Woody Allen's roots in American popular culture are broad and laced with a variety of European literary and filmic influences, some of them paid explicit homage within his films (Ingmar Bergman and Dostoevsky, for example), others more subtly woven into the fabric of his work from a wide range of earlier comic traditions. Allen's genuinely original voice in the cinema recalls writer-directors like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Preston Sturges, who dissect their portions of the American landscape primarily through comedy.
The American 1970s may have been dominated by a ?New Wave? of younger, auteurist-inspired filmmakers including George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola, all contemporaries as well as sometime colleagues. It is, however, an outsider to this group, the older Robert Altman, perhaps that decade's most consistent chronicler of human behavior, who could be characterized as the artistic rebel most committed to an unswerving personal vision.
Of all trades ancillary to the cinema, few offer worse preparation for a directing career than criticism. Bogdanovich's background as Hollywood historian and profiler of its legendary figures inevitably invited comparisons between his movies and those of directors like Ford, Hawks, and Dwan, whom he had deified. That he should have occasionally created films that deserve such comparison argues for his skill and resilience.
Jonathan Demme has proven himself to be one of the more acute observers of the inner life of America during the course of a directorial career that began in the early 1970s, though he began as just another prot?g? of the Roger Corman apprentice school of filmmaking. Demme's concern with character?focused particularly through the observation of telling eccentricities?is perhaps his trademark, combined with a vitality and willingness to use the frameworks of various genres to their fullest extent.
In 1992, after almost forty years in the business, Clint Eastwood finally received Oscar recognition. Unforgiven brought him the awards for Best Achievement in Directing and for Best Picture, along with a nomination for Best Actor. Indeed, this strikingly powerful Western was nominated for no less than nine Academy Awards, Gene Hackman collecting Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the movie''s ruthless marshall, ?Little Bill? Daggett, and Joel Cox taking the Oscar for editing.
For a while during the early 1980s Scottish cinema was virtually synonymous with Bill Forsyth. Today his work remains among the most original and distinctive to have emerged not only from Scotland but from Britain as a whole.
In a career spanning just over fifty years (1925-76), Hitchcock completed fifty-three feature films, twenty-three in the British period, thirty in the American. Through the early British films we can trace the evolution of his professional/artistic image, the development of both the Hitchcock style and the Hitchcock thematic. His third film (and first big commercial success), The Lodger, was crucial in establishing him as a maker of thrillers, but it was not until the mid-1950s that his name became consistently identified with that genre.
Elia Kazan's career has spanned more than four decades of enormous change in the American film industry. Often he has been a catalyst for these changes. He became a director in Hollywood at a time when studios were interested in producing the kind of serious, mature, and socially conscious stories Kazan had been putting on the stage since his Group Theatre days.
In the late 1970s, when the conflict between the State and the citizens of Poland was imminent, a new trend emerged in cinematography?the ?cinema of moral unrest.? All the films in this trend have one common denominator: an unusually cutting critical view of the state of the society and its morals, human relationships in the work process, public and private life. It is more than logical that Krzysztof Kieslowski would have belonged to this trend; he had long been concerned with the moral problems of the society, and paid attention to them throughout his film career with increasing urgency.
Few American directors have been able to work within the studio system of the American film industry with the independence that Stanley Kubrick has achieved. By steadily building a reputation as a filmmaker of international importance, he has gained full artistic control over his films, guiding the production of each of them from the earliest stages of planning and scripting through post-production. Kubrick has been able to capitalize on the wide artistic freedom that the major studios have accorded him because he learned the business of filmmaking from the ground up.
There is a trajectory that emerges from the shape of David Lean's career, and it is a misleading one. Lean first achieved fame as a director of seemingly intimate films, closely based on plays of Noel Coward. His first directorial credit was shared with Coward, for In Which We Serve. In the 1960s he was responsible for extraordinarily ambitious projects, for an epic cinema of grandiose effects, difficult location shooting, and high cultural, even literary, pretention. But, in fact, Lean's essential approach to the movies never changed.
Spike Lee is the most famous African-American to have succeeded in breaking through the Hollywood establishment to create a notable career for himself as a major director. What makes this all the more notable is that he is not a comedian?the one role in which Hollywood has usually allowed blacks to excel?but a prodigious, creative, multifaceted talent who writes, directs, edits, and acts, a filmmaker who invites comparisons with American titans like Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, and Orson Welles.
In the scramble for space and fame that became the nouvelle vague, Louis Malle began with more hard experience than Godard, Truffaut, or Chabrol, and he showed in Ascenseur pour l'chafaud that his instincts for themes and collaborators were faultless. Henri Deca?'s low-light photography and Malle's use of Jeanne Moreau established him as emblematic of the new French cinema. But the Cahiers trio with their publicist background made artistic hay while Malle persisted in a more intimate voyage of discovery with his lovely star.
Few of Mankiewicz's contemporaries experimented so radically with narrative form. In The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz (who wrote most of the films he directed) let a half-dozen voice-over narrators tell the Contessa's story, included flashbacks within flashbacks, and even showed one event twice (the slapping scene in the restaurant) from two different points of view.
The films of Mike Nichols are guided by an eye and ear of a satirist whose professional gifts emerge from a style of liberal, improvisational comedy that originated in a Chicago theater club and developed into a performing partnership with Elaine May in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In clubs and recordings, on radio, television, and Broadway, Nichols and May routines gnawed hilariously close to the bone.
Marcel Ophuls's 1976 film, The Memory of Justice, which examines war crimes by juxtaposing the Nuremburg Trials with the conflict in Vietnam, managed to please neither the critic Pauline Kael ("I feel a pang of guilt, because I think it's a very bad film?chaotic and plodding, and with an excess of self-consciousness which at times Ophuls seems to mistake for art") nor David Puttnam, one of its British producers, who claimed that the work was far too ?personal? and who apparently urged Ophuls to be more ?fascist? in his approach.
Perhaps any discussion of Steven Spielberg must inevitably begin with the consideration that, as of 1996, Spielberg remains the most commercially successful director the world has yet seen?an incredible, if mind-boggling proposition which, in another time, might have immediately made the director's films ineligible for serious critical consideration.
Fran?ois Truffaut was one of five young French film critics, writing for Andr? Bazin's Cahiers du cin?ma in the early 1950s, who became the leading French filmmakers of their generation.
King Vidor began work in Hollywood as a company clerk for Universal, submitting original scripts under the pseudonym Charles K. Wallis. (Universal employees weren't allowed to submit original work to the studio.) Vidor eventually confessed his wrongdoing and was fired as a clerk, only to be rehired as a comedy writer. Within days, he lost this job as well when Universal discontinued comedy production.
References to Orson Welles as one of America's most influential directors and Citizen Kane as one of the great American films have become a simplistic way to encapsulate Welles's unique contribution to cinema. It is a contribution which seems obvious but is difficult to adequately summarize without examining his complex career.
If nothing else, Kathryn Bigelow has lastingly scotched the assumption that the terms ?woman director? and ?action movie? are somehow incompatible. She herself has grown understandably weary of questioning along these lines, responding tersely that she does not see directing as ?a gender-related job.? But it is undeniable that no other female director has shown herself so adept at handling the intricate, kinetic ballets of stylized violence indispensable to the current Hollywood action genre.
In 1919 Lillian Gish was one of Hollywood?s most respected performers and D. W. Griffith?s favorite actress. That year, confident that her knowledge of the movies was equal to his own, Griffith asked her to direct a movie starring her sister Dorothy for Paramount. Convinced that women had already proven to be proficient directors, Gish happily accepted the offer. Griffith gave her a $50,000 budget and total liberty in the production.
