Recommend any great directors i haven't tried yet? - List of great directors.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

There's a little thing happening over at the Seven Samurai board on imdb that i found interesting:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/board/nest/6129034

They're building quite a list of great directors. Made me think of asking you all. Each time i discover a new director's work that delights me (recently Renoir and Truffaut) i worry that one day i'll run out of new directors to try!

Can anyone recommend to me some great directors, assuming i plan to or have seen films by most directors on the Seven Samurai list.

[blunted by community]

eisenstein
dmytryc
max ophuls
powell & pressburger
john ford
john huston
howard hawks
kazan
the 2 vons, sternberg, stroheim
lang
lawrence olivier
raoul walsh
michael curtiz
james whale
branagh
anthony mann
robert aldrich
vincent minelli
abel gance
sam fuller
edgar g ulmer
tod browning
murnau


all these guys have films worth checking out

[Flint]

Hey Sir Bygber-
Here's some guys I didn't see on the lists whose work I really think is phenomenal:

Tarkovsky (Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Sacrifice)
Bresson (everything from "A Man Escaped" and after)
Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life, and anything else in Technicolor)
Rene Laloux (Fantastic Planet, The Time Masters, Light Years)
Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line)
Michael Mann (Heat, Theif, Manhunter, The Insider)
Powell & Pressberger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Life & Death of Colonel Blimp)
Gilliam (complete works)
Zhang Yimou (complete works - this guy is one of my all time favorites. Some of his best: Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, The Story of Qui Ju, Not One Less)


Let me know (if you haven't seen any of these) what you think after checking it out!

-Flint

[Glenn Anders]

Sir Bygber: Add Aleksei German and the late Elim Klimov.

I wish you great discoveries.

Glenn

[allegra]

...and by all means, don't forget Fassbinder!!!

[Christopher]

I am also a great fan of Chinese director Zhang Yimou...and what about the Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa? He's on my list of the Top Ten.

[TheMcGuffin]

Wow...such a hard and fun question. I guess the best way to answer this is to give my favorite 10 directors...in no particular order...that would take to freakin long:

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Orson Welles
3. Akira Kursawa
4. Billy Wilder
5. Francois Truffaut
6. Zhang Yi Mou
7. Powell & Pressburger
8. John Woo
9. Martin Scorcese
10. Charlie Chaplin

Dang that was harder than i thought. These aren't my choices of 10 best directors of all time, but the ones whose work i like watching the most

[Sir Bygber Brown]

The directors i've checked out at length so far are:

Welles
Woody Allen
Fellini
Kurosawa (Fav: Rashomon, Ran and Yojimbo. checked out Dreams, decided to give him benefit of the doubt, and ended up agreeing with everyone who said it was indulgent. There are beautiful images, and some eventful moments, like the erupting of Mount Fuji, but the rest is walking, and was it really worthy of a movie?)
Robert Altman (i only didn't like Kansas City so far)
Buster Keaton (just saw The Cameraman - charming fun)
Charlie Chaplin (Modern Times with a live orchestra accompaniment = heaven)
Sergio Leone (OUATITWest and Good Bad Ugly = God; soundtrack of OUATIAmerica is great, but i couldn't respect its narrative. Moments of brilliance, great structure, but here are my quandries: Man spies on woman and pays her for sex with sweets, woman becomes fat whore, man moves on to woman he will take seriously and becomes mafia hero. Man slaps woman, woman loves man. Man plays with woman's breast with gun barrell for no good reason. Man rapes woman, woman smiles when remembering him. Man-child spies on woman-child dancing and being naked, both grow up to think they have some special connection in their past. Not for me. This is what Once Upon a Time in the West would have been like had someone not told Leone "no" every so often. First idea he had for including a complex female character (Cardinale) in his movie was having her step off the train to a low camera angle, which would spy up her skirt when the wind blew it up, and she would wear no knickers.)
Kazan (streetcar and waterfront phenomenal. Zapata - not so good, but will see again some day)
Murnau (Love Last Laugh and Nosferatu. Can't wait to see Sunrise)


(and Scorcese and Hitch, though not systematically - just every so often happen to catch a flick of theirs. Love Goodfellas and Vertigo)

And i've seen a bit of
Bergman (Smiles Summer Night and Hour of the Wolf were great. Life Marionnettes not so good)
Bunuel (wow! - Golden Age and Exterminating Angel)
Renoir (Grand Illusion)
Truffaut (400 Blows)
Lang

I've just found a copy of Eisenstein's Notes of a Film Director and am looking forward to checking out Nevsky, Potemkin, Oktober, and Ivan.

Tarkovsky sounds like something to try. Andrei Rubelev (sorry if name's wrong) is the one i've heard brought up most often. Would probably check it out first.

Am in desparate lust for von Stroheim. Saw a doco on his Greed, and scenes from it looked incredible, and was just reminded of him by seeing Grand Illusion. He gave such a subtle, incredible performance in that. Do people forget that? How great he was in that movie?

Come to think of it, i'll add:

Carl Dreyer
and Ozu to the list

Also have not seen any Cronenberg movies, or David Lean's epics.

[Christopher]

A few more of my favorites: Vittorio de Sica and Satyajit Ray. I don't think we have to worry about running out of great directors, especially when a great film is worth seeing a great many times!

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Here is another list i found, taking place on the directors board:

http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000036/flat/6137673

Even more involved than the first, because the board is devoted to talk of directors.

[Glenn Anders]

Though it was surprising and pleasant to see a discussion of Aleksei Ghermann (Guerman or German -- take your pick), what surprised me, sweeping down the lists, was how little was said about Welles, how seldom he was even mentioned!

It is also a clear tip off to a person's youth when someone puts Quentin Tarantino on the list of Great Directors.

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I tend to agree, Glenn. I didn't think what made Reservoir Dogs great was the direction. I thought the structure and the dialogue in the screenplay were what was great about it. The acting was rather average, when you look back at it. Pulp Fiction is great, but Tarantino is like Bogdanovich, you can see other people's movies in his more than you can see him. Especially true of Kill Bill (dare i even say its name on a Welles board...). I'll still put Pulp Fiction on a list of great movies, but not Tarantino on a list of directors.

[Jaime N. Christley]

It's clearly a sign of maturity, then, to begrudge someone's choices for favorite directors? Not so sure about that.

Tarantino is to film what DJ Shadow is to music, as someone wrote in the Village Voice: he takes things from everywhere and makes those things his own. The elements may not be original, but the constructions - and the films he makes from those elements - are.

Anyway, I have a friend who's about ten years younger than me and loves Bogdanovich even more than Tarantino, and not just for THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and PAPER MOON, but for many of the later films, whose reputations aren't as strong.

A few of "my" great directors that many people haven't gotten around to checking out:

Jerry Lewis (THE PATSY, THE LADIES' MAN)
Arnaud Desplechin (ESTHER KAHN, PLAYING 'IN THE COMPANY OF MEN')
Michael Haneke (CODE UNKNOWN, LA PIANISTE)
Michael Cimino (HEAVEN'S GATE)
the "other" Powell & Pressburger films (A CANTERBURY TALE, GONE TO EARTH)
Jacques Tati (PLAYTIME, M. HULOT'S HOLIDAY)
Mitchell Leisen (REMEMBER THE NIGHT)
the "other" Frank Capra (THE MIRACLE WOMAN)
Kurosawa Kiyoshi (PULSE, CURE)
Alexander Sokurov (RUSSIAN ARK, DAYS OF ECLIPSE, MARIA, MOTHER AND SON, STONE, THE LONELY VOICE OF MAN, MOURNFUL INDIFFERENCE, etc)
Michael Almereyda (HAMLET, NADJA, HAPPY HERE AND NOW)
Leo McCarey (MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, GOOD SAM)
Sacha Guitry (THE STORY OF A CHEAT, FAISONS UN RÊVE, LES PERLES DE LA COURONNE)
Boris Barnet (ALYONKA, BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS, THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA SQUARE)
King Vidor (THE BIG PARADE)
Victor Sjostrom (LOVE'S CRUCIBLE, A DANGEROUS PLEDGE, HE WHO GETS SLAPPED, THE WIND)
Andre de Toth (DAY OF THE OUTLAW, PLAY DIRTY, NONE SHALL ESCAPE, THE LAST OF THE COMANCHES)
Albert Lewin (THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE PRIVATE AFFAIRS OF BEL AMI)
Kenneth Anger (PUCE MOMENT, SCORPIO RISING)
Bruce Conner (A MOVIE, REPORT, COSMIC RAY)
Stan Brakhage (DOG STAR MAN, VISIONS IN MEDITATION#2: MESA VERDE)
Clint Eastwood (BREEZY)
John Carpenter (PRINCE OF DARKNESS, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, CHRISTINE)
early Brian De Palma (HI, MOM!)
Cy Endfield (ZULU, TRY AND GET ME!)
Phil Karlson (KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL)

and more, and more, and more...

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I'm glad you said that, b.c i agree ppl should be able to include recent directors in a list of great ones and not feel they're being thought young and inexperienced. Saying contemporary directors shouldn't be mentioned is as pretensious as saying old ones can't (many people who haven't seen great classic movies think we mention them on lists like these just to be chic - i've heard it said on IMDB boards once in a while).

I think P.T Anderson can stand among the greats. After Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love (you only need one, as Welles said) he's proved himself.

But no-one said anything about "begrudging". I said after Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs i wouldn't put Tarantino on a list of great directors. I think he's a great original screenplay writer, when he wants to be, and as a director i think he deals well with structure and form.

And i take back what i said about him not putting his own stamp on his material - even Kill Bill. But after Kill Bill and Jackie Brown, i think he's uneven. I think a great director can pick good and bad performances (let's say in Dogs, b.c Kill Bill was supposed to have that hammy, genre-endorsing acting), and there are a million and one false notes throughout Dogs. Particularly with Chris Penn and occasionally in Tim Roth (think at the end: "well let me ask you one question" for Penn).

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I think Mystic River and Unforgiven were incredible, but i don't think Eastwood can control his actors after seeing some of his other 90's movies, like Absolute Power and True Crime (horrible rendering in ham of a great suspenseful, if straightforward, Andrew Klavan novel).