, and psychosis than he is to his characters. But its important to note that he tells the stories of his characters as much through physiology and the unconscious as he does through narrative and dialogue. Often tackling what are noted to be unfilmable novels (Naked Lunch, Crash, Spider), he is successful where other lesser directors might not have been because he uses the creative liberties of films fantasy otherness to enunciate ontological disparities. His films often provide competing layers of reality, not just in his more hallucinatory work (Videodrome, eXistenZ), but also in a film like A History of Violence where Tom Stalls biography remains wrapped behind an impenetrable series of

internal mechanisms. Elaborate gore and special effects, generally only used for spectacle elsewhere, are in these films metaphor, manifestations of the unconscious, and commentaries on systems of control (the body being the ultimate control system with its own inherent constrictions and limitations).

Even sexuality is mechanical and functional. For a director known for graphic and transgressive eroticism (Crash, Videodrome, M Butterfly, Dead Ringers), theres not a single titillating moment in Cronenbergs canon, making him that rare talent daring to go beyond the pleasure principle. Desire in his films is always intimately linked with the means of destruction, the dual forces of creation and destruction ever competing at the cellular level, as well as in the nervous system of postmodern culture. There is frequently light in a Cronenberg film, but it is so obscured by darkness that it is barely visible. Therefore, Cronenberg makes a far better diagnostician than a treating doctor. He is the one tasked with the unfortunate function of telling the mind that the body is going to die.

A Dangerous Method starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen will soon be making the festival rounds and will be released later this year.

The 100 Essential Directors Part 3: George Cukor John Ford

Spiritual possession, screwball comedy, German kinks, and the quintessential American Western genre are among the disparate characters we shine a light on today as PopMatters counts down the 100 Essential Film Directors. Today we look at George Cukor through John Ford. Who falls in the middle might surprise you

George Cukor (1899 - 1983)

Three Key Films: Dinner at Eight (1933), The Philadelphia Story (1940), A Star Is Born (1954) Underrated: Love Among the Ruins (1975) This made-for-TV movie starred Laurence Olivier and Katherine Hepburn in their only pairing, as an aging lawyer and actress who find love. Although a bit sentimental at times, it is Cukors last homage to legendary actors, while still including Cukors sharp sense of humor and gentle style of storytelling.

Unforgettable: Cukor crafted numerous classic scenes, but the one that truly represents his skills with actors is the gin game between Billie (Judy Holliday) and Harry (Broderick Crawford) in Born Yesterday (1950). While the scene has little dialogue, it allows two great actors to rule the screen in one of films funniest sequences. As was often the case, Cukor got out of the way and let his stars do what they did best, while framing them to perfection.

A Star Is Born (1954)

The Legend: Cukor has always been identified as an actors director, more specifically, a womans director. Understandable, considering that in The Women (1939), not a single man appears onscreen, and looking at the titles in his filmography indicates how frequently his movies were women-centric. Yet, such a classification demeans Cukors skills as a director, one who directed three men to Oscars (Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Coleman, Rex Harrison), but only two women (Ingrid Bergman, Judy Holliday). Cukors homosexuality and femininity have been credited with providing him a penchant for telling womens stories, yet most every female lead in Cukors films had a strong male lead to play off. With films such as A Double Life, the tale of an actors Othello-inspired descent into madness, Cukor proved he could dive into the male psyche with equal skill.

Cukor honed his talent in New York, directing on the Broadway stage before his childhood friend and mentor, David Selznick, helped him establish himself in Hollywood. So deep was his love of the stage as a child in New York that he frequently skipped school to attend plays, and his first job was as a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera. The family plans for George to continue in his fathers law practice were interrupted by WWI; after serving in the army, Cukor decided to pursue his own dreams in the theatre instead of continuing his education. Recognizing he didnt have the looks for a life on stage, Cukor felt most comfortable working behind the scenes, although it was in the theatre that his love of actors developed.

Still, it is a disservice to classify Cukor as an actors director, since his use of setting and camera angle, which foretell how audiences are to perceive characters and action, and his challenges to the dominant male hierarchy show Cukor to be a man with a vision, most clearly presented in his earlier works, but evident throughout his 51-year career. If anything, Cukor was a writers director, one who placed story above all else, and he emphasized those stories through ideal casting. Each film lets the story unfold on its own terms, without the dramatic excesses other directors indulge. His romances feature no torrid or scandalous love scenes, his thrillers little to no violence. A good story didnt need sensationalizing, he felt. Cukor knew how to tell a good story and how to get actors to invest wholly in those stories.

Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme (1944 - present)

Three Key Films: Something Wild (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Rachel Getting Married (2008) Underrated: Beloved (1998). Most critics dismissed Oprah Winfreys passion project, an adaptation of Toni Morrisons classic, and audiences werent buying either, but the growth and maturity Demme shows as a craftsman and artist in this film is unmissable. Tackling an epic story that travels through time periods and supernatural planes, illuminating the after-effects of slavery on African American women with blunt succintness for perhaps the first time in film, Demmes mastery of mise en scene, and of the rhythm of Morrisons poetic language reveals his dreamy Terrence Malick-esque auteurist leanings as Demme marries nature, violence, drama, history and literature in a beautiful, intimate

ceremony. He directs Winfrey, Kimberly Elise, Danny Glover, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Thandie Newton, and Beah Richards to soaring heights.

Unforgettable: Clarice Starlings blind search of Buffalo Bills basement, as the serial killer turns off the lights and she is left in the blackness, virtually defenseless. Shot in terrifying green night vision, from the POV of the killer himself as he taunts the fledgling, terrified agent with the barrel of a gun, the climax to this Oscar champion creates an almost unbearable tension by preying on our fear of the dark.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The Legend: Some might argue that without The Silence of the Lambs, Demme may not have made this list. Yes, he has made a surplus of outstanding films, including quite a few unjustly ignored documentaries such as The Agronomist (2003), but initially, the now 67-year-old director was most known more for his first two critical successes in the early 1980s ending up as box office duds (Handle With Care and Melvin and Howard). Despite the excellent Talking Heads docStop Making Sense (1984), the quirky masterpiece of Something Wild, and the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Married to the Mob (1988), Demme flew mostly under the radar for the rest of the Me Decade. That is, until he paired up with Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, and screenwriter Ted Tally in 1991 to create the definitive portrait of a serial killer, the film that defined the psychological thriller/horror film hybrid for modern audiences.

From the Oscar-winning follow-up Philadelphia (1993) to the Oprah-starring adaptation Beloved, and, most recently, with a successful foray into hand-held directing with Rachel Getting Married, Demme proved one thing for certain over three decades of incredible work: his adaptability. If you ask him to direct an intense and complex human detective story, he can do it. Ask him to arrest viewers with Philadelphia, a courtroom drama that uses AIDS in America as a lens to uncover homophobia and discrimination (one of the first substantial American films to do so), and hell deliver. Ask him to adopt a new technical style into his directing repertoire while broaching the delicate subject of a childs death during a complex wedding celebration, and Demme will produce a gem. Complicated is his middle name.

Remakes are almost never a good idea, but remaking a classic like John Frankenheimers taut The Manchurian Candidate borders on preposterous. Demme did it anyway, and in many respects, he outdirects Frankenheimer and his original with a slick, captivating, and unnerving modern political charge that recalls the paranoid political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. With The Truth About Charlie (2002), a remake of Charade (1967), bombing so badly only two years earlier, the (relatively) few of us who gave his remake of John Frankenheimers 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate a chance ended as thrilled as we were initially appalled.

Demme seems to thrive on cinematic challenges, and is as valued a member to this list as any other auteurwith or without the juggernaut of The Silence of the Lambs. We just wish he would make more movies!

Claire Denis

Claire Denis (1948 - present)

Three Key Films: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Shots of Rum(2008), White Material (2009) Underrated: The Intruder (2004) Your worst enemies are hiding inside. Hiding in the shadows. Hiding in your heart. Denis most obscure and inscrutable film deeply divided audiences and critics, some viewers considering it to be a profound treatise on identity, life and death, and others attacking it as an impenetrable tone poem that fails to add up despite scattered striking images. Initially baffling it might be, but The Intruder is a movie that, even more than Denis other films, richly repays and rewards repeat viewings. Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancys book, the film is at once a metaphysical exploration, a travelogue, and a quest narrative of sorts, tracking its heartless protagonist, Trebor (Michel Subor), as he journeys from Jura to Pusan in South Korea and finally to Tahiti, undergoing a heart transplant and attempting to seek out his estranged son. As a story in which, in Denis words, everything is broken, The Intruder doesnt need to add up, and for all its opacity, the film remains an indelible, haunting experiencea trip, in two sense, at least. Iconic moment: Endings in Denis cinema are invariably memorable and surprising, and none more so than Denis Lavants extraordinary acrobatic solo dance at the conclusion of Beau Travail, a moment that at once underscores the movies exploration of the male body and space and blows it all to pieces. Previously depicted as the controlled military man, Lavants Galoup lets rip with a frankly astonishing display of moves in this scene: twirling, flailing, leaping, rolling on the floor, and finally propelling himself out of the frame. I wanted to show that Galoup could escape himself, Denis has commented. And youll never hear Coronas The Rhythm of the Night again without seeing these images.

White Material (2009) The Legend: I always freak out when I hear people opposing sensation to story-telling, Claire Denis has said. A great story-teller always gives you that sense of warmth or cold [Sensation and storytelling] are not opposed Why deprive a film of what belongs to cinema? Perhaps more consistently than any other contemporary filmmaker, Denis movies work to make sensation into story-telling, and vice versa. Elliptical and fragmentary, sometimes oblique to the point of opacity, Denis films re-write the rule-book in terms of narrative content and characterization, her stories often emerging through an intense focus on the bodies of her actors and a moody, sensuous evocation of places and spaces. The result is a cinematic style that, in its combination of discretion and ellipsis with moments of confrontational, sometimes brutal directness, is one of the most distinctive in modern French cinema.

Born in Paris, Denis was raised in colonial West Africa, where her father was a civil servant; she went on to study at the IDHEC, the French film school, and served as an assistant to directors including Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. This background finds its way into her films in ways that vary from the obvious to the indirect. Elements of autobiography would certainly seem to inform her debut film, Chocolat (1988), in which a white French woman returns to Cameroon, where she recalls her childhood as the daughter of a regional administrator and her relationship with the familys servant, Prote (Isaach de Bankol). Issues of race and the fallout of colonialism remain pertinent in Denis cinema, and in its exploration of the experiences of white characters in Africa (Beau Travail and White Material) and African and Caribbean immigrants in France (No Fear, No Die [1990]; 35 Shots of Rum [2008]) her work can certainly be seen to engage with the complexities and uncertainties of our post-colonial world.

But Denis movies are too subtle and impressionistic for crude polemics around racial politics. Rather, her films approach such issues in more abstract terms, charting what the director herself calls movement[s] towards the unknown Other and toward the unknown in other people. Indeed, the notion of movement is particularly key to Denis cinema which brings a choreographic sensibility to its presentation of bodies at rest and in motion, and also makes spectacular use of rock and pop music ranging from Neil Young to the Beach Boys and the Commodores. An invigorating tactility, an effort to make her movies felt in the body of the spectator, characterizes her film-making practice.

Denis frequently works with the same colleagues, including actors (de Bankol, Grgoire Colin, Alex Descas, Nicholas Duvauchelle), musicians (the British band Tindersticks) and the cinematographer Agns Godard. The contributions of such collaborators clearly play a part in the distinctive ambiance that her films create even as her work moves from the gore of the horror filmTrouble Every Day (2001) to the warmth and sensitivity of an Ozu-inspired family drama (35 Shots of Rum). But what defines Deniss cinema most is the liberating amount of interpretive space that it gives to the audience. In the words of Ryland Walker Knight, Denis captures lifes richness by observing behavior, and then lets us develop the picture. Ultimately, it is nothing less than the mystery and materiality of human experience which is conveyed with such bracing insight and feeling in Denis dynamic work

Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma (1940 - present)

Three Key Films: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Carrie(1976), Scarface (1983)

Underrated: Femme Fatale (2002) Rebecca Romijn stars as Lily, a jewelry thief who inexplicably runs into her doppelganger, who then proceeds to kill herself giving the other a chance at rebirth. De Palmas obsession with reinvention is never more obvious than in this bizarre, surprisingly entertaining sexual thriller. He constantly places Romijns characters in situations that can be interpreted as baptisms (there is lots of water in this movie) and through the films he references (from Double Indemnity (1947) to To Catch a Thief(1955) ) he reminds us that the arts are the closest mankind has come at achieving rebirth. Antonio Banderas plays De Palmas alter ego, a paparazzi who is trying to decipher Lilys secrets through pictures he is far from fully comprehending.

Unforgettable: The Be Black, Baby sequence from Hi, Mom! (1970). In a career filled with outstanding set pieces (the Union Station shootout in The Untouchables (1987), the prom scene from Carrie, the climactic bloodbath of Scarface), this one tops them all. Robert De Niro reprises his role as Jon Rubin, the conflicted young man of De Palmas Greetings (1968), who this time around has decided to become a filmmaker. He shoots people from his apartment, giving De Palma one of his many camera-as-gun metaphors, and seems to be at odds in this new career path as well. His fortune changes when he runs into a troupe of black actors who put together a documentary called Be Black, Baby. The strange film includes audience members in black face being menaced by black actor in white face and De Niro as a policeman that weirdly feels like a premonition of his Travic Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976). This movie within a movie isnt so much about social changes or being black in America, its a challenging aesthetic project that took guerrilla filmmaking to the next level: it announced the movie camera as the weapon of choice for future revolutionaries. Scarface (1983)

The Legend: The most polarizingand under-appreciateddirector of the New Hollywood, Brian De Palmas ultimate legacy may be that of being the first post-modernist director in American cinema. While the so-called movie brats of the 1970s may have reveled in their cinematic upbringings, none did so more explicitly than De Palma. Referencing movie lore visually and orally may be business as usual in 2011, but back in 1973, when De Palma made the HitchcockianSisters, more than a few eyebrows were raised. He did himself no favors by continuing to draw comparisons to the Master of Suspense, and the primary argument by De Palma detractors is that he is simply an imitator, as opposed to an innovator. De Palma would probably never deny this as he has made a point out of exploring the nature of copying and doubles in films like the claustrophobic Body Double and the erotic thriller Femme Fatale. Throughout his career he has shown a fascination with what can only be deemed as possession. Whether it be the cross dressing killer of Dressed to Kill (1980) (which not coincidentally features a now iconic shower scene with Angie Dickinson) or the identity disorder of Mission: Impossible (1996), De Palma seems mystified by the idea of taking over someone elses life. His imitation therefore should be studied as a symptom of post-modernism: who are we really in a world largely influenced by the media?

His films are filled with camera tricks like split screens that irk some who find his film making as too gimmicky. However with an empathic attitude you will discover a man hard at work trying to dissect the essence of being through cinema. Even his most controversial works, like the misunderstood Mission to Mars, do more than just act as a mere Kubrick-redux, they challenge the very notions of what the movies are all about. Watch how he constantly features and fetishizes elements of filmmaking as protagonists in his movies: from the camera of Hi, Mom!, to the sound recorder of Blow Out (1981), to the Cannes Film Festival mise en scene that opens Femme Fatale. Heck, even the knife in Dressed to Kill (which could work as an instrument for editing), his explorations of life as a big movie are perhaps what has defined his entire filmography. De Palmas works are nothing less than master film classes, disguised as trashy, self indulgent entertainment.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren (1917 - 1961)

Three Key Films: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Meditation on Violence (1947), The Very Eye of Night (1959) Underrated: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti(1981). Thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship, Deren traveled to Haiti to film voodoo rituals from 1947 to 1954, publishing a book on the subject, Deren wouldnt live to finish the film, but 20 years after her death, her former collaborator Teiji Ito would complete it. In the footage that Ito compiled, we see that Deren was creating an important historical and cultural document, not to mention the fact that she herself was seen participating in the ceremonies. As admirable as Itos work is, were still left wondering what Derens own final cut of her own footage would have looked like.

Unforgettable: Three minutes into Meshes of the Afternoon where we see the Derens character falling asleep and then the second (but not last time) she runs up a path home, leaving us wondering what were really watching (dream, hallucination, artistic statement). The scene keeps getting replayed throughout the 14-minute film, changing each time in more disturbing ways, as later seen in films like Groundhogs Day, Mulholland Drive and Last Year at Marienbad. Its as important a moment insurrealistic cinema as the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou; unlike Bunuels extreme imagery, Deren went for a more subtle type of mind bending, also breaking apart the narrative thread of cinema. We also see Deren as the ravishing exotic beauty she was, not to mention that mirror-faced hooded figure and reappearing knives, keys and multiple Derens.

The Very Eye of Night (1959)

The Legend: On March 7, 2010, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally recognized a woman as being worthy of the title best director for the first time in the 81-year history of the Academy Awards. Even as a constant Hollywood critic, Deren would have loved to have seen that moment, if not receive an achievement award from the Academy (which should happen). Originally from the Ukraine, her family came to America five years after her birth. After college, she made her way to New York City where she did a thesis on poetry, worked as a photographer and assisted a choreographer. She then made her way out to Los Angles, finding a kindred spirit in Czech Alexander Hammid, who became her second husband and collaborator onMeshes of the Afternoon, which alone would have assured her place in film history.

Deren would go on to make five more short films (including the space ballet The Very Eye of Night, done with the Metropolitan Opera), as well as leaving behind almost as many unfinished projects after a combination of brain hemorrhage and malnutrition took her life tragically early at 44.Because her films were all in short form, her collected work fit on one DVD, the highly recommended Experimental Films (Mystic Fire). The 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Derenis also a valuable resource.

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889 - 1968)

Three Key Films: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr(1932), Ordet (1955) Underrated: Gertrud (1962) Dreyers final film, and only truly underrated if one posits it in comparison to his other more canonically revered earlier features, Gertrud is in many ways an apotheosis of Dreyers style and themes, and unquestionably as devastating as his other key films. Following the titular heroine, played with moving delicacy by Nina Pens Rode, as she searches in vain for an impossible ideal love. Sober, static, and so subtle that its full impact might not reach the viewer for days,Gertrud quietly matches The Passion of Joan of Arc in its commitment to an idealistic, independent, uncompromising female martyr. Gertrud does not burn at the stake, but her tragedy cuts open the viewer with the same blunt force.

Unforgettable: The word miraculous gets thrown around increasingly often as a lazy way to build up a films hype, but if theres any scene in cinema it genuinely applies to, it is the finale ofOrdet (1955), Dreyers monolithic exploration of faith and intolerance. A miracle, in the most traditional sense of the word, does occur in this scene, but its the way Dreyer stages itin signature long takes, without a single trick or wink, in a somber crescendo of exposed emotionthat makes the moment so staggeringly powerful. As much a paean to the power of film as the power of faith, the scene demands to be seen with fresh eyes, so I will say no more: just make sure your schedule allows you at least an hour of meditation following your screeningits very likely youll need it.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

The Legend: Despite a relatively small filmography, Carl Theodor Dreyer is truly a revered figure in cinema history; his emotionally draining storytelling and mysteriously slow output rate have afforded him an almost mythic status. The illegitimate son of a Swedish housekeeper, Carl Dreyer would pass through multiple foster homes before his placement in the care of Carl Theodor and Inger Marie Dreyer, around the same time as his biological mothers accidental death. Dreyer would later estrange himself from his adpoted family as a teenager, and though dismissive of the impact of his childhood in interviews, his past seems unquestionably tied to his cinematic ruminations of sorrow, interpersonal disconnect, and martyrdom.

Dreyers first forays into film were with the Danish Nordisk company in the 1910s; work from this period includes The President (1915) and The Parsons Widow (1920). These early features show a concern for the suffering of women that would culminate in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a film any cineaste should be intimately familiar with. That films mystical power derives from Dreyers marriage of religious and spiritual tropes with intensely visceral depictions of torturea marriage of the holy and human that defines Dreyers entire oeuvre. Renee Maria Falconettis legendary performance as Joan adds to the emotional depth: shot almost entirely in extreme close-ups, Falconettis bare, tear-stained face is one of cinemas truly iconic images; her portrayal belongs not in the category of performance but instead possession.

following Joan of Arc, Dreyers output pace slowed considerably; over the next four decades he would release only four features. The atmospheric Vampyr (1932) was met with mixed reviews upon its release, but its surrealist imagery and expressionist construction has since made it a genre classic and an essential piece of Dreyers oeuvre: thematically and stylistically it bridges Dreyers earlier output with his later work by showcasing an interest in the darker side of spirituality as well as pushing the boundaries of realist representation. Day of Wrath (1943) continues to explore the intermediary space between darkness and light, demons and angels: here we see Dreyers trademark tonal and sensory austerity in full effect.

His final films abandon the occult elements of the previous two works, but retain their austere style and emotional nakedness: Ordet (1955), based on the play by Kaj Munk, unfolds slowly but rigorously in its depiction of religious intolerance among a Danish farming community. Dreyer documents the various crises of the films central family with such sobriety and empathy that once the narrative content turns increasingly urgent, the viewing experience nearly turns physical. The same can be said for Gertrud (1962), Dreyers final film, which also uses long takes and carefully-constructed mise-enscene to heighten the power of its emotional crescendo.

Despite tackling such disparate subject material, Dreyers films all feature a striking, overpowering understanding of what it means to suffer: their humanity and humility are the traits that have come to define Dreyer and his oeuvre, and indeed he remains untouchable when said subject matter is concerned.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein (1898 - 1948)

Three Key Films: The Battleship Potemkin (1925); October (Ten Days That Shook the World) (1928); Alexander Nevsky(1938) Underrated: Que Viva Mexico (filmed in 1932, released in 1979) Eisenstein travelled to Mexico to film this tale of Mexican independence, but the film was shut down when filming went long and over budget. Although a version was released 31 years after Eisensteins death to acclaim, we will never know what his final edit of the film would have been. Unforgettable: A young mother attending a political rally is shot by the Cossacks in Battleship Potemkin (1925). As she falls to the ground dying, she inadvertently bumps her baby carriage, sending it careening down a lengthy flight of steps. Though hundreds flee the onslaught of bullets, interest in the fate of the baby in the carriage dominates the scene. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most copied sequences in film history (most notably in De Palmas The Untouchables[1987]).

The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The Legend: Eisenstein reportedly commented, What a monument you would have raised in my memory if I had died straight after The Battleship Potemkin! Ive made a mess of my own biography! While this may be a bit of an overstatement, Eisenstein was correct that he peaked early in his career. However, Eisenstein tended to exhibit some of the autocratic control that his films sought to expose in various governments, overseeing every aspect of his films to the point of obsession, a quality that hindered much of his later work.

Internal and external conflict furthered restricted his genius. As a young man, he and his father were at odds during WWI and the October Revolution in Russia, resulting in irreparable harm to their relationship. As an artist, he frequently found himself being chastised by the new Soviet government and often fought with producers and studios. Perhaps because of these experiences, conflictboth societal and personalis at the front of all his great films. In examining the role of government in the lives of the proletariat, Eisenstein was a pioneer in using mood, lighting, and montage to convey heroism and villainy. In a time when silent films were usually one-reelers, he crafted epics, filled with sweeping crowd scenes and disturbing images, some of which couldnt be shot today, such as the plummet of a live horse from a raised drawbridge into the river below.

His visionary films influenced filmmakers worldwide, establishing that film could be more than just mindless entertainment. While his early contributions to film guarantee him a place as one of the most

influential directors in film history, his later works were inconsistent. Eisenstein struggled to duplicate the early success of October and Battleship Potemkin. His plans for a trilogy biography of Ivan the Terrible yielded a classic, Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944), and a disaster, Part II (released in 1958, ten years after his death). He died before the third part was finished.

Yet, his influence wasnt limited to his work as a director. Before he had directed his first movie, Eisenstein wrote the first of several theories of film. In these works, he expounds his theory of Dialectical Montage, based on the Marxist dialectic. The theory states that thesis (a force or side) meets an antithesis (counterforce), resulting in synthesis (an amalgamation of thesis and antithesis that is greater than and differs from both). This dialectical tension can be presented on film in one of five editing processes: Metric (limiting the number of frames shown), Rhythmic (editing based on the use of time), Tonal (emphasis of emotional elements), Overtonal (a synthesis of the previous three), and Intellectual (emphasis of intellectual themes). Not only was Eisenstein true to his own theories, most of the directors on this list of Great Directors have followed them, whether they realized it or not.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 - 1982)

Three Key Films: The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972),The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Berlin Alexanderplatz(1979/80)

Underrated: In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)Unforgettable:Over the course of Fassbinder?s 40 odd films, there are many moments that brand themselves upon the viewers brain, but perhaps the most scarring is the slaughterhouse sequence from In a Year with 13 Moons. Elvira the reluctant transvestite relates her story of failed romance to her hooker friend, Red Zora, while various slowcreeping tracking shots capture the skinning, disembowelment and bloodletting of cattle. As Elvira becomes hysterical at her own misery, the blood starts to foam in the drains, and we realize that love itself is no different from this killing factory. The film and this sequence become even more powerful if one knows the circumstances of the films creation. Fassbinders boyfriend(on whom Elviras former identity, Erwin, was based) committed suicide on Fassbinder?s birthday, in his apartment, and was not discovered for several days. The tragic incident inspired Fassbinder to write, produce, shoot, edit, do the art design and direct the film in matter of weeks (the film was conceived and completed while he was working on The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz). This film alone is perhaps justification for Fassbinders inclusion on this list.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979/80)

The Legend: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, at the age of 16, filled out a questionnaire required of schoolchildren that asked them about their plans for the future. He replied that his goal was to become a filmmaker, and make such a large amount of films that his life itself would become a film. With all of the well-publicized sexploits, drug use, and provocative press statements (that would give Von Trier a run for his money) it seems he accomplished his teenage goal insofar as he was always on the screens of the media and his films saturated the movie houses. He was born in 1945 in Germany, three weeks after the Third Reich surrendered to the Allied Forces. Over the course of his 14-year career, 1968-1982, he made over 40 films across every conceivable medium dealing with the lingering specter of Nazism and the exploitation of emotions within Germany of the 1970s.

Surprisingly, many of Fassbinders films are available on DVD; which is pretty impressive considering he made three short films, four television films, one television series, four filmed plays, 24 feature films and one segment of an omnibus film, not to mention the numerous theatrical productions he directed, produced and starred in (along with roles in the production and cast of fellow filmmakers projects). He accomplished this stunning feat by literally killing himself with work (and the vast amounts of cocaine he required for said work). He died on the night of June 10th, 1982 with the screenplay for his next film in his hands and a lit cigarette in his mouth. He has several masterpieces apart from the four mentioned here, but these are good entry points into his work. Other amazing films to check out once familiar with his style would be The American Soldier, Effi Briest and The Third Generation.

Overall, Fassbinders body of work can be characterized under that catchall banner of melodrama. However, his preoccupation with the exploitation of emotions and German history transforms his work from mere weepies to a sort of cinematic whistleblowing on the shenanigans of social tyranny.

Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini (1920 - 1993)

Three Key Films: La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 (1963)

Underrated: Satyricon (1969). Sure, Fellini received his third Best Director Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Petronius satire about imperial Rome, but this was also the same movie that had Richard Corliss declare Fellini was reaching his decline while Pauline Kael labeled it as terrible. At first glance Satyricon might look just like an oversexed, overindulgent experiment through which Fellini added nothing new to his oeuvre; however, taking into consideration the year when it was released, the film can be seen as a compromise between an up and coming rebellious generation (i.e. hippies) and an artist who wanted to remind them where they came from.

Unforgettable: A Swedish bombshell Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) arrives in Rome to the delight of the paparazzi who follow her all over town. However its only the lucky Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) who gets to witness what has become one of the most sensual scenes in film history. As Sylvia becomes lost in the narrow Roman streets, she discovers the Trevi Fountain and decides to have a bath. Marcello watches from the distance as she invites him Marcello, come here!. He doesnt get in. We wouldve in a heartbeat. From La Dolce Vita.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

The Legend: A master of image, form and story, Federico Fellinis career could very well serve as a representation of cinemas evolution. From his early work as a cartoonist and screenwriter, to his eventual worldwide recognition as one of the masters of the medium, he wasnt afraid of experimentation. During the 1940s he attempted to make films that adjusted to the postwar reality that was pushing European cinema into a style that recalled nonfiction filmmaking. After works like Variety Lights (1950) and his contribution as a writer to the seminal Rome, Open City(1945), but Fellini found his voice when he made La Strada. The film starred his wife Giulietta Massina as Gelsomina, a simple minded woman who joins a traveling circus act led by the savage Zampan (Anthony Quinn).

While the film stuck to the aesthetics of neorrealism, much like Nights of Cabiria (1957), plot-wise it touched the oneiric territory that would characterize Fellinis further work. Its this combination of harsh reality with melancholy and fantasy that defines some of his greatest films, from Juliet of the Spirits (1964) to Amarcord (1975). Talking about dreams is like talking about the movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams he once said and proof of this is his 8 which deftly, if almost by accident, penetrates the creative mind and its complexly mysterious nature.

Fellini wasnt a big fan of the truth and his biographers usually point out the way in which his life story changes according to the listener. His one true purpose was to tell stories and entertain. In Amarcord (1973), film for which he received a record breaking fourth Oscar nomination for Best Director (no other foreign language filmmaker has achieved this), he remembers his childhood but filters it through a nostalgic, fantastic lens which makes it one of the most endearing coming-of-age films ever made. He told them, like he wished they wouldve happened.

John Ford

John Ford (1894 - 1973)

Three Key Films: Stagecoach (1939), Grapes of Wrath(1940), The Searchers (1956) Underrated: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) Boasting a list of film credits as long as your arm, Ford was bound to have several overlooked gems in his oeuvre. But this alternative Western stands atop the pile with its mixture of historical drama, gorgeous early Technicolor, and standout performances from Henry Ford and John Carradine (as an eye-patched badass Canadian! Sort of.). Though its white vs. Indians racial politics dont feel too comfortable anymore, and its gender relations are stereotypes all the way, it all works without slipping too far into formula in an era when formula often got in the way.

Unforgettable: The you pick it up scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In his early 60s elegy for a genre in decline, brilliantly constructed as a lament for an idealized American

West, there are at least a dozen unforgettable moments. Indeed, in many critiques of the film, this is the central problem: that the film itself feels more like an homage to the great genre pictures that have come before, many of which starred the same actors in their younger days. Well, sure. But, isnt that clearly the point of the exercise? A film about aging, about the end of an era, and about the ways legends are constructed around myths to serve as signposts in an uncertain future, Liberty Valance is supposed to feel familiar and comforting. Thats the reason it is so heartbreakingly nostalgic and evocative. Anyway, this is the best scene from one of the best films I can name. In it, the two soonto-be anachronistic cowboys are arguing about nothing, ready to kill for it, and standing between them its the future in the person of James Stewart, a peaceful, rational, Eastern problem-solver. How the west was won, indeed.

Stagecoach (1939)

The Legend: 140. Thats how many movies are attributed to John Ford over his 50 years in Hollywood. Its an absurd number, almost impossible to imagine. How does one compare a filmmaker who was prolific to this extreme to someone as stingily unproductive as Terrence Malick? Indeed, and this is the most amazing part, even though most of us has never seen even half of these films (many are lost), what we are left with are at least a few dozen unassailable masterpieces. For a man who was tireless, obviously overworked, tied to a studio system which had him churning out picture after

picture at breakneck speed for decades, John Ford managed to compile an unparalleled list of unqualified successes.

Born in 1894 in Maine, John Feeney moved to California in 1914 to begin a career in film production. His older brother had already established himself in Hollywood, and John was able to walk into a job. Before long, however, his brothers star began to fade and John (now John Ford) took up the reins, transitioning to directing silent films at a breakneck pace. Highly respected by his colleagues for both the quality of his films and his astonishing work ethic, Ford would become president of the Motion Picture Directors Association (today known as the Directors Guild of America).

Though most often remembered for his Westernsindeed, any short list of the best this genre has to offer will be overrun with John Ford picturesFord made something like 35 films between his last silent Western (3 Bad Men (1926)) and his triumphant, genre-defining Stagecoach (1939), so he clearly had other interests as well. Indeed, Ford was amazingly successful at translating major literary works onto celluloid. Though more commonly trivialized by film fans for having beaten Welles Citizen Kane , his only Best Picture Oscar was for the wonderful How Green Was My Valley in 1941. An inveterate weirdo, famous for his idiosyncrasies like munching on handkerchiefs while he worked (to the point that he started each day with a dozen fresh ones that he would set about gnawing to smithereens), his sporting of an unnecessary eye-patch, his solitary post-production days-long drinking binges, and his driving of a car so ramshackle that he was once refused entry to his own set because the guard refused to believe that the great John Ford would own such a piece of shit. The great poet of the American landscape, a master of the long shot, and perhaps the most influential American filmmaker one can name, Ford died in 1973 at the age of 79.

The 100 Essential Directors Part 4: Samuel Fuller John Huston

On our fourth day, this journey through who we believe to be the 100 Essential Film Directors continues to twist and turn in unexpected ways. From bold, opinionated Hollywood voices to those who essentially created the language of cinema, today will shed light on kings of genre like Samuel Fuller, through lions like the legendary John Huston.

Samuel Fuller (1912 - 1977)

Three Key Films: The Steel Helmet (1951), Pickup on South Street (1953), The Big Red One (1980) Underrated: Park Row (1952). Frank Capra called Its a Wonderful Life his best film for decades before anyone would listen. Sam Fuller felt the same way about his newspaper epic Park Row, which has finally become available on DVD this year. Inspired by his years working in the cutthroat New York newspaper businessa copyboy at 12, crime reporter at 17Fullers fondness for the industry is apparent. The plot and themes are basically the same as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Loveable underdogs take on corrupt institution, only here its a startup newspaper taking on a corrupt institution personified in Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), a classic Fuller brunette and coldhearted, greedy publisher whom the loveable underdog is more than happy to sleep with. Long-admired for his explosive camera movement, Park Row features one of Fullers most exciting fight scenes and plenty of sardonic wit, with just the right amount of heart planted firmly on its sleeve.

Unforgettable: From The Steel Helmet. The titles scroll, the camera resting on the dome of a helmet, smooth except for a single bullet hole piercing the right side. A grave, familiar image of wartime sacrifice. Only this isnt WWII. This is Korea. And as the titles fade, the seemingly abandoned helmet suddenly rises to reveal the squinting, shifty eyes of an American soldier, hiding from the enemy. Stephen Frears would open The Queen (2006) similarly, humanizing our iconography by bringing what seemed to be a royal portrait to life.

The Big Red One (1980)

The Legend: Martin Scorsese said, If you dont like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just dont like cinema. Samuel Fuller was told to cast John Wayne in the role of platoon leader in his epic and autobiographical war film, The Big Red One, he said hed rather not make the movie at all. One need watch only a couple of Fullers pictures to understand why his response is no surprise. Though his scope was broadhe made war films, melodramas, westerns, crime noir, and odd things in between Fullers trademark punchy dialog, exuberant violence and inventive camera work unifies the disparate settings and characters. Whether were shaking down a Japanese pachinko parlor in House of Bamboo (1955), or confined within a submarine in Hell and High Water(1954), the integrity of his vision is clear. Were clearly operating in the same mental space. No, what is surprising about the story of making The Big Red One is that anyone would ask him to cast John Wayne to begin with. Trying to imagine The Duke in any of Fullers war films is like picturing Darth Vader in 2001. Thats not a knock on Wayne (or Vader), but theyre fictional characters, operating on the level of myth. Somehow, the surrealistic world of Sam Fuller manages to feel emphatically real.

His films didnt always feel real though. Critics at the time complained that his tawdry subjects stretched credulity and disliked his left-of-center aesthetics. Similarly, viewers accustomed to a different kind of war film found many aspects of Fullers breakthrough The Steel Helmet quite unreal. An integrated platoon? An American shooting a POW? An intelligent commie? Many were outraged. They said the film was funded by Reds, and accused the real-life war hero of being anti-American. (Fullers WWII platoon landed in Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, earning him Bronze and Silver Stars.) Unfortunately, this sort of controversy plagued Fullers career. Several decades later, his film White Dog would be shelved by Paramount, who feared a threatened boycott by the NAACP. Never mind that the film was actually a sobering contemplation on the roots and results of racism, made by a director whose progressive record on race was abundantly evident in both his themes and his integrationist casting choices. Paramount would not release it. Angry, Fuller moved to France and did not make another American film.

Despite these battles, Fuller was not a provocateur. Instead he strove to capture a sense of reality that only he could see and, in doing so, redefined our expectations of cinema. What once seemed pulpy (The Crimson Kimono 1959), surreal (The Naked Kiss 1964), and outrageous (Shock Corridor 1963), now seems simply ahead of its time. As a result, his greatest legacy might be his influence. The French New Wavers, Spielberg, Jarmusch, Tarantino (and on and on) have acknowledged Sam Fullers direct impact on their work. In fact, you can hardly imagine their films without him. His idiosyncratic vision normalized what we value in cinema today.

Jean Luc Godard

Jean Luc Godard (1930 - present)

Three Key Films: Breathless (1960), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Contempt (1963)

Underrated: Made in U.S.A. (1966): Godards movies are often imbued with political subtext, but Made in U.S.A.essentially eschews with the sub and simply makes the political discussion its blatant focus. Its perhaps a little more obviously ideological than other Godard efforts, which might explain why it is in a position to be considered underrated. Either way, what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in seemingly spontaneous wit. Made in U.S.A.provides a rather intriguing conversation about politics and a careful snapshot of 60s France. Through the eyes and ears of Godard, its always a fascinating place to be.

Unforgettable: Theres a delightfully playful scene inMasculin, Feminin (1966) where main male character Paul is engaged in a conversation with a friend at a caf. When a man enters the caf to ask the worker for directions, Paul waits until he leaves and then stands up, strolls to the entrance, and essentially re-enacts the strangers brief action. After asking the same question as the man he is oddly impersonating, he sits back down with his dumbfounded friend, who questions what just happened. Paul explains that he wanted to experience the sensation of walking in another persons shoes, before brushing off the experience as an underwhelming exercise. This moment epitomizes Godards love of imaginative observation and his desire to embrace originality while simultaneously shrugging it off with a smile.

Breathless (1960)

The Legend: The brilliant master who helped open the floodgates to the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard is a true cinematic revolutionary. His movies are ablaze with a strikingly passionate spirit that fills every corner of the frame. The very act of entering his world is endlessly exciting because of the potent possibilities that are promised by his wide range of intriguing talents. Theres nothing quite like the world as seen through Godards eyes and his many movies (his filmography stretches far and wide) amaze with their originality.

Born in 1930 to a Franco-Swiss family in Paris, Godard grew up with Protestant influences and eventually sought education in both France and Switzerland. The 1950s brought his beginnings in cinema criticism and creation, which soon culminated with his hugely popular hit Breathless, released in 1960 and still regarded as one of Godards most famous and beloved films. From there, Godard embarked on a filmmaking journey that continues to this day. His incredibly fruitful period in the 60s (that portion of his career that is considered a part of New Wave cinema) concluded with Week End (1967), but he would go on to make many more movies in the decades that followed. In 2010, he received an Honorary Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Godards cinematic voice seems to speak an entirely new language, one of wonderful whimsy and vibrant vivacity. His words leap off the screen and the combination of adventurous editing, playful musical cues, daring dialogue, and succulent photography ensures that the very unique viewing

experience provided by his movies is both visually and aurally intoxicating. Theres a dreamlike quality to his movies that is extended to invade our own reality. Its all very self-reflexive and self-aware, with Godard often choosing to use his camera as a mirror in order to look back on the real world.

His approach to filmmaking and storytelling tends to be very imaginative and extremely energetic, but keeping up with his vision is always a delight and never a bore. His work doesnt alienate, but rather draws us in with its fascinating blend of political satire and gender commentary. He refuses to take the easy way out and he enjoys challenging the audience in a rewarding manner. He is an iconic and incredible director who plays by his own rules. His movies are true treasures. Through them, Godard speaks to us with passion erupting and his genius flowing over.

D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith (1875 - 1948)

Three Key Films: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance: Loves Struggle Through the Ages(1916), Broken Blossoms(1919) Underrated: Shot on the same trip as In Old California, the first film shot in Hollywood, Ramona (1910) ties together Griffiths fascination for native and Latino history, his background as an actor and his developing skill as a director. He had been on stage as Alessandro, the Native American lover of Ramona, in 1905, and subsequently became enamored with the story, based on a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Ramona. His fondness of the story is apparent in the intimate framing of especially the burial scenes, and Ramona shows him experimenting with the balance

between domestic settings and large-scale panoramic scenes that would be perfected in later works. His use of deep-focus shots and close ups ensured the emotional impact of the narrative on audiences, and perfectly captured the magnanimous California landscape. An early poignant reminder of both Griffiths skill and the ambiguity of his racial politics.

Unforgettable: The iconic final ride of white hooded Ku Klux Klan members in The Birth of a Nation, led by Little Colonel Ben Cameron. The powerful imagery of the Klansmen galloping through a stream and across a ledge is given a sense of urgency by Griffiths camera movements and parallel editing; the camera anxiously follows the horses down the winding forest road, while at the same time the personal space of the white characters is increasingly encroached upon.

The Birth of a Nation (1915) The Legend: The time will come, and in less than ten years when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures, David Wark Griffith predicted in 191Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. The words are emblematic of the visionary behind them; Griffith had an unwavering faith in the potential of film, and envisioned this as extending far beyond the theatre.

The son of a farmer-turned-Confederate colonel, Griffith internalized his fathers racist ideas from an early age on. His childhood in rural Kentucky was characterized by poverty, only exacerbated by four former slave families that refused to leave the Griffith-land and that formed four important factors in keeping the family poor. Griffiths father Jacob was decisive in shaping his thematic concerns, but the

techniques that he remains universally lauded for were the result of his own determination. Credited with inventing both the catchphrase lights, camera, action and fake eyelashes, Griffith quickly revealed himself a multifaceted talent. For Biograph, he shot up to 3 films a week, but he dreamed of directing longer features and started independently. He pioneered techniques that have remained in vogue ever since, notably the high angle, the iris shot, cross-cutting, and parallel editing.

All of these can be found in The Birth of a Nation, which also demonstrated Griffiths aptitude at staging battle scenes of an unprecedented scale. As the themes of his productions are often regarded as distinctly American, his foreign success can be attributed mostly to these technical feats and directorial skill. Indeed, The Atlanta Constitution cited the excellence of presentation as the main attraction for Birth when it estimated in November 1916 that over twenty-five million people had seen the film outside of the U.S. But after Birth, Griffith felt betrayed by the negative audience response over the films racial content. He filmed Intolerance as a response, but his post-Birth endeavors never enjoyed more than modest success. Social commentary concerning race and class remained integral to his work, and was not as black-white as Birth would lead to believe; in times when public opinion dictated otherwise, he emerged as a defender of Native- and Chinese American rights, and did not hesitate to incorporate this into film. Broken Blossoms, a 1919 production again starring Lilian Gish, is perhaps Griffiths most intimate and powerful film and a case in point.

While his legacy is tainted by the blatantly racist content of some of his productions, Griffiths prophesies turned out to be self-fulfilling. He singlehandedly paved the way for innovations in presentation (such as a professional orchestra and in-theatre facilities) that completely transformed the movie-going experience. As such, he persuaded an entirely new demographicthe middle class to frequent the theatre, and the heterogeneous, national audience that flocked to see Birth would define and feed the industry for decades to come. Appreciating D.W. Griffith thus means understanding him as a product of his time in societal ideas, while at the same time acknowledging that he was light-years ahead of his time in technique. The significance of his work remains twopronged, functioning as a time capsule on the one hand, and as a blueprint of Hollywood on the other.

Toms Gutirrez Alea

Toms Gutirrez Alea (1928 - 1996)

Three Key Films: Memories of Underdevelopment (1968),The Last Supper (1976), Strawberry and Chocolate (1994)Underrated: Up to a Certain Point (1983) Unforgettable: The tour-de-force of black comedy in the eponymous scene of The Last Supper is surely the most unforgettable moment in a Gutirrez Alea film. Set in 1795, in Spanish colonial Cuba, the film details the last days of the Havana sugar cane plantation in the face of the famous slave revolt of the same year. In a desperate attempt to quell the rising revolutionary fervor, the Master of the plantation decides to invite twelve of the slaves to share in his Easter festivities. The supper scene begins with a rather defensive monologue from the Master on the fundamentals of Christianity. The Masters goal is to explain his ecumenical right to power over the natives and African slaves in Cuba; however, his condescending message is lost in the confusion between Christs transubstantiation and cannibalism. The similarity between the two is humorously ridiculed by the slaves, whose laughter and intelligence of the matter shocks the Master into a bumbling, drunken stupor from which he falls unconscious in mid-sentence. With the Master doubly humiliated and subdued, the rebellion can finally begin.

Strawberry and Chocolate (1994)

The Legend: Gutirrez is the most internationally lauded filmmaker from Cuba and consistently produced a variety of film objects that contradicted and enlightened the outside perspective of the island nation. Among more than 20 features, he has tackled issues of social and political criticism via genres and styles as diverse as documentary (This Land of Ours, 1959), romantic comedy (Up to a Certain Point, Strawberry and Chocolate), experimental (Memories of Underdevelopment), melodrama (Survivors, 1979; and Guantanamera, 1996), and black comedy (The Last Supper and Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966).

The director learned the art of filmmaking abroad in Italy, under the masters of Neo-realism. However, the techniques he learned from De Sicca, Visconti and Rossellini seem only to be the foundation of his audacious style. His most popular film, Memories of Underdevelopment, is a collage of neo-realist tropes and new wave flair but eludes the pretensions of both styles. Set in the years between the revolutions end and the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the film presents us with a society ready to make it on its own; the protagonists tastes for capitalist culture end up driving him into a ghostly existence just a memory of the countrys underdevelopment. Apart from making films, Gutierrez Alea founded a filmmaking school in Havana and mentored many young directors into strong careers. Towards the end of his life, he found himself in ill health and unable to assume full directing responsibilities, but the collaborations he did with his former student Juan Carlos Tabio are some of his best films. Strawberry and Chocolateexposes and gently tries to negotiate a discourse of homosexuality in Cuba. Rather than the standard fare of the doomed relationship, however, the film is

a sexy, breezy rom-com that managed to garner the first ever Academy Award nomination for a Cuban film.

Unfortunately, only a paltry few of his films are available on home video in the US. But luckily they are among his best. Do not hesitate to see any of these!

Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke (1942 - present)

Three Key Films: Funny Games (1997), Cache (2005), The White Ribbon (2009)

Underrated: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) The final part of Hanekes Austria-set emotional glaciation trilogy has never gained the amount of attention given to its predecessors, The Seventh Continent (1989) and Bennys Video (1992). But this subtle and provocative film is among Hanekes most resonant works. As its title suggests, the film is an elliptical account of numerous events involving disparate characters (a homeless Romanian boy; a student; a bank security guard and his wife) who are finally connected by a random and apparently motiveless act of violence. A precursor, in both content and structure, to Code Unknown, the movies withering critique of the mediatization of experience is encapsulated by the ending, in which we see a complex and multifaceted event diminished and packaged as it takes its place in the endless parade of TV news images.

Unforgettable: The film rewind in Funny Games. In a rare moment of one-up-(wo)man-ship against the familys two captors, Anna (Susanne Lothar) shoots Peter (Frank Giering), only for his accomplice Paul (Arno Frisch) to grab a remote-control and rewind the films action from within the diegesis, subsequently replaying the scene to prevent Peters murder. Functioning as a self-reflexive disavowal of the catharsis of the retaliatory violence expected from a suspense thriller, the scene is one of the most startling moments not only in Hanekes oeuvre but in all of contemporary cinema.

The White Ribbon (2009) The Legend: Cold, detached, theoretical, didactic and sadistic are some of the words that invariably appear in discussions of Michael Hanekes work. While a superficial engagement with Hanekes cinema might make all of these terms seem apt at various points, none of these reductive descriptions truly does justice to the power of Hanekes work and the density of its inquiry into the complexities of living and interacting in the contemporary world. Calculated to provoke and disturb, its certainly true that Hanekes films can be grueling experiences, but they seldom fail to reward ones patience and commitment. Watching Hanekes movies, the viewer always feels in the grip of a controlled, discerning intelligence, that of a filmmaker who is intensely preoccupied by some of the most pressing social and ethical questions facing us today.

A German-born Austrian, Haneke studied psychology, philosophy and drama at the University of Vienna. He worked as a film and literary critic before beginning his directing career in the German theater and in television. His first cinematic feature, The Seventh Continent, appeared in 1989; the story of an Austrian family going through their daily lives in a series of ritualized routines before

calmly undertaking an irrevocable decision, the film established some of the key aspects of the directors spare, measured, understated and elliptical style. It was followed by two more films,Bennys Video and 71 Fragments of A Chronology of Chance, that also explored what Haneke would call the emotional glaciation of Austria. The trilogy was followed by a made-for television adaptation of Kafkas The Castle (1997), and then by Funny Games, still perhaps Hanekes most notorious film, a Brechtian deconstruction of the home invasion thriller that critiques the concept of violence-asentertainment but was accused by some critics of employing precisely the kind of shock tactics that it sought to attack. Since then, Haneke has gone on to make more ambitiously-scaled films, often employing European star actors: Juliette Binoche in Code Unknown and Cache; Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher (2002) and Time of the Wolf (2003). He has also continued to engage in a subversive manner with genre conventions: melodrama in The Piano Teacher, disaster film in Time of the Wolf, suspense thriller in Cache. His most recent film, the Palme dor-winning The White Ribbon, was a foray into period drama, a chilling account of mysterious, violent happenings in a north German village just before World War I.

Deeply concerned with the ethics of spectatorship, Hanekes work frequently explores the ways in which the proliferation of images in contemporary culture may serve to reduce rather than intensify the viewers sense of reality. As Catherine Wheatley has argued, Haneke believes we are living in a time in which people have become inured to the experience of real life through the medium of television (and film), which divides brute reality into neat segments and packages it between commercials, insinuating it into the daily routines of consumer life. Screens-within-the-screen, frames-within-the-frame, thus form a recurrent motif in his cinema, which attempts to forge an alternative relationship to the spectator, engaging him or her as a discriminating, thoughtful participant rather than a voracious, unthinking consumer.

Indeed, watching a Haneke film the viewer often feels drawn into an intense, all-too-rare state ofalertness, challenged to puzzle out the significances that seem hidden in his often static and painstakingly-composed frames. Clearly, theres an element of didacticism in Hanekes project to make us see better, but ultimately his cinema is one of open-ended questions rather than fixed, final answers. Wider allegorical resonances in his work emerge subtly, almost subliminally, and despite his engagement with a range of contemporary panics and paranoiasaround race, immigration, sexuality, powerhis work never feels issue-led. Finally, an unsentimental compassion and concern underpins the invigorating moral seriousness of Hanekes film-making, with its urgent inquiry into what we watch, how we live, and the relationship between the two

Howard Hawks

Howard Hawks (1896 - 1977)

Three Key Films: Bringing Up Baby (1937), The Big Sleep(1946), and Rio Bravo (1959)

Underrated: Ball of Fire (1941) Hawks retells the story ofSnow White and the Seven Dwarves as a group of cloistered scholars writing an encyclopedia. While Gary Cooper is miscast as an academic and not terribly convincing as Prince Charming, Barbara Stanwyck in the title role does what she did better than any other actress in the history of film: play the bad girl gone good. Not Hawks at his best, but still enormously entertaining.

Unforgettable: No one does dialogue better than Howard Hawks, so of course Hawkss most iconic moment features people talking. Slim (Lauren Bacall, in her screen debut) reduces the tough guy Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart), whom she calls Steve, to a quivering mass of jelly:

Slim: You know Steve, youre not very hard to figure, only at times. Sometimes I know exactly what youre going to say. Most of the time. The other times [sits in his lap], the other times youre just a stinker. [Kisses him]. Steve: Whatd you do that for? Slim: Been wondering whether Id like it. Steve: Whats the decision? Slim: I dont know yet. [Kisses him again, long; after a while she stands up and walks to the door].

Its even better when you helpYou know you dont have to act with me Steve. You dont have to say anything and you dont have to do anything, not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, dont you Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.

Bringing Up Baby (1937)

The Legend: Many critics, even while ranking him as one of the two or three greatest directors of the studio era in Hollywood, nonetheless denigrate Hawks as a director. Many regard his work as too entertaining to be serious cinema, not like what you get with Bergman or Fellini. Certainly Hawks did not regard himself as an artiste (though Jean-Luc Godard has in fact called him The great American artist).

Howard Hawks was born in a financially well-to-do family in Goshen, Indiana, and later went to Exeter and Cornell, making him one of the more urbane Hollywood directors. While not an intellectual, he was friends with writers like Faulkner and Hemingway. An avid flierhe flew in WWIand briefly a race car driver, Hawks drifted into the movies in the twenties, first as a writer before becoming a director.

Although in many ways a mans man, Hawkss films explore the complexities of gender to a degree unusual in his era, so that Hawks is one of the most heavily studied directors by feminist theorists. His women typically want to be with men, but seeking romance was not their primary goal in life. Not terribly demure, the Hawks woman often takes the initiative. In Bringing Up Baby, it is Katherine

Hepburns Susan who pursues paleontologist David (who was, in one of the many mildly dirty jokes that Hawks enjoyed, looking for his bone, literally; in fact Davids first line in the film is a confession that he doesnt know where his bone goes), not David who pursues Susan. In the same film David (Cary Grant), trying to explain to Susans aunt why he is dressed in a womans dressing gown, shouts, I just became gay all of a sudden! perhaps the first open use of the term in pop culture.

No director in the history of film mastered as many genres as Hawks. He directed one of the greatest gangster films in Scarface (1932). Though only a few of his films were strictly speaking comedies (though all of his films contained both a great deal of humor and darkness), he is easily one of the two or three greatest comedy directors cinema has known. He is the second most important director of Westerns after only John Ford. He directed (uncredited) the first alien invasion SF film, The Thing From Another World (1951), and made several great war films, a musical, and a truly great detective film in The Big Sleep.

Hawks reputation continues to rise and the reason lies in the films. Few directors ever made so many good ones (Hawks defined a good movie as Three great scenes. No bad ones.). The great British critic Robin Wood, while insisting that choosing The Worlds Greatest Film was a silly enterprise, nonetheless put forward Rio Bravo as his candidate for the title. David Thomson not only names The Big Sleep as his favorite film but claims that if he had possession of the worlds great movies on a sinking ship, but with time to save only ten, they would be: Twentieth Century(1934), Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River (1948), I Was a Male War Bride (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), andRio Bravo. All directed by Howard Hawks.

Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes (1961 - present)

Three Key Films: Safe (1995), Far From Heaven (2002),Mildred Pierce (2011) Underrated: Superstar as a whole. Produced in 1987 and withdrawn from public screenings in 1990 due to licensing issues, the film investigates Karen Carpenters rise as a star and descent into anorexia with utmost humanity. Haynes does this through the use of Barbie and Ken dolls, with an intricately whittled away Barbie in the Karen Carpenter role. The 43-minute film has seen the light of day via Youtube and Google video, and even in this lower quality one can sense the pains Haynes took to elevate the oft-ridiculed Carpenters, revealing the human tragedy underneath. Unforgettable: Im Not There (2007), one of the boldest films in recent memory (as well as a revolutionary take on the biopic) was also one of the most ignored. Many critics wrote it off as cluttered and over-indulgent, overlooking Haynes ambitions and his success in achieving them. Even those who found Im Not There a bit too wide in scope must concede that Cate Blanchetts Dylan incarnation is head-scratchingly uncanny in the best sense. Everybody remembers this bold transformation and gender reversal.

Far From Heaven (2002)

The Legend: Todd Haynes is a stylist with no signature style. Each of his films have indelible looks and leave stunning traces on the brain, buta few key elements and recurring actors asidehis films rarely look like they have been made by the same person. Somethink debut feature Poison(1991) and Bob Dylan biopic Im Not Theredont even look like the same film from beginning to end. It is no small chore to put out a glam-rock fantasy that takes narrative cues from Citizen Kanethen follow it up with a homage to the melodramas of yesteryear, but Haynes did just that, withVelvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven, respectively.

An openly gay filmmaker born in California in 1961, Haynes is one of the most notable progenitors of the Queer Cinema movement of the late 1980s/early 1990s, even though pigeonholing him as such no matter the import of that pigeonholeoverlooks such qualities as his knack for effortlessly illustrating rock and pop myths and tragedies. Haynes often aims to champion societys outcasts, be they lost gay boys, subversive and contravening artists, suburban black men living in the 50s, or successful women living during the Great Depression.

Ive always felt that viewers of film have extraordinary powers. They can make life out of reflections on the wall Haynes has said, and Haynes has always ensured what his viewers are watching are indeed reflections. He does this via the use of hyperbolic dialogue (the horror portion of his first feature, Poison), nods to older cinematic styles (Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven) and the mutability of his actors (Im Not There with its six Bob Dylans).

If not always successful, Haynes risks are at least easy on the eyes. For all its inconsistency of plot, Velvet Goldmine has just enough glitter to appeal to glam rock fans without descending too far into camp. Far From Heaven offered a misleadingly beautiful depiction of another era long before Mad Men, and for all its unease, his 1995 breakthrough Safes sense of foreboding and barren take on suburbia keeps the viewer gripped. No matter where Haynes goes, his fans are ensured a most blissful sensory overload as a result.

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog (1942 - present)

Three Key Films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1974),Fitzcarraldo (1982), Grizzly Man (2005) Underrated: Stroszek (1977). A stark, disconcerting and unforgettable experience, Stroszek is not a film one returns to for fun. It remains one of the most efficient and ruthless appraisals of the American Dream myth while managing to be amusing, touching and ultimately demoralizing. Using his infallible instincts, Herzog has non-actor Bruno S. embody the unlucky, exploited Stroszek. Fleeing Berlin for what they assume will be the warmer and more prosperous U.S.A., Stroszek and his companions end up in the frigid, desolate landscape of Wisconsin. The final scene, after things have gone predictably off the track, features Stroszek on a ski lift holding a frozen turkey. Beneath him, in coin-operated cages, a duck plays a drum with his beak, a rabbit rides a wailing fire truck and a chicken dances while the soundtrack features the ebullient harmonica woops of Sonny Terry. Arguably the most surreal, and satisfying, commentary on the human condition ever filmed: once youve seen it, it stays seen. Unforgettable: After enabling an entire crew, including his daughter, to die during a doomed expedition to the legendary El Dorado, Aguirre is alone. Having watched his group slowly succumb to

disease, drowning and Indian arrows, Aguirre is nonchalant when dozens of monkeys swim aboard his raft. As the creatures scramble and scurry, he snatches one and holds it in front of his face. I am the Wrath of God, he declares, and the sweeping Amazon suddenly turns claustrophobic. We know Aguirre is near death, and his final disintegration offers an austere commentary on ambition and conquest. The close-up camera angle swirls backward and circles the raft from above, like a silent and definitive judgment from Nature itself. From Aguirre, The Wrath of God.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

The Legend: Few artists in any genre are as closely associated with the work they do. All of Werner Herzogs films are to a certain extent autobiographical. Its not merely a matter of how much of himself he invests into each project; its the nature of the projects themselves. Herzog has long combined creative restlessness with spiritual obsession and the results are often compelling, occasionally awe-inspiring and never less than interesting. He was the quintessential critical darling for entirely too long: he made movies that people admired, but he was anything but a household name. Never seeming to careand certainly not one to covet notorietyhe quietly plugged along, keeping busy and remaining relevant. During the last decade his genius, and superhuman work ethic, have finally been recognized and rewarded.

It was not always thus. Herzog is possibly the ultimate underdog who inevitably got the acclaim and approbation he deserved. Herzog is undeniably a legend based solely on the stunning body of work he

has produced. The real legend, of course, is his life and the excitement, misadventure and barely believable anecdotes it has inspired. There are too many to list, but a handful should suffice in order to convey what a unique force of nature Herzog has always been.

He stole his first camera, an act he considered less a matter of theft than necessity. On the set of his 1970 film Even Dwarfs Started Small (a wonderfully Herzogian title, and concept), after a few near calamities he promised the crew he would jump into a cactus patch if the rest of the filming was completed without incident (it was and he did). During the filming of his first masterpieceAguirre, The Wrath of God he dealt with the mercurial Klaus Kinski in a fashion that would set the tone for their subsequent collaborations: after Kinski, during one of his typical tantrums, threatened to leave the set, Kinski pulled out a gun and swore he would first shoot Kinski, then himself unless the actor got back to work (it worked). In the mid-70s, in an attempt to inspire his friend Errol Morris to complete a project, he agreed to eat his shoe (the project was completed, the shoe was cooked and eaten, and the occasion was filmed for posterity). The filming of his filmFitzcarraldo (inspired by a true story) involved moving a 320 ton steamship over a mountainwithout utilizing a single special effect. During the filming, one of the Peruvian natives on the shoot, exasperated by Kinskis histrionics, offered to kill him; Herzog was tempted but declined because he needed the actor to finish the movie. In 2006, while being interviewed for the BBC, Herzog was (inadvertently?) shot by an unknown assailant with an air rifle. Naturally, he continued the interview and, after showing the stunned reporter and film crew the wound, calmly remarked It is not a significant bullet. (This footage, thankfully, survives for posterity.)

It is, of course, the work that endures and it seems likely that Herzog has amassed a filmography that will inspire and be studied so long as people are making moving pictures. It is difficult to isolate, or even describe what aspect(s) of Herzogs style makes him so original and indelible. Certainly his penchant for improvisation can be attributed to a desire for emotion over refinement. His brave, if unorthodox decision to utilize unknown actors (or non-acting natives) speaks to his compulsion for authenticity. His challenging, occasionally unfeasible choice of projects and locations illustrates a recalcitrance that has always translated into integrity. Equal parts Joseph Conrad and Percy Fawcett, Herzog obliterates all clichs and encomiums: he is the Sisyphus who refused to fail, embracing tribulations to proveto the medium, to himselfthat they can be overcome. If Herzog did not exist, he would need to be invented, and then filmed by a director like Herzog

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1990)

Three Key Films: Rebecca (1940), Vertigo (1958), Psycho(1960)

Underrated: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) The only film Hitchcock ever remade (officially, that is, since he certainly re-imagined The 39 Steps as North by Northwest), one would be forgiven for assuming that this first go around must not have been much of a success. If it had been a triumph, then why would Hitch have rolled it back out 20 years later, rewriting key sequences and drastically expanding the plot (and runtime)? But, the surprising thing is that this first version is a crackling thriller, and is every bit as interesting as the other films from this period (though it also suffers from many of the same limitations). Though not necessarily a wholly successful picture, the first Man Who Knew Too Much still features a few undeniably bravura set pieces. The unforgettable climax of the filmthe attempted assassination during a concert performance at the Royal Albert Hall demonstrates every facet of Hitchcocks genius at roiling an audience up to a frenzy of anticipation. Just before the bullet is fired, the screen dissolves into fog. We begin to lose our focus as well. Where is the shooter? Where are we in relation to the impending violence? Will the bullet find its mark? Then, suddenly, a scream.

Unforgettable: The Bus Explosion, Sabotage (1936). Sabotage shocked audiences with one of the most astoundingly suspenseful sequences that had yet been committed to film. As we watch a child carry a bomb across London, all of us knowing that the thing is set to go off at one oclock, Hitchcock cuts back and forth between shots of the boy with his terrible package and clock faces as they count

out the seconds. As we begin to fear thatmy godhe may actually be blown apart, Hitchcock allows the time to pass one oclock, to go two minutes over the deadline. And then, suddenly, appallingly, just as we have started to sense that the device is faulty, that the boy will make it through after all, it detonates. The kid does not stay in the picture. Hitch once referred to this extraordinary scene as a terrible mistake. I worked the audience up, and then I let the bomb go off, he told Dick Cavett in a famous interview from 197I had made the mistake of not relieving them [the audience] at the end of the suspense. In other words, if you put the audience through the mill like that, you must relieve them. The bomb must be found. And yet, this mistake (he even claimed he would undo it if he had the chance) remains for me one of the most important sequences in his oeuvre.

Vertigo (1958)

The Legend: Alfred Hitchcock was raised in a strict Catholic household by difficult and highly punitive parents. (Theres a famous story of his father sending him down to the local police station with a note asking the cops to lock him up for ten minutes as punishment for some trifle he had committed at home!) An unhappy child, Hitchcock would find solace in his creative side, and would eventually turn to the new medium of film to exercise his frustrations. By 1920 he was working for a London film studio, making his way through the ranks toward the helm of his first major picture 1922s Number 13. But it wasnt until 1926 and The Lodger, a thriller, that Hitchcock really found his voice (not to mention his audience). Transitioning from silent films to talkies, Hitchcock continued to steadily develop his reputation in Britain into the 1930s, and with each film he generated more attention overseas. Finally, in the late

1930s Hitchcock was successfully courted by American heavyweight producer David O. Selznick, and made the move to Hollywood where his career and reputation would reach unparalleled heights in short order. Ultimately, it seems likely that there will never be another filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock. Just imagine: this is a man whose career spanned almost 60 years, who survived the complex shifts from silent to talkie and black and white to colour, who worked as an auteur and a studio hack (sometimes simultaneously), who experimented with an array of original techniques (a real-time feature, a one-set film), and who managed to develop some of the most complex characters and arresting images ever committed to film.

At his peak, Hitchcock was averaging almost a film a yearin the most extraordinary example of his industriousness, he made seven movies (including at least three stone classics) between 1953 and 1956! Unable, or unwilling, to compromise, he was famously stubborn and pigheaded. He was also frustratingly sexist, blind to racial politics, and prone to armchair psychology. He had a black sense of humour and a soft spot (or was it an obsession?) with blondes. He wondered if anyone could ever truly be called innocent; he mistrusted bureaucracy and the very rich; he had a thing for gay subtexts. He hated death, but was drawn to it, as are we all. He helped to create the modern horror genre, the modern thriller, and the modern black comedy. He changed film, even as he was inventing new ways to approach it.

John Huston

John Huston (1906 - 1987)

Three Key Films: The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), The Dead (1987)

Unforgettable: If youre the police, where are your badges? The response to this question, asked by Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, is one of the most famous in movie history. Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoyas incredulous amusement at this silly American, daring to question his authority, has implanted itself in our cultural consciousness. Badges? he asks. If youve never seen the film, the lines that follow are a bit different than you expect, but its still exhilarating to finally understand what everyone else seems to know. Underrated: Fat City (1972). Long attracted to characters living on the margins, its little surprise Huston would choose to adapt Leonard Gardners novel about amateur boxers, migrant workers and alcoholics living in Stockton California, a town painted so bleakly by both Gardner and Huston that it seems ready to slide off the margin altogether. A hit at Cannes, the story centers around the chance meeting between a washed-up boxer who never made it (Stacey Keach) and an aimless young boxer who never will (a shockingly young Jeff Bridges). Plenty happens to the men. Nothing happens to the men. Susan Tyrrell is unforgettable as a majestic and domineering drunk. You might expect the prominently featured soundtrack of established hits by Kris Kristofferson to date the film, but the old vet Huston recognized something enduring in the songs. Their gruff sadness and Hustons tender naturalism make for a moving portrait of modern squalor.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

The Legend: Talkies have been around for over eight decades. John Huston made indisputably great films in more than half of them. He made big Hollywood pictures with A-list actors and big budgets, shot quite literally around the world. And yet he was prolific, directing almost as many films as Roger Corman, the king of fast and cheap. He won Oscars in Directing and Writing, and was nominated as an

Actor. He called acting a cinch, and writing came so quickly to him that he temporarily quit it for more challenging pursuits. Before deciding at 31 to finally take his film career seriously, Huston had spent periods of his life in vaudeville and journalism, rode with the Mexican Cavalry, and fought as an amateur boxer. He didnt always drink beer, but when he did, Im sure John Huston preferred Dos Equis.

If directing provided Huston with that yearned-for challenge, its hard to tell. His directing feels effortless. By using the camera to mirror psychology rather than merely to capture action, Huston brilliantly elevated the intensity in his films from the very beginning. His first film, The Maltese Falcon, was immediately declared a classic and has only grown in stature since. Like Orson Welles, he shared the novelistic sense that a plot is only a set up, and that the real thrill comes in seeing how the characters will react. As a result, Huston was the kind of director who turned actors into stars. The stories were tightly wound masterpieces, but the characters were the feature.

Huston showed remarkable ability to evolve. Maintaining his central philosophyto simultaneously examine and excitedemanded he must. Employ an innovative technique or stylistic angle too often and it quickly becomes stale. But Huston had a nose for expiration dates. Though 1950s The Asphalt Jungle had just complicated and reinvigorated the film noir, 1953s Beat the Devil immediately attempts to declare the genre dead, and inadvertently invents a new genre (camp) along the way. This sense of restlessness defines Hustons career, and is only surpassed by the magnitude of his achievements. Many call The Maltese Falcon the greatest detective movie ever made, and The Treasure of Sierra Madre the greatest adventure. The African Queen (1951) is the gold standard of romantic comedies. He was always ahead of the game, even beating young bucks like Lucas and Spielberg to the revivalist serial punch with 1975s sprawling epic, The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Famous for his uncanny ability to edit in his head, Huston shot only what would be used in the cut (as opposed to the standard method of shooting everything and letting the editor figure it out). His intellectual and aesthetic accuracy is such that even his misses manage nobility. His troubling and meandering The Misfits (1961), for instance, is also an epic ensemble showcase, a graduate seminar in screen acting. And the Razzie nomination he received for Annie (1982) is easily tempered by the bold willingness of a legend to take on his first musical at seventy years old. Plus, he still had greatness in the tank, making both Prizzis Honor (1985) and The Dead just before his death. He was one of the best filmmakers who ever lived, but he worked until the very end as if that wasnt good enough.

The 100 Essential Directors Part 5: Derek Jarman to Mike Leigh

Mid-way through our series, Day 5 is a glorious mishmash of international auteurist cinema. Beginning with Derek Jarmans sumptuous visions and ending with three directors who might share a name, but have very little else in common. Today we go from saints and sinners, from Brookyln to Britain, from the beginning of time to the Dystopian future, and around the world and beyond. Mid-way through our series, Day 5 is a glorious mishmash of international auteurist cinema. Beginning with Derek Jarmans sumptuous visions and ending with three directors who might share a name, but have very little else in common. Today we go from saints and sinners, from Brookyln to Britain, from the beginning of time to the Dystopian future, and around the world and beyond.

Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994)

Three Key Films: Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Blue (1993)

Underrated: Sebastiane (1976) Jarmans debut and the first film shot entirely in Latin is a marriage of Jarmans greatest loves and concerns: history and homosexuality. Produced with a tiny budget (25,000/$45,000) it was the first openly homoerotic British film and announced a fresh new voice for an ailing British film industry in the mid-70s. Through the tale of roman soldier and martyr Saint Sebastian, Jarman switches between the everyday life of the soldiers and vivid homoerotic encounters that celebrate unashamedly the male nude. Yet crucially he balances this visual feast with a complex

portrayal of Sebastians journey towards spirituality, not reducing the story to its known conclusion but highlighting the multi-faceted nature and questions that arise from religious experience.

Unforgettable: Final moments of Blue. A luminous blue screen that never moves or changes, takes us back to the conception of moving pictures, the tradition and history that occupied Jarman constantly. With only a soundtrack to move the film, the blue becomes a filter for our own images created behind or in front of the screen. Filmed months before Jarmans death from AIDS, he was beginning to lose his sight and his vision became blurred by a blue tinge. The audio is narrated sections, spoken by various friends and actors, from his diary, revealing his poetical struggle with AIDS. Against sentimentality Blue is a rejection artifice and also a political statement against the AIDS epidemic. No ninety minutes could deal with the eight years HIV takes to get its host. Hollywood can only sentimentalize it. The film ends with these lines, and remains the most moving scene in his work: For our time is the passing of a shadow and our lives will run like sparks through the stubble. I place a delphinium. Blue, upon your grave.

Caravaggio (1986)

The Legend: A young man makes love to a black-masked fascist commando on top of a large Union Jack flag. This is one of the most memorable and symbolic scenes of The Last of England and a view into the nerve center of Jarmans work and life. If given only two subjects that would occupy Jarman there is no doubt that these would be his sexuality and his country. Both aspects powerfully united on the British flag in The Last of England, defined by his discovery that he was HIV positive in 1986 and the political situation in England.

The Last of England, is an assault in many ways, asking the viewer to fight to find their own interpretation within the visual richness. It is an experimental film, a bricolage of old home movies, staged scenes from literature and art history and contemporary events thrust among a terrifying vision of the future.

Jarman is known best as one of Britains most controversial filmmakers. As experimental with the art of film as with taboo-breaking subjects, he was however caught between being a radical and a traditionalist.

Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman grew up on various RAF bases around England, his father a strict military officer who agreed to his son studying art only after he had pursued a degree in History, English and Art History. He went on to study painting, but his introduction to film came through his interest in costume design. After a chance meeting on a train from Paris with a friend of Ken Russells he was invited to design The Devils (1971) for Russell, giving him an insight into professional filmmaking. The costumes would remain with Jarman, the juxtaposition of different settings and moments in history fascinated him, leading to his avant-garde interpretations of many historical dramas. The first of which, Sebastiane, used history as the site for sexual investigation. A Renaissance man trapped in punk London, Jarmans ideal project was Caravaggio, a chance to indulge in painterly light, artist struggles and complex relationships. Seven years in the making Jarman himself struggled with funding, becoming frustrated by the formalities he returned shortly after to the casualness of the Super 8 for The Last of England.

Shortly before Caravaggios premiere Jarman took the HIV test. The discovery led to him abandoning conventional cinema and speeding ahead with experimental work. War Requiem(1988) the filmic interpretation of Benjamin Brittens mass, followed within a year of The Last of England. His father died and with the money left to him Jarman bought a small cottage in Dungeness, in the shadow of a power station, where he became to cultivate a garden. Recording the fruits of his labor in The Garden (1990) love also blossomed for Jarman bringing him serenity in his later years. From 1990 to his death in 1994 he produced three films, Edward II (1991),Wittgenstein (1993) and Blue (1993). Blue, perhaps the most radical of all Jarmans films, is an elegiac abstract of life and film and a testament to the visionary filmmaker who never stopped even when his sight began to fail.

Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan (1909 - 2003)

Three Key Films: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955) Underrated: A Face in the Crowd (1957). Andy Griffith made his film debut in this searing drama that examined the then-new medium of television and the power it has to manipulate the public. Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay, and Griffith turns in an exhaustive, manic performance as Lonesome Rhodes, an Arkansas yokel who becomes a radio host and then a television sensation. Patricia Neal is the radio reporter who discovers Rhodes; Walter Matthau is the television writer who will compete with Rhodes for her affection, both performances that benefit from Kazans signature approach with his actors, a combination of filmic style and directorial restraint. The film is allegedly based on real public figures (Will Rogers? Arthur Godfrey?), yet it remains profoundly prescient in its topics, from the corruptive power of celebrity to the gullibility of the public.

Unforgettable: Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), the waterfront crime boss, has given Charlie Malloy (Rod Steiger) an impossible assignment: He must either convince his brother Terry (Marlon Brando) to dummy up and refuse to testify against Friendly or he must give Terry over to be killed. The conversation takes place in the back of a car, and its surely one of the key scenes that changed film acting. Brando gets all of the attention as the former prize-fighter who coulda been a contenda instead of getting a one-way ticket to Palookaville, but Steiger is masterful as well, his pained expression telling the story of two orphans coming to tragic terms with hard bargains and lost fights.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

The Legend: In 1999, Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Leading up to the ceremony, many protested the decision and others vowed not to applaud the 90-year-old film legend when the award was presented. When Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro introduced Kazan that evening, some applauded, some didnt. The event was a striking reminder that, 50 years after Kazan testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, some key factions in Hollywood had still not forgotten nor forgiven Kazan, even when recognizing Kazan as one of the giants of 20th century cinema, a man who changed American filmmaking.

Kazan was born in what is today Istanbul in 1909 and emigrated to the United States with his parents four years later. Through his and his parents struggles in their home countries and the challenging opportunities in America, Kazan developed an ardent concern for social justice and a passionate appreciation for the American Dream, two themes that would recur throughout his film career.

He would make his first mark on the stage, joining the Group Theater, a coalition of actors dedicated to telling socially and culturally relevant stories of the time. It was with the Group Theater in the 1930s that Kazan directed his first plays, including Thornton Wilders The Skin of Our Teeth, Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire.

In 1947, Kazan founded the Actors Studio, which, with Lee Strasberg as director, would establish method acting and soon earn the reputation as the greatest finishing school for actors in the country, teaching the likes of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Karl Malden. For the Actors Studio, Kazan would direct Brando in a new stage version of Streetcar, a pairing that Kazan would reunite in 1951 for the film version. Kazans first film was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), which established the directors concern for social issues, followed by Gentlemans Agreement, a film that boldly took on anti-Semitism. The film, starring Gregory Peck would take home the Best Picture Oscar and win Kazan his first Best Director Oscar for 1947. Next came Pinky in 1949, one of the first films to thoroughly examine the effects of racism against blacks in the American south, as well as the phenomenon of passing.

In these early films, Kazan helped establish a new American realism in filmmaking. Taking his cues from the Italian Neorealism movement, Kazan preferred on-location shooting, natural light and sound, socially relevant stories of common citizens, the absence of clear-cut resolutions, and the use of relatively unknown actors. Often called an actors director, Kazan was, by all accounts, a masterful acting coach. As Brando would later testify, He was an arch-manipulator of actors feelings. In all, Kazan would direct 21 different actors to Oscar nominations and would establish the film careers of Brando, Dean, Malden, Warren Beatty, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, and dozens of others.

In the 1950s, Kazan hit a creative stride that few have ever matched. In 1951, Streetcar was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, made Brando a major star, and popularized method acting in film. It was the first of three films that paired Kazan and Brando, followed by Viva Zapata! (1952), a biopic of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and On the Waterfront in 1954, arguably Kazans masterpiece.

On the Waterfront came two years after Kazan testified before the HUAC, eventually naming eight people who had, like himself, previously been a member of the American Communist Party. WhileWaterfront stands on its own, its difficult to watch the film without thinking of Kazans personal battle with his decision, as Terry Malloy (played by Brando) struggles with his conscience and ultimately testifies against his friends.

Kazan would go on to adapt John Steinbeck in the stunning East of Eden (1955), adapt Tennessee Williams again in the controversial black comedy Baby Doll (1956), make a star of Andy Williams in the media expos A Face in the Crowd (1956), introduce Warren Beatty and revitalize Natalie Wood

in Splendor in the Grass (1961), and adapt his own autobiography in America America(1963), among other films, totaling 20 in all. Indeed, despite Kazans political behaviors, it remains inarguable that few directors made more permanent contributions to filmmaking.

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (1940 - present)

Three Key Films: Close-Up (1990), Taste of Cherry (1997),Certified Copy (2010)

Underrated: Through the Olive Trees (1994)

Unforgettable: The lingering, elusive final shot of Through the Olive Trees as Hossein (Hossein Rezai) chases his leading lady and love Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian) through the titular grove to hypnotic effect. Kiarostamis camera, from a staggering panoramic distance, leaves the audience breathless, wondering if the girl has accepted his marriage proposal or not.

Certified Copy (2010)

The Legend: The complexities of human behavior, mainly when hidden in the ambiguous gray shadows of the interplay of simplicity, reality, morality, and specific geography, are a ripely showcased throughout Kiarostamis filmography. A versatile artist, filmmaker, poet, painter, and photographer famous in his native Iran for many decades before his Cannes Film Festival break-out Close-Up, Kiarostamis rise to prominence as a key figure of the Iranian New Wave made him the countrys most celebrated and watched filmmaker and cemented Irans artistic reputation in the international cinematic discourse. Close-Up was catapulted to international celebrity by champion endorsements from a diverse, supportive group of other essential directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, making Kiarostami the de facto leader of a formidable group of filmmakers that included his close collaborators Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi.

A master of both reflexive and self-reflexive styles, Kiarostami is best known for blurring the lines between what is reality and what is simply cinema, of tradition and modernity, and for his cultural and cinematic hybridity. Transitions are of the utmost importance in the directors work, how people get to where they are going, which is often by car. New York Times Film Critic A.O. Scott wrote that Kiarostami, in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema. He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk. The time spent traveling by car is not lost on Kiarostami, who reveals artistic possibility in the most seemingly ordinary locations and sets many emotionally-riveting sequences inside of the coach of an automobile, from Close-Up, Through the Olive

Trees and A Taste of Cherry up to his most recent effort, Certified Copy. Starring iconic French actress Juliette Binoche, who took the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year for her magnetic work in Kiarostamis technically-immaculate film, the director proves his verisimilitude yet again, as well as his commitment to constantly pushing the envelope and challenging himself when it comes to style, form, technique, and method.

Krzysztof Kielowski

Krzysztof Kielowski (1941 - 1996)

Three Key Films: The Decalogue (1989-90), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), Red (1994)

Underrated: White (1994) Nothing in Kielowskis oeuvre is really underrated since he produced so few films and all are heralded as masterworks. So, I have improvised here a bit, and chosen the only film he ever made that I think is less than perfect. This light, comic examination of the theme of equality (the blanc of the bleu/blanc/rouge thematic framework for the trilogy) works on almost every level for me, but is truly the only film of his that fails to hit me all at once, to stagger me into awed submission. Though Julie Delpy gives an admirable performance, I think it is the way she is directed that is my stumbling block here, and no scene exemplifies this more explicitly than the bizarre and surreal scene in which she performs a screeching orgasm as though she were a cat. Unlikely, deeply unsexy, and character-shattering, it is the only downright mistake in this utter masters far-too-tiny oeuvre.

Unforgettable: The Recycling Lady, Red Throughout almost all of Kielowskis films, certain images and even characters recur. Indeed, part of the joy of re-watching his films is in recognizing how of a piece they all are, how interconnected and tangled up is their mythology, and how excitingly and satisfyingly poetic this feels. Overall, perhaps the most unassuming, but most poignant image to recur in his work is the tiny old Recycling Lady, struggling to get her bottle into the appropriate slot. In Blue, White and The Double Life of Veronique she is left helpless, pathetically failing to accomplish this most mundane of tasks, as each of the main characters see her but fail to act. It is only in Rouge that Irne Jacob comes to her aid. And, all at once, it is shivers and hot tears.

Red (1994)

The Legend: Born in war-torn Warsaw and raised in a shattered post-war and Soviet-influenced Poland, Kielowski found his way into film almost by accident, his actual intention being to study movies so as to become a superior theatre director. Emerging from the same d Film School that had produced both Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda, he turned first to making gritty documentaries about working life in a so-called workers paradise. By the mid-70s he was trying his hand at fiction, but his non-documentary films emphasized social realism and maintained a third-party perspective that helped to define his signature style. Kielowskis camera would focus on the mundane, everyday events and moments and activities, reminding viewers that though he was presenting a fiction, this fiction was grounded in real life.

In the post-Solidarity Polish political landscape, Kielowski was able to produce more freely, and by the late 80s was working toward what would be his first major masterpiece, the ten-hour film cycle The Decalogue. Wildly ambitious, each of the ten films in this cycle were based on one of the Ten Commandments, and featured overlapping characters and overarching themes. Set mostly in a grey, brutalist apartment bloc, and exploring the most central moral and ethical questions in the JudeoChristian tradition, Kielowskis film cycle was an unqualified success, and vaulted him to the attention of filmmakers around Europe.

Now able to secure funding from outside Poland, his next (and final) four films would be coproductions with Western studios, and would achieve the international attention they richly deserved. Indeed, energized by his sudden fame following the success of 1990s The Double Life of Vronique, and the waves of adulation lavished upon that sensitive, haunting film, Kielowski undertook another ambitious film cycle that would explore the three colours of the French flag, and the ostensible ideals each colour was meant to symbolize. As each of these films appeared in the early 90s, critical attention and popular interest in his work snowballed.

By the time of Red, the ultimate film in the cycle in 1994, Kielowski was an international sensation. In one of those hopelessly tragic turns of fate, however, it would prove to be his last film. He died on the table during heart surgery two years later, while only part of the way through his next cycle of three films loosely based on Dantes Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso. Throughout his films characters recur, scenes are replayed, ideas are discussed again and again, and nothing is ever really resolved. It is often said that he made the same film again and again, but it is more accurate to say that he made one very long film from several different angles. Each new perspective lends a new layer of complexity, of mystery, of revelation, of beauty.

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa (1910 - 1998)

Three Key Films: Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) Underrated: Red Beard(1965).Heavily criticized upon its release, this is one of Kurosawas most humane, beautiful films. The story of a crusty, older physician (Toshiro Mifune) taking as his protg a young, ambitious doctor (Yuzo Kayama) who disdains working in a clinic serving the poor, the young man begins to change when he cares for the physical and emotional well-being of a young girl saved from a brothel. Some of the most moving scenes involve the young girl Otoyo caring for the young doctor when he in turn falls ill. A film filled with many heart-rending moments and featuring perhaps Kurosawas most extraordinary set, it was sadly also the directors last with actor Toshiro Mifune, bringing to a close arguably the greatest director-actor collaboration in the history of film.

Unforgettable: The epic final battle in the pouring rain in Seven Samurai, as the villagers, led by the five remaining samurai, fight for their survival against a gang of bandits. Using between three and five cameras, Kurosawa pioneered in the sequence a host of cinematic techniquesshooting falling bodies in slow-motion, using telephoto lenses to create the illusion that the camera was right beside bucking horses, splicing cuts from two or three cameras to create a narrative image through editing. Despite no CGI and or special effects of any kind, it remains one of the great action sequences in cinema and the most impressive scene in one of the greatest films ever made.

Seven Samurai (1954)

The Legend: The importance of Rashomons winning the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival cannot be overstressed. It simultaneously resurrected the career of Kurosawawhose previous film was deemed a major setback to his careerand signaled to the West that there were directors in the rest of the world who were the equal of any in Hollywood or Europe. His success in Venice led to a contract at Toho where he immediately made two films that are not merely among Japans greatest, but masterpieces of world cinema: Ikiru, about a petty bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) dying of cancer who overcomes a host of obstacles to oversee the building of a childrens playground, and Seven Samurai, his hugely influential and widely-imitated film about a group of samurai who save an impoverished village from bandits.

After Seven Samurai, Kurosawa would make a string of masterpieces such as Throne of Blood(1957), The Lower Depths (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo(1960), and High and Low(1963). But with television cutting ticket sales for movies, after Red Beard Toho ceased funding Kurosawa. Also, for reasons still not fully understood, Kurosawa decided to no longer use Toshiro Mifune in his films. This loss dramatically weakened the acting in Kurosawas later films; many have wondered how much better Kagemusha (1980) or Ran (1985) might have been had Mifune been used in the lead for each. In the remaining 33 years of Kurosawas life after 1965 he was to make only seven films due both to a constant struggle to find funding for his films. In contrast, he had made 23 films in the first 22 years of his career. Several younger Hollywood filmmakers who considered themselves his disciples, such as

Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, helped Kurosawa obtain more reliable funding and he was able to make some memorable films, in particular the epic Ran. But it was his earlier period that has proven so hugely significant for filmmakers around the world. The technique he developed using multiple cameras to capture the action from different angles has proven especially influential. Kurosawas would use two to three cameras equipped with telephoto lenses to capture a scene. The cameras would be so far away that the actors would be unaware of them, so that they would act not towards the camera but towards one another. The gains are enormous using three cameras: a more natural acting style, more continuity in editing, and a decrease in the time needed for shooting scenes, since fewer set ups were required. His use of slow motion has also been used by countless filmmakers, especially action directors.

By any standard Kurosawa is both one of the most important and most entertaining directors in the history of cinema. His films are not loved only by cinephiles, but by everyday filmgoers. As an example, as I type this Seven Samurai is ranked #13 by viewers on IMDB.com. No film above it on the list is as old and no subtitled or foreign film is ranked higher, a testimony not just to the enormous power of the film, but of Kurosawas films in general.

Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang (1890 - 1976)

Three Key Films: Metropolis (1927), M (1931), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)

Underrated: The Big Heat (1953). The title alone is enough to evoke a dozen dark black and white crimes. With a style lifted almost intact from early German expressionism and ported over to the troubled, post-War years, Fritz Lang seemed to have finally found his way in the often confusing town of Tinsel. With its simple storycop taking on the syndicate that killed his wifeand a terrific cast, the director was able to influence the tone and tenure of every single cinematic aspect. From an intensity and an aggressiveness with the directing approach to the no holds barred brashness of the often brutal material, Lang loved this kind of creative conundrum. Unlike his earliest efforts which relied on

oversized visuals and expansive ideas to sell his sentiments, this was a small movie made big by that man behind the lens. Decades later, after film noir had become a staple of film scholarship, many would praise this dour descent in the seedy underworld. For Lang, it had long been familiar territory.

Unforgettable: The birth of the robotic Maria. There are plenty of amazing moments in Metropolis, many of them as iconic and worthy of the motion picture mythology they tend to foster. From the clockwork hands of the citys main machine to the towering pyramid-like skyscrapers, there is vision in abundance throughout. But for many, the moment when Maria, our feisty little revolutionary firebrand, is imitated by the ruling regime, stands as the significant turn in science fiction filmmaking. With F/X that still awe and amazing today (how they were done, exactly, is still a mystery) and a visual punch that adds power to an already strong story, few sequences in Langs oeuvre are as recognizable, or riveting.

Metropolis (1927)

The Legend: Before he made a single motion picture, Friedrich Christian Anton Fritz Lang had already lived at least two lifetimes. He had attended finishing school and studied engineering and art in college. He traveled Europe, returning to his home country of Vienna when World War I broke out. He fought in Russian and Romania, and returned wounded and shell shocked. He then did a bit of acting before taking on a writing job at one of Germanys most influential movie studios. Before long, he was behind the lens. After meeting his wife (and future collaborator) Thea Von Harbou, he

attempted a string of films that would come to define his style and his lasting legacy. With Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) a four hour epic told it two parts and 1924sDie Nibelungen (another massive undertaking), Lang established his reputation for narrative scope and storytelling vision. All of this would come directly to the fore with the creation of what many consider to be the first real masterpiece of science fiction filmmaking, 1927s Metropolis.

Telling an allegorical tale of one man battling the oppressive regime of a massive, technologically advanced city, it remains a stunning work of both visual and narrative power. From the multifaceted architectural elements used to continually highlight human subjugation to the full blown special effects sequences which see robots turned into humans, machines transform into demons, and an entire underground apartment block flooded and destroyed, it was a tour de force that continued to suggest Langs larger than life designs. So, naturally, many were shocked when he his first official talkie went back to the crime thrillers he helmed during the first part of his career. Of course, no one could have expected the shocking severity of his brilliant M. From the subject matter (a child killer on the loose in the streets of Berlin) to the unusual approach to the story (it is the villains, not the police, who end up metering out justice), it marked a major turning point for Lang, both personally and professionally. As he started work on its follow-up, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the Nazis rose to power. When his wife going the movement, Lang filed for divorce, saw his efforts banned by Hitler, and eventually fled to America.

Once in Hollywood, the filmmakers stern, strict on-set approach did not sit well with studios or stars. He was lumped into a cliched category of dictatorial directors, hard to work for and with little to show for his artistic tantrums. Over the course of his 27 years in Tinseltown (most working for MGM), he would continue to confuse his admirers. Sometimes, hed hit upon quality material (his first US film, 1936s Fury or 1944s Ministry of Fear). Applying what he had learned during his days at the heart of German Expressionism, he turned the typical Western (The Return of Frank James, 1940) and the crime story into dark, disturbing variations of their former self. This was especially true of the latter, where Langs bravura black and white imagery would come to define the film noir genre. By the end, however, the filmmaker seemed spent and without true inspiration. His final effort, 1960s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse saw him returning to the famed underworld figure he had helped create four decades before. An odd fate for a man whose future shock scenarios and starkly contrasted cautionary tales remains viable cinematic staples today.

Ang Lee

Ang Lee (1954 - present)

Three Key Films: The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005) Underrated: Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). Not only a feast for the eyesthe opening scene depicting Chef Chu (Sihung Lung), who has literally lost his taste, painstakingly prepare Sunday dinner for his three emotionally distant daughters is almost musical in its compositionbut also holds the promise of much of what Lees work would come to be revered for: his great narrative patience; his generous and thoughtful use of silence; the lush eye through which he views the melancholic worlds he creates; his exploration of the tensions between tradition and modernity; and the dangers of self-repression. Unforgettable: The spare, crushing moment at the end ofBrokeback Mountain (2005) when Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) explores the childhood bedroom of his deceased lover Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and discovers a pair of blood-stained shirtsmementos from their roughhousing years earlier hanging together in the closet like two skins, as Annie Proulx writes in her celebrated story on which the film is based. Ennis, whose anguish over the impossibility of their romance has turned him a steel wall, finally succumbs to his grief, bringing the shirts to his face in an attempt to inhale Jacks longgone scent. The moment is a perfect representation of the films slow emotional burn, and when relief comes, it does so with a grace and introspection that Lee so expertly architects.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

The Legend: Born to traditional, education-focused Chinese parents in Taiwan (his father served as principal of the high school he attended), Lee twice failed, perhaps serendipitously, the entrance exam necessary for a university education. Much to the chagrin of his father, Lee went on to study dramatic arts at nearby academy before immigrating to the United States to study film at the University of Illinois. He subsequently pursued graduate studies at NYUs Tisch School of the Arts, where his star quickly rose: he won several awards, and was eventually signed to agent representation, based on the strength of his thesis film.

Lee, still struggling with tensions between he and his father (and parallel tensions between his eastern and western self), went on to write and direct his feature length debut Pushing Hands(1992), the tale of an elderly martial arts instructor who moves from China to suburban New York to live with his son and his American daughter-in-law. Pushing Hands would prove invaluable to Lees development as a filmmaker not only because of thematic concerns that would carry over to his future work, but because it would also go on to inform his stylistic and technical approach to moviemaking. A literal filmic merging of his two conflicting identities, it marked the advent of what would become one of Lees greatest assets: his unique perspective as the constant outsider. I never know where I am, Lee says, [so] I trust the elusive world of cinema more than anything else. I live on the other side of the screen.

This perspective would serve Lee well in his adaptation of Rick Moodys novel The Ice Storm(1997). Set in affluent 1970s Connecticut at the height of the sexual revolution and strewn with characters whose inability to connect proves tragic, Lee plays with concepts of emptiness and isolation throughout the movie: barren trees, sleek, cold, colorless home interiors, and exchanges between characters often slow and spoken without much eye contact. The film possesses a kind of distanced intimacy that further elucidates the emotionally stifled world of Moodys novel, an aspect that may not have translated as potently onscreen if helmed by another director.

His next film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), would thrust him into international mainstream success. Though most commonly lauded for its epic story and groundbreaking, astoundingly choreographed martial arts effects, it still brims with a staid elegance that is quintessential Lee. The concepts of distance and gravity, previously explored only metaphorically in Lees work, were now at play in a fantastic, physical sense. Those sequences were unlike anything audiences had seen before, made possible by Lees ability to take in and consider the emptiness of space and fill it to his suit his inimitable vision.

His greatest artistic risk, however, would come with his adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, which won him the Oscar for Best Director. What could have so easily turned laughablea film about two cowboys in love, sporting a title ripe for punningwas instead instantly regarded as one of the most wrenching and enduring love stories ever put to film. The private, intimate feel Lee sought to achieve is perhaps what allows viewers to connect to the films long-suffering lovers: devoid of any preconceived notions of gay identity, it instead purely focuses on the forces of love and its terrible obstructions. Again, Lee makes crucial use of space and emptiness, the film populated by few supporting characters and a vast Midwestern landscape that is both whimsical and foreboding.

Though Lees commitment to a patient, open-ended narrative approach does not always garner appreciationhis interpretation of Hulk (2003) proved too cerebral and poignant for filmgoers wanting a twenty foot green goliath to smash his way through two hours, and the small scope ofTaking Woodstockss (2009) excised much of the grandness of the historic festival in favor of character developmentit is this fascination with the smaller gestures, regardless of scale or genre, that makes him such an essential contributor to contemporary cinema. Lees hesitance in claiming a distinctive identity manifests in his work not with the disruptive affect of a man torn between, but rather with the confident contemplations of one who has decidedly freed himself up to imagine and realize worlds through a perspective solely his own.

Spike Lee

Spike Lee (1957 - present)

Three Key Films: Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X(1992), When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts(2006)

Underrated: Mo Better Blues (1990). Coming on the heels of the explosive Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues, a Denzel Washington vehicle about the mercurial but troubled career of a jazz trumpeter, couldnt help but come off as a tamer, safer Spike Lee film. Yet the film marks Lees venture into a more mature, measured style of filmmaking, and he coaches his actors into some of their all-time best performances, none more so than Washington, whose depiction of Bleek Gilliam is profound and multi-layered in his charismatic self-sabotage. The film is emotionally epic, as Gilliam negotiates a destructive love triangle, his all-consuming love of his music in the face of diminishing crowds, his aging father, a rival musician played by Wesley Snipes, and the gambling debts of his friend and manager, played by Lee himself. Its a first-rate story of real heft and sweep, all of it bolstered by an ace soundtrack written and performed by Branford Marsalis. Lee came under heat from the Anti-Defamation League for the portrayal of Jewish nightclub owners (played by John and Nicholas Turturro), a reflection that the director had not lost his readiness to head straight into to race relations tricky waters Unforgettable: Mookie throws the trash can. After the death of Radio Raheem at the hands of New York City police, angry crowds close in on Sal and his sons, owners of Bed-Stuys pizzeria. Radio Raheem, along with his friend Buggin Out, had been protesting the lack of African-American photos

on Sals Wall of Fame on the restaurant wall, a protest that spills into violence and eventually Radio Raheems murder. Sals young black employee, Mookie, played by the director, picks up a metal crash can and hurls it through the large front window of Sals, immediately prompting a full-scale riot and the burning of Sals to the ground. Spike would later say that Why did Mookie throw the trash can? was a question that only white people asked him.

caption The Legend: If Spike Lee combustible storytelling and visionary filmic style seemed to arrive fullyformed in the late 80s, such talent sprang from an upbringing in Atlanta and Brooklyn that infused Lee with a deep-rooted education in art, literature and jazz music at the hands of his parents Jacquelyn, a teacher, and Bill, a jazz musician. Spike, though, had a robust mental alacrity all his own, a personality that led his mother early on give him is nickname.

Spikes interest in movies began to peak in the 1970s, although the maverick directors of the era failed to capture the American black experience, a void that Lee was himself driven to fill. Lee attended New York Universitys Tisch School of Arts, where he earned his masters degree and made the student film Joes Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which won him the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Student Academy Award in 198The film showcased Lees complex character building and marked his first collaboration with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, who would help establish the visual dynamism of the Spike Lee style.

It would be Lees next three films that would solidify him as a major new voice in American cinema. Shes Gotta Have It, Lees first full-length joint, put a comedic spin on the entanglements of gender and race, introducing the Mars Blackmon character that Spike would make pitchman for Nikes Air Jordan shoes. It was a film that also foresaw a revitalized Brooklyn. Next came School Daze, a quasi-musical about Spikes college experiences in Atlanta. It was a film that pushed racial buttons harder than his previous films did, bringing his first national controversies for the films depiction of what some saw as racial stereotypes both among students and in the failings of black colleges. Still, reviewers admired the films spark, and film observers everywhere were talking about Spike Lee.

In 1989, Lee accumulated all of his cinematic skills and firebrand leanings into a single thrilling film. Do the Right Thing was the years most discussed film and earned Lee his first Oscar nomination. Through his use of vibrant color sybolism, a continuous soundtrack of jazz and hip-hop, a whirlwind ensemble cast, and an inexhaustible eye for dazzling camera technique, Lee set out to make a film in which every shot and every scene were a study in film composition. Set on the hottest day of a summer in Brooklyns Bed-Stuy neighborhood, Lee catalogued a series of conflicts: Men vs. women, whites vs. blacks, old vs. young, fathers vs. sons, Lakers vs. Celtics, police vs. citizens. The film even ends with conflicting quotes from MLK and Malcolm X, a fitting end to a remarkable film that offers provoking questions, the kinds that come with no easy answers.

Lee continued on a commercially successful streak in the 90s with urban dramatic films, such asMo Better Blues, set within the contemporary jazz scene, and Jungle Fever, a powerful portrayal of interracial love and lust. But it would be 1992s Malcolm X, the biopic starting Denzel Washington as the title civil-rights leader, that would find Lee reaching another creative peak. The film, beset by production and budget difficulties, along with the kinds of controversies that would follow Lee throughout his career, had long been Lees dream project, and the director pushed through to achieve one of the decades most critically acclaimed and enduring films.

If Lee hasnt matched the heights of his astonishing first decade as a filmmaker, he has often come close and has continued as a prolific writer and director of broadening versatility, whether poleaxing media depictions of African-Americans in 2000s satirical ringer Bamboozled or peeling back the moral complexities of sexual, racial, and class relations by way of the plot-twisty bank-robbery caper Inside Man in 2006. Throughout a career of highlights, Lee has refused to kiss a square inch of Hollywood ass, making news by speaking his mind, yes, but more important, letting his camera and his pen do the talking, sparking crucial conversations at every step.

Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh (1943 - present)

Three Key Films: Naked (1993), Topsy-Turvy (1999), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Underrated: All or Nothing (2002). A contemporary drama released between Leighs two stunning period filmsTopsy-Turvy and Vera Drake (2004), All Or Nothing slipped through the net; indeed, the movie has been described by Leigh and Lesley Manville as the one that got away Dismissed by some British critics as grim and interminable, this raw ensemble drama about the fortunes of three families on a South London council estate is in fact a rewarding, involving and, finally, quietly affirmative piece of work: I feel that this film is entirely about redemption, Leigh has said. With superb performances from Manville, Timothy Spall, Ruth Sheen, James Corden, and, in her first role for Leigh, Sally Hawkins, All or Nothing combines Ozu-like intimacy with an oddly epic scope; its ripe for rediscovery.

Unforgettable: The meeting between Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) and Hortense (Marianne JeanBaptiste) in the diner in Secrets and Lies, shot in one brilliantly sustained long take, encapsulates the films brand of humor and heartbreak, as Cynthia moves from denial and amnesia to the recognition that the young woman sitting beside her is in fact the daughter that she gave up for adoption years before.

caption

The Legend: Directly, objectively, yet compassionately [Ermanno Olmis The Tree of Wooden Clogs] puts on the screen the great, hard, real adventure of living and surviving from day to day and from year to year, the experience of ordinary people Mike Leighs praise for Olmis film stands as a very apt description of Leighs own work, which has, from the very beginning, concerned itself with the experience of ordinary people: working, raising families, dealing with loss and illness, trying to communicate and connect. Howie Movshovitz defines Leighs output as a sustained attempt to capture the texture of real life and terms such as social realism, kitchen-sink drama and naturalism invariably appear in discussions of the British auteurs work. However, none of these terms seems quite adequate in capturing the very distinctive brand of humane insight and uproarious social comedy that characterizes Leighs film-making. As the director states, no work of art is truly naturalistic. Art is not real life and has to be organized, designed and distilled because its dramatic.

Leighs very particular process of organizing, designing and distilling his material remains one of the most original and commented upon in contemporary cinema. In recent years, the director has become somewhat more open about discussing elements of his methodeven while keeping the more esoteric aspects firmly behind closed doors. Famously, Leighs projects begin with no script, starting instead from a basic premise that is developed through lengthy improvisation sessions with his actors, who initially base their characters on a personor various peoplethat they know. The months of rehearsal result in Leighs composition of a bare-bones shooting script, which is refined, distilled, and

finalized after more improvisation, by the time shooting commences. The process is organic, finely detailed and highly collaborative; small wonder that many actors (including his unofficial repertory company of performers: Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Imelda Staunton, Peter Wight, Phil Davis, the late Katrin Cartlidge and, more recently, Martin Savage, Eddie Marsan and Sally Hawkins) have frequently described their work with Leigh as among the most rewarding and fulfilling of their careers.

Leighs idiosyncratic methods were initially developed in his work for the theater. However, it was a viewing of John Cassavetes seminal Shadows (1959) that first alerted him to the possibility of creating complete plays from scratch with a group of actors. His first film, Bleak Moments , a devastating anatomization of English reserve and failures in communication, appeared in 1971, but it would be another 17 years before his next feature film, High Hopes was made. In the intervening period, Leigh dedicated himself to working for television, producing a string of memorable dramas for the BBCs celebrated Play for Today strand, including Hard Labour (1973),Nuts in May (1976), The Kiss of Death (1977) and Abigails Party (1977). Following High Hopes andLife is Sweet (1990), the turning point in Leighs career came with Naked, an epically-scaled and often brutal drama which tracks its garrulous anti-hero, Johnny (David Thewlis), from Manchester to the streets of London, exploring his fairly vicious relationships with women; the films confrontational approach was likened by one (hostile) critic to a mugging. Naked was followed by the equally extraordinary Secrets and Lies, perhaps the quintessential Leigh film in its subtle, immersive drawing together of a group of extended family members, colleagues and friends. His camerawork characterized by what David Thompson has called a detached, medical watchfulness Leigh often bases his scenes around social engagements, with their ensuing dramas, revelations and embarrassments; the climactic, emotionally charged barbecue sequence in Secrets and Lies is, in many ways, the Leigh scene par excellence.

Leigh has broadened his scope to encompass period drama with Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake(2004), bringing his distinctive aesthetic (and most of his favorite actors) to bear on these projects, which subtly challenge the conventions of heritage cinema. Sometimes prone to caricature and overemphasis, Leighs weaker films can be obvious and schematic, occasionally relying too heavily on broadly-drawn contrasts between characters and taking a rather judgmental attitude towards the protagonists. His best films, in contrast, work to change and challenge the audiences pre-judgments about characters, and cast a sharp yet sympathetic eye upon human frailty and resilience. According to Andy Medhurst, the directors skill lies in making moving (in both senses of the word) pictures that evoke the horrors and humors of being English. For all the national specificity of his work, however, it is, finally, Leighs sustained engagement with the great, hard, real adventure of living and surviving from day to day that makes his films resonate so profoundly for audiences across the world.