Thanks to the internet (which has likely destroyed enlightened civilization but admittedly has its upside), we have at long last been able to screen the one film by Krzysztof Kieslowski that had previously eluded us. (Our post from 2017, Kieslowski for Completists, has been updated accordingly.) Finally seeing the very fine and very representative Life Story (aka Curriculum Vitae, or, if you must go the full Peter Jennings, Zyciorys), left us thinking about directors, and completism—musings that might also have been stimulated by the fact that we recently screened Alexander the Great by MCC favorite Theo Angelopoulos . . . and were often bored. For One Hundred and Ninety Nine minutes. Yet we have every eager intention of watching the four remaining new-to-us Angelopoulos features.
This got us to thinking about great directors, and the canon and such things, and, relatedly, when and under what circumstances we find ourselves in urgent, completist mode (years ago nothing could stop us from tracking down every last Ozu, or Melville, a search that occasionally led to treasured Korean bootlegs). And with all that in mind . . . it’s time for a list!! Of a certain type of director—a subset, really, of the scores of directors whose work we are quite attached to. What we mean, exactly, is not easy to articulate, but “directors we talk about the way Bill Murray talks about Tito Puente in Stripes” comes very close.
A good point of departure for such a conversation comes from our post, What We Want from the Movies, in which we mentioned five attributes: something to say, authenticity, beauty, filminess, and voice. For this particular discussion, all five of those treasured characteristics remain crucial, but voice becomes a more prominent focus of attention. Our favorite directors with a singular, distinct, identifiable voice, and who have produced a coherent body of work, large enough to be imagined as an oeuvre, erring, at the margins, on the side of exclusivity (so a “maybe” is a “no”). Yeah, that’s the list.
From there, however, things gets increasingly arbitrary. So many MCC intimates, for example, don’t make such a list. John Huston? We easily count three masterpieces (The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, The Dead) and ten more gems without even trying . . . but he’s not quite voice-y enough for inclusion here. Louis Malle could be categorized that way as well. And the wonderful Bertrand Tavernier seems like a maybe, and we’d rank him ahead of Claude Sautet, and so on—you get the point. The list is also (of course) subjective, egregiously limited by gaps in knowledge and radically skewed by personal taste, and there’s no pretending about that—it’s not just voice, we have to have an emotional attachment to the content as well (this explains the absence of many of the giants of silent cinema and the glaring omission of John Ford, among others).
With that truckload of qualifications, here then, finally, the list, in alphabetical order, each director with one representative film. But think of this as a work in progress—or perhaps we’ve just forgotten someone. Drop us a note and we can talk about it.
Woody Allen (Manhattan)
Robert Altman (Nashville)
Theodoros Angelopoulos (The Hunters)
Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger)
Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria)
Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage)
Robert Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest)
John Cassavetes (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie)
Claude Chabrol (Just Before Nightfall)
Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale)
Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt)
Alfred Hitchcock (The Thirty Nine Steps)
Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red)
Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove)
Akira Kurosawa (High and Low)
Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window)
Jean-Pierre Melville (Army of Sahdows)
Max Ophuls (The Reckless Moment)
Yasujiro Ozu (Early Summer)
Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game)
Alain Resnais (La Guerre est Finie)
Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse)
Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s)
Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull)
Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum)
François Truffaut (The Soft Skin)
Agnes Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7)
Orson Welles (Touch of Evil)
Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity)