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.
In a 1958 essay entitled ?Get Out and Push,? Lindsay Anderson expressed his approach to working in the cinema.
Antonioni's cinema is one of non-identification and displacement. In almost all of his films shots can be found striking emphasis on visual structure that works in opposition to the spectator's desire to identify, as in classical Hollywood cinema, with either a protagonist's existential situation or with anything like a seamless narrative continuity?the ?impression of reality? so often evoked in conjunction with the effect of fiction films on the spectator.
Francis Ford Coppola became the first major American film director to emerge from a university degree program in filmmaking. He received his Master of Cinema degree from UCLA in 1968, after submitting his first film of consequence, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), a freewheeling comedy about a young man on the brink of manhood, to the university as his master's thesis.
The films of Constantin Costa-Gavras are exciting, enthralling, superior examples of dramatic moviemaking, but the filmmaker is far from being solely concerned with keeping the viewer in suspense. A Greek exile when he made Z, set in the country of his birth, Costa-Gavras is most interested in the motivations and misuses of power: politically, he may be best described as an anti-fascist, a humanist. As such, his films are as overtly political as any above-ground, internationally popular and respected filmmaker in history.
Jim Jarmusch has risen quickly to the forefront of young, independent American filmmakers. Recognition has been his from the very beginning with the release of his first film, Stranger Than Paradise, a work that won a Camera d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival (for best ?first film") and "Best Picture? from the National Society of Film Critics. The key to Jarmusch's success is a well-defined and thoughtfully conceived stylistic approach and a coherent circle of interests.
Emir Kusturica's films are concerned with a universal humanism. While they come out of a specific part of the world?in which the political situation plays no small role in affecting his characters' lives?they are timeless stories in that they deal with basic human needs, wants, desires, feelings, and experiences.
It is ironic that A Hard Day's Night, the one film guaranteed to ensure Richard Lester his place in cinema history, should in many ways reflect his weaknesses rather than his strengths. If the film successfully captures the socio-historical phenomenon that was the Beatles at the beginning of their superstardom; it is as much due to Alun Owen's ?day in the life? style script, which provides the ideal complement to (and restraint on) Lester's anarchic mixture of absurd/surreal humour, accelerated motion, and cinema v?rit?, to name but a few ingredients.
Joseph Losey's career spanned five decades and included work in both theater and film. Latterly an American expatriate living in Europe, the early years of his life as a director were spent in the very different milieus of New Deal political theater projects and the paranoia of the Hollywood studio system during the McCarthy era. He was blacklisted in 1951 and left America for England where he continued making films, at first under a variety of pseudonyms.
The undoubted perversity that runs throughout the works of David Lynch extends to his repeated and unexpected career turns: coming off the semi-underground Eraserhead to make the semi-respectable The Elephant Man, with a distinguished British cast; then bouncing into a Dino de Laurentiis mega-budget science-fiction fiasco, Dune; creeping back with the seductive and elusive small-town mystery of Blue Velvet; capping that by transferring his uncompromising vision of lurking sexual violence to American network television in Twin Peaks; and alienatin
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.
Described by Alain Bergala in Cahiers du cnema as ?Renoir's true heir today,? Maurice Pialat is squarely in the tradition of French auteur cinema. Like Renoir, Feyder, and Gremillon in the 1930s, and Godard, Resnais, Varda, and a few others after the war, Pialat is an artisan who works both within and against the French film industry. He has often acknowledged his ?debt? to Renoir, as well as to Pagnol, in terms of both working methods and a certain conception of realism.
