The Great Directors with Miss Media Junkie

Going back through my records, I discovered that I've done twenty posts about my favorite movies directed by some of the all-time directing greats, and yet I don't have a proper directory listing for them, and I haven't really sat down to write a mission statement or an introduction for them before now. On the one hand, I think they're pretty self-explanatory. "This is my favorite film from so-and-so director..." On the other hand, I do feel that stating my intentions about this series could be helpful.

I first started writing these posts, beginning with Luis Buñuel's "Exterminating Angel," back in June of 2010. At first I didn't intend for them to be a regular feature, but as time went by and I ran short of ideas for content, it became a nice topic to fall back on, and I started looking forward to picking out a new director every month to feature. I also found it a good way to be able to include more classic film content, which I never write about as much as I'd like to. These are not proper reviews in any sense. They're recommendation pieces that are meant to help the reader discover the works of the filmmaking greats, and I include more contextual and historical information with them than I would when I write about other films, including some brief thoughts about each director. I also tend to get more personal about my own viewing experiences, to help counteract any history lecture vibes.

Who counts as a great director? Someone who has contributed significantly to world cinema, which sounds terribly pretentious, but it's the gist of what I'm looking for. I try to stick with older and foreign directors over the contemporary, mainstream ones. I'm not trying to be comprehensive, and I'm not going in any particular order. Each month, I just write about who I want to write about. Occasionally I'll stick a Tim Burton or a David Cronenberg in the mix, if they've been around long enough and they have a substantial body of work to explore. Maybe Duncan Jones and Rian Johnson will end up being the most important filmmakers of our times, but they're still in the nascent stages of their careers and I feel it would be unwise to jump the gun. Besides, their films are more likely to come up in the regular course of my usual blogging anyway.

The criteria to be featured are pretty straightforward. I only write about directors whose work I'm very familiar with, which means I've seen at least ten of their feature films, or for those less prolific directors like Jacques Tati and Leni Riefenstahl, I've seen at least half of their filmography. Documentary work may or may not count, which I decide on a case by case basis. In a few cases this has encouraged me to seek out more films from a particular director I want to feature. There are a couple of directors who I have seen the full ten films for, but still don't feel comfortable about writing about yet, because I'm missing a few key works. For instance, I'm not keen on writing the post for Howard Hawks without seeing the original 1932 "Scarface," or the post for Fritz Lang without seeing "Die Niebelungen."

There are a few issues I'm currently wrestling with, though. I'm still working out what to do with those directors who primarily work in short forms, like Stan Brakhage and Jan Svankmajer. I'm also not sure how to handle the directors who I generally dislike, but who are clearly important enough to be featured, like Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. The more films of his I force myself to watch, the less I think I understand him. Also, I've written about a couple of films outside of this series of posts that probably should be part of the series, with a few revisions. For instance, my favorite Martin Scorsese film at the moment is "King of Comedy," which I already wrote about in 2011 after I first saw it. And I've already written a piece on "Mulholland Dr." too, my favorite David Lynch movie.

For now, I leave you with a full list of links to all the Great Director posts that I've written so far, and you can expect a new installment sometime this month. The plan is to continue to keep this post updated and I'll have a permanent link in the sidebar for it eventually.

2023

Lotte Reiniger ("The Adventures of Prince Achmed")
Penny Marshall ("Awakenings")
Melvin van Peebles ("Watermelon Man")
Guillermo Del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth")
Kathryn Bigelow ("Blue Steel")
Ousmane Sembène ("Moolaadé")
Chantal Akerman ("Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles")

2022

John Waters ("Polyester")

Cecil B. DeMille Film ("Cleopatra")

Henri-Georges Clouzot ("The Wages of Fear")

Frederick Wiseman ("At Berkeley")

Pedro Almodovar ("Volver")

Dorothy Arzner ("Craig's Wife")

Errol Morris ("Mr. Death")

Tsai Ming-Liang ("Goodbye, Dragon Inn")

Robert Wise ("The Sound of Music")

Carol Reed ("The Agony and the Ecstasy")

Paul Verhoeven ("The Fourth Man")

René Laloux ("Time Masters")

2021

Sergio Leone ("For a Few Dollars More")

Michael Curtiz ("The Adventures of Robin Hood")

Preston Sturges ("Sullivan's Travels")

Frank Capra ("Arsenic and Old Lace")

Ang Lee ("The Wedding Banquet")

Frank Perry ("Last Summer")

Rob Reiner ("The Princess Bride")

René Clair ("À Nous la Liberté")

Blake Edwards ("Victor Victoria")

Mikio Naruse ("Late Chrysanthemums")

The Archers ("Black Narcissus")

Samuel Fuller ("Shock Corridor")

Elia Kazan ("A Streetcar Named Desire")
Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind")

2020

Vincente Minnelli ("An American in Paris")
Dario Argento ("Deep Red")
Robert Stevenson ("Bedknobs and Broomsticks")
Jean-Pierre Melville ("Le Samouraï")
Alain Resnais ("Providence")
Vittorio De Sica ("Marriage, Italian Style")


2019

David Fincher ("Fight Club")

John Cassavetes ("A Woman Under the Influence")
Josef von Sternberg ("Morocco")
Richard Williams ("Who Framed Roger Rabbit")
Ken Russell ("The Boy Friend")
Nicholas Roeg ("Walkabout")
Sergei Eisenstein ("Alexander Nevsky")

2018

Jean Cocteau ("Orpheus")
Miloš Forman ("Amadeus")
Louis Malle ("Zazie dans le Métro")
Wim Wenders ("Paris, Texas")
François Truffaut ("The 400 Blows")
Sam Peckinpah ("The Ballad of Cable Hogue")

2017

Roberto Rossellini ("Stromboli")
Brian De Palma ("Carrie")
Agnes Varda ("Le Bonheur")
Francis Ford Coppola ("The Godfather")
Hal Ashby ("Harold and Maude")
Eric Rohmer ("A Tale of Autumn")
Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing")
Stanley Donen ("Singin' in the Rain")

2016

Terry Gilliam ("Brazil")
Jacques Demy ("The Young Girls of Rochefort")
Sidney Lumet ("Network")
Michelangelo Antonioni ("Red Desert")
Ernst Lubitsch ("Ninotchka")
Luchino Visconti ("The Leopard")
Clint Eastwood ("The Bridges of Madison County")
Peter Greenaway ("A Zed &Two Noughts")
Ridley Scott ("The Martian")

2015

Kenji Mizoguchi ("The Life of Oharu")
Roman Polanski ("Repulsion")
Robert Bresson ("Pickpocket")
Jean-Luc Godard ("Masculin Feminin")

2014

Mike Nichols ("The Birdcage")
George Cukor ("My Fair Lady")
Fritz Lang ("M")
Abbas Kiarostami ("Close-Up")
Krzysztof Kieslowski ("The Double Life of Veronique")

2013

Satyajit Ray ("The Big City")
Buster Keaton ("Seven Chances")
Charlie Chaplin ("The Kid")
Howard Hawks ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes")
Werner Herzog ("Lessons of Darkness")
Robert Altman ("3 Women")
Yasujiro Ozu ("Late Spring")
Pier Paolo Pasolini ("The Gospel According to St. Matthew")
Zhang Yimou ("To Live")
Carl Theodore Dreyer ("The Passion of Joan of Arc")
Alfred Hitchcock ("Psycho")
Ingmar Bergman ("The Hour of the Wolf")

2012

Sydney Pollack ("They Shoot Horses Don't They?") 

John Ford ("The Grapes of Wrath")
The Coen Brothers ("Raising Arizona")
R.W. Fassbinder ("Ali: Fear Eats the Soul")
Jacques Tati ("Mon Oncle")
Otto Preminger ("Angel Face") 

David Lean ("Hobson's Choice")

William Wyler ("Roman Holiday")
Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands")
Orson Welles ("The Trial")
Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away")
Akira Kurosawa ("Ran")
Billy Wilder ("Sunset Boulevard")

2011

Steven Spielberg ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind")
Federico Fellini ("Nights of Cabiria")
David Cronenberg ("The Fly")
Stanley Kubrick ("The Shining")
David Lynch ("Mulholland Dr.")
Martin Scorsese ("The King of Comedy")
Woody Allen ("Love and Death")
Jean Renoir ("The Rules of the Game") 
Wong Kar Wai ("Chungking Express")

2010

Andrei Tarkovsky ("Stalker")
Luis Buñuel ("The Exterminating Angel")
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