Ingmar Bergman's unique international status as a filmmaker would seem assured on many grounds.
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?
Sergei Eisenstein is generally considered to be one of the most important figures?perhaps the most important figure?in the history of cinema. But he was not only the leading director and theorist of Soviet cinema in his own lifetime, he was also a theatre and opera director, scriptwriter, graphic artist, teacher, and critic. His contemporaries called him quite simply "the Master."
Abel Gance's career as a director was long and flamboyant. He wrote his first scripts in 1909, turning to directing a couple of years later, and made his last feature, Cyrano et d'Artagnan, in 1964. As late as 1971 he re-edited a four-hour version of his Napoleon footage to make Bonaparte et la r?volution, and he lived long enough to see his work again reach wide audiences.
