Introduction: Great Filmmakers
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This entry was finished at
21:36 GMT on 10 April 2003
but posted at
01:58 GMT on 12 April 2003
I've been meaning to kick off a Great Filmmakers series of posts for a month and a half now. It's a daunting task, to put it mildly. My aims are to communicate the qualities that make each filmmaker unique; to provide a context for understanding his work; to give an overview of his career and the major recurring themes in that career; and to suggest a few, a very few, ideal entry points where you, loyal reader, may begin exploring that career on your own.
And I want to do all that in posts that are brief enough to be read in one sitting, with interruptions. I'm unsure, frankly, that I'm up to it.
My criteria for greatness are something less than scientific. The filmmaker must be a master at his craft(s) — if a director, the three primary crafts would be storytelling, visual storytelling, and, for lack of a better term, painterly composition. He must have a unique and recognizeable voice or style. He should have a broad range. His work should have an influence over his peers, if not enduring popularity more generally. And he ought to, in some manner, become more than the sum of these parts.
I keep an informal hierarchy in my mind (I'm big on informal hierarchies) of great filmmakers. There are four tiers, and the top, the highest, has only three names. I'm tough, you see. The second tier is more heavily populated, containing most of the names you would expect on a list like this. Members of this level may be less consistent, less unique or more derivative than I think is necessary for the very top. Those on the third tier have achieved greatness at least once, probably have it in them to do it again, but mostly haven't. On the fourth level are the potentials, those who, in my judgment, have it in them but have yet to achieve it.
Naturally there is a great deal of personal taste and subjectivity involved here. Still, at the top two levels, the only arguments I would expect from someone well-versed in film history would be over whom I have excluded.
Names, names, what are the names? Well, at the risk of overplaying my hand...
The top level contains, in alphabetical order, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, and Kurosawa Akira.
I'll probably write very little about Hitch, because you likely already know all about him.
When I write about Kurosawa, if ever I can bring myself to do so, it will be an intensely personal and, for me, emotionally draining piece. How personal? I will tell you the date, hour, minute, and geographic location where I first heard of his death. I'll include a MapQuest link to get you to the general vicinity (I could walk you to the exact spot). I'll describe the weather that day. Some things hit me hard. That day damn near killed me. Reread that last sentence, because I mean it literally.
Lubitsch, however, will get the full treatment. He is less well known than he ought to be.
The second level contains such names as John Ford, Fritz Lang, Ozu Yasujiro, Billy Wilder, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, and Steven Zaillian.
Citizens of Tier Three include George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But the two directors who epitomize this level to me are William Dieterle and Michael Curtiz.
There are a handful of names I place outside of this hierarchy, for one of two reasons.
First are the giants upon whose shoulders everyone else stands. George Melies invented filmic fantasy and the very notion of special effects. D. W. Griffith single-handedly constructed the grammar and early vocabulary of filmic story telling, as well as creating the first feature-length film.
Then there are those whose enormous and continuing impact on my life render me incapable of a completely objective evaluation of their work. Fred "Tex" Avery and Chuck Jones are, together, responsible for more than half of both my sense of humor and my sense of comedy (which are, by the by, quite different things). Miyazaki Hayao always makes it impossible for me to watch his films in a detached manner.
There you are. Hopefully, this will serve as a kind of guide to all of the future posts on this topic, helping you determine where I'm coming from, and giving you some hints as to where I'm on solid ground, and where I'm just stark raving loony.