It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a director retrospective. And with the Carry On reviews down to just the last handful, and summer always the easiest season to stay on top of things – not to mention that an impending move means that I’ll have less access to art theaters than I’ve enjoyed since starting this blog – I’ve decided to spend August looking at the work of some filmmaker or another.
But which? That is for you to decide, my dear readers. Though I pledged never to do one of these again, I’ve decided to go the route of setting up a reader poll – no point in me spending months tracking down, for example, every last extant G.W. Pabst film only to find out that nobody here but me gives a shit about G.W. Pabst – which is going to be open from now until 11:59 PM, CDT, June 30 (UTC -5 hours, for the non-Americans out there).
Check it out on the sidebar over there to the right. Incidentally, you can write in someone else – comment on this post to explain who – though there are certain filmmakers I will not consider, chief among them being Terrence Malick, who will be getting the weeklong retrospective treatment starting on May 30, and Tyler Perry, who I’ve been hinting for ages would get a retro, and it’s going to happen in November.
Now, a closer look at the candidates:
Kathryn Bigelow
American
Years active: 1982 – current
8 features, 5 TV episodes, 1 music video.
The first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Bigelow is known for her action films and thrillers, including cult-classic surfer/crime picture Point Break and neo-vampire movie Near Dark. Rumor holds that she is presently working on her second War on Terror movie, following the rapturously-received The Hurt Locker.
Sergei Eisenstein
Russian
Years active: 1923-1945
7 features and 2 shorts completed during his life, 1 feature completed in 1979
One of the most important filmmakers in history – his Battleship Potemkin is one of the most influential and widely-studied films ever made – Eisenstein was one of the architects of modern editing theory, and a forward-driving visual artists whose compositional language in movies such as Ivan the Terrible is among the most sophisticated that the medium has ever known.
John Hughes
American
Years active: 1982-2008
8 features as director
The quintessential chronicler of the suburban experience during the Reagan Years in such films as The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Hughes’s romanticisation of teenage life shaped how an entire generation viewed itself growing up and coming of age.
NOTE: Because of the importance of his screenplays in the development of pop cinema in the 1980s, should he win, I will also be reviewing a yet-undetermined number of Hughes-penned features that he did not direct.
Sergio Leone
Italian
Years active: 1959-1984 (as director)
7 credited features, 1 uncredited, scenes from 2 others
He did not invent the Spaghetti Western, but Leone’s masterpieces in that field – including the Man With No Name Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West – unquestionably remain the most popular exports in the history of the Italian genre film, and the filmmaker’s peculiar celebration and condemnation of extreme violence in one and the same breath has influenced countless contemporary imitators, most famously Quentin Tarantino.
Preston Sturges
American
Years active: 1940-1955 (as director)
12 features, 1 which exists in multiple forms
A writer-director in an age when such a thing was virtually unheard of, Sturges’s movies, like The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, were and remain, simply, among the funniest damn things ever put to celluloid; inspired travesties of sex and money and Americana that remain dauntingly manic even 70 years on.
NOTE: At this time, I have been unable to find a copy of Sturges’s last feature, 1955’s The French, They Are a Funny Race.
Tarr Béla
Hungarian
Years active: 1977-current
9 features, 1 TV movie, 2 shorts, 2 anthology segments
Famous – notorious? – for his 7.5-hour Sátántangó, Tarr’s aggressively unfriendly, glacial aesthetic is alienating by design, but it’s useless to deny that he is one of the most important living filmmakers, a man whose phenomenally unique work must at least be grappled with by every serious cinephile.
NOTE: At this time, I have been unable to find a copy of Tarr’s contribution to City Life, the sequence “Utolsó hajó”. Also, as his most recent project, The Turin Horse, has not yet been released outside of Europe, I will not be reviewing it as part of this retrospective, should he win.