Your Top 5 Film Directors?

You mean 3rd.

 

Murnau
Hitchcock
Huston
Powell (and Pressburger)
Coen Bros

 

John Ford
Akira Kurosawa
Clint Eastwood
Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarentino

 

I have to break it down a bit differently (sorry):

My Top 5 Favorite Directors for silent work...

F. W. Murnau
Paul Leni
Erich Von Stroheim
George Melies
Rex Ingram

My Top 5 favorite for Directors accomplished in both silent & sound medium...

Fritz Lang
G. W. Pabst
King Vidor
Josef Von Sternberg
Carl T. Dreyer

My Top 5 favorite Classic & Contemporary sound film Directors...

Orson Welles
Akiro Kurosawa
Peter Jackson
Billy Wilder
Sam Peckinpah

Honorable mention (this list could go on indefinitely):

Abel Gance
Alfred Hitchcock
Stanley Kubrick
John Ford
Mike Nichols


Cat

 

That's how I feel about Fellini. I remember reading a quote from Woody Allen and he said "Don't get me wrong, his style absolutely knocks me out, but his films bore me to tears". I couldn't agree more. Trying to make it through La Dolce Vita was painful. I love Bergman, though. Persona is flat-out awesome.

 

Feel free! You've got some good choices.

 

I've got to admit I feel the same way about Fellini. I suppose it's the opposite of a guilty pleasure. I feel guilty for not liking them (at least not as much as a lot of other people do). I actually prefer Bergman much more than Fellini, in fact.

 

Yeah, I find Bergman's films to be much more...deserving of my attention? I hate to put it that way, because Fellini's artistry should not go unnoticed. There were parts of 8 1/2 that floored me from a technical/artistic standpoint (especially the opening scene in the tunnel), but the end couldn't come soon enough. After a while, I start to want something more than Marcello Mastroianni smoking cigarettes and complaining about stardom while sleeping with every gorgeous Italian woman under the sun.

I could write a book about how (some) directors like Fellini, Godard, Buñuel, etc., despite their dazzling displays of film craft, fail to connect with me in any real way. But that's for another time. When I have a publishing deal.

 

I love some of the films that Fellini has been involved with as a screenwriter, in particular, Rossellini's Open City and Paison.

 

Not really my top 5, but 5 I wanted to mention at the moment

Alfred Hitchcock
Jean Cocteau
Vittorio DeSica
Paul Verhoeven
Fritz Lang

Special mention:

Ken Russell (his movies aren't that great, but they're incredible)

 

More great picks that crossed my mind earlier. Beauty and the Beast in one of the most incredible films, visually, that I've ever seen. And The Bicycle Thief is an all time favorite (another one to thank my film class for).

 

To me Fellini films are like watching filmed stage productions with really good art direction and set design. It doesn't come alive as 'cinema', for me....
That said, I really like La Dolce Vita; I really dug Godard's Two Or Three Things I Know About Her when I saw it at the Harvard screening room in 1990 or so, nice widescreen, that was groovy.

Ken Russell never bored me! Lisztomania might suck, but it's the greatest sucky movie I've ever seen!


Oh yeah, here's my top faves, in no real order:

Hal Ashby

Terrence Malick

Stanley Kubrick

George Romero

Ken Russell


(all Americans, except that bloke at the end)

 

That's a good point. The camera angles and shot composition provide a deliberate style of space and movement, and every scene is orchestrated very precisely with regard to actors entering and leaving the frame and so on. Pretty fascinating to watch, I must say.

 

5- Francky Truffaut
4- Freddy Hitchcock
3- Charlie Chaplin
2- Marty Scorsese
1- Stan Kubrick

 

You must be close with these guys or something.

 

Hey, Stan already had an -y on his name, and you chopped it off!

(I think his close friends called him Chuck Kubrick.
Kidding.)

 

Jean-Pierre Melville
Mizoguchi Kenji
Orson Welles
Billy Wilder
Wong Kar-Wai

Other directors -- Hawks, Godard, Buñuel -- chalked up equally great lists of masterpieces. But these are the guys I feel the biggest personal affection for.

 

Excellent choice. The films by Mizoguchi should be seen more and more. Also, Mikio Naruse, whose DVDs with decent English subs are just coming out. Just a handful?

Naruse's 'Flowing (Nagareru)' is just mesmerizing. What a incredible experience to see it.

 

Naruse was almost unknown in English-speaking countries until about twenty years ago. He's still nowhere near as famous as Kurosawa, Ozu, or Mizoguchi, even though his reputation in Japan is just as high. Ironic, since Naruse's Wife, Be Like a Rose (Tsuma yo bara no yau ni) from 1935 was the first Japanese film to be widely shown in the U.S.

Most of the Naruse films I've seen have been on unsubtitled Japanese DVDs -- kind of a struggle, though since they're domestic dramas the vocabulary is easier than in the average historical epic. I'd strongly recommend them to anyone who likes Ozu, though Naruse is grittier, and his characters are usually lower down in the economic spectrum.

 

I wonder if the folks who didn't like the Fellini movies saw them on DVD rather than a movie screen--I saw the flicks back in the seventies and was enchanted by them. In the last couple of years, my best film experiences were seeing "Wizard of Oz" and "Incredible Shrinking Man" on the big screen. Both movies I'd had seen plenty of times on TV, but were incredible on the big screen.

I saw most of the Ingmar Bergman major movies as a young person in the early 70's, and I wonder if I wasn't too young to appreciate them. I did enjoy Fanny and Alexander in the 80's, tho.

 

I can't believe how menacing The Wizard of Oz tornado scene was on the big screen! And I'd seen the movie 100 times before seeing it in a theater. People watching it for the first time back in it's initial release, most likely in a much bigger and better theater than I saw it in, must have been scared to death (I was going to say blown away but I hate puns).

 

Billy Wilder
John Ford
Orson Welles
Wes Anderson
Preston Sturges

 

1)Akira Kurosawa - For building a castle just to burn it down in "Ran"
2)Eliseo Subiela - Argentine surrealist, for collecting dreams in "Don't Die Without Telling me Where You're Going"
3)Pedro Almodovar - For making my stomach hurt from laughing
4)Atom Egoyan - For showing people as they really are, particularly in "The Sweet Hereafter"
5)Stanley Kubrick - For making movies in different genres that are among my favorites in each.

 

Jean Renoir (Favourite film: Rules of the game)
Werner Herzog (Favourite film: Aguirre)
FW Murnau (Favourite film: Sunrise)
Lindsay Anderson (Favourite film: If....)

And about 100 others for 5th place- Griffith, Stroheim, Welles, Pasolini, Lumet, Marcel Ophuls, Tarkovsky...and although I've only seen 2 of their films, Chris Marker & Albert Lamorisse.

Who did I forget?

 

FRITZ LANG!