The Great Directors with Miss Media Junkie

Going back through my records, I discovered that I've done twenty posts about my favorite movies directed by some of the all-time directing greats, and yet I don't have a proper directory listing for them, and I haven't really sat down to write a mission statement or an introduction for them before now. On the one hand, I think they're pretty self-explanatory. "This is my favorite film from so-and-so director..." On the other hand, I do feel that stating my intentions about this series could be helpful.

I first started writing these posts, beginning with Luis Buñuel's "Exterminating Angel," back in June of 2010. At first I didn't intend for them to be a regular feature, but as time went by and I ran short of ideas for content, it became a nice topic to fall back on, and I started looking forward to picking out a new director every month to feature. I also found it a good way to be able to include more classic film content, which I never write about as much as I'd like to. These are not proper reviews in any sense. They're recommendation pieces that are meant to help the reader discover the works of the filmmaking greats, and I include more contextual and historical information with them than I would when I write about other films, including some brief thoughts about each director. I also tend to get more personal about my own viewing experiences, to help counteract any history lecture vibes.

Who counts as a great director? Someone who has contributed significantly to world cinema, which sounds terribly pretentious, but it's the gist of what I'm looking for. I try to stick with older and foreign directors over the contemporary, mainstream ones. I'm not trying to be comprehensive, and I'm not going in any particular order. Each month, I just write about who I want to write about. Occasionally I'll stick a Tim Burton or a David Cronenberg in the mix, if they've been around long enough and they have a substantial body of work to explore. Maybe Duncan Jones and Rian Johnson will end up being the most important filmmakers of our times, but they're still in the nascent stages of their careers and I feel it would be unwise to jump the gun. Besides, their films are more likely to come up in the regular course of my usual blogging anyway.

The criteria to be featured are pretty straightforward. I only write about directors whose work I'm very familiar with, which means I've seen at least ten of their feature films, or for those less prolific directors like Jacques Tati and Leni Riefenstahl, I've seen at least half of their filmography. Documentary work may or may not count, which I decide on a case by case basis. In a few cases this has encouraged me to seek out more films from a particular director I want to feature. There are a couple of directors who I have seen the full ten films for, but still don't feel comfortable about writing about yet, because I'm missing a few key works. For instance, I'm not keen on writing the post for Howard Hawks without seeing the original 1932 "Scarface," or the post for Fritz Lang without seeing "Die Niebelungen."

There are a few issues I'm currently wrestling with, though. I'm still working out what to do with those directors who primarily work in short forms, like Stan Brakhage and Jan Svankmajer. I'm also not sure how to handle the directors who I generally dislike, but who are clearly important enough to be featured, like Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. The more films of his I force myself to watch, the less I think I understand him. Also, I've written about a couple of films outside of this series of posts that probably should be part of the series, with a few revisions. For instance, my favorite Martin Scorsese film at the moment is "King of Comedy," which I already wrote about in 2011 after I first saw it. And I've already written a piece on "Mulholland Dr." too, my favorite David Lynch movie.

For now, I leave you with a full list of links to all the Great Director posts that I've written so far, and you can expect a new installment sometime this month. The plan is to continue to keep this post updated and I'll have a permanent link in the sidebar for it eventually.

2013

Yasujiro Ozu ("Late Spring")
Pier Paolo Pasolini ("The Gospel According to St. Matthew")
Zhang Yimou ("To Live")
Carl Theodore Dreyer ("The Passion of Joan of Arc")
Alfred Hitchcock ("Psycho")
Ingmar Bergman ("The Hour of the Wolf")

2012

John Ford ("The Grapes of Wrath")
The Coen Brothers ("Raising Arizona")
R.W. Fassbinder ("Ali: Fear Eats the Soul")
Jacques Tati ("Mon Oncle")
David Lean ("Hobson's Choice")
William Wyler ("Roman Holiday")
Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands")
Orson Welles ("The Trial")
Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away")
Akira Kurosawa ("Ran")
Billy Wilder ("Sunset Boulevard")

2011

Steven Spielberg ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind")
Federico Fellini ("Nights of Cabiria")
David Cronenberg ("The Fly")
Stanley Kubrick ("The Shining")
Woody Allen ("Love and Death")
Wong Kar Wai ("Chungking Express")

2010

Andrei Tarkovsky ("Stalker")
Luis Buñuel ("The Exterminating Angel")
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