Good Directors That I Want to Discover
This list encompasses some culturally important directors.
1) I try to list their most notable works.
2) I try to find one of their quotes to illustrate their filmmaking style.
Note: When I find video interviews of them, I don't correct their spelling mistakes because I shouldn't be doing an interpretation job. I wrote everything as I heard it.
1) I try to list their most notable works.
2) I try to find one of their quotes to illustrate their filmmaking style.
Note: When I find video interviews of them, I don't correct their spelling mistakes because I shouldn't be doing an interpretation job. I wrote everything as I heard it.
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Friedkin's mother was an operating room nurse. His father was a merchant seaman, semi-pro softball player and ultimately sold clothes in a men's discount chain. Ultimately, his father never earned more than $50/week in his whole life and died indigent. Eventually young Will became infatuated with Orson Welles after seeing Citizen Kane (1941). He went to work for WGN TV immediately after graduating from high school where he started making documentaries, one of which won the Golden Gate Award at the 1962 San Francisco film festival. In 1965, he moved to Hollywood and immediately started directing TV shows, including an episode of the The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962); Hitchcock infamously chastised him for not wearing a tie.The French Connection, The Exorcist, To Live and Die in L.A., Sorcerer, Killer Joe, Paper Moon, The Boys in the Band, A Decade Under the Influence, Bug, The People vs. Paul CrumpWell, why bad things happen to good people. An innocent 12-year-old girl, who goes through extraordinary symptoms that clearly represent a disease that medical science is unable to deal with. That’s extremely disturbing to people. Because most people either have a child, or have been a child or are a child. So whenever your child goes through the sort of illnesses that are depicted in The Exorcist, it’s of great concern to everyone. And I think the fact that I made the film in a realistic way is what ultimately gets to people. It’s not done as though it takes place on a planet far, far away or something like that, or in an intangible world—it’s set in the real world, with characters who are portrayed as humanly possible. So I think that the fact the story is portrayed realistically is what disturbs people about the events in it. It was a very productive and exciting period to work with William Peter Blatty on his great creation.
I think the world is on a precipice today. I don’t see any strong leadership to counteract the terrorism that exists in the world, as well as various other problems. I think if the world does not pull together, it will blow apart. And it has now affected innocent people sitting at an outdoor café somewhere, who have no politics, you know, no particular philosophy that would be disturbing to someone else. There is just evil in the world, and that’s what relates Sorcerer to The Exorcist. There is a force of evil in the world that causes all these problems. Life is actually a beautiful gift, but people regard it not as something that is vulnerable, but as something that they take for granted. The major powers in the world just keep threatening each other, attacking each other, and there’s going to come a point where there’s enough nuclear proliferation to destroy the world. So yes, that is the metaphor behind Sorcerer.
One of the major inspirations to me for The French Connection, was the Costa-Gavras film, Z. I think that Costa-Gavras achieved that, he made a film that felt like a documentary. It felt like the audience was experiencing everything at the moment, in the moment and that gave me the courage to do The French Connection that way. I’ve said this to Costa already; he knows the debt that I owe to him and to his cinema. It was also done to some extent earlier by Jules Dassin, in The Naked City, and in some of the films he made in New York and Hollywood before he was blacklisted.
I felt that I could take what I had learned from making documentary films and impose it on to a story, which had not been done to a great extent... The actual case took 10 months and the film runs 100 minutes, but it’s an impression of the French Connection case. It’s not a documentary: it’s an impression of who those people were, and how they interacted with one another.
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/a-discussion-with-william-friedkin/- Director
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The son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter, Alan Parker was a London advertising copywriter in the 1960s and early 1970s with Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP), an ad agency. He formed a partnership with David Puttnam as his producer (Puttnam had been a photographers' agent), and left CDP to become a full-time director of television commercials before moving onto feature films.Midnight Express, Evita, Angel Heart, Mississipi Burning.Hard to find a single quote of him describing his filmmaking style. He often stated that he wanted to make his films different. Also, he also stated he wants full control over his films and that he couldn't that anymore in Hollywood in the era of digital, this is why he reoriented his career to painting
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Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it's virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context.
After studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he branched out into the theater, performing with a touring repertory company. This led to television, where in alliance with producer Tony Garnett he produced a series of docudramas, most notably the devastating "Cathy Come Home" episode of The Wednesday Play (1964), whose impact was so massive that it led directly to a change in the homeless laws.
He made his feature debut Poor Cow (1967) the following year, and with Kes (1969), he produced what is now acclaimed as one of the finest films ever made in Britain. However, the following two decades saw his career in the doldrums with his films poorly distributed (despite the obvious quality of work such as The Gamekeeper (1968) and Looks and Smiles (1981)) and his TV work in some cases never broadcast (most notoriously, his documentaries on the 1984 miners' strike).
He made a spectacular comeback in the 1990s, with a series of award-winning films firmly establishing him in the pantheon of great European directors - his films have always been more popular in mainland Europe than in his native country or the US (where Riff-Raff (1991) was shown with subtitles because of the wide range of dialects). Hidden Agenda (1990) won the Special Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival; Riff-Raff (1991) won the Felix award for Best European Film of 1992; Raining Stones (1993) won the Cannes Special Jury Prize for 1993, and Land and Freedom (1995) won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival - and was a substantial box-office hit in Spain where it sparked intense debate about its subject matter. This needless to say, was one of the reasons that Loach made the film!The Wind That Shakes the Barley, I, Daniel Blake, Land and Freedom, Sweet Sixteen, The Limey, The Angel's Share, Kes, Sorry we missed you, Looking for EricIn order to know what films to make rather than how to make them. Which is the most important question, it is not "how do you do it", that's not too difficult, it is "what do you do". “It’s what films you make, and not how you make them, that’s the most important question. Which stories do you tell and who do you put on screen?”
In order to make films, you gotta try to understand the world, otherwise, what story do you tell? So how do you understand the world... well you gotta read history. You gotta engage in the ideas that have shaped the way we are.
When you make a film, you do reflect the world whether you want it or not, you do reflect it. Even the most extreme fantastical film will some connection to it because the people who make it are born now or live now. And their preoccupations will be reflected in their work. Nobody comes from nowhere. Everyone has preconceptions that are born from their experience. So you reveal yourself whether you think you are or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JbMZhEjEnA- Director
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Known for his creative stage direction, Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He directed a string of successful films, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received 12 Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film about union corruption on the New York harbor waterfront. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which introduced James Dean to movie audiences.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, which brought him strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues. His testimony helped end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, along with ending the work of playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified his act by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Nearly a half-century later, his anti-Communist testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him, "without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses." On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan died at age 94 of natural causes at his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to Kazan.A Streetcar Named Desired, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, America America, Splendor in the Grass, Gentleman's Agreement, A Face in the Crowd, Viva Zapata!, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Panic in the Streets, Baby Doll, Wild River, Boomerang!I'm a man that was born in Constantinople, that was brought to America by his family at the age of four and I grew up in the American streets, was educated in the American schools, has a great love for American, a great feeling for America and I have the desire to tell the story of our country, to truthfully show our country on the screen.
I saw the great Russian pictures of the 20s, Dovzhenko, Eisenstein,..., and they were an inspiration to me, I have never forgotten them, I have never been influenced by anything else in my life, I made up my mind when I was 18 or so to try to become a film director and I never wanted to do anything else, I was an actor and a state director and so on, but my whole desire in life was to work in films.
I always appreciated the specific nature of the motion picture art, I never thought that it was like the stage, the means of telling a story in films are entirely different than that on the stage. I haven't wanted to make the movies for like the theater, but rather less like so and the more films I make, the more I feel that films are one thing and the theaters are something entirely different. And, I develop, I try to make my films increasingly pictorial, and when I work in the theater that is a different craft, a different medium. I do not want to bring them together.
It's very dangerous to select actors by tests or readings in my opinion. Very often, a mediocre actor can give a brilliant reading[...] Very often the most talented people can't work quickly and needs care and patience in their hands. The only I can find talent is to do it very slowly, to get to know them[...] Very often their guards drop and I find out who they are and what is inside them, what their souls are are, what material they have inside them for our art. And when I find that, I know whether they are talented enough.
The Method essentially is terribly human, profoundly human thing. It was affected by psychoanalysis. The understanding of the soul so to say. People would train into control their own emotions, but there are also sensory exercises. We make the senses for keen, more felt.
Objects are critical in the method, they are very important in the method. ??Everybody trains into?? the inner life of an object, otherwise the significance or the symbolism of an object. What an object means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgZhsfg60s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjVt9naUvSk
PS: Orson Welles really hated Kazan: https://youtu.be/Z6DC4AjTG2M- Writer
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Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940, in Rome, Italy, the first-born son of famed Italian producer Salvatore Argento and Brazilian fashion model Elda Luxardo. Argento recalls getting his ideas for filmmaking from his close-knit family from Italian folk tales told by his parents and other family members, including an aunt who told him frighting bedtime stories. Argento based most of his thriller movies on childhood trauma, yet his own--according to him--was a normal one. Along with tales spun by his aunt, Argento was impressed by stories from The Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen and Edgar Allan Poe. Argento started his career writing for various film journal magazines while still in his teens attending a Catholic high school. After graduation, instead of going to college, Argento took a job as a columnist for the Rome daily newspaper "Paese Sera". Inspired by the movies, he later found work as a screenwriter and wrote several screenplays for a number of films, but the most important were his western collaborations, which included Cemetery Without Crosses (1969) and the Sergio Leone masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). After its release Argento wrote and directed his first movie, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which starred Tony Musante and and British actress Suzy Kendall. It's a loose adoption on Fredric Brown's novel "The Screaming Mimi", which was made for his father's film company. Argento wanted to direct the movie himself because he did not want any other director messing up the production and his screenplay.
After "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" became an international hit, Argento followed up with two more thrillers, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971), starring 'Karl Madlen' (qv" and 'James Fransiscus', and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) ("Four Flies On Black Velvet"), both backed by his father Salvatore. Argento then directed the TV drama Testimone oculare (1973) and the historical TV drama The Five Days (1973). He then went back to directing so-called "giallo" thrillers, starting with Deep Red (1975), a violent mystery-thriller starring David Hemmings that inspired a number of international directors in the thriller-horror genre. His next work was Suspiria (1977), a surreal horror film about a witch's coven that was inspired by the Gothic fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson, which he also wrote in collaboration with his girlfriend, screenwriter/actress Daria Nicolodi, who acted in "Profondo Rosso" ("Deep Red") and most of Argento's films from then to the late 1980s. Argento advanced the unfinished trilogy with Inferno (1980), before returning to the "giallo" genre with the gory Tenebrae (1982), and then with the haunting Phenomena (1985).
The lukewarm reviews for his films, however, caused Argento to slip away from directing to producing and co-writing two Lamberto Bava horror flicks, Demons (1985) and Demons 2 (1986). Argento returned to directing with the "giallo" thriller Opera (1987), which according to him was "a very unpleasant experience", and no wonder: a rash of technical problems delayed production, the lead actress Vanessa Redgrave dropped out before filming was to begin, Argento's father Salvatore died during filming and his long-term girlfriend Daria broke off their relationship. After the commercial box-office failure of "Opera", Argento temporarily settled in the US, where he collaborated with director George A. Romero on the two-part horror-thriller Two Evil Eyes (1990) (he had previously collaborated with Romero on the horror action thriller Dawn of the Dead (1978)). While still living in America, Argento appeared in small roles in several films and directed another violent mystery thriller, Trauma (1993), which starred his youngest daughter Asia Argento from his long-term relationship with Nicolodi.
Argento returned to Italy in 1995, where he made a comeback in the horror genre with The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and then with another version of "The Phantom of the Opera", The Phantom of the Opera (1998), both of which starred Asia. Most recently, Argento directed a number of "giallo" mystery thrillers such as Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2003) and Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005), as well as two gory, supernatural-themed episodes of the USA TV cable anthology series Masters of Horror (2005).
Having always wanted to make a third chapter to his "Three Mothers" horror films, Argento finally completed the trilogy in 2007 with the release of Mother of Tears (2007), which starred Asia Argento as a young woman trying to identify and stop the last surviving evil witch from taking over the world. In addition to his Gothic and violent style of storytelling, "La terza madre" has many references to two of his previous films, "Suspiria" (1997) and "Inferno" (1980), which is a must for fans of the trilogy.
His movies may be regarded by some critics and opponents as cheap and overly violent, but second or third viewings show him to be a talented writer/director with a penchant for original ideas and creative directing.Profondo Rosso, Suspiria, OperaGiallo is something... style, italian style. I most invented this because I was one of the first to do that. Giallo is something difficult to... [define?] some trailer, but with the psychology and psychoanalysis, something inside, beautiful woman, this is giallo.
I like to change things because I come from critics and like critics I understand that we have something that don't exist before. I stood it and then I creat this style.
I was inspired by a lot by Alfred Hitchcock and by Ingmar Bergman for a lot of film and like style to shoot I... Big influence in me, the French films, the Nouvelle Vague. It is very important for me to tell the stories, how to tell stories. And also, Fellini is an inspiration for me, very important because Fellini, it is inspired by our dreams, his dreams, his nightmares and you know something real. It is similar to me.
Violence and sexuality, it is complicated because it comes from maybe like the very wild ideas about it is somethings, comes from my deep. You know, it comes from my deep. I mean conscious, I write and when I finish to write, I understand what is the story but when I write I think it is something which comes very fluently, simple, smiple.
I'm not a dark person, no. There are two Dario Argento, one is the director and the other one is Dario Argento in life. The life is very different, we have to personality when I'm on the films I'm another person, a person who looks in my dream, in my dark side. And then, when i finish flms I'm simple and like everybody.
Today, there aren’t many options. Most horror films are made with special effects, so you have either the special effects film or you have a kind of plot that’s repeated. A kind of film is successful and immediately many more are made that are exactly the same. For instance, one could be about a gang of friends hang out a house, maybe something horrible happens, and they’re all killed. So the house is haunted, there is a presence, and the film’s a success. Then many other films will follow the same track.
To make a film, you need funds and an idea. There must be an idea and author to make it in the best possible way. I don’t think there has been a big change. Studios have to make money on their investments. It’s mainly a financial problem. That’s what remains. I don’t think the attitude has changed. At the end of the day, they all want to make money, so that’s what they go for.
[Explaing why he was opposed to a remake of Suspiria]Well, the film has a specific mood. Either you do it exactly the same way — in which case, it’s not a remake, it’s a copy, which is pointless — or, you change things and make another movie. In that case, why call it “Suspiria”?
https://www.indiewire.com/2016/08/dario-argento-interview-suspira-remake-2016-locarno-film-festival-1201714247/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4zUudn3UO8&ab_channel=BFIEvents- Director
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Paul Verhoeven graduated from the University of Leiden, with a degree in math and physics. He entered the Royal Netherlands Navy, where he began his film career by making documentaries for the Navy and later for TV. In 1969, he directed the popular Dutch TV series, Floris (1969), about a medieval knight. This featured actor Rutger Hauer, who has appeared in many of Verhoeven's later films. Verhoeven's first feature, Wat zien ik (1971) (trans. "What do I See?"), was released in 1971. However, it was his second, Turkish Delight (1973), with its combination of raw sexuality and a poignant story-line, that gained him great popularity in the Netherlands, especially with male audiences. When his films, especially Soldier of Orange (1977) and The 4th Man (1983), received international recognition, Verhoeven moved to the US. His first US film was Flesh+Blood (1985) in 1985, but it was RoboCop (1987) and, especially, Total Recall (1990) that made him a big box office success. Sometimes accused of portraying excessive violence in his films, Verhoeven replies that he is only recording the violence of society. Verhoeven has co-scripted two of his films: Soldier of Orange (1977) and Flesh+Blood (1985). He also directed an episode of the HBO The Hitchhiker (1983) TV series. Several of his films have been photographed by Jost Vacano, including the hit cult film, Starship Troopers (1997), starring Casper Van Dien.- Producer
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Park Chan-wook was born on 23 August 1963 in Seoul, South Korea. He is a producer and writer, known for Oldboy (2003), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022). He is married to Eun-hee Kim. They have one child.- Director
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Masaki Kobayashi was born on 14 February 1916 in Hokkaido, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for Harakiri (1962), Samurai Rebellion (1967) and The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961). He died on 4 October 1996 in Tokyo, Japan.- Director
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Nagisa Oshima's career extends from the initiation of the "Nuberu bagu" (New Wave) movement in Japanese cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to the contemporary use of cinema and television to express paradoxes in modern society. After an early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto, Oshima rose rapidly in the Shochiku company from the status of apprentice, in 1954, to that of director. By 1960, he had grown disillusioned with the traditional studio production policies and broke away from Shochiku to form his own independent production company, Sozosha, in 1965. With other Japanese New Wave filmmakers, like Masahiro Shinoda, Shôhei Imamura and Yoshishige Yoshida, Oshima reacted against the humanistic style and subject matter of directors like Yasujirô Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, as well as against established left-wing political movements. Oshima has been primarily concerned with depicting the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society. His films tend to expose contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization. Many of Oshima's earlier films, such as A Town of Love and Hope (1959) and The Sun's Burial (1960), feature rebellious, underprivileged youths in anti-heroic roles. The film for which he is probably best-known in the West, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), centers on an obsessive sexual relationship. Like several other Oshima works, it gains additional power by being based on an actual incident. Other important Oshima films include Death by Hanging (1968), an examination of the prejudicial treatment of Koreans in Japan; Boy (1969), which deals with the cruel use of a child for extortion purposes, and with the child's subsequent escapist fantasies; The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), about another ongoing concern of Oshima's, the art of filmmaking itself; and The Ceremony (1971), which presents a microcosmic view of Japanese postwar history through the lives of one wealthy family. In recent years, Oshima has repeatedly turned to sources outside Japan for the production of his films. This was the case with In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Max My Love (1986). It is less well-known in the West that Oshima has also been a prolific documentarist, film theorist and television personality. He is the host of a long-running television talk show, "The School for Wives", in which female participants (kept anonymous by a distorting glass) present their personal problems, to which he responds from offscreen.- Director
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Robert Altman was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to B.C. (an insurance salesman) and Helen Altman. He entered St. Peters Catholic school at the age six, and spent a short time at a Catholic high school. From there, he went to Rockhurst High School. It was then that he started exploring the art of exploring sound with the cheap tape recorders available at the time. He was then sent to Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri where he attended through Junior College. In 1945, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces and became a copilot of a B-24. After his discharge from the military, he became fascinated by movies and he and his first wife, LaVonne Elmer, moved to Hollywood, where Altman tried acting (appearing in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)), songwriting (he wrote a musical intended for Broadway, "The Rumors are Flying"), and screen-writing (he co-wrote the screenplay for the film Bodyguard (1948) and wrote the story (uncredited) for Christmas Eve (1947)), but he could not get a foot hold in Tinseltown. After a brief fling as publicity director with a company in the business of tattooing dogs, Altman finally gave up and returned to his hometown of Kansas City, where he decided he wanted to do some serious work in filmmaking. An old friend of his recommended him to a film production company in Kansas City, the Calvin Co., who hired him in 1950. After a few months of work in writing scripts and editing films, Altman began directing films at Calvin. It was here (while working on documentaries, employee training films, industrial and educational films and advertisements) that he learned much about film making. All in all, Altman pieced together sixty to sixty-five short films for Calvin on every subject imaginable, from football to car crashes, but he kept grasping for more challenging projects. He wrote the screenplay for the Kansas City-produced feature film Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), he produced and directed several television commercials including one with the Eileen Ford Agency, he co-created and directed the TV series The Pulse of the City (1953) which ran for one season on the independent Dumont network, and he even had a formative crack at directing local community theater. His big-screen directorial debut came while still at Calvin with The Delinquents (1957) and, by 1956, he left the Calvin Co., and went to Hollywood to direct Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. From here, he went on to direct a large number of television shows, until he was offered the script for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1969. He was hardly the producer's first choice - more than fifteen other directors had already turned it down. This wasn't his first movie, but it was his first success. After that, he had his share of hits and misses, but The Player (1992) and, more recently, Gosford Park (2001) were particularly well-received.- Writer
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The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the fact that his films often deal with religious themes) Dreyer did not receive a strict Lutheran upbringing, but was raised in a household that embraced modern ideas: in his spare time the adoptive father was an avid photographer, and the Dreyers voted for The Danish Social Democrates. When he was baptized the reasoning was culturally, not religiously motivated. Dreyer's childhood was an unhappy one. He did not feel his adoptive parents' love (especially the mother), and longed for his biological mother, whom he never knew.
After working as a journalist, he entered the film industry, and advanced from reading scripts to directing films himself. In the silent era his output was large, but it quickly diminished with the arrival of the talkie. In his lifetime he was recognized as being a fanatical perfectionist amongst producers, and thus difficult to work with. His career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises. He is now regarded as the greatest director ever to emerge from Denmark.- Director
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Gabriel Axel was born on 18 April 1918 in Århus, Denmark. He was a director and actor, known for Babette's Feast (1987), The Red Mantle (1967) and Christian (1989). He was married to Lucie Axel Moerch. He died on 9 February 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark.- Director
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Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker who was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, which then was located in the British Occupation Zone of what became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially as West Germany until reunification). At university, Wenders originally studied to become a physician before switching to philosophy before terminating his studies in 1965. Moving to Paris, he intended to become a painter.
He fell in love with the cinema but failed to gain admission to the French national film school. He supported himself as an engraver while attending movie houses. Upon his return to West Germany in 1967, he was employed by United Artists at its Düsseldorf office before he was accepted by the University of Television and Film Munich school for its autumn 1967 semester, where he remained until 1970. While attending film school, he worked as a newspaper film critic. In addition to shorts, he made a feature film as part of his studies, Summer in the City (1971).
Wenders gained recognition as part of the German New Wave of the 1970s. Other directors that were part of the New German Cinema were Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. His second feature, a film made from Peter Handke's novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), brought him acclaim, as did Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). It was his 1977 feature The American Friend (1977) ("The American Friend"), starring Dennis Hopper as Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero Tom Ripley, that represented his international breakthrough. He was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival for "The American Friend", which was cited as Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review in the United States.
Francis Ford Coppola, as producer, gave Wenders the chance to direct in America, but Hammett (1982) (1982) was a critical and commercial failure. However, his American-made Paris, Texas (1984) (1984) received critical hosannas, winning three awards at Cannes, including the Palme d'Or, and Wenders won a BAFTA for best director. "Paris, Texas" was a prelude to his greatest success, 1987's Wings of Desire (1987) ("Wings of Desire"), which he made back in Germany. The film brought him the best director award at Cannes and was a solid hit, even spawning an egregious Hollywood remake.
Wenders followed it up with a critical and commercial flop in 1991, Until the End of the World (1991) ("Until the End of the World"), though Faraway, So Close! (1993) won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. Still, is reputation as a feature film director never quite recovered in the United States after the bomb that was "Until the End of the World." Since the mid-1990s, Wenders has distinguished himself as a non-fiction filmmaker, directing several highly acclaimed documentaries, most notably Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Pina (2011), both of which brought him Oscar nominations.- Director
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Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, France.- Director
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Joe Dante is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art. After a stint as a film reviewer, he began his filmmaking apprenticeship in 1974 as trailer editor for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. He made his directorial debut in 1976 with Hollywood Boulevard (1976) (co-directed with Allan Arkush), a thinly disguised spoof of New World exploitation pictures, shot in ten days for $60,000.
In 1977 Dante made his solo debut as a film director with Piranha (1978), which went on to become one of the company's biggest hits and was distributed throughout the rest of the world by United Artists. During his tenure at New World, Dante edited Ron Howard's directorial debut Grand Theft Auto (1977) and co-wrote the original story for Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979).
For Avco-Embassy Dante next directed the highly praised werewolf thriller The Howling (1981), followed by the It's a Good Life segment of the episodic Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).
Having worked with Steven Spielberg on Twilight Zone, Dante was chosen to helm one of the first Amblin Productions for Warner Bros. Gremlins (1984) became a runaway hit and grossed more than $200 million worldwide.
Dante followed up with Explorers (1985) for Paramount, a sci-fi fantasy about three kids who build their own spaceship, and then Innerspace (1987) for Guber/Peters, Amblin and Warner Bros., an action comedy in which miniaturized test pilot Dennis Quaid is injected into the body of supermarket clerk Martin Short.
Tom Hanks starred in Dante's next film for Imagine/Universal, The 'Burbs (1989), which was followed by Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) for Warner Bros. in 1990. Matinee (1993) featuring John Goodman as a huckster showman premiering his new horror film during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a production of Dante and partner Michael Finnell's Renfield Productions for Universal in 1993.
Dreamworks/Universal's Small Soldiers was released in 1998, followed in 2003 by Warner Bros. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) featuring one of Dante's favorite actors, Bugs Bunny.
Dante's Homecoming (2005), debuted in December 2005 to rave reviews from critics and audiences alike and was named to numerous "Top 10" critics lists. The Sitges and Brussels International Film Festivals both honored Homecoming with Special Jury Recognition Awards, and the New Yorker called it the best political film of 2005. More recent work includes The Screwfly Solution (2006), and Boo (2007). His new 3D thriller, The Hole (2009), for Bold Films recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it garnered the first-ever award for Best 3D Feature.
Dante also produces the critically-acclaimed webisode/mobile phone series, Trailers from Hell.
Along the way Dante contributed several comedy segments to the multi-part Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) spoof produced by John Landis, and directed various episodes of the tv series Amazing Stories (1985), The Twilight Zone (1985), Police Squad! (1982), Night Visions (2001) and Picture Windows (1994). He also directed the network pilots for The Osiris Chronicles (1998) and the NBC series Eerie, Indiana (1991), on which he was creative consultant throughout its run.
Dante received Cable Ace nominations for his direction of Showtime's Runaway Daughters (1994) and HBO's The Second Civil War (1997).- Actress
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Elaine May (born under the name Elaine Iva Berlin) is an American actress, comedian, film director, playwright, and screenwriter from Philadelphia. Her professional career started in the 1950s and is still ongoing. She has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She is best remembered for directing the Cold War-themed action comedy "Ishtar" (1987). She won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director, but the film has had a vocal minority of critics who defend its quality.
In 1932, May was born to a Jewish-American family. Both her parents were theatrical actors. Her father Jack Berlin was also a theater director and led his own traveling Yiddish theater company. Her mother was actress Ida Aaron. May made her stage debut c. 1935, at the age of 3. Her father had decided to include her in his performances. As a a child actress, she was reportedly cast in the roles of boys.
The theater company toured extensively, and May was part of their tours. She kept changing schools, enrolling for a few weeks and then moving to another city. May reputedly hated school, but loved reading books on her own. Her favorite topics were fairy tales and mythology.
Jack Berlin died c. 1942, and May's career as a child actress consequently ended. She was left in the custody of her mother. The duo settled in Los Angeles, and May eventually enrolled in Hollywood High School. In 1946, May dropped out of school. In 1948, she married her her first husband, the toy inventor Marvin May. She was only 16-years-old at the time of her marriage. She would later keep her husband's surname as her professional name.
In 1949, May had her only child, Jeannie Brette May. Jeannie would later become a professional actress in her own right, under the name Jeannie Berlin. May and her husband separated c. 1950, and she received a divorce in 1960. She started supporting herself through a series of odd jobs.
In 1950, May was interested in attending college, but most colleges in California required applicants to have high school diplomas. As a high school dropout, she did not have the necessary diploma. Learning that the University of Chicago did not use this requirement, she hitch-hiked her way to Chicago, At the time her personal fortune consisted of 7 dollars.
Once she arrived in Chicago, May started informally taking classes at the university by auditing, sitting in without enrolling. She habitually engaged in discussions with her instructors. She once had a fight with a philosophy instructor because of their different interpretations of the motives behind Socrates' apology. May was introduced to aspiring actor Mike Nichols (1931-2014),who was also attending the University. They bonded over their shared passion for the theater.
In 1955, May became one of the charter members of the Compass Players, a Chicago-based improvisational theater group. Nichols joined the group shortly after. The two of them formed a working partnership, jointly developing improvised comedy sketches. May helped the Compass Players to become a highly popular comedy troupe, due to her talent for satire. She helped in the training of novice members of the group.
In 1957, Nichols was asked to leave the Compass Players. His popularity had outshone most members of the group, and had caused internal conflicts. May left the group with him. They then decided to form their own stand-up comedy team, "Nichols and May". Their improvisational skills, and ability to come up with fresh material allowed them to impress their audience.
In 1960, the comedy duo made their Broadway debut, with the show "An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May". A recording of the show won the 1962 "Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album". "Nichols and May" became very popular in New York City, performing in sold-out shows. They also started making appearances in radio and television, and even recorded commercials.
May was reportedly surprised with her own success. She had spend much of her adult life in near-poverty, but she was now earning a regular income from show business. She joked in an interview that she was practically barefoot when she arrived in New York, and now had to get used to wearing high heels.
In 1961, the duo was at the height of their fame. But they decided to dissolve their partnership in order to pursue solo careers. Nichols started working as a Broadway stage director, while May started her new career as a playwright. Her most successful play was "Adaptation" (1969), which she also directed. For her work as a theatrical director, she won the 1969 "Outer Critics Circle Award, Best Director".
May made her debut as a film director with the black comedy "A New Leaf" (1971). It was an adaptation of a short story by Jack Ritchie (1922-1983), depicting the story of an impoverished patrician who marries a wealthy heiress for her money. The main character initially considers murdering his wife to inherit her wealth, but first he has to protect her from other predators who were after her money.
Her first film found little success at the box office, but was praised by critics and was nominated for the "Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy". It later earned a reputation as a cult classic, and in 2019 it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
Her second film was the romantic comedy "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972). It concerns a newlywed man who falls madly in love with a younger woman while on his honeymoon. He pursues his romantic interest obsessively despite all signs that his love is unrequited, and despite the disapproval of the woman's protective father. The film was critically acclaimed, and has at times been listed in retrospectives concerning the funniest American films.
In an unusual career move, her third film was not a comedy. It was the rather bleak gangster film "Mikey and Nicky" (1976). It depicts a small-time mobster whose life is in danger, resorting to asking for help from his childhood friend. While creating this film, May got involved in a legal dispute with the film studio Paramount Pictures. The studio eventually decided to only allow a limited release for the film. The film found a niche audience in the home video market, but May's career as a director suffered from this dispute. She was effectively blacklisted.
May decided to focus on her screenwriting career. She found success with the script to the fantasy-comedy "Heaven Can Wait" (1978), about the afterlife of a man who died prematurely. The film was based on a 1938 play by Harry Segall (1892-1975), and also served as a remake to the classic film "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941) which was based on the same play. The film earned about 99 million dollars at the worldwide box office, and was a critical hit. May was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Oliver Stone (1946-).
During the early 1980s, May mainly worked as an uncredited script doctor. She "polished" scripts by other screenwriters. Her greatest success in this role was the romantic comedy "Tootsie" (1982), for which she wrote several additional scenes. She attempted her comeback as a director with the action comedy "Ishtar" (1987), which became a box office flop for the film studio Columbia Pictures. The film's failure reportedly convinced Columbia's parent company Coca-Cola to sell the under-performing studio to Sony.
"Ishtar" was derided at the time as the worst film of its era by many critics, but was also defended by a vocal minority of critics. It has since attracted a cult audience, who consider this to be a great film. However the film's failure ended May's career as a film director and damaged her reputation. She also ceased working as a screenwriter for several years, reduced to working as an actress again.
May made her comeback as a screenwriter with the comedy film "The Birdcage" (1996), a remake of the European comedy "La Cage aux Folles" (The Cage of Madwomen, 1978). In the film, the openly gay parents to a young man have to pretend to be straight in an attempt to impress their son's prospective in-laws. The film earned about 185 million dollars at the worldwide box office, the greatest hit in May's career up to that point. She was nominated for the "Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay", but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton (1955-).
May found more critical success with her next screenplay, for the political film "Primary Colors" (1998). It was an adaptation of the roman à clef novel "Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics" (1996) by Joe Klein (1946-). The novel itself was a fictionalized version of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, and depicts an idealistic campaign worker's disillusionment with the politician. The film's cast were nominated for several awards. May herself received her second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Bill Condon (1955-).
May largely retired from screenwriting since the end of the 1990s. As an actress, she had a supporting role in the crime-comedy "Small Time Crooks" (2000). The film concerned nouveau riche criminals, who attempt to socialize with the American upper class. For this role, she won the "Best Supporting Actress Award" at the National Society of Film Critics Awards.
May lived in retirement until joining the cast of the television mini-series "Crisis in Six Scenes" (2016), her first television role in several decades. The series was created by Woody Allen (1935-), who happened to be an old friend of May.
In 2018, May made a theatrical comeback in Broadway. She played the elderly gallery owner Gladys Green in a revival of the play "The Waverly Gallery" (2000) by Kenneth Lonergan (1962-). In the play, Gladys shows early signs of Alzheimer's disease, and her family has to deal with her mental decline. May received critical acclaim for this role. For this role, she won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. At age 87, she was the second-oldest winner of a Tony Award for acting.
As of 2021, May is 89-years-old. She is no longer very active, but she reportedly has plans to direct another film. She remains a popular actress.- Director
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Sydney Pollack was an Academy Award-winning director, producer, actor, writer and public figure, who directed and produced over 40 films.
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born July 1, 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, USA, to Rebecca (Miller), a homemaker, and David Pollack, a professional boxer turned pharmacist. All of his grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. His parents divorced when he was young. His mother, an alcoholic, died at age 37, when Sydney was 16. He spent his formative years in Indiana, graduating from his HS in 1952, then moved to New York City.
From 1952-1954 young Pollack studied acting with Sanford Meisner at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York. He served two years in the army, and then returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse and taught acting. In 1958, Pollack married his former student Claire Griswold. They had three children. Their son, Steven Pollack, died in a plane crash on November 26, 1993, in Santa Monica, California. Their daughter, Rebecca Pollack, served as vice president of film production at United Artists during the 1990s. Their youngest daughter, Rachel Pollack, was born in 1969.
Pollack began his acting career on stage, then made his name as television director in the early 1960s. He made his big screen acting debut in War Hunt (1962), where he met fellow actor Robert Redford, and the two co-stars established a life-long friendship. Pollack called on his good friend Redford to play opposite Natalie Wood in This Property Is Condemned (1966). Pollack and Redford worked together on six more films over the years. His biggest success came with Out of Africa (1985), starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. The movie earned eleven Academy Award nominations in all and seven wins, including Pollack's two Oscars: one for Best Direction and one for Best Picture.
Pollack showed his best as a comedy director and actor in Tootsie (1982), where he brought feminist issues to public awareness using his remarkable wit and wisdom, and created a highly entertaining film, which was nominated for ten Academy Awards. Pollack's directing revealed Dustin Hoffman's range and nuanced acting in gender switching from a dominant boyfriend to a nurse in drag, a brilliant collaboration of director and actor that broadened public perception about sex roles. Pollack also made success in producing such films as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Quiet American (2002) and Cold Mountain (2003). Pollack returned to the director's chair in 2004, when he directed The Interpreter (2005), the first film ever shot on location at the United Nations Headquarters and within the General Assembly in New York City.
In 2000, Sydney Pollack was honored with the John Huston Award from the Directors Guild of America as a "defender of artists' rights." He died from cancer on May 26, 2008, at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades, California.- Writer
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Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director whose films were known for their colorful visual style, was born in Parma, Italy. He attended Rome University and became famous as a poet. He served as assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone (1961) and directed The Grim Reaper (1962). His second film, Before the Revolution (1964), which was released in 1971, received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Bertolucci also received an Academy Award nomination as best director for Last Tango in Paris (1972), and the best director and best screenplay for the film The Last Emperor (1987), which walked away with nine Academy Awards.- Writer
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Tokyo-born Yasujiro Ozu was a movie buff from childhood, often playing hooky from school in order to see Hollywood movies in his local theatre. In 1923 he landed a job as a camera assistant at Shochiku Studios in Tokyo. Three years later, he was made an assistant director and directed his first film the next year, Zange no yaiba (1927). Ozu made thirty-five silent films, and a trilogy of youth comedies with serious overtones he turned out in the late 1920s and early 1930s placed him in the front ranks of Japanese directors. He made his first sound film in 1936, The Only Son (1936), but was drafted into the Japanese Army the next year, being posted to China for two years and then to Singapore when World War II started. Shortly before the war ended he was captured by British forces and spent six months in a P.O.W. facility. At war's end he went back to Shochiku, and his experiences during the war resulted in his making more serious, thoughtful films at a much slower pace than he had previously. His most famous film, Tokyo Story (1953), is generally considered by critics and film buffs alike to be his "masterpiece" and is regarded by many as not only one of Ozu's best films but one of the best films ever made. He also turned out such classics of Japanese film as The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), Floating Weeds (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962).
Ozu, who never married and lived with his mother all his life, died of cancer in 1963, two years after she passed.- Writer
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The master filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, as one of the creators of neo-realism, is one of the most influential directors of all time. His neo-realist films influenced France's nouvelle vague movement in the 1950s and '60s that changed the face of international cinema. He also influenced American directors, including Martin Scorsese.
He was born into the world of film, making his debut in Rome on May 8, 1906, the son of Elettra (Bellan), a housewife, and Angiolo Giuseppe "Beppino" Rossellini, the man who opened Italy's first cinema. He was immersed in cinema from the beginning, growing up watching movies in his father's movie-house from the time that film was first quickening as an art form. Italy was one of the places were movie-making matured, and Italian film had a huge influence on D.W. Griffith and other international directors. Between the two world wars, Hollywood would soon dictate what constituted a "well-made" film, but Rossellini would be one of the Italian directors who once again put Italy at the forefront of international cinema after the Second World War.
His training in cinema was thorough and extensive and he became expert in many facets of film-making. (His brother Renzo Rossellini, also was involved in the industry, scoring films.) He did his apprenticeship as an assistant to Italian filmmakers, then got the chance to make his first film, a documentary, "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune", in 1937. Due to his close ties to Benito Mussolini's second son, the critic and film producer Vittorio Mussolini, he flourished in fascist Italy's cinema. Once Il Duce was deposed, Rossellini produced his first classic film, the anti-fascist Rome, Open City (1945) ("Rome, Open City") in 1945, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes. Two other neo-realist classics soon followed, Paisan (1946) ("Paisan") and Germany Year Zero (1948) ("Germany in the Year Zero"). "Rome, Open City" screenwriters Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini were nominated for a Best Writing, Screenplay Oscar in 1947, while Rossellini himself, along with Amidei, Fellini and two others were nominated for a screen-writing Oscar in 1950 for "Paisan".
"I do not want to make beautiful films, I want to make useful films," he said. Rossellini claimed, "I try to capture reality, nothing else." This led him to often cast non-professional actors, then tailor his scripts to their idiosyncrasies and life-stories to heighten the sense of realism.
With other practitioners of neo-realism, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, film was changed forever. American director Elia Kazan credits neo-realism with his own evolution as a filmmaker, away from Hollywood's idea of the well-made film to the gritty realism of On the Waterfront (1954).
Rossellini had a celebrated, adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman that was an international scandal. They became lovers on the set of Stromboli (1950) while both were married to other people and Bergman became pregnant. After they shed their spouses and married, producing three children, history repeated itself when Rossellini cheated on her with the Indian screenwriter Sonali Senroy DasGupta while he was in India at the request of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to help revitalize that country's film industry. It touched off another international scandal, and Nehru ousted him from the country. Rossellini later divorced Bergman to marry Das Gupta, legitimizing their child that had been born out-of-wedlock.
Rossellini continued to make films until nearly his death. His last film The Messiah (1975) ("The Messiah"), a story of The Passion of Christ, was released in 1975.
Roberto Rossellini died of a heart attack in Rome on June 3, 1977. He was 71 years old.- Director
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Robert Mulligan was born on 23 August 1925 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Summer of '42 (1971) and The Other (1972). He was married to Sandy Levy and Jane Sutherland. He died on 20 December 2008 in Lyme, Connecticut, USA.- Director
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Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and became thoroughly entrenched in the studio system. His films during the 1930s and '40s encompassed nearly every genre imaginable and some, including Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), are considered to be film classics. His brilliance waned in the 1950s when he made a number of mediocre films for studios other than Warner. He directed his last film in 1961, a year before his death at 74.- Writer
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A true master of his craft, Michael Haneke is one of the greatest film artists working today and one who challenges his viewers each year and work goes by, with films that reflect real portions of life in realistic, disturbing and unforgettable ways. One of the most genuine filmmakers of the world cinema, Haneke wrote and directed films in several languages: French, German and English, working with a great variety of actors, such as Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Toby Jones, Ülrich Muhe, Arno Frisch and the list goes on.
This grand figure from Austrian cinema was born in Germany on 23 March 1942, from a German father and an Austrian mother, with both parents being from the artistic world working as actors, a career that Michael also tried but without much success. At the University of Vienna he studied drama, philosophy and psychology, and after graduation he went on to become a film critic and TV editor. His career behind camera started with After Liverpool (1974), which he wrote and directed. He went on to direct five more TV films and two episodes from the miniseries "Lemminge" (1979)_.
The years spent on television works prompted him to finally direct his first cinema feature, during his early 40's, which is somewhat unusual for film directors. But it was worth waiting. In The Seventh Continent (1989), Haneke establishes the foundation of what his future cinema would be about: a cinema that doesn't provides answers but one that dares to throw more and more questions, a cinema that reflects and analyses the human condition in its darkest and unexpected ways outside of any Hollywood formula. Films that exist to confront audiences and not comfort them. In it, Haneke deals with the duality of social values vs. internal values while exposing an apparent perfect family that runs into physical and material disintegration for reasons unknown. It was the first time a film of his was sent to the Cannes Film Festival (out of competition lineup) but he managed to cause some commotion in the audience with polemic scenes that were meant to extract all possible reactions from the crowd.
His next ventures at the decade's turn was in dealing with disturbed youth and the alienation they have in separating reality from fiction, trying to intersect both to drastic results. In Benny's Video (1992), it's the disturbing story of a teen boy who experiences killing for the first time capturing the murder on tape, impressed by the power of detachment that films and videos can cause to people; and later on the highly controversial Funny Games (1997), where two teens hold a family hostage to play sadistic games just for their own sick amusement. The film cemented Haneke's name as one of the greatest authors of his generation but sparkled a great debate with its themes of violence, sadism and the influence those things have in audiences. At the 1997's Cannes Film Festival, it was the film that had the most walk-out's by the audience. In between both films, he released 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Kafka's The Castle (1997), the latter being one of the rare times when Haneke developed an adapted work.
In the 2000's, he strongly continued in producing more outstanding works prone to debate and reflection in what would become his most prolific decade with the following films: Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), Time of the Wolf (2003), Caché (2005), an American remake shot-by shot of Funny Games (2007) and The White Ribbon (2009). His study about romance versus masochism in The Piano Teacher (2001) was an intense work, with powerful performances by Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel, that the Cannes jury in the year were so impressed that Haneke managed to actually reverse their award rules where it was decided that film entries at the festival couldn't win more than one main award (the two lead actors won awards and Haneke got the Grand Prize of the Jury, just lost the Palme d'Or). With The White Ribbon (2009), an enigmatic black-and-white masterpiece following the inception of Nazism in this pre WWI and WWII story focusing on repressed children living in this small village where strange events happen all the time and without any possible reasoning, Haneke conquered the world and audiences with an artistic and daring work that won his first Palme d'Or a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film and received an Oscar nomination for the same category plus the cinematography work of Christian Berger.
2012 was the year that marked his supremacy in the film world with the release of the bold and beautiful Amour (2012), a love story with powerful real drama and one where Haneke removed most of his usual dark characteristics to present more quiet and calm elements without losing input in creating controversy. The touching story of George and Anne provided one the greatest moments of that year and earned Haneke his second and consecutive Palme d'Or at Cannes and his first Oscar nominations for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay - and it was one of the several nominees for Best Picture Oscar, winning as Best Foreign Language Film.
After abandoning a flash-mob film project, he returned to the screen with Happy End (2017), a film dealing with the refugee crisis in Europe and again he debuted his film at Cannes, receiving mildly positive reviews.
Besides his film work, Haneke also directs theatre productions, from drama to opera, from Così fan tutte to Don Giovanni.Funny Games (1997), The Piano Player, Hidden, Code Unknown, The White Ribbon, Amour, Benny's Video, The Seventh Continent, Happy End, Funny Games (2007), Le temps du loupA filmmaker can reach that also in the description of psychological processes. By showing or just not showing certain situations you can make a film unbearable for the audience. If you reach this, your film will be more than just consumed. I don't want to say that I do not enjoy to consume good entertainment. But I really think that it depends on your topic whether the film should be consumable or not. And if you want to talk about a problematic topic, the film itself should do justice to that.
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The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and then director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own "montage of attractions"--a sequence of pictures whose total emotion effect is greater than the sum of its parts. He later theorized that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphor in what he called "intellectual montage" sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor--Victorian theatre-- to create abstract concepts with concrete images.- Director
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Lev Kuleshov was a Russian director who used the editing technique known as the "Kuleshov effect." Although some of the editing innovations, such as crosscutting were used by other directors before him, Kuleshov was the first to use it in the Soviet Russia. he was driving a Ford sports car amidst hard situation in the post-Civil war USSR, and remained a controversial figure who joined the Soviet communist party and destroyed archives of rare silent movies during his experiments, thus clearing way for his own works: documentaries and feature films ranging from political cinema to timeless gems.
He was born Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov on 1 January, 1899, in Tambov, Russia. His father, Vladimir Kuleshov, belonged to Russian landed gentry, was a patron of arts and owner of a private estate in Central Russia. His mother, Pelagea Shubina, was a teacher before she married his father. His parents understood his weaknesses (poor speaking ability and bouts of depression) and strengths (a sharp eye, persistence and determination). His forte was the ability to see what for others remained unseen. Young Kuleshov received exclusive private education at the home of his father who had a degree from Moscow Art College. After the death of his father, 15-year-old Kuleshov and his mother moved to Moscow. There he studied art and history at the prestigious Stroganov School, then continued his studies at Moscow School of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture focusing on oil painting.
In 1916 he started his film career as a set designer at the Moscow film studio of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov and occasionally acted in some of its productions. He played a young lover opposite Emma Bauer, a stunning beauty, whom he truly fell in love with even before the filming started. That was the silent film Za schastem (1917). Watching himself on the silver screen, young Kuleshov was disappointed with the comic effect of his acting conflicting with naturalism of his true feelings. He decided to focus on directing and developing the style of his own. His new friend, experienced film-maker Akhramovich-Ashmarin, introduced him to American school of film-making, which also influenced his work.
With the help from Khanzhonkov's leading cinematographer, Yevgeny Bauer, Kuleshov made his first experimental works in editing. In 1917, he made his first publication in 'Vestnik Kinematografii': in three consecutive articles Kuleshov trashed the "salon" traditions of his employer by writing about an artist's role in converting film industry into a new form of art. His directorial career began under the patronage of Bauer, with whom Kuleshov worked as art director on such films, as Nabat (1917) and Za schastem (1917), and completed the latter as director after the original director Bauer died. In 1918, Kuleshov made his directorial debut with 'Project of Engineer Prite', and the film brought him attention of film studio executives who gave the 19-year-old beginner a chance to participate in documenting the early history of the Civil War-era Russia.
Following the Russian revolution of 1917, Kuleshov joined the Bolsheviks and sided with the Red Army in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1919, which was a continuation of the First World War. He covered the war on the Eastern front with a documentary crew. After the end of the Civil War, the Communist Party solidified control of the country, thus helping Kuleshov's career. His friend, Vladimir Gardin, appointed him instructor at the Moscow Film School. There he made a career as director and teacher. In 1920, he directed a war film Na krasnom fronte (1920), a government sponsored film about the Red Army. For some time Kuleshov continued wearing the Red Army uniform, to show his loyalty to the new government.
He studied the techniques of Hollywood directors, particularly D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and introduced such innovations as crosscutting in editing and montage into Russian cinema. For his experiments Kuleshov was cutting old silent films from the archives of Khanzhonkov, Bauer and other private studios nationalized by the socialist govenment. Kuleshov used the archives of old silent movies for his own cutting experiments and thus most of the film archives was destroyed. Kuleshov remained quiet about this part of his career when he experimented with editing technique. He focused on putting two shots together to achieve a new meaning.
The "Kuleshov effect" is using the Pavlovian physiology to manipulate the impression made by an image and thus to spin the viewer's perception of that image. To demonstrate such manipulation, Kuleshov took a shot of popular Russian actor Ivan Mozzhukhin's expressionless face from an early silent film. He then edited the face together with three different endings: a plate of soup, a seductive woman, a dead child in a coffin. The audiences believed that Ivan Mozzhukhin acted differently looking at the food, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire, or grief respectively. Actually the face of Ivan Mozzhukhin in all three cases was one and the same shot repeated over and over again. Viewers own emotional reactions become involved in manipulation. Images spin those who are prone to be spun. Although editing and montage have already been used in art, architecture, fashion, politics, book publishing, theatrical productions and religious events (just look at placement of icons in churches, or photos in books, or pictures at exhibitions), the use of such editing in silent films was innovative and eventually led to more advanced visual effects.
Vsevolod Pudovkin, who claimed to have been the co-creator of Kuleshov's experiment, later described how the audience "raved about the acting... the heavy pensiveness of Ivan Mozzhukhin's mood over the soup, the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same." Kuleshov demonstrated the effect of editing that was successfully used in montage of such films, as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Konets Sankt-Peterburga (1927) among other Soviet films. Kuleshov's good education, as well as his connections among Russian intellectual elite also helped his career.
At that time, Kuleshov and a group of his students, among them actress Aleksandra Khokhlova, collaborated on several movies that are now generally regarded as seminal films in Russian cinema. Among them are The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), a satire on clash of civilizations showing naive American Christian pastor who comes to Russia just to be robbed twice, but then helped by exemplary Soviet policeman. In 1926 he produced his most popular film, By the Law (1926), based on a Jack London story. The movie was successful in Russia and especially in Europe. In 1933, he directed The Great Consoler (1933), based on biography of American writer O. Henry. The film was highly praised by Osip Brik and Lilya Brik. It was an interesting advancement in Kuleshov's experimental style.
In 1936, he received his Ph.D and became professor of directing and Moscow Film School. In 1941, Kuleshov's book 'Osnovy kinorezhissury' (aka... Fundamentals of Film Direction) was published in Moscow. Kuleshov was promoted to high position within the Soviet film industry and was designated Doctor of Science for the book, which was translated in several languages and became regarded among filmmakers worldwide.
During WWII, Kuleshov made two films. One, made in collaboration with writer Arkadiy Gaydar, was Klyatva Timura (1942). To complete the film, Kuleshov with his film crew was moved on Soviet government expense from cold Moscow to warm Stalinabad, the capital of Turkmenistan. There, in 1943, together with his wife, Aleksandra Khokhlova, he directed his last movie, We from the Urals (1944), a film about young Soviet boys making heroic efforts in the Eastern Front of WWII. After that, he returned from Central Asia back to Moscow. The Soviet capital was recovering after attacks of Nazi armies. For his contribution to art, and also for his dedication to communist ideas, a prestigious position as Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) where he worked for the next 25 years. Over the course of his career, his students were hundreds of Soviet filmmakers, such as directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet, Mikhail Kalatozov and many others. His most trusted and devoted friend was Sergei Eisenstein.
Kuleshov visited Paris and presented a retrospective of his films in 1962. There he enjoyed much attention from international media. His friends in the Western world included many celebrities, such as Yves Montand, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet among others. Kuleshov was member of the Jury at 1966 Venice Film Festival and attended other film festivals as a special guest. He made several exclusive trips outside of the Soviet Union.Kuleshov was a friend of the State security chief, KGB General V.N. Merkulov.
Kuleshov was awarded Order of Lenin, Order of Red Banner, was designated People's Artist of Russia (1969), and received other decorations and perks from the Soviet government.
Outside of his film career, Lev Kuleshov was fond of hunting, he owned a collection of exclusive hunting guns and often used them to kill game outside of Moscow and in Southern Russia. He also spent much time at Mediterranean resort near Yalta in Crimea and often made hunting trips in that area. Kuleshov was married to his student Aleksandra Khokhlova, and lived with his wife in a prestigious block on Lenin Prospect in central Moscow. There he died in 1970, and was laid to rest in Moscow's most prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery. Kuleshov's funeral took place while the Soviet Union was celebrating the centennial anniversary of the former leader Vladimir Lenin.- Editor
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Esfir Shub was born into a family of landowners. She studied literature in Moscow, but after Revolution she began to attend the classes at the Institute for Women's Higher Education and then got a job as a 'theater officer' at the State Commissariat of Education. In the theatre she worked in collaboration with the famous avant-garde director Meyerhold and the poet Mayakovsky, who was one of her friends.
Shub joined the Goskino film company and met Dziga Vertov. Their professional friendship was lifelong, but stormy. Shub shared his belief in film's intrinsic ability to reveal aspects of reality not visible to the naked eye, but she became engaged more in the interpretation of the historical world than in only contemporary matters.
First Shub worked as a re-editor of foreign films for Soviet distribution. In 1927 (the tenth anniversary of Revolution) she made her first documentary film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). This film was the first part of the trilogy, which also consists of The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928). In the process of making the trilogy, Shub had to contend with not only an overwhelming volume of material but also the problem of locating relevant footage. She often found that valuable documents of the pre-war period had been sold abroad or had been badly damaged in ill-equipped newsreel archives. Shub compensated the lack of material by using newly shot footage. Her films derive much of their power from this technique of providing a contemporary context for archival footage. Thus, Shub created the absolutely new genre 'historical compilation film'. She later claimed she just wanted to create 'editorialized newsreels'.
The critics and colleagues admired Shub's work, because she found a middle path between narrative and documentary forms. Sovkino denied her authorial rights for her trilogy claiming that she was just an editor. However, in 1935 Shub was awarded the title Honored Artist of the Republic.
In the beginning of the forties she collaborated with Vsevolod Pudovkin on the successful Twenty Years of Soviet Cinema (1940). Then she left Goskino to become chief editor of the 'News of the Day' at the central studio for documentary film in Moscow. Most of her later years were confined to editing duties. Shub was definitely the most prominent Soviet woman filmmaker of her generation.- Director
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Vsevolod Pudovkin was born on 28 February 1893 in Penza, Russian Empire [now Russia]. He was a director and actor, known for Admiral Nakhimov (1947), Zhukovsky (1950) and Minin i Pozharskiy (1939). He was married to Anna Zemtsova. He died on 30 June 1953 in Jurmala, Latvian SSR, USSR [now Latvia].- Director
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Alex Proyas has moved effortlessly between helming TV commercials and music videos to feature films. Born to Greek parents in Egypt, Proyas relocated to Australia with his family when he was three years old. He began making films at age ten and went on to attend the Australian Film Television and Radio School along with Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse. Proyas collaborated with Campion on two of her shorts, A Girl's Own Story (1984), for which he wrote and performed a song, and Passionless Moments (1983), which he photographed. Proyas' own short, Groping (1980), had earned him some attention at festival screenings in Sydney and London. Also while still a student, the enterprising novice formed Meaningful Eye Contact, a production company. Spirits of the Air: Gremlins of the Clouds (1987) marked Proyas' feature debut as director and screenwriter. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the film, with its stylized production design and aural texture, was atypical of standard Australian fare, more closely resembling a longform music video. Critics admired the director's vision, but felt the overall result was lacking. Proyas continued to hone his craft helming TV advertisements for products like Nike, Nissan and Swatch (earning kudos from advertising associations in both Australia and England) and directing videos for such artists as Sting, INXS and Crowded House. In 1993 Proyas was tapped to helm the screen adaptation of James O'Barr's comic strip The Crow (1994). During production, star Brandon Lee died of an accidental gunshot wound (ironically, the film's story revolves around his character's resurrection). His death cast a pall over the remainder of the filming and its subsequent theatrical release, although reviews were generally favorably, most singling out the production values which created a colorless rain-soaked wasteland that invoked comparisons with Ridley Scott's seminal Blade Runner (1982) and Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Made for about $14 million, it grossed close to $50 million domestically. Proyas seemed set to move on to other projects and was announced as the director of Casper (1995), but left the project and was replaced by Brad Silberling. After a four-year absence he returned with another thriller, Dark City (1998), about an amnesiac who may or may not have been a serial killer. Garage Days (2002) marked Proyas' return to his homeland, Australia: the movie tells the story of a young Sydney garage band desperately trying to make it big in the competitive world of rock 'n' roll. In 2004 Proyas returned to Hollywood: he directed I, Robot (2004), a science-fiction film suggested by the 'Isaac Asimov' short story compilation of the same name that starred Will Smith. It was a box office success, but met with mixed reactions by readers and fans of the Asimov stories.- Director
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He, along with the other members of the "Compass Players" including Elaine May, Paul Sills, Byrne Piven, Joyce Hiller Piven and Edward Asner helped start the famed "Second City Improv" company. They used the games taught to them by fellow cast mate, Paul Sills 's mother, Viola Spolin. He later worked in legitimate theater as an actor before entering into a very successful comedy duo with Elaine May. The two were known as "the world's fastest humans".- Writer
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Carlos Cuarón was born on 2 October 1966 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He is a writer and director, known for And Your Mother Too (2001), Rudo y Cursi (2008) and Sugar Kisses (2013).- Producer
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Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.
Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years.- Director
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Dziga Vertov was born on 2 January 1896 in Bialystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Podlaskie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and The Sixth Part of the World (1926). He was married to Elizaveta Svilova. He died on 12 February 1954 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia].- Director
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Wong Kar-wai (born 17 July 1956) is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised, emotionally resonant work, including Ah fei zing zyun (1990), Dung che sai duk (1994), Chung Hing sam lam (1994), Do lok tin si (1995), Chun gwong cha sit (1997), 2046 (2004) and My Blueberry Nights (2007), Yi dai zong shi (2013). His film Fa yeung nin wa (2000), starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Wong's films frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as sketchy, digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery. Wong was the first Chinese director to win the Best Director Award of Cannes Film Festival (for his work Chun gwong cha sit in 1997). Wong was the President of the Jury at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, which makes him the only Chinese person to preside over the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was also the President of the Jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2013. In 2006, Wong accepted the National Order of the Legion of Honour: Knight (Highest Degree) from the French Government. In 2013, Wong accepted Order of Arts and Letters: Commander (Highest Degree) by the French Minister of Culture.- Producer
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After studying drama in the arts institute, Jean Pierre Dardenne and his brother Luc made some videos about the rough life in blue-collar small towns in the Wallonie. After their meeting with filmmaker Armad Gatti and cinematographer Ned Burgess, they decided to enter in the movie business.
In 1978 they shot their first documentary, Le chant du rossignol, about the resistance against the Nazis during the second world war in Belgium. In 1986 they shot their first fiction movie, Falsch, about a Jewish family massacred by the Nazis. After their second movie, Je pense a vous, they released La Promesse, a movie about inmigration in Belgium. The film was a success worldwide winning awards in many festivals.
In 1999 they had another hit with Rosetta, that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival. The movie tells the story of a blue collar worker with an alcoholic mother who tries to have a better life in a small belgium city.
In 2002, they came back to Cannes with their last movie, Le Fils, that won the ecumenical jury prize and the award for best actor for Olivier Gourmet.- Producer
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Luc Dardenne was born on 10 March 1954 in Awirs, Wallonia, Belgium. He is a producer and director, known for Two Days, One Night (2014), The Kid with a Bike (2011) and The Child (2005).- Director
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Yimou Zhang was born on 14 November 1951 in Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. He is a director and writer, known for Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). He has been married to Ting Chen since December 2011. They have three children. He was previously married to Hua Xiao and Hua Xie.- Writer
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Hideaki Anno was born on 22 May 1960 in Ube, Japan. He is a writer and director, known for Shin Godzilla (2016), Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (2007) and The Wind Rises (2013). He has been married to Moyoco Anno since 26 March 2002.Evangelion, End of Evangelion- Director
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Maroun Bagdadi was born on 21 January 1950 in Beirut, Lebanon. He was a director and writer, known for Out of Life (1991), L'homme voilé (1987) and Little Wars (1982). He died on 10 December 1993 in Beirut, Lebanon.Out of Life- Actress
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Nadine Labaki was born on 18 February 1974 in Beirut, Lebanon. She is an actress and director, known for Where Do We Go Now? (2011), Capernaum (2018) and Caramel (2007). She has been married to Khaled Mouzanar since October 2007.Capharnaum- Director
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Moved to New York City at the age of seventeen from Akron, Ohio. Graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in English, class of '75. Without any prior film experience, he was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts, New York.- Camera and Electrical Department
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When he made his directorial debut in 1970, Nicolas Roeg was already a 23-year veteran of the British film industry, starting out in 1947 as an editing apprentice and working his way up to cinematographer twelve years later. He first came to attention as part of the second unit on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), with Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964) two years later containing his first really distinctive solo work. He went on to photograph films for such distinguished directors as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)), John Schlesinger (Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)) and Richard Lester (Petulia (1968)) before his sensational directorial debut in 1968. Co-directed with writer (and painter) Donald Cammell, Performance (1970) was intended to be a simple-minded star vehicle for Mick Jagger and Warner Bros were so horrified when they saw the final multi-layered kaleidoscope of sex, violence, and questions of identity that they delayed its release for two years. Roeg went to Australia for his solo debut as director (Walkabout (1971)), which was also his last film as cinematographer, and throughout the next decade he produced a world-class body of work (Don't Look Now (1973); The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976); Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980)) that revealed his uniquely off-kilter view of the world, expressed through fragmented, dislocated images and a highly original yet strangely accessible approach to narrative. He married the star of Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), the elegant Theresa Russell who would play the female lead in nearly all his subsequent films, though these have generally found less favor with critics and audiences, and the release of both Eureka (1983) and Cold Heaven (1991) was severely restricted due to problems with the films' distributors.- Director
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Kenneth Anger grew up in Hollywood and started out as a child actor, but his interest in filmmaking was evident at an early age: he made his first film, Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941) , at age 14.
Anger developed into one of the pioneers of the American underground film movement. His gritty, violent, often homosexual-themed films were too strong for American audiences of the time, and many of his productions were filmed in Europe, mainly France.
However, Anger is best known for authoring the landmark "Hollywood Babylon" book series, which detailed a far seamier side of the Hollywood film industry than most people were aware.- Cinematographer
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Italian director Mario Bava was born on July 31, 1914 in the coastal northern Italian town of Sanremo. His father, Eugenio Bava (1886-1966), was a cinematographer in the early days of the Italian film industry. Bava was trained as a painter, and when he eventually followed his father into film photography his artistic background led him to a strong belief in the importance of visual composition in filmmaking.
Other than a series of short films in the 1940s which he directed, Bava was a cinematographer until 1960. He developed a reputation as a special effects genius, and was able to use optical trickery to great success. Among the directors for whom Bava photographed films were Paolo Heusch, Riccardo Freda, Jacques Tourneur and Raoul Walsh. While working with Freda on Lust of the Vampire (1957) in 1956, the director left the project after an argument with the producers and the film mostly unfinished. Bava stepped in and directed the majority of the movie, finishing it on schedule. This film, also known as "The Devil's Commandment", inspired a wave of gothic Italian horror films. After a similar incident occurred on Freda's Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), and Bava's having been credited with "saving" Tourneur's The Giant of Marathon (1959), Galatea urged Bava to direct any film he wanted with their financing.
The film that emerged, Black Sunday (1960), is one his most well known as well as one of his best. This widely influential movie also started the horror career of a beautiful but then unknown British actress named Barbara Steele. While Black Sunday is a black and white film, it was in the color milieu that the director excelled. The projects which followed began to develop stunning photography, making great use of lighting, set design, and camera positioning to compliment mise-en-scenes bathed in deep primaries. Through works such as Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), The Whip and the Body (1963), and Planet of the Vampires (1965), Bava's films took on the look of works of art. In the films The Evil Eye (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964), he created the style and substance of the giallo, a genre which would be perfected in the later films of Dario Argento.
Bava worked in many popular genres, including viking films, peplum, spaghetti westerns, action, and even softcore, but it is his horror films and giallo mystery films which stand out and for which he is best remembered. Recommended are Black Sunday (1960), The Whip and the Body (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966), A Bay of Blood (1971), and Lisa and the Devil (1973). Bava's son Lamberto served as his assistant on most of his films since 1965, and since 1980 has been a director himself. Lamberto Bava's films include Macabre (1980), Demons (1985) and Body Puzzle (1992).
But after the commercial failure of his later films, as well as the unreleased works of Rabid Dogs (1974), Bava went into a decline and by 1975, retired from filmmaking all together. He was persuaded to come out of retirement at the request of his son, Lamberto, to direct Shock, as well as a made-for-Italian television movie. Mario Bava died from a sudden heart attack on April 27, 1980 at age 65. With his death, an era in Italian filmmaking had come to a close.- Producer
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Syrian-American Moustapha Akkad produced a series of "Halloween" movies but it was The Lion of the Desert (1980) and The Message (1976), on the history of Islam, into which he poured his heart. It was reportedly difficult for him to make it in Hollywood but no one could deny his talent as a director and producer. He was killed along with his daughter, Rima Al Akkad Monla, in a bombing in 2005 in Amman, Jordan.- Director
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Youssef Chahine (born in Alexandria, Egypt, 1926) started studying in a friars' school, and then turned to Victoria College until the High School Certificate. After one year in the University of Alexandria, he moved to the U.S. and spent two years at the Pasadena Play House, taking courses on film and dramatic arts. After coming back to Egypt, cinematographer Alevise Orfanelli helped him into the film business. His film debut was Baba Amin (1950): one year later, with Son of the Nile (1951) he was first invited to the Cannes Film festival. In 1970, he was awarded a Golden Tanit at the Carthage Festival. With Le moineau (1973), he directed the first Egypt-Algeria co-production. He won a Silver Bear in Berlin for Alexandria... Why? (1979), the first installment in what proved to be an autobiographic trilogy, completed with Hadduta Masriya (1982)(An Egyptian Story (1982)) and Alexandria: Again and Forever (1989).
In 1992, Jacques Lassalle proposed him to stage a piece of his choice for Comédie Française: Chahine chose to adapt Albert Camus' "Caligula," which proved hugely successful. The same year he started writing Al-mohager (1994), a story inspired by the Biblical character of Joseph, son of Jacob. This had long been a dream-project, and he finally got to shoot it in 1994. In 1997, 46 years and 5 invitations later, he was again selected Hors Competition in Cannes with Destiny (1997).- Writer
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A bright child, John Sayles began reading novels before age 9. A Williams College grad in 1972, he shunned a corporate career to work various blue-collar jobs, moving to east Boston to take a factory job. He wrote stories and submitted them to various magazines, and the Atlantic Monthly gave him the idea of publishing them in a novel--thus "Pride of the Bimbos" (1975) was born.
In the late 1970s he worked for renowned low-budget producer Roger Corman as a screenwriter. He saved much of the money he earned from that job, got some friends together and made Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) in 25 days. Altough it was a hit, he had trouble obtaining financing for the films he wanted to make because he would not give up his right of final cut. Baby It's You (1983) was Sayles' only film made under studio control.
In 1983 the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship granted him a tax-free income of $32,000 a year for 5 years. That stipend and money he earned for writing such films as The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) and Breaking In (1989) enabled him to make the kinds of films he wanted to make. Lone Star (1996) placed Sayles in the ranks of top American filmmakers. In it and his other films, a broadly appealing social consciousness emerges, showing Sayles to be concerned with what's going on with regional cultures, national values and what living in the US is like today.
Sayles and Maggie Renzi, whom he met during college, have lived together since the 1970s, splitting their time between a Hoboken, NJ, house and a farm in upstate New York. They have no plans to marry.- Director
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Arthur Hiller was born on 22 November 1923 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was a director and producer, known for Love Story (1970), The Hospital (1971) and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). He was married to Gwen Hiller. He died on 17 August 2016 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Need to add to the scorpio directors poll- Director
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David Yates was born on 8 October 1963 in St. Helens, Merseyside, England, UK. He is a director and producer, known for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), The Legend of Tarzan (2016) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011).Need to add to the libra directors poll- Director
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Jean-Marie Straub was born on 8 January 1933 in Metz, Moselle, Lorraine, France. He was a director and editor, known for The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Sicily! (1999) and Class Relations (1984). He was married to Danièle Huillet. He died on 20 November 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland.- Director
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Born in the Bronx, Ferrara started making amateur films on Super 8 in his teens before making his debut with violent exploitation films such as 'Driller Killer' and 'Ms.45'. Good reviews for the latter helped create his cult reputation, leading to larger budgets, studio funding and 'name' actors (Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel), but he still likes taking his camera out onto the meanest streets of New York, as the ultra-cheap, highly controversial 'Bad Lieutenant' demonstrates.- Writer
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Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.- Director
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Admirers have always had difficulty explaining Éric Rohmer's "Je ne sais quoi." Part of the challenge stems from the fact that, despite his place in French Nouvelle Vague (i.e., New Wave), his work is unlike that of his colleagues. While this may be due to the auteur's unwillingness to conform, some have argued convincingly that, in truth, he has remained more faithful to the original ideals of the movement than have his peers. Additionally, plot is not his foremost concern. It is the thoughts and emotions of his characters that are essential to Rohmer, and, just as one's own states of being are hard to define, so is the internal life of his art. Thus, rather than speaking of it in specific terms, fans often use such modifiers as "subtle," "witty," "delicious" and "enigmatic." In an interview with Dennis Hopper, Quentin Tarantino echoed what nearly every aficionado has uttered: "You have to see one of [his movies], and if you kind of like that one, then you should see his other ones, but you need to see one to see if you like it."
Detractors have no problem in expressing their displeasure. They use such phrases as "tedious like a classroom play," "arty and tiresome" and "donnishly talky." Gene Hackman, as jaded detective Harry Moseby in Night Moves (1975), delivered a now famous line that sums up these feelings: "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Undeniably, his excruciatingly slow pace and apathetic, self-absorbed characters are hallmarks, and, at times, even his greatest supporters have made trenchant remarks in this regard. Said critic Pauline Kael, "Seriocomic triviality has become Rohmer's specialty. His sensibility would be easier to take if he'd stop directing to a metronome." In that his proponents will quote attacks on him, indeed Rohmer may be alone among directors. They revel in the fact that "nothing of consequence" happens in his pictures. They are mesmerized by the dense blocks of high-brow chatter. They delight in the predictability of his aesthetic. Above all, however, they are touched by the honesty of a man who, uncompromisingly, lays bear the human soul and "life as such."
Who is Eric Rohmer? Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer on December 1, 1920 in Nancy, a small city in Lorraine, he relocated to Paris and became a literature teacher and newspaper reporter. In 1946, under the pen name Gilbert Cordier, he published his only novel, "Elizabeth". Soon after, his interest began to shift toward criticism, and he began frequenting Cinémathèque Français (founded by archivist Henri Langlois) along with soon-to-be New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. It was at this time that he adopted his pseudonym, an amalgam of the names of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and novelist Sax Rohmer (author of the Fu Manchu series.) His first film, Journal d'un scélérat (1950), was shot the same year that he founded "Gazette du Cinema" along with Godard and Rivette. The next year, Rohmer joined seminal critic André Bazin at "Cahiers du Cinema", where he served as editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1963. As Cahiers was an influential publication, it not only gave him a platform from which to preach New Wave philosophy, but it enabled him to propose revisionist ideas on Hollywood. An example of the latter was "Hitchcock, The First Forty-Four Films", a book on which he collaborated with Chabrol that spoke of Alfred Hitchcock in highly favorable terms.
Rohmer's early forays into direction met with limited success. By 1958, he had completed five shorts, but his sole attempt at feature length, a version of La Comtesse de Ségur's "Les Petites filles modèles", was left unfinished. With Sign of the Lion (1962), he made his feature debut, although it was a decade before he achieved recognition. In the interim, he turned out eleven projects, including three of his "Six contes moraux" (i.e., moral tales), films devoted to examining the inner states of people in the throes of temptation. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963) and Suzanne's Career (1963) are unremarkable black-and-white pictures that best function as blueprints for his later output. They also mark the beginning of a business partnership with Barbet Schroeder, who starred in the former of the two. The Collector (1967), his first major effort in color, has been mistaken for a Lolita movie; on a deeper plane, it questions the manner in which one collects or rejects experience. Rohmer's first "hit" was My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for two Oscars and won several international awards. It continues to be his best-known work. In it, on the eve of a proclaiming his love to Francoise, his future wife, the narrator spends a night with a pretty divorcée named Maud. Along with a friend, the two have a discussion on life, religion and Pascal's wager (i.e., the necessity of risking all on the only bet that can win.) Left alone with the sensual Maud, the narrator is forced to test his principles. The final parts in the series, Claire's Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972) are mid-life crisis tales that cleverly reiterate the notion of self-restraint as the path to salvation.
"Comedies et Proverbs," Rohmer's second cycle, deals with deception. The Aviator's Wife (1981) is the story a naïve student who suspects his girlfriend of infidelity. In stalking her ex-lover and ultimately confronting her, we discover the levels on which he is deceiving himself. Another masterpiece is Pauline at the Beach (1983), a seaside film about adolescents' coming-of-age and the childish antics of their adult chaperones. Of the remaining installments, The Green Ray (1986) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) are the most appealing. The director's last series is known as "Contes des quatre saisons" (i.e., Tales of the Four Seasons), which too presents the dysfunctional relationships of eccentrics. In place of the social games of "Comedies et Proverbs", though, this cycle explores the lives of the emotionally isolated. A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992) are the more inventive pieces, the latter revisiting Ma Nuit chez Maud's "wager." Just as his oeuvre retraces itself thematically, Rohmer populates it with actors who appear and reappear in unusual ways. The final tale, Autumn Tale (1998), brings together his favorite actresses, Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand. Like "hiver," it hearkens back to a prior project, A Good Marriage (1982), in examining Romand's quest to find a husband.
Since 1976, Rohmer has made various non-serial releases. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) and Rendez-vous in Paris (1995), both composed of vignettes, are tongue-in-cheek morality plays that merit little attention. The lush costume drama The Marquise of O (1976), in contrast, is an excellent study of the absurd formalities of 18th century aristocracy and was recognized with the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. His other period pieces, regrettably, have not been as successful. Perceval le Gallois (1978), while original, is a failed experiment in stagy Arthurian storytelling, and the beautifully dull The Lady and the Duke (2001) is equally unsatisfying for most fans of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, the director has demonstrated incredible consistency, and that he was able to deliver a picture of this caliber so late in his career is astounding. The legacy that this man has bestowed upon us rivals that of any auteur, with arguably as many as ten tours de force over the last four decades. Why, then, is he the least honored among the ranks of the Nouvelle Vague and among all cinematic geniuses?
Stories of Rohmer's idiosyncrasies abound. An ardent environmentalist, he has never driven a car and refuses to ride in taxis. There is no telephone in his home. He delayed the production of Ma Nuit chez Maud for a year, insisting that certain scenes could only be shot on Christmas night. Once, he requested a musical score that could be played at levels inaudible to viewers. He refers to himself as "commercial," yet his movies turn slim profits playing the art house circuit. Normally, these are kinds of anecdotes that would endear a one with the cognoscenti. His most revealing quirk, however, is that he declines interviews and shuns the spotlight. Where Hitchcock, for instance, was always ready to talk shop, Rohmer has let his films speak for themselves. He is not worried about WHAT people think of them but THAT, indeed, they think.
It would be dangerous to supplant the aforementioned "je ne sais quoi" with words. Without demystifying Rohmer's cinema, still there are broad qualities to which one may point. First, it is marked by philosophical and artistic integrity. Long before Krzysztof Kieslowski, Rohmer came up with the concept of the film cycle, and this has permitted him to build on his own work in a unique manner. A devout Catholic, he is interested in the resisting of temptation, and what does not occur in his pieces is just as intriguing as what occurs. Apropos to the mention of his spirituality is his fascination with the interplay between destiny and free will. Some choice is always central to his stories. Yet, while his narrative is devoid of conventionally dramatic events, he shows a fondness for coincidence bordering on the supernatural. In order to maintain verisimilitude, then, he employs more "long shots" and a simpler, more natural editing process than his contemporaries. He makes infrequent use of music and foley, focusing instead on the sounds of voices. Of these voices, where his narrators are male (and it is ostensibly their subjective experience to which we are privy), his women are more intelligent and complex than his men. Finally, albeit deeply contemplative, Rohmer's work is rarely conclusive. Refreshingly un-Hollywood, rather than providing an escape from reality, it compels us to face the world in which we live.16mm de fiction. (format aussi utilisé par les frères Dardenne)- Writer
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Abdellatif Kechiche was born on 7 December 1960 in Tunis, Tunisia. He is a writer and director, known for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), Games of Love and Chance (2003) and Poetical Refugee (2000).- Writer
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Bruno Dumont was born on 14 March 1958 in Bailleul, Nord, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France. He is a writer and director, known for Li'l Quinquin (2014), The Life of Jesus (1997) and Camille Claudel 1915 (2013).- Director
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Tetsuya Nakashima was born on 2 September 1959 in Fukuoka, Japan. He is a director and writer, known for Confessions (2010), Kiraware Matsuko no isshô (2006) and Kamikaze Girls (2004).- Writer
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The name "Melville" is not immediately associated with film. It conjures up images of white whales and crackbrained captains, of naysaying notaries and soup-spilling sailors. It is the countersign to a realm of men and their deeds, both heroic and villainous. It is the American novel, with its Ishmaels and its Claggarts a challenge to the European canon. It is Herman Melville. And yet, for over three decades, it was also worn by one of the French cinema's brightest lights, Jean-Pierre Melville, whose art was as revolutionary as that of the eponymous author.
Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born on October 20, 1917, to a family of Alsatian Jews. In his youth he studied in Paris, where he was first exposed to great films, among them Robert J. Flaherty's and W.S. Van Dyke's silent documentary White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). It left so deep a mark upon the pubescent Grumbach that he became a regular at the cinema, an obsession that would benefit him in adulthood. His own earliest efforts, 16mm home movies, were made with a camera given to him by his father in this period. In 1937, however, his career was forestalled when he began obligatory service in the French army. He was still in uniform when the Nazis invaded in 1940; under the nom de guerre of Melville, he aided the Resistance and was eventually forced to flee to England. There he joined the Free French forces and took part in the Allies' liberation of continental Europe. After the war, despite a desire to revert to Grumbach, he found that pseudonym had stuck.
Eager to earn his place in the movie industry, Melville applied to the French Technicians' Union but was denied membership. Undaunted by what he regarded as party politics, he set up his own production company in 1946 and started releasing films outside the system. The first, a low-budget short titled 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (1946), was a success, inspired by his boyhood love for the circus. His feature-length debut, The Silence of the Sea (1949), was highly innovative. An intimate piece on the horrors of World War II, it starred unknown actors and was filmed by a skeleton crew. Its schedule was unusual: It was shot over 27 days in the course of a year. Its production was unusual: it incorporated "on-location" scenes--rarities in that era--done without vital permits. Its provenance was unusual: it was adapted from a book before the author's consent was obtained. Above all, its style was unusual. Its dark, claustrophobic sets and bottom-lit close-ups signaled a departure from the highly cultured cinema of René Clair, Marcel Pagnol, Abel Gance and Jacques Feyder. It was neither comedietta nor costume drama nor avant-garde "cinéma pur." Where its roots may have been in Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937), it was clearly something new.
Over the following 12 years Melville continued to create films that would influence the auteurs of La Nouvelle Vague (i.e., the French New Wave.) In 1950 he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on an unsatisfying version of The Terrible Children (1950), the tale of a strange, incestuous relationship between siblings. When You Read This Letter (1953), with French and Italian backing, was his first commercial project. While it was unprofitable, the fee he received allowed him to establish a studio outside of Paris. His next work, Bob the Gambler (1956), featured Roger Duchesne, a popular leading man of the 1930s who had drifted into the underworld during the war. As such, he was a uniquely apt choice for the role of the fashionable, self-immolating Bob. His supporting cast included Daniel Cauchy as toadying sidekick Paolo and newcomer Isabelle Corey as the temptress Anne. Although the picture was not a hit, it was a favorite of the aficionados that frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Français. Among them were the young savants Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the latter of whom used Guy Decomble of "Bob le flambeur" in his The 400 Blows (1959) that ushered in the "New Wave" era. They adored the hip, new rendering of a tired scenario, much of it shot in the streets with hidden cameras. They viewed it as fresh and daring, a "freeing up" through the rejection of high-minded literary adaptations and the embracing of pop culture. Simply put, Melville refused to play by the rules, and they followed suit.
In retrospect, "Bob le flambeur" seems straightforward: A reformed mobster turned high-stakes gambler comes out of retirement to pull one last job. Its genius lies in its simplicity. Melville admired American culture, as his alias indicated. He drove around Paris in an enormous Cadillac, sporting a Stetson hat and aviator sunglasses. He drank Coca-Cola and listened to American radio. The works of American directors John Ford and Howard Hawks were appealing to him, as they were ageless sagas of heroes and villains. Melville strove to build his own pantheon by blending the American ethos with his postwar sensibilities. As he perceived it, it was America that had valiantly rescued France from German occupation. Still, for a young man with Alsatian roots, the line separating good guys and bad guys had been breached, and one can see this disillusionment from The Silence of the Sea (1949) onward. Thus, while he borrowed from the American noir's revolt against the dichotomous Hollywood creations of the 1930s, the artist was forging his own apocryphal brand of dark tragedy. In his paradigm, a criminal could be a kind of hero within his milieu, so long as he stuck by his word and his allegiances. It was his personal style and his adherence to the code of honor that defined a "good guy"; obversely, it was his faith in others that was his downfall. It is a universe without the possibility for salvation, in which love and friendship are brief interludes in the cat-and-mouse games that lead to certain destruction. In that sense, Bob is a crucial link between Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Godard's Breathless (1960), in which Melville gave a brilliant cameo performance.
Jean-Pierre Melville is often regarded as the godfather of the Nouvelle Vague. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that had it not been for his aforementioned passion for American film, he might have shown us a very different "Bob le flambeur". Originally conceived as a hard-boiled gangster flick about the step-by-step plotting of a heist, Melville was forced to rethink its narrative after watching John Huston's remarkably similar The Asphalt Jungle (1950). It was only then that he had the idea to turn Bob into the comedy of manners that so delighted the cinephiles of the day. For this and other debts of gratitude, his next picture, Two Men in Manhattan (1959), was "a love letter to New York" and the America he revered. It was also his third straight box-office flop, however, and it caused Melville to break away from a New Wave movement that he felt catered to the cognoscenti. He later said, "If . . . I have consented to pass for their adopted father for a while, I do not wish it anymore, and I have put some distance in between us."
The first step in this split came with Léon Morin, Priest (1961), a wartime piece about a priest's endeavors to bring redemption to the inhabitants of a small town. Produced by Carlo Ponti, it was a big-budget affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, both household names by then. On the strength of its favorable reception, Melville released four consecutive cops-and-robbers movies, the most notable of which were The Informer (1962) and The Samurai (1967). Belmondo again headlined in "Le Doulous", not as a clergyman but as the fingerman Silien, whose loyalty to his old mob cronies entangles him in a web of intrigue and disaster. During the making of "Le Samouraï", a hauntingly minimalist film about a doomed assassin, Melville's studio burned to the ground and the project was completed in rented facilities. Regardless, it was a critical and commercial success. Presenting Alain Delon as ultra-cool assassin Jef Costello, it was considered one of the most meticulously-crafted pictures in the history of the cinema. Delon would later star in a second masterpiece, The Red Circle (1970), featuring the ultimate onscreen jewel heist. His Charles Bronson-cum-Jack Lord sang-froid toughness served as a counterpoint in Melville's oeuvre to the lighter and less predictable Belmondo. Another memorable production was Army of Shadows (1969), an austere portrait of perfidy within the ranks of the French Resistance.
It is trite to say that a particular artist is "not for everyone." In Melville's case, this statement could not be more fitting. Despite a round belly and an unattractive face, he was a notorious womanizer, and his chauvinism is painfully obvious in his movies. They are cynical, male-driven works in which women are devoid of nobility, merely functioning as beautiful chess pieces. His men also lack spiritual depth, diligently playing out their roles toward the final showdown. A "profound moment" inevitably occurs before a mirror, a cliché for which many critics do not share the creator's enthusiasm. As a result of these peccadilloes, as well as its lack of back-stories and character motivations, Melville's later output has been accused of stiffness, with its wooden troupe of cops, crooks and general mauvais sujets. Further, well-structured plots notwithstanding, Melville films are methodically paced with tremendous attention paid to time and place. Hollywoodphiles often find them slow, with an overemphasis on tone and style.
Some have gone as far as to claim that the réalizateur's genius was outstripped by his importance to the development of the medium. They look to him as a sort of Moses figure, helping to guide the Nouvelle Vague to the promised land without partaking in its fruits. At his death by heart attack in 1973, the 55-year-old had directed just 14 projects, at least six of which are acknowledged classics. Aside from Godard and Truffaut, luminaries such as John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Volker Schlöndorff, Johnnie To and Martin Scorsese have pointed to him as an key influence. If a man's legacy is best measured not only by its quality but by the respect of his colleagues, Jean-Pierre Melville's contribution to cinema surely ranks with the greatest.- Director
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Stanley Kwan was born on 9 October 1957 in Hong Kong. He is a director and producer, known for Lan Yu (2001), Hold You Tight (1998) and Rouge (1987).- Actor
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Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in Kingston, New York. He is the son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, Herma (Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian, and his mother was from a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. Peter originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.
Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.
Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.
The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film's set designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.
Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What's Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan O'Neal'. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.
Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more films, Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.
An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by some critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved's book "The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History" (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.
Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.
Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal' from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) was not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery, would make only one more film before calling it quits.
After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, then committed suicide.
They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.
Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".
Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Picture Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001's The Cat's Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles' bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series The Sopranos (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi's analyst.
Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.
Now in his early eighties, Bogdanovich has arguably imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as filmmaker who never regained the acclaim bestowed on their first major success. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.
There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Picture Show (1971) was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).
In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films.- Director
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Elem Klimov was born on 9 July 1933 in Stalingrad, Nizhne-Volzhskiy kray, RSFSR, USSR [now Volgograd, Volgogradskaya oblast, Russia]. He was a director and actor, known for Come and See (1985), Rasputin (1981) and Pokhozhdeniya zubnogo vracha (1965). He was married to Larisa Shepitko. He died on 26 October 2003 in Moscow, Russia.- Writer
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Lav Diaz was born on 30 December 1958 in Datu Paglas, Maguindanao, Mindanao, Philippines. He is a writer and director, known for The Woman Who Left (2016), Season of the Devil (2018) and From What Is Before (2014).- Writer
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Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 30. Since then he has made many movies and has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Iranian film. He is also a major figure in the arts world, and has had numerous gallery exhibitions of his photography, short films and poetry. He is an iconic figure for what he has done, and he has achieved it all by believing in the arts and the creativity of his mind.- Actor
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Born in Wels in 1961, grew up in Vienna. Started writing and directing while still in school. His first film was aired on television in 1978. In 1980 he started studying screenwriting and directing at the Vienna Film Academy. Two films completed during his studies received international prizes and were screened at the Stadtkino, an arthouse cinema in Vienna. Spielmann graduated in 1987. Soon afterwards, he wrote and directed four cinema and made-for-TV films in succession.
In 1999, after several years of silence, his next feature film Die Fremde was Austria's nomination for the Foreign Language Oscar. This was followed by 'Spiel im Morgengrauen', a made-for-TV movie, and in 2004 the feature Antares.
Antares was shown internationally at more than 30 festivals, at arthouse theaters in many countries including France, the USA, and Germany. It was nominated by Austria to compete for the Foreign Language Oscar. Its explicit sex scenes spark heated debate among Academy members.
Since 2005 Spielmann has also written and directed for the stage.
In 2006 he was awarded the Upper Austrian State Prize for Culture in the category of film. The same year he founded the production company Spielmannfilm.- Actor
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Takeshi Kitano originally studied to become an engineer, but was thrown out of school for rebellious behavior. He learned comedy, singing and dancing from famed comedian Senzaburô Fukami. Working as a lift boy on a nightclub with such features as comic sketches and striptease dancing, Kitano saw his chance when a comedian suddenly fell ill, and he went on stage in the man's place. With a friend he formed the comic duo "The Two Beat" (his artist's name, "Beat Takeshi", comes from this period), which became very popular on Japanese television.
Kitano soon embarked on an acting career, and when the director of Violent Cop (1989) (aka "Violent Cop") fell ill, he took over that function as well. Immediately after that film was finished he set out to make a second gangster movie, Boiling Point (1990). Just after finishing Getting Any? (1994), Kitano was involved in a serious motorcycle accident that almost killed him. It changed his way of life, and he became an active painter. This change can be seen in his later films, which are characterized by his giving more importance to the aesthetics of the film, such as in Fireworks (1997) and Kikujiro (1999).- Writer
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Francis Veber was born on 28 July 1937 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France. He is a writer and director, known for Le Dîner de Cons (1998), The Birdcage (1996) and Ruby & Quentin (2003). He has been married to Françoise Veber since 11 January 1964. They have two children.- Actress
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Maïwenn (sometimes credited as Maïwenn Besco or her birth name Maïwenn Le Besco, born 17 April 1976) is a French actress, film director and screenwriter.
Maïwenn Le Besco was born in Les Lilas, Seine-Saint-Denis, France, a suburban area east of Paris. Maïwenn is of mixed Breton, Vietnamese, French, and Algerian descent. Her Algerian ancestry comes from her maternal grandfather. Maïwenn's mother, Catherine Belkhodja, introduced her to the entertainment industry at a young age, an experience later chronicled by Maïwenn in her one-woman shows Le Pois Chiche (The Chickpea) and I'm an Actress.
Maïwenn starred in several films as a child, then teen, actress--notably as the child version of the lead role played by Isabelle Adjani in the hit film One Deadly Summer (1983).
Following her marriage to director Luc Besson and the birth of their daughter in 1993, Maïwenn interrupted her career for several years. During this period, she only appeared in a supporting part in Besson's Léon: The Professional (1994), in which she was credited as Ouin-Ouin. She also directed the film's making-of. Perhaps Maïwenn's most internationally-seen film role was her appearance as the alien Diva Bazina in Besson's The Fifth Element (1997).
After her breakup with Besson, Maïwenn returned to France. She performed as a standup comedian in an autobiographical one-woman-show, and reentered the movie business after several filmmakers saw her comedy routine in Paris. She appeared in several notable movies, including the horror film High Tension (2003), in which she starred opposite Cécile de France. By the time the film came out in 2003, she had decided she wanted to try directing. In 2006, she directed her first feature film, the semi-autobiographical Pardonnez-moi (2006). According to Maïwenn, after Besson learned she planned to use her own money to produce the film, he told her "You need to immediately stop what you're doing. You're crazy. Nobody puts their own money into a movie." After seeing the film he apologized, saying she was right on this occasion. Her second film was All About Actresses (2009), in which she appears as herself making a documentary. She achieved international recognition when her third film, the social drama Polisse (2011), won the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. All three films feature Maïwenn with a camera, stemming from a childhood fascination and her interest in the mise en abyme, the story within a story. Her 2015 film My King (2015) was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, with Emmanuelle Bercot winning the Best Actress award.
Maïwenn met film director Luc Besson when she was 12 and they began dating when she was 15. In January 1993, at age 16, she gave birth to their daughter Shanna. On the DVD extras for the 1994 film Léon: The Professional, Maïwenn said the film is based on her relationship with Besson. She was 20 at the beginning of filming (early 1996) for The Fifth Element, during which Besson left her for the film's star, Milla Jovovich.
In 2004, Maïwenn had a son, Diego, with Jean-Yves Le Fur, her second ex-husband who is a real estate developer.- Actor
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Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.- Writer
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Pier Paolo Pasolini achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry. A published poet at 19, he had already written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in 1954. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own novel and its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation. He was arrested in 1962 when his contribution to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) was considered blasphemous and given a suspended sentence. It might have been expected that his next film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), which presented the Biblical story in a totally realistic, stripped-down style, would cause a similar fuss but, in fact, it was rapturously acclaimed as one of the few honest portrayals of Christ on screen. Its original Italian title pointedly omitted the Saint in St. Matthew). Pasolini's film career would then alternate distinctly personal and often scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts: Oedipus Rex (1967) (Oedipus Rex); The Decameron (1971); The Canterbury Tales (1972) (The Canterbury Tales); Arabian Nights (1974) (Arabian Nights), with his own more personal projects, expressing his controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and homosexuality, notably Teorema (1968) (Theorem), Pigsty and the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a relentlessly grim fusion of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the 'Marquis de Sade' which was banned in Italy and many other countries for several years. Pasolini was murdered in still-mysterious circumstances shortly after completing the film.I experience thing in a very interior fashion. My views of thing of the world, objects, is not a secular one. I always see thing as being a bit miraculous. For me, every object is a miracle. My view of the world is in a certain way a religious one, though not rigid and sectarian. That's why I invest this way of seeing things in my work.
I'm not looking for consolation. Like every human being, every now and then, I look for some small delight or satisfaction, but consolation is always rhetorical... insincere, unreal.
The type of people I love the most by far are people who perhaps never reached fourth grade. Very plain and simple people, and those aren't just empty words on my part. I say it because the culture of the petite bourgeoisie, at least in my country but perhaps in France and Spain too, always bring corruption and impurity along with it, while the illiterates, or those who barely finished first grade, always have a certain grace, which is lost as they're exposed to culture. Then it's found once again at a very high level of culture. But conventional culture always corrupts.
Avec avec la disparition de l'espoir, il y aussi une disparition de l'amour pour l'homme moyen. Il y a l'amour pour l'homme exceptionnel. Je suis comme un sculpteur. En faisant le portrait d'un jeune homme de la périphérie de rome ou des autres personnages, il be fait pas un portrait familiar, il fait une énorme statut. J'ai fait un mélange de style et vous savez quand il y a un mélange de style, ça signifie qu'il y a une menace dans la structure idéale de l'oeuvre et j'ai compris la raison. Parce que dans Accatone, je suis moi même. Je raconte le récit d'Accatone, l'auteur c'est le narrateur. Dans l'évangile, ce n'est pas vrai. Je ne suis pas croyant, je suis marxiste. Je peux raconter l'histoire du fils de dieu avec la fidélité que je voudrais appeler prosaïque à l'évangile de saint-mathieu. Et alors, ce n'est pas seulement moi qui raconte l'histoire du christ, je suis moi à travers les yeux d'un autre homme, d'un croyant, d'un croyant simple, d'un croyant du peuple... du peuple italien. De cela nait le mélange de style, il y a ma façon de voir la réalité et la façon de voir la réalité d'un croyant. Ce mélange de style donc de structure mentale, de vision de la réalité signifie que j'ai instaurer un dialogue entre moi et le croyant et ça c'est la raison pratique pour laquelle j'ai tourné l'évangile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Y3LOeJJ48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IA1bS1MRzw- Director
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Dino Risi became a movie director by chance. In 1940 he met Alberto Lattuada at a friend's boutique. Lattuada told him they needed an assistant director for the movie Piccolo mondo antico (1941). Risi accepted just for fun, not for work. Later, he became a psychiatrist and wrote some articles for a local newspaper in his spare time.
After the Second World War, he met a producer who financed his short films. One of these, Buio in sala (1950), was bought by Carlo Ponti. At that point, Risi decided to become a movie director. So he went to Rome and wrote the plot of Poor But Beautiful (1957) which made him famous. But the film that changed his life forever was The Easy Life (1962). At the opening night, Risi and producer Mario Cecchi Gori were waiting outside the movie theater. They were worried because no viewers had been coming to see the movie. So Risi went back home with much disappointment. However, the next day all the tickets were sold out and Risi became a star.- Director
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Louis Malle, the descendant of a French nobleman who made a fortune in beet sugar during the Napoleonic Wars, created films that explored life and its meaning. Malle's family discouraged his early interest in film but, in 1950, allowed him to enter the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. His résumé showed that he had worked as an assistant to film maker Robert Bresson when Malle was hired by underwater explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau to be a camera operator on the Calypso. Cousteau soon promoted him to be co-director of The Silent World (1956) ("The Silent World"). Years later, Cousteau called Malle the best underwater cameraman he ever had. Malle's third film, The Lovers (1958) ("The Lovers"), starring Jeanne Moreau broke taboos against on screen eroticism. In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the obscenity conviction of an Ohio theater that had exhibited "Les Amants." A director during the Nouvelle Vague, New Wave" of 1950s and 1960s (though technically not considered a Nouvelle Vague auteur), he also made films on the other side of the Atlantic, starting with Pretty Baby (1978), the film that made Brooke Shields an international superstar. The actress who played a supporting role in that film was given a starring role in Malle's next American film, Atlantic City (1980). That promising actress was Susan Sarandon.
In one of his later French films, Goodbye, Children (1987), Malle was able to find catharsis for an experience that had haunted him since the German occupation of France in World War II. At age 12, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school near Paris that was a refuge for several Jewish students, one of them was Malle's rival for academic honors and his friend. A kitchen worker at the school with a grudge became an informant. The priest who was the principal was arrested and the Jewish students were sent off to concentration camps.
In his final film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), Malle again penetrated the veil between life and art as theater people rehearse Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya." In that film, Malle worked again with theater director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn, the conversationalists of My Dinner with Andre (1981). Malle was married to Candice Bergen, and he succumbed to lymphoma in 1995.- Writer
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The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.
After moving to Paris, Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs in Paris, including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein. With financial assistance from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film, the 17-minute Un chien andalou (1929), in 1929, and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its shocking imagery (much of which - like the sliced eyeball at the beginning - still packs a punch even today). It made a deep impression on the Surrealist Group, who welcomed Buñuel into their ranks.
The following year, sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first feature, the scabrous witty and violent L'Age d'Or (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career. That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War he emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros.
Moving to Mexico in the late 1940s, he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in The Young and the Damned (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries (though many of them are well worth seeking out). But in 1961, General Franco, anxious to be seen to be supporting Spanish culture invited Buñuel back to his native country - and Bunuel promptly bit the hand that fed him by making Viridiana (1961), which was banned in Spain on the grounds of blasphemy, though it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
This inaugurated Buñuel's last great period when, in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière he made seven extraordinary late masterpieces, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Although far glossier and more expensive, and often featuring major stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, the films showed that even in old age Buñuel had lost none of his youthful vigour.
After saying that every one of his films from Belle de Jour (1967) onwards would be his last, he finally kept his promise with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), after which he wrote a memorable (if factually dubious) autobiography, in which he said he'd be happy to burn all the prints of all his films- a classic Surrealist gesture if ever there was one.
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Beginning his film career as a screenwriter, Henri-Georges Clouzot switched over to directing and in 1943 had the distinction of having his film The Raven (1943) banned by both the German forces occupying France and the Free French forces fighting them, but for different reasons. He shot to international fame with The Wages of Fear (1953) and consolidated that success with Diabolique (1955), but continuous ill health caused large gaps in his output, and several projects had to be abandoned (though one, Hell (1994), was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol). His films are typically relentless suspense thrillers, similar to Alfred Hitchcock's but with far less light relief.- Writer
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Krzysztof Kieslowski graduated from Lódz Film School in 1969, and became a documentary, TV and feature film director and scriptwriter. Before making his first film for TV, Przejscie podziemne (1974) (The Underground Passage), he made a number of short documentaries. His next TV title, Personnel (1975) (The Staff), took the Grand Prix at Mannheim Film Festival. His first full-length feature was The Scar (1976) (The Scar). In 1978 he made the famous documentary From a Night Porter's Point of View (1979) (Night Porter's Point of View), and in 1979 - a feature Camera Buff (1979) (Camera Buff), which was acclaimed in Poland and abroad. Everything he did from that point was of highest artistic quality.- Director
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Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911, in small-town Galesville, Wisconsin, to Lena (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. He was of German and Norwegian descent. Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the University of Chicago after a year, but made such an impression on his professor and writer Thornton Wilder that he was recommended for a scholarship with Frank Lloyd Wright, where he learned the importance of space and geography, not to mention his later love for CinemaScope. When political differences came between the seasoned architect and his young protégé, Ray left for New York and became immersed in the radical theater.
He joined the Theatre of Action , which is where he met his good friend Elia Kazan, and later the Group Theatre. Times were tough and money was tight, but Ray loved the bohemian lifestyle of the close-knit group and enjoyed one of the happiest times of his life. Anybody who met him always noted his intellect and amazing energy. During this period he, along with his fellow Theater Group members, was also active in Socialist/Communist movement (which curiously went unnoticed during the Red Scare). In January 1937, Ray was put in charge of local theater activities by the Department of Agriculture's Resettlement Administration and moved to Washington with his wife Jean Evans, who was pregnant with his first child, Anthony. He also, along with Alan Lomax, traveled around the south and recorded folk musicians for the Library of Congress. The collaboration proved worthy, and in the early 40s Lomax and Ray were hired by CBS to produce a regular evening slot, headed by Woody Guthrie. In between this time Ray divorced his wife. Ray soon met John Houseman, who would become a very close friend. Houseman asked Ray to produce shows for the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, which ended quickly due to political pressures. Meanwhile, Ray's good friend of the Group Theatre days Elia Kazan had been called to Hollywood to make his feature film debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and hired Ray to be his assistant, where Ray was first introduced to filmmaking. Houseman called Ray back to New York where Ray made his live TV debut with the enormously popular Sorry, Wrong Number (1946), plus some other radio work.
In 1946 Houseman lent Ray the novel "Thieves Like Us" by Edward Anderson, and Ray fell in love with it; he was familiar with the Depression-era south. He worked hard at the adaptation, and though uncredited for the screenplay, Ray actually contributed a large amount to it. There was never any question of Ray directing the film, and under the sympathetic eyes of producers Houseman and Dore Schary, who was well-known for giving first-time writers and directors breaks, Ray enjoyed possibly the only truly happy film making experience of his career. The film stars Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as young, naive lovers trying to let their love blossom while running from the law. The film is remembered today for Ray's unique use of the camera (this was one of the first times a helicopter was used to shoot action), a fast pace, and above all, his extreme empathy for society's outsiders. Sadly, the film was shelved for two years due to Howard Hughes's takeover of RKO, and the film was released to a single theater in England to great reviews before it was finally released in the U.S.
Ray was eager to go back to work and quickly accepted a project without thinking. That film was A Woman's Secret (1949), which Ray probably would've turned down had he though twice about going back to work, as it bears little of his fingerprints. The film is only memorable because it is where Ray met actress Gloria Grahame, who became his second wife. Ray referred to the film as "a disastrous experience, among other things because I met her." When she became pregnant, Grahame divorced her husband and married Ray, because they thought it was the right thing to do. The same day that she became divorced, Ray and Grahame were wed in Las Vegas, but their marriage was over before it even started; Grahame spent their honeymoon alone while Ray gambled away nearly $40,000 in one night. Though RKO's publicity department alleged that Grahame and Ray met after Grahame's separation and that their son Timothy was born nearly 4 months premature, certain obvious truths contradict that statement. The marriage was disastrous; the two separated a year later and their attempt at professional friendship ended when Ray caught Grahame in bed with his son by Jean Evans. They divorced in 1952. Although They Live by Night (1948) was still unreleased in the US at this time, several Hollywood stars had their own private screening rooms and the film was seen by several important people.
One such person was Humphrey Bogart, who was so impressed with the debut that he invited Ray to direct his first independent production, Knock on Any Door (1949), for a loan-out at Columbia. Though Bogart was initially puzzled by Ray's intensely emotional style of directing, the two had a lot in common and became good friends. The film became a modest success, but Ray had misgivings and later said, "I wish Luis Buñuel had made The Young and the Damned (1950) before I made Knock on Any Door (1949), because I would have made a hell of a lot better film." Indeed, though the subject (juvenile delinquents) is close to Ray's heart, the film is too perhaps too polemic for its own good. Back at RKO, Ray was obliged to make films close to Howard Hughes's heart but not to his own. Despite Ray's leftist views and previous association with the Communist Party, his friendship with Hughes benefited Ray for the better during the Red Scare, and Ray remained untouched, but was morally and contractually obligated to make films he had no care for, such as Born to Be Bad (1950), which starred Hughes' one-time lover, Joan Fontaine, and Flying Leathernecks (1951), a blatant pro-war film that went against Ray's politics. Ray also did uncredited touch-up work to film such as Roseanna McCoy (1949), The Racket (1951), Androcles and the Lion (1952), and Macao (1952) during his years at RKO. Though Ray had his misgivings on their last collaboration, Bogart must have been impressed with Ray because he was optioned for a second loan-out at Columbia. Based loosely on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place (1950) tells the story of a violent screenwriter who falls in love with a fellow Hollywood burnout while he is under investigation for a murder of a girl he barely knew. The story was changed drastically from the source novel and shaped to better suit Bogart, and the result is considered one of Bogart's best and most complex performances. Despite their marital problems, Ray insisted on casting Gloria Grahame for the role of Bogart's lover because he knew she was right for the role, and Grahame was praised for her work as well.
A critically acclaimed film at the time of its release but something of a box-office disappointment, In a Lonely Place (1950) has gained a reputation over the decades as a classic example of both film noir and existential, heartbreaking romance. Before his contract was finished at RKO, Ray was at least able to make two memorable films: On Dangerous Ground (1951) was a complex cop drama that again featured expressionistic camera moves (hand-held cameras were used, a rarity for the 1950s) and a look into a violent protagonist, and The Lusty Men (1952), a film about the complexity of coming home was disguised as a rodeo movie. It is considered an underrated work of both Robert Mitchum and Ray. After he left RKO, his first project was the pseudo Western Johnny Guitar (1954), which he never liked and hated making (mostly because of Joan Crawford) despite its box-office success. Today the film has gathered a cult status (Martin Scorsese is a big fan), and during this period the French New Wave directors began to take note of this American auteur; Jean-Luc Godard in particular idolized Ray and once stated that "the cinema is Nicholas Ray." In September of 1954, Ray wrote a treatment to "The Blind Run," about three troubled teenagers who create a new family in each other. This would form the basis for his most popular and influential film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). After some re-writes, Ray started shopping for a lead actor. After a trip to the Strasberg Institute in New York proved fruitless, he learned that Elia Kazan had recently discovered a New York stage actor for his latest film, but he wasn't recommending him; even after Ray saw a rough cut of this actor's latest film he still wasn't sure.
It was only when Ray met 24-year-old James Dean at a party did he realize that this hot new talent would be perfect for the role of Jim Stark, a troubled youth whose world is unraveled in a 24-hour period. Ray and Dean formed a very close bond during filming, with Ray allowing Dean to improvise and even direct to his liking. The rest of the cast came together with the talents of two fifteen-year-olds: Natalie Wood (to whom Ray was rumored to have made advances) and Sal Mineo; as well as smaller roles, which Ray cast based on weeks of bizarre, improvised auditions as well as interviews with the actors. Filming was a wild ride, but it paid off; Mineo and Wood were both Oscar-nominated in the supporting acting categories, and Ray received his only Oscar nomination, for the screenplay.
Ray and Dean planned to make more movies after this, but Dean's death would never make that possible, and at least they left movie audiences with one great film. Ray loved working with younger actors and wanted to only make movies about them, but first he made Hot Blood (1956), based on research that his ex-wife had compiled about gypsies. During a stay in Paris Ray read an article called "Ten Feet Tall," about a teacher whose life fell apart because of a Cortisone addiction. Ray was fascinated by this and empathized with teachers' low pay at the time. Star and producer James Mason played Ed Avery, a family man whose life takes a nightmarish turn when he becomes addicted to Cortisone. Though a critical and financial disaster, today Bigger Than Life is considered Nicholas Ray's masterpiece and very ahead of its time. The French magazine Cahiers du Cinema named it one of the 10 best films of the 50s. In fact, the magazine was a huge admirer of Ray, and frequently would acclaim Ray's films for their style and substance while American critics dismissed them, adding to Ray's cult status as a director. Ray continued to make films, but his health started to become a problem on the set of Wind Across the Everglades (1958), and Ray was fired, with most of his footage discarded.
In the 1960s, he was invited to make two big-budget films in Spain, the Biblical epic King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963), where he suffered a heart attack brought on by years of heavy drinking and smoking, not to mention stress. This sadly brought his Hollywood career to a premature finish. After his heart attack, he tried many times to direct again, but no projects made it off the ground. In addition, Ray was frequently using drugs and immersing himself in the chaos of the 1960s and the hippie generation. He did not direct again until the satirical porn short Wet Dreams (1974). Also in the 1970s, he became a teacher at New York University (one of his students was Jim Jarmusch), and despite his eccentricity, he connected with his students and together they made We Can't Go Home Again (1973), half documentary and half fiction. With the help of his friend Wim Wenders, he completed his last film, Lightning Over Water (1980), which was supposed to be about a painter dying of cancer and trying to sail to China to find a cure, but instead it became a sad documentary about Ray's last days.
Nicholas Ray died on June 6th, 1979 of lung cancer, but before his death he left the world some of the most painfully realized and contemporary motion pictures ever put on celluloid, and shared a fully realized vulnerability that will never be duplicated. Thirty years after his death, the cinema still is Nicholas Ray.- Writer
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Olivier Assayas is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is best know for his films Demonlover (2002), Something in the Air (2012), Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016).
Assayas is the son of French director/screenwriter Raymond Assayas, alias Jacques Rémy.
His directorial debut was in the short film Copyright (1979).- Writer
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Born in Paris, France, in 1952. Jacques Audiard's family has always been involved in movie business. His father, Michel, was a popular screenwriter and director and his uncle a producer. But in his teens he refused that world and wanted to be a teacher. He studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne but didn't finish his degree. By that time, his then girlfriend suggested he work as a trainee editor during his university holidays. He worked as an assistant editor on several movies like "Le locataire" (1976) directed by Roman Polanski.
He also joined a theater where he did all kinds of work. He specially enjoyed adapting works for stage. In the eighties he wrote the screenplays of some successful movies like "Mortelle Randonnee" (1983), "Reveillon Chez Bob" (1984), "Saxo" (1987), "Frequence meurtre" (1988) and "Grosse fatigue" (1994). Most of those films were thrillers directed by prestigious filmmakers like Claude Miller and Michel Blanc. He also directed some well received short movies.
Thanks to the success of those movies he was able, in 1994, to raise up the money to make his first movie "Regarde les hommes tomber" a somber road movie starred by two of the most important French actors: Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean Louis Trintignant. That movie won 3 Cesars of the French academy for best editing, best new director (Jacques Audiard) and best new actor (for Kassovitz).
Kassovitz also became the star of his second movie "Un heros tres discret" released in the Festival de Cannes in 1996 where it won the award for best screenplay. "Un heros tres discret" undermined the myth of the French resistance to the Nazis by telling the story of a young impostor who rises high in French society after World war by concocting a past for himself as a hero. It also won awards in the festivals of Stockholm and Valladolid and made his name internationally.
In 2001 he made his third movie "Sur mes levres". The love story between two outsiders (a deaf office worker and a hoodlum) who decide to con a group of gangsters also became a success. It also won three Cesars (best actress, sound and screenplay).
His last movie, "De battre mon Coeur sest arrête" (a remake of "Fingers" a James Toback's movie) was released in the Berlin festival of 2005.
With those movies, Audiard has become the new master of the "polar" (French thriller) and inheritor of others great French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) and Henri Georges-Clouzot (1907-1977).- Director
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Stéphane Brizé was born on 18 October 1966 in Rennes, Ille-et-Vilaine, France. He is a director and writer, known for At War (2018), The Measure of a Man (2015) and A Woman's Life (2016).- Director
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'Alan Smithee' is a common pseudonym for directors whose film was clearly taken away from her/him and recut heavily against her/his wishes in ways that completely altered the film.
The Directors Guild contract generally does not permit a director to remove her/his name from films. The Directors Guild has been striving for decades to establish the director as the "author" of a film, and part of getting the credit for the successes is taking the blame for the failures. The only exceptions they make are cases in which a film was clearly taken away from a director and recut heavily against her/his wishes in ways that completely altered the film. Directors are required to appeal to the Guild in such cases. If the appeal is successful, their name is replaced by Alan Smithee. So if you notice a film directed by Alan Smithee, it is certain it is not what its director intended, and likely that it is not any good.Alan Smithee' is a common pseudonym for directors whose film was clearly taken away from her/him and recut heavily against her/his wishes in ways that completely altered the film.- Writer
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Chris Marker was born on 29 July 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was a writer and director, known for 12 Monkeys (1995), Sans Soleil (1983) and Third Side of the Coin (1960). He died on 29 July 2012 in Paris, France.- Director
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Alain Resnais was born on 3 June 1922 in Vannes, Morbihan, France. He was a director and editor, known for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Same Old Song (1997) and My American Uncle (1980). He was married to Sabine Azéma and Florence Malraux. He died on 1 March 2014 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France.- Director
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Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of Switzerland and attended school in Nyons, Switzerland. His parents divorced in 1948, at which time he returned to Paris to attend the Lycée Rohmer. In 1949 he studied at the Sorbonne to prepare for a degree in ethnology. However, it was during this time that he began attending with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer.
In 1950 Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, founded "Gazette du cinéma", which published five issues between May and November. He wrote a number of articles for the journal, often using the pseudonym "Hans Lucas". After Godard worked on and financed two films by Rivette and Rohmer, Godard's family cut off their financial support in 1951, and he resorted to a Bohemian lifestyle that included stealing food and money when necessary. In January 1952 he began writing film criticism for "Les cahiers du cinéma". Later that year he traveled to North and South America with his father and attempted to make his first film (of which only a tracking shot from a car was ever accomplished).
In 1953 he returned to Paris briefly before securing a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film in 1954 about the building of the dam called Operation Concrete (1958). Later that year his mother was killed in a motor scooter accident in Switzerland. In 1956 Godard began writing again for "Les cahiers du cinéma" as well as for the journal "Arts". In 1957 Godard worked as the press attache for "Artistes Associés", and made his first French film, All Boys Are Called Patrick (1959).
In 1958 he shot Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958), his homage to Jean Cocteau. Later that year he took unused footage of a flood in Paris shot by Truffaut and edited it into a film called A Story of Water (1961), which was an homage to Mack Sennett. In 1959 he worked with Truffaut on the weekly publication "Temps de Paris". Godard wrote a gossip column for the journal, but also spent much time writing scenarios for films and a body of critical writings which placed him firmly in the forefront of the "nouvelle vague" aesthetic, precursing the French New Wave.
It was also in that year Godard began work on Breathless (1960). In 1960 he married Anna Karina in Switzerland. In April and May he shot The Little Soldier (1963) in Geneva and was preparing the film for a fall release in Paris. However, French censors banned it due to its references to the Algerian war, and it was not shown until 1963. In March 1960 Breathless (1960) premiered in Paris. It was hugely successful both with the film critics and at the box office, and became a landmark film in the French New Wave with its references to American cinema, its jagged editing and overall romantic/cinephilia approach to filmmaking. The film propelled the popularity of male lead Jean-Paul Belmondo with European audiences.
In 1961 Godard shot A Woman Is a Woman (1961), his first film using color widescreen stock. Later that year he participated in the collective effort to remake the film The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), which was heralded as an important project in artistic collaboration. In 1962 Godard shot Vivre sa vie (1962) in Paris, his first commercial success since "Breathless". Later that year he shot a segment entitled "Le Nouveau Monde" for the collective film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), another important work in the history of collaborative multiple-authored art.
In 1963 Godard completed a film in homage to Jean Vigo entitled The Carabineers (1963), which was a resounding failure with the public and stirred furious controversy with film critics. Also that year he worked on a couple of collective films: The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964) (from which Godard's sequence was later cut) and Six in Paris (1965). In 1964 Godard and his wife Anna Karina formed their own production company, Anouchka Films. They shot a film called A Married Woman (1964), which censors forced them to re-edit due to a topless sunbathing scene shot by Jacques Rozier. The censors also made Godard change the title to "Une femme marié" so as to not give the impression that this "scandalous" woman was the typical French wife. Later in the year, two French television programs were produced in devotion to Godard's work.
In the spring of 1965 Godard shot Alphaville (1965) in Paris; in the summer he shot Pierrot the Fool (1965) in Paris and the south of France. Shortly thereafter he and Anna Karina separated. Following their divorce, Godard shot Made in U.S.A (1966), "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966)", "L'amour en l'an 2000" (1966) (a sequel to "Alphaville" shot as a sketch for the collective film "L'amour travers les ages" (1966)).
In 1967 Godard shot The Chinese (1967) in Paris with Anne Wiazemsky, who was the granddaughter of French novelist François Mauriac. During the making of the film Godard and Wiazemsky were married in Paris. Later in the year he was prevented from traveling to North Vietnam for the shooting of a sequence for the collective film Far from Vietnam (1967). He instead shot the sequence in Paris, entitled "Camera-Oeil". Also during 1967 Godard participated (as the only Frenchman) on an Italian collective film called Love and Anger (1969).
In 1968 Godard was commissioned by French television to make Joy of Learning (1969). However, television producers were so outraged by the product Godard produced that they refused to show it. In May of that year Henri Langlois was fired by the head of the French Jean-Pierre Gorin to form the Dziga-Vertov group, infuriating Godard. He became increasingly concerned with socialist solutions to an idealist cinema, especially in providing the proletariat with the means of production and distribution. Along with other militantly political filmmakers in the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard published a series of 'Ciné-Tracts' outlining these viewpoints. In the summer of 1968 Godard traveled to New York City and Berkeley, California, to shoot the film "One American Movie", which was never completed. In September he made a trip to Canada to start another film called "Communication(s)", which also went unfinished, and then made a visit to Cuba before returning to France.
In 1969 Godard traveled to England, where he made the film See You at Mao (1970) for BBC Weekend Television, but the network later refused to show it. In the late spring he traveled with the Dziga-Vertov group to Prague to secretly shoot the film "Pravda". Later that year he shot Lotte in Italia (1971) ("Struggle for Italy") for Italian television. It was never shown, either.
In 1970 Godard traveled to Lebanon to shoot a film for the Palestinian Liberation Organization entitled "Jusque à la victoire" (1970) ("Until Victory"). Later that year he traveled to dozens of American universities trying to raise money for the film. In spite of his efforts, it was never released.- Writer
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French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953 Truffaut published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine Truffaut, and some of his friends as passionate as he was, became defenders of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.
The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse; named after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952). He also directed The Mischief Makers (1957), considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. His other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film, The 400 Blows (1959), was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the year his first daughter, Laura Truffaut, was born.
From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982, with French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness.- Director
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Bi Gan is known for Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018), Kaili Blues (2015) and A Short Story (2022).- Writer
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Jean Cocteau was one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century. In addition to being a director, he was a poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, and actor. He began writing at 10 and was a published poet by age 16. He collaborated with the "Russian Ballet" company of Sergei Diaghilev, and was active in many art movements, but always remained a poet at heart. His films reflect this fact. Cocteau was also a homosexual, and made no attempt to hide it. His favorite actor was his close friend Jean Marais, who appeared in almost every one of his films. Cocteau made about twelve films in his career, all rich with symbolism and surreal imagery. He is now regarded as one of the most important avant-garde directors in cinema.- Producer
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Béla Tarr was born on 21 July 1955 in Pécs, Hungary. He is a producer and director, known for Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), The Turin Horse (2011) and Satantango (1994). He is married to Ágnes Hranitzky.- Writer
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Born in his ancestral palazzo, situated in the same Milanese square as both the opera house La Scala and the Milan Cathedral, Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) was raised under the auspices of aristocratic privilege, theater and Catholicism. This triangulation of monuments would create an equally titanic filmmaker whose work remained stylistically sui generis through arguably the most impressive decades of 20th century filmmaking. The quietude of La Terra Trema (1948) is managed with an operatic virtuosity, and the baroque period pieces-for which he is best known today-clearly point to a noble upbringing. However, there is also a Gothic character to Visconti-embodied in the spired cathedral that overshadowed his childhood-that has remained largely unsung. The relationship between the Visconti family and Gothic architecture stretches back to the Medieval Era. In 1386, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti envisioned a cathedral in the heart of Milan, though it was fated to remain under construction for almost half a millennium until Napoleon ordered its completion in the 19th century. Just as his ancestor brought Northern Gothic architecture to Italy, so, in 1943, did Luchino introduce the groundbreaking cinematic genre of Italian neorealism to the peninsula. Doing away with sets, neorealist cinema was set in the raw environment of postwar Italy. In one sense anti-architectural in its desire to transcend the bonds of interior space, this same ambition is what makes the style a perfect cinematic analog to the Gothic. The Gothic is an architecture of exteriority: Throwing ceilings to the sky and opening walls onto the outside with large windows, the Gothic presents light as the manifestation of divinity within a place of worship. The mysticism of light, dating back to the pseudo-Dionysian theology of Abbot Suger of St. Denis Cathedral, translates well to the medium of light that is the cinema. In any Visconti work, lighting is intimately connected to set design: It is often seen in the gleam of curtains, the radiance of starlight or the glow of Milanese fog, where the director carries the religiosity of Gothic architecture into his realism. Visconti's religion (or should we say religions? For he was also a Marxist) adds an ethical weight, powerful and challenging, to his works. The term decadence, often associated with Visconti, only attains meaning through being in excess of contemporary mores. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Italian communists could accept Visconti's homosexuality, and a resultant displaced angst is plainly worn by his protagonists-monumental individuals who bear the full weight of their social milieus. While neorealism has come to be packaged with its own mythology-a new cinema for a liberated nation, the idea of a new "Italian" style-re-centering our historical gaze on the Gothic Visconti allows one's imagination to spread across a much larger plane of geography and time. From his cinematic apprenticeship with Jean Renoir in France-the very cradle of Gothic architecture-to his German trilogy, Visconti's style has always been one of cosmopolitan effort. This international flavor also matches the deeper etymological referent of the Gothic-the Goths, those barbarian invaders who toppled the Roman Empire. Among Visconti's formal signatures are many borrowings from foreign directors, including the particularly pronounced influence of Jean Renoir, Josef Von Sternberg and Elia Kazan. Global in scope, timeless in influence and architectural in spirit: This is the legacy of Luchino Visconti.- Writer
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Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and even antigay, he completed 44 projects between 1966 and 1982, the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas. His prodigious output was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertinage that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure.) Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. Some find his cinema needlessly controversial and avant-garde; others accuse him of surrendering to the Hollywood ethos. It is best said that he drew forth strong emotional reactions from all he encountered, both in his personal and professional lives, and this provocative nature can be experienced posthumously through reviewing his artistic legacy.
Fassbinder was born into a bourgeois Bavarian family in 1945. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. In order to have time for her work, his mother frequently sent him the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. At the age of 15, Fassbinder defiantly declared his homosexuality, soon after which he left school and took a job. He studied theater in the mid-sixties at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich and joined the Action Theater (aka, Anti-Theater) in 1967. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. [So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.] In his theater years, he also developed a repertory company that included his mother, two of his wives and various male and female lovers. Coupled with his ability to serve in nearly any crew capacity, this gave him the ability to produce his films quickly and on extremely low budgets.
Success was not immediate for Fassbinder. His first feature length film, a gangster movie called Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. His next piece, Katzelmacher (1969), was a minor critical success, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured Jorgos, an emigrant from Greece, who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. In subsequent years, he made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) and Whity (1971) before scoring his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). This moving portrait of a street vendor crushed by the betrayal and his own futility is considered a masterpiece, as is his first international success Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Fear Eats the Soul). With a wider audience for his efforts, however, some critics contend that Fassbinder began to sell out with big budget projects such as Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1981). In retrospect, however, it seems that the added fame simply enabled Fassbinder to explore various kinds of filmmaking, including such "private" works as In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), two films about individual experience and feelings. His greatest success came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) (The Marriage of Maria Braun), chronicling the rise and fall of a German woman in the wake of World War II. Other notable movies include The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Satan's Brew (1976) and Querelle (1982), all focused on gay and lesbian themes and frequently with a strongly pornographic edge.
His death is a perfect picture of the man and his legend. On the night of June 10, 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, the unfinished script for a version of Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. So boundless was his drive and creativity that, throughout his downward spiral and even in the moment of his death, Fassbinder never ceased to be productive.- Writer
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Jean Vigo had bad health since he was a child. Son of anarchist militant Miguel Almareyda, he also never really recovered from his father's mysterious death in jail when he was 12. Abandoned by his mother, he passed from boarding school to boarding school. Aged 23, through meetings with people involved in the movies, he started working in the cinema, then bought a camera and shot his first film, a short documentary, À Propos de Nice (1930) then, two years later, Taris (1931) (aka Taris champion de natation). These two very personal works frighten the producers, and it lasted two years before someone showed some interest in his project of a children movie. This would be his masterpiece, Zero for Conduct (1933) (aka Zero for Conduct), a subversive despiction of an authoritarian boarding school, which directly came from Vigo's memories. The film is straightaway censored for its "anti-French spirit." In despair, he nevertheless shot L'Atalante (1934), a romantic and realistic story of a young couple beginning their life together in a barge. He died just afterward of septicemy. His work would not be recognized before 1945. This accursed filmmaker is now admired for his poetic realism.- Writer
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Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the difficulty of precisely describing their category is itself the very quintessence of Antonioni's films. Among the most-cited contributions of Antonioni's cinema are their striking descriptions of that unique strain of post-boom ennui everywhere apparent in the transformed life and leisure habits of the Italian middle and upper classes. Detecting profound technological, political and psychological shifts at work in post-WWII Italy, Antonioni set out to explore the ambiguities of a suddenly alienated and dislocated Italy, not simply through his oblique style of narrative and characters, nor through any overt political messaging, but instead by tearing asunder the traditional boundaries of cinematic narrative in order to explore an ever shifting internal landscape expressed through architecture, urban space and the sculptural, shaping presence of objects, shapes and emotions invented by camera movement and depth of focus.
Antonioni deftly manipulates the quieter, indirect edges of cinematic structure, often so discretely that his existential puzzles are felt before they can be intellectualized. The negative space is as prominent as the positive, silence as loud as noise, absence as palpable as presence, and passivity as driving a force as direct action. Transgressing unspoken cinematic laws, Antonioni frequently focuses on female protagonists while refusing to sentimentalize or morally judge his characters and placing them on equal footing with the other elements within his total dynamic system, like sounds or set pieces. And he violates spoken rules with unconventional cutting techniques, fractured spatial and temporal continuity, and a camera that insistently lingers in melancholy pauses, long after the actors depart, as if drifting just behind an equally distracted, dissipating narrative. Leaving questions unanswered and plot points irresolute, dispensing with exposition, suspense, sentimentality and other cinematic security blankets, Antonioni releases the viewer into a gorgeous, densely layered fog to contemplate and wrestle with his characters' imprecise quandaries and endless possibilities. Culminating in tour de force endings that often reframe the narrative in a daring, parting act of deconstruction, Antonioni's rigorously formal, yet open compositions allow his great, unwieldy questions to spill over into the world outside the cinema and outside of time.
Born into a middle-class family in the northern Italian town of Ferrara, Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna where he also co-founded the university's theatrical troupe. While dedicating himself to painting, writing film reviews, working in financial positions and in different capacities on film productions, Antonioni suffered a few false starts before expressing his unique directorial vision and voice in his first realized short film, Gente del Po, a moving portrait of fisherman in the misty Po Valley where he was raised. Uncomfortable with the neo-realist thrust of Italian cinema, Antonioni directed a series of eccentric and oblique documentary shorts that, in retrospect, reveal his desire to investigate the psyche's mysterious interiors. In his first fictional feature, Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni immediately subtly challenged traditional plot and audience expectation in ways that anticipate the formal and emotional expressionist dynamic that would fully flower within the groundbreaking L'Avventura (1960).
Reversing its raucous 1960 premiere to an infuriated Cannes audience, L'Avventura was rapturously lauded by fellow artists and filmmakers and awarded a special Jury Prize "for its remarkable contribution toward the search for a new cinematic language." It also presented the controlled ambivalence of Monica Vitti, who would become his partner, muse and psychological constant throughout his famed trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962) in addition to the exquisite Red Desert (1964), a film that marked another significant shift toward expressive color, male leads and working with soft focus and faster cuts. After the phenomenal commercial success of the MGM-produced Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni was devastated by the anti-climactic box office disaster of Zabriskie Point (1970) and returned to documentary. Invited to make Chung Kuo China by the Chinese government, Antonioni delivered a mesmerizing yet unsentimental four-hour tour of China which was vehemently rejected by its solicitors. A few years later, Antonioni returned to fictional form in his last masterpiece, The Passenger (1975), an enigmatic fable of vaporous identity that offers a bold companion piece to L'Avventura. Aside from the thematically retrospective Identification of a Woman (1982) and a period film made for television, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) in which he conducted unusual experiments with color and video, Antonioni closed out his career with mostly short films, many of which were made after he suffered a stroke in 1985.
Tremendously influential yet largely taken for granted, Antonioni made difficult, abstract cinema mainstream. Embracing an anarchic geometry, Antonioni turned the architecture of narrative filmmaking inside-out in the most eloquent way possible, with many of his iconic scenes eternally preserved in the depths of the cinema's psyche. Observing modern maladies without judgment - sexism, dissolution of family and tradition, ecological/technological quandaries and the eternal questions of our place in the cosmos - Antonioni's prescience continues to resonate deeply as we find our way in the quickly moving fog.- Director
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Mike Leigh is an English film and theatre director, screenwriter and playwright. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and further at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. He began his career as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s. Leigh is known for his lengthy rehearsal and improvisation techniques with actors to build characters and narrative for his films. His purpose is to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films." His films and stage plays, according to critic Michael Coveney, "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period."
Leigh's most notable works include the black comedy-drama Naked (1993), for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the Oscar-nominated, BAFTA- and Palme d'Or-winning drama Secrets & Lies (1996), the Golden Lion-winning working-class drama Vera Drake (2004), and the Palme d'Or-nominated biopic Mr. Turner (2014). Other well-known films include the comedy-dramas Life Is Sweet (1990) Meantime (1983) and Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biographical film Topsy-Turvy (1999) and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). He won great success with American audiences with the female led films, Vera Drake (2004) starring Imelda Staunton, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) with Sally Hawkins, the family drama Another Year (2010), and the historical drama Peterloo (2018). His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy and Abigail's Party.
Leigh has helped to create stars - Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Antony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked - and remarked that the list of actors who have worked with him over the years - including Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, Julie Walters - "comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent." His aesthetic has been compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and the Italian Federico Fellini. Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Review of Books in January 1994, commented: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."
Leigh was born to Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor. Leigh was born at Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, which was at that time a maternity home. His mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Leigh was brought up in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire. He attended North Grecian Street Junior School. He is from a Jewish family; his paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. The family name, originally Lieberman, had been anglicised in 1939 "for obvious reasons". When the war ended, Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film Bleak Moments (1971). There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.
Outside school Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Labour Zionist youth movement Habonim. In the late 1950s he attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all-round the country. Throughout this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte. His father, however, was deeply opposed to the idea that Leigh might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors who came to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests. In 1960, "to his utter astonishment", he won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress, Alison Steadman.
Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, found himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes and so became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (in 1963), the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique on Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows (1959), an improvised film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed 'living, loving and bickering' on the streets of New York and Leigh had "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors." Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker-"Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the (Arts Theatre) production"- Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and the writing of Flann O'Brien, whose "tragi-comedy" Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw in this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear and in 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisations, the actors having based their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Ronald Searle, George Grosz, Picasso, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. He played small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, (West 11, Two Left Feet) and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC Television series Maigret. In 1964-65, he collaborated with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.
Leigh has been described as "a gifted cartoonist ... a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television."
Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. In addition to those two, in an interview recorded at the National Film Theatre at the BFI on 17 March 1991; Leigh also cited Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, Yasujiro Ozu and even Jean-Luc Godard, "...until the late 60s." When pressed for British influences, in that interview, he referred to the Ealing comedies "...despite their unconsciously patronizing way of portraying working-class people" and the early 60s British New Wave films. When asked for his favorite comedies, he replied, One, Two, Three, La règle du jeu and "any Keaton". The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by 'a detached, medical watchfulness', Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Michael Coveney: "The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime and Naked. And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlie's (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work and the pub scene in Life is Sweet..."- Writer
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Elio Petri was born on 29 January 1929 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) and His Days Are Numbered (1962). He was married to Paola Pegoraro. He died on 10 November 1982 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Writer
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During the 1970s, Lina Wertmüller emblazoned her name into the pantheon of Italian cinema with a series of intensely polemical, deeply controversial and wonderfully entertaining films. Among the most politically outspoken and iconoclastic members of the second generation of postwar directors - the direct heirs to the neo-realists - Wertmüller was also one of the first woman directors to be internationally recognized and acclaimed. Armed with a keenly satiric and Rabelaisian humor, Wertmüller reinvented the narrative forms and character types of Italian comedy to create one of the rare examples of a radical, politically galvanized cinema that managed to achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, the fierce invectives against social, cultural and historical inequities at the heart of Wertmüller's mid-1970s masterworks Love and Anarchy, Seven Beauties and Swept Away seemed only to help the films find an appreciative audience, especially in the United States, where they broke box office records for foreign films and even secured Wertmüller an Oscar nomination for Best Director - the very first woman named for this category. Although Wertmüller remains a well-known name, her remarkable films are strangely overlooked and only selectively revisited. And yet, the incredible energy and daring of her most popular works is equally present in lesser-known masterpieces such as All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi, films that are both extremely topical and yet still totally relevant today.- Writer
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Born on November 6, 1947 in Shanghai, China, Edward Yang has become one of the most talented international filmmakers of his generation. Along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang, Yang ranks among the leading artists of the Taiwanese New Wave, and one of the world's most brilliant auteurs. Growing up in Taipei, Taiwan, he was very interested in Japanese Manga/Comic Books, which led to the writing of his own screenplays. After studying engineering in Taiwan, he enrolled in the Electrical Engineering program at The University of Florida, receiving his Masters degree in 1974 while doing work with The Center for Informatics Research. Yang did not pursue a PhD and instead attended USC Film School briefly, but dropped out after feeling disenchanted by the program's commerce-and-business focus and his own misgivings of pursuing a Film Career. Upon working in Seattle with microcomputers and Defense software, an encounter with a piece by Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God) gave him inspiration to observe classics in world cinema and reignited his interest in Film. He eventually wrote the script and served as a production aide on the Hong Kong TV movie, The Winter of 1905 (1981). Although he returned to Taiwan to direct a number of television shows, his break came in 1982 with the direction and writing of the film short, Desires (1982), in the seminal Taiwanese New Wave collaboration In Our Time(1982). While Hou Hsiao-Hsien's movies dealt primarily with history or Taiwan's countryside, Yang created films analyzing and revealing the many themes of city and urban life. His first major piece was That Day On The Beach (1983), a modernist narrative reflecting on couples and family. He followed with the urban films Taipei Story (1984), a reflection on urban-Taiwan through a couple - where he cast fellow auteur Hou Hsiao Hsien as the lead - and The Terrorizer (1986), a complex multi-narrative tale. In Yang's brilliant A Brighter Summer Day (1991), a sprawling examination of teen gangs, societal clashes, the influence of American pop-culture and youth, his first authentic masterpiece was crafted. He has followed with the satires A Confucian Confusion (1995), and Mahjong (1996), films that looked at the struggle between the modern and the traditional, the relationship between business and art, and how capitalistic greed may corrupt, influence, or effect art. It is, however, his most recent film, Yi Yi (2000), that is considered his magnum opus, an epic story about the Jian family seen through their different perspectives. The three-hour masterwork begins with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and examines all areas of human life in a variety of interesting, artistic ways. He has also collaborated with fellow auteur, novelist, and screenwriter Nien-Jen Wu on the piece, casting him as one of the leads, NJ. Yang's filmmaking style looks at the uncertain future of modernizing Taiwan in an enlightening manner, and his vision is one of the most original operating in world cinema today.- Director
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Thirty-one years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust. She became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. The Library of Congress placed Daughters of the Dust and her UCLA MFA senior thesis Illusions in the National Film Registry. These two films join a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures by the Librarian of Congress. Dash recently designed two rooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and VOGUE, In American: An Anthology of Fashion, featured at the NYC Met Gala 2022.- Director
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A Serbian film director. Born in 1954 in Sarajevo. Graduated in film directing at the prestigious Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague in 1978. During his studies, he was awarded several times for his short movies including Guernica (1978), which took first prize at the Student's Film Festival in Karlovy Vary. After graduation, he directed several TV movies in his hometown, Sarajevo. In collaboration with the screenwriter Abdulah Sidran in 1981, he made the successful feature debut Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981) which won the Silver Lion for best first feature at the Venice Film Festival. Their subsequent work, human political drama When Father Was Away on Business (1985) unanimously won top prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival as well as FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar. In 1989 he won the Best Director award at Cannes for Time of the Gypsies (1988), a film about the life of a gypsy family in Yugoslavia scripted by Gordan Mihic. His first English language movie, Arizona Dream (1993) starring Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway and scripted by his USA student, David Atkins was awarded the Silver Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival. Underground (1995), a bitter surrealistic comedy about the Balkans, scripted by Dusan Kovacevic, won him a second Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995.Underground, Black Cat, White Cat- Writer
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Educated at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart, Emeric Pressburger worked as a journalist in Hungary and Germany and an author and scriptwriter in Berlin and Paris. He was a Hungarian Jew, chased around Europe (he worked on films for UFA in Berlin and Paris) before World War II, finally finding sanctuary in London--but as a scriptwriter who didn't speak English. So he taught himself to understand not only the finer nuances of the language but also of the British people. A few lucky breaks and introductions via old friends led to his meeting with "renegade" director Michael Powell. They then went on to make some of the most interesting (IMHO) and complex films of the 1940s and 1950s under the banner of "The Archers". Pressburger often showed a deep understanding of the British only granted to those "outside, looking in". He always prided himself on being "more English than the English". After all, some of us were just BORN English, but he CHOSE to become English. He spent his last days at Shoemakers Cottage, Aspall, Stowmarket, Suffolk in the English countryside that he loved so well.- Director
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Serge Bourguignon was born on 3 September 1928 in Maignelay-Montigny, Oise, Picardie, France. He is a director and writer, known for Sundays and Cybèle (1962), Le sourire (1960) and Two Weeks in September (1967).- Director
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Costa-Gavras was born on 12 February 1933 in Loutra-Iraias, Greece. He is a director and writer, known for Z (1969), Missing (1982) and Amen. (2002). He has been married to Michèle Ray-Gavras since 1968. They have two children.- Director
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Jean Delannoy began his film career in the 1920s as an actor. By the 1930s he had switched careers and become an editor, then a short-subjects director. By the mid-'30s he was a full-fledged director, and soon garnered a reputation as a sensitive, understated craftsman with a thorough command of the medium. By the 1950s, however, he was doing overheated melodramas and overblown epics, including a particularly undistinguished version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956)), and he was soon reduced to churning out such drivel as Action Man (1967) (US title: "Action Man") and The Double Bed (1965) (US title: "The Double Bed").- Writer
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The comic genius Jacques Tati was born Taticheff, descended from a noble Russian family. His grandfather, Count Dimitri, had been a general in the Imperial Army and had served as military attaché to the Russian Embassy in Paris. His father, Emmanuel Taticheff, was a well-to-do picture framer who conducted his business in the fashionable Rue de Castellane and had taken a Dutch-Italian woman, Marcelle Claire van Hoof, as his wife. To Emmanuel's lasting dismay, Jacques had no intention of following in the family trade of framing and restoration. Instead, he went on to pursue an education (specialising in arts and engineering) at the military academy of Lycée de Saint Germain-en-laye. After graduating, his main preoccupation became sports. He already boxed and played tennis and was introduced to rugby during a sojourn in London. Back in Paris, he joined the Racing Club de France (1925-30), and for some time seriously contemplated a career as a professional rugby player. However, Jacques also had an uncanny talent for pantomime, imitating athletes at his school to the amusement of classmates and teachers. By the time he had reached the age of 24, encouraged by his success as an entertainer in the annual revue of the Racing Club, he suddenly decided to combine his two passions and, without further ado, entered the world of show business.
From 1931, Jacques toured the Parisian music halls, theatres and circuses with his impersonations, acrobatics, drunk waiter and comic tennis routines (the latter would be famously re-enacted by his alter ego, Monsieur Hulot). He had by this time changed his name to 'Tati' in order to accommodate theatre bills.The French magazine "Le Jour" was among the first to acknowledge his growing popularity, describing Jacques as "a clown of great talent". At the same time, he made his screen debut in a series of short featurettes, tailored to show off his practised gags, notably Oscar, champion de tennis (1932) and Watch Your Left (1936) ("Watch your left", a very funny boxing sketch). The Second World War, military service and inherent strictures resulting from the German occupation put a temporary halt to his career. Then, in 1946, through a friend, the writer-director Claude Autant-Lara, Jacques obtained a small role in the whimsical fantasy Sylvie et le fantôme (1946), about a girl (Odette Joyeux) in love with a ghost (Tati).
The small township of Sainte-Sévère, where Tati had taken refuge during the occupation, served as inspiration for his first film, initially conceived as a one-reeler entitled "L'Ecole des facteurs" (School for Postmen). Unable to find widespread distribution, Tati decided to re-shoot the bucolic comedy --with himself in the central role -- as a feature film, using the villagers as extras and filming everything on location. And thus, Jour de Fête (1949) and Francois the village postman came into being. However, the film was soon overshadowed by his next enterprise and a critic of the satirical publication Le Canard Enchainé even proposed to fight a duel with anyone who would prefer "Jour de Fete" to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)!
With "Holiday", Tati reinvented the visual comedy of the silent era in a style not dissimilar to that of Max Linder. There is hardly any dialogue, except for background chatter, but natural and human noises are enhanced whenever required for the desired comic effect. The film is almost plotless, essentially comprised of a series of vignettes (to the recurring musical motif of Alain Romans's breezy 1952 composition "Quel temps fait-il à Paris?") at a seaside resort frequented by assorted holiday makers. All are stereotypical of their respective social class, as are the villagers themselves. Their inability to escape social conditioning and the stress they endure in the process of 'enjoying themselves' are observed with a keen satirical eye through their interaction with each other. At the centre is the ever-present character of the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, who arrives in a rickety 1924 Amilcar. Tall and reedy, clad in a poplin coat, wearing a crumpled hat, striped socks, trousers which are patently too short, rolled umbrella, a pipe firmly clenched between his teeth and perambulating with an odd stiff-legged gait, Hulot cuts an ungainly, yet hilarious figure. Well-meaning though he is, he invariably leaves disaster in his wake and departs the scene quickly as things go wrong, letting others sort out the mess. "Holiday" is more than just a brilliant collection of sight gags, but also an ironic observation of the foibles of human nature. Tati acknowledged the influence of both Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields in the creation of Hulot. Very much like Keaton or Charles Chaplin, he was also a consummate perfectionist who micro-managed each scene with unerring precision. Comedy for Tati was a serious business.
In Tati's subsequent ventures, Hulot became relegated from being the focus of the story to merely subordinate to its concept. As just one of many characters, Hulot weaves in and out of My Uncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), his simple, old-fashioned world contrasted sharply against the coldness of mechanisation, obsessive consumerism and the growing uniformity of houses and cities. "Playtime", shot in 70mm, took six years to make and required the creation of a massive glass and concrete high-rise set with myriad corridors and cubicles (dubbed 'Tativille' and built at a cost of $800,000) which raised the picture's total budget to $3 million and left Tati bankrupt. His next project, Trafic (1971), a satire of modern man's love of cars, failed to recoup these losses. Creditors impounded Tati's films, which were not re-released until 1977, when a canny Parisian distributor expunged his outstanding debts. Throughout his career, Tati remained obdurately committed to his artistic integrity and to his independence as a film maker. He was one of few directors who consistently employed non-professional actors. He turned down offers from Hollywood for a 15-minute series of television comedies, following the success of "Mon Oncle". He summed it all up by declaring "I could have satisfied the producers of the world by making a whole series of little Hulot films, and I would have made a lot of money. But I would not have been able to do what I like - work freely". (NY Times, November 6, 1982)- Director
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Hong Sang-soo was born on 25 October 1960 in Seoul, Korea. He is a director and writer, known for Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), Night and Day (2008) and The Woman Who Ran (2020).