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.
Ingmar Bergman's unique international status as a filmmaker would seem assured on many grounds.
Chris Marker's principal distinction may be to have developed a form of personal essay within the documentary mode. Aside from his work little is known about him; he is elusive bordering on mysterious. Born in a suburb of Paris, he has allowed a legend to grow up about his birth in a ?far-off country.? Marker is not his name; it is one of a half-dozen aliases he has used. He chose ?Marker,? it is thought, in reference to the Magic Marker pen.
As a student at the Polish State Film School and later as a director working under government sponsorship, Roman Polanski learned to make films with few resources. Using only a few trained actors (there are but three characters in his first feature) and a hand-held camera (due to the unavailability of sophisticated equipment) Polanski managed to create several films that contributed to the international reputation of the burgeoning Polish cinema.
With a handful of international film awards and two Academy Award nominations for best foreign film (Ju Dou in 1990, and Raise the Red Lantern in 1991), Zhang Yi-Mou has emerged as the most distinguished and celebrated of mainland China filmmakers. This success is particularly admirable in view of the fact that, following a promising early education, Zhang was tragically forced to work for ten years as a field laborer during China's notorious Cultural Revolution and was not admitted to the Beijing Film Academy until he was twenty-seven.
