At the age of twenty-one, Bernardo Bertolucci established himself as a major artist in two distinct art forms, winning a prestigious award in poetry and receiving high critical acclaim for his initial film, La commare secca. This combination of talents is evident in all of his films, which have a lyric but exceptionally concrete style. His father, Attilio Bertolucci, was famous in his own right as a critic, professor, and poet, and in 1961 introduced Bernardo to Pier Paolo Pasolini, an esteemed literary figure.
An ancient Chinese encyclopedia, according to Borges, divides animals into ?(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (0 fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.? One is tempted to add, (o) those featured in Peter Greenaway's films.
Perhaps no other director has generated such a broad range of critical reaction as D.W. Griffith. For students of the motion picture, Griffith's is the most familiar name in film history. Generally acknowledged as America's most influential director (and certainly one of the most prolific), he is also perceived as being among the most limited. Praise for his mastery of film technique is matched by repeated indictments of his moral, artistic, and intellectual inadequacies.
The cinema of Aki Kaurismaki is a cinema of the absurd. He and his brother, director Mika Kaurismaki, have become two of the world's most prolific and uniquely impudent movie makers. At first, they were far outside the Finnish establishment, in that their parodies and farces lampooned the conventions of their society. Nevertheless, as they became known and respected on the international film scene, they quickly came to be regarded as the leading talents of their country's minuscule motion picture industry.
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.
Between the years 1942 and 1957, English director Michael Powell and his Hungarian partner, Emeric Pressburger, formed one of the most remarkable partnerships in cinema. Under the collaborative pseudonym ?The Archers,? the two created a series of highly visual and imaginative treatments of romantic and supernatural themes that have defied easy categorization by film historians.
