Ingmar Bergman's unique international status as a filmmaker would seem assured on many grounds.
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.
For all the critical attention (and furious critical controversy) his work occasioned over half a century, Luis Bu?uel resisted our best taxonomical efforts. To begin with, while no artist of this century strikes one as more quintessentially Spanish than Bu?uel, how can one apply the term ?Spanish filmmaker? to a man whose oeuvre is far more nearly identified with France and Mexico than with the land of his birth?
Prior to the release of To Sleep with Anger in 1990, Charles Burnett had for two decades been writing and directing low-budget, little-known, but critically praised films that examined life and relationships among contemporary African Americans.
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.
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.
