Twelve Great Directors by Craig Hammill (SMC Founder)
DON SIEGEL (1912-1991)
Best known for his 1950's sci-fi horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and his 1970's cop action movie Dirty Harry, Siegel was one of those journeymen directors who bit by bit under the radar built up a body of singular, idiosyncratic work as good as any American director. The Siegel touch is usually very punchy, pulpy with flashes of poetry like a bare knuckle fight that leaves you seeing stars. . .you somehow admire before you hit the pavement unconscious. Siegel got his start editing the montages in the Warners Brothers' department (you can see his great work in Casablanca among others) and you can see that editor's mind in all his work. Siegel famously did not shoot a lot of coverage (extra footage to edit) because he knew how things would cut together. Thus he was often to bring things on time and under budget (usually a real MUST for a long career). Siegel was also capable of incredibly sustained lyric poetry, just check out his most nutso collaboration with Clint Eastwood The Beguiled about an amoral civil war soldier who gets taken in by a house of very lonely, very sexual, very fiery women. Or the spare almost Bressonian tones of his two prison classics: Riot in Cell Block 11 and Escape From Alcatraz. Not to mention a number of genre pieces that are just dynamite: Madigan, Hell is For Heroes, The Killers (with an amazing Lee Marvin and Ronald Regan as the bad guy!), Charley Varrick (an action movie starring Walter Matthau!). Of course, this programmer's favorites are the first two mentioned. Invasion of the Body Snatchers still stands as one of the weirdest Rorschach tests of all cinema (do the alien body takeovers stand in for the Communists or the mass hysteria of America?) and Dirty Harry which, despite its (wrong in this programmer's opinion) reputation as some kind of right-wing action movie, really is one of the great movies about how the American hero must also be the American outsider misfit.
KENJI MISUMI (1921-1975)
This programmer often likes to say Kenji Misumi is the Japanese Don Siegel or Don Siegel is the American Kenji Misumi. I'm not sure that means anything to anyone but me. But it means something! Maybe what I mean is that, like Siegel, Misumi made a career directing mostly genre Samurai fare with great flair until people wised up and realized this was a full blown top tier film artist. Misumi often got picked to launch series because of his success launching the original Zatoichi movie in the early 1960's. He also directed the first three Lone Wolf and Cub movies (later re-cut into one American dubbed movie we know as Shogun Assassin) and the first Hanzo the Razor which is one of the most gonzo movies this programmer has ever seen. Imagine Dirty Harry in feudal Japan with heavy helpings of near softcore sex scenes that suddenly become avant garde investigations into... interior biology. But for this programmer, Misumi's greatest directorial moments almost always came in his Zatoichi films. You will be so grateful you took the next week to watch Fight Zatoichi Fight, Zatoichi and the Chess Expert, Zatoichi Challenged, and Samaritan Zatoichi (all available on the Criterion Channel). You're going to get your kick-ass samurai movie (actually about a blind masseur with a gambling problem who has a sword hidden as his walking cane and has a soft spot for the poor, orphans, oppressed peoples of all kinds). But you're going to get moments of such stunning poetic emotional beauty as to floor you. This still from Zatoichi Challenged begins the rightly celebrated "Swordfight in the Snow" which everyone has been stealing or honoring since (you might recognize it in Tarantino's Kill Bill Part 1). But no one could do it with that strange beautiful mix of sudden brutal violence yet tender delicacy. The Misumi touch is so cinematic it can't really be described. It must be experienced. Experience it!
JACQUES BECKER (1906-1960)
An assistant director to Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker started directing movies in the 1940's and had one of the great undersung runs of almost any director. Movies like Antoine & Antoinette, Casque D'or, Touchez Pas Aa Grisbi, and his final movie, the dynamite prison escape movie Le Trou are all suffused with this tremendous love of people, like a classic vintage wine that has that special something none of the other wines of that year have. The Becker touch tends to be this paradoxical love of characters mixed with an obsessive love of grace note detail. Nowhere is this on better display than one of the all-time great gangster noirs Touchez Pas Au Grisibi starring a ferocious lion in winter Jean Gabin. The story is as punchy as it gets: Max, a sophisticated yet aging gangster, pulls off a perfect heist. But then his bonehead partner gets himself caught and Max has to descend into the French underworld (this whole movie feels like it was shot in a dreamworld Paris at night) one last time to rescue him. While the movie really is THAT DYNAMITE in terms of its story, it's the little moments-Max's pajamas or the music he likes or the way he romances women or eats his late night dinner or immediately sizes up the scammers, cheap hoods, and showgirls who populate a world he desperately wants to leave behind. I guess I might as well come out with it: I'm a bit obsessed with Touchez Pas Au Grisibi, one of the greatest movies about the importance of having a touch of class in everything you do. It may very well have been Becker's most autobiographical movie on his directing style.
SERGEI EISENSTEIN (1898-1948)
Of course Eisenstein is a giant of cinema. Of course it probably is weird to see him here in a list of mostly directors who are not quite as universally celebrated as the Olympian pantheon. But for some reason, for all the name checking Eisenstein gets, this programmer doesn't actually feel like Eisenstein's visionary work/theory/recommendations on editing has been as actively pursued and developed as it should. In fact, I can only really think of one director who took Eisenstein's editing work and built on it: Martin Scorsese. Eisenstein, especially in his earlier works Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October, and Old & New, conducted a series of editing experiments that forever revolutionized what editing could be. This programmer will never forget the exhilaration and shock felt when at the end of Strike, Eisenstein intercut striking factory workers being killed by strike-busting guards with a cow being slaughtered. Or the tremendous experiments of repeated motion (showing a movement again and again from different angles so that it gains a kind of tension and extension in film space and time) in Potemkin and Old & New. Eisenstein would later skillfully continue yet hide these bold experiments (the Communist authorities felt Eisenstein, a gay theater director, was being too flamboyant and individualistic in his approach) under the cloak of national history in his tremendous historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible (both stone cold masterpieces). In Nevsky, specifically, Eisenstein cuts the imagery to Sergei Prokofiev's all-time great movie music score and thus creates ballets of sound/music/image. In his two great books, Film Form and Film Sense, Eisenstein pointed out that a truly great edit creates a kind of invisible "3rd" cut-the thought/realization/irony revealed by the juxtaposition of the SHOT A and SHOT B. This is all a way of saying that cinematic editing still feels like the true undiscovered country of cinema. Eisenstein carved out a path. We still have to climb higher up that mountain.
TAKASHI MIIKE (b. 1960)
Miike has or will soon have directed over 100 feature films. And he's only 59 years old. There's a great interview out there where he reveals candidly this has more to do with the fact that he accepts whatever projects he gets offered where the money is in place rather than some grand auteur design. And yet... there is some kind of grand auteur design. The sheer strangeness and breadth of his work along with his willingness to switch genres, tones, or throw in something totally out of left field into every movie he directs makes his work like watching a high wire act in a carnival funhouse where no one involved cares about local safety laws. Miike's sheer number of truly GREAT movies is astounding: Visitor Q, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Bird People of China, Graveyard of Honor, the Dead or Alive trilogy, Gozu, Zebraman, Big Bang Love Juvenile A, 13 Assassins. . .to just name a few. Some of these are gangster movies, some thoughtful travelogues, some hilariously inappropriate children's movies, some homoerotic future prison movies, some taboo shattering shock fests that bloom into celebrations of family. Of course, he's often most known for the movie whose still we include below: the (truly, we promise you) terrifying horror movie Audition. Like so many of his movies, Audition, about a widower in the TV business who "auditions" beautiful women hoping to find a new girlfriend or wife pulls the rug out from under you. The second half of the movie is a hilarious and biting body horror where the subject of desire turns the tables in an unbelievably scary way. When you watch a Miike movie you never know what's going to happen... but you do know it will happen in a thrillingly unique brilliant cinematic way. Every movie of Miike's is just pure inspiration never to play it totally safe.
RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER (1945-1982)
Literally born in the waning days of World War II, Fassbinder would devote his all too brief life to a kind of rage at having been born into a culture that could produce both a genius poet like Goethe and a madman like Hitler. Fassbinder famously said in a questionnaire (given him by schoolchildren!!?!) that he never expected to live to see old age. He died at 37 after a life of burning the candle at both ends with an unbelievable work output only matched by an unbelievably self-destructive regime of drugs, drink, cigarettes. Fassbinder directed over 3-4 movies, TV series, etc a year for almost all his adult life. Although every Fassbinder movie is worth seeing, standouts like Why Does Herr R Run Amok, Beware of a Holy Whore, World on a Wire, The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Fox and His Friends, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his shockingly brilliant episode in the documentary Germany in Autumn are all filled with a kind of white-hot satiric rage at the hypocrisies of all people while at the same time somehow also being deeply humanist. There's a great story an actor tells of working on a Fassbinder movie and realizing that every single character/political viewpoint in the movie at some point was mercilessly ridiculed by Fassbinder. "Well whose side are you on?" the actor asked. "I shoot in all directions," Fassbinder replied. This programmer has never heard a more succinct summation of an artistic philosophy that seems worth following. Fassbinder loved humanity and its potential so much, he devoted an entire lifetime pointing out how too bloody often everyone on all political sides, of all persuasions throws it all away.
STAN BRAKHAGE (1933-2003)
Stan Brakhage is so great, Trey Parker & Matt Stone (who had Brakhage as a teacher in college) named their South Park character "Stan" after him! Brakhage spent his entire life from his teenage years to the end of his life experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what film is and what it can do. An experimental avant garde filmmaker, Brakhage spent the first half of his career making a series of startling life action movies that often were vehicles for Brakhage to deal with his own emotional and psychological mine fields. Desistfilm & Anticipation of the Night finds a teenage Brakhage dealing with teen energy and suicidal thoughts. Window Water Baby Moving is a beautiful film about the birth of one of Brakhage's children. The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes finds Brakhage filming 30 minutes of autopsy footage in a Pittsburgh morgue to deal with death. His opus is often considered Dog Star Man, in which Brakhage did some of the most stunning, mindblowing editing in any movie by combining and layering superimpositions of solar flares, a man climbing a mountain, babies, the woods, slugs of black, painting on film, to create a kind of cinematic Ulysses/Odyssey. Brakhage would later devote the second half of his career to mostly stunning abstract movies where he would paint on film directly to create gorgeous "moving" paintings. But his later work, Commingled Containers, where Brakhage shot undulating water in extreme close up is one of the most spiritual avant garde movies this programmer has ever seen. Not to get too heady here. You might be saying right about now, "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea." But if you want a shot of inspiration directly into your creative heart, then Brakhage's body of work is just the prescription you need. The frontier of your cinematic country will expand exponentially.
MIKE LEIGH (b. 1943)
Mike Leigh has quietly amassed one of the greatest bodies of work of any living moviemaker. His ensemble pieces often deal with tender yet brutally candid looks at working class British life. Sometimes the movies veer to the humane, emotional, and heartwarming like Life Is Sweet, Career Girls, Secrets & Lies, Happy Go Lucky. Sometimes Leigh goes for the jugular of modern society with brutal (and often bitingly funny in a way that draws blood) observation pieces like Naked, High Hopes. And as of late, he's totally surprised us with a few wonderfully rich, expansive, yet idiosyncratic looks at the artistic life with Mr. Turner and Topsy Turvy. Leigh's working style is famous in the industry and famously hard to fully figure out. He improvises with his actors over and over until scenes begin to form. Then those scenes are worked on again and again until at some mysterious point, the actors realize the scene is fully written and they've just shot it. This improv to script style gives Leigh's movies a wonderful asymmetrical verisimilitude where you never know exactly what someone's going to do or say. Leigh has also benefited from lifelong collaborations with some of Britain's finest living actors-Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spahl, Lesley Manville- and the amazing cinematographer Dick Pope. Of all Leigh's movies, this programmer is most in love with Life Is Sweet, a strangely heartwarming story of a family with twin daughters who, despite their problems, seem to enjoy each other and life. And Topsy Turvy, Leigh's wonderful (and totally unexpected) biopic of Gilbert & Sullivan and the making of their hit operetta The Mikado. In some way's Topsy Turvy is Leigh's master statement. We see the behind the scenes process of making a great work of art. But we see it through the prism of all the wonderfully flawed talented human beings who come together to collaborate to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
ISMAEL RODRIGUEZ (1917-2004)
This programmer has already gone on and on about his love of the Cine De Oro (Golden Cinema) of Mexico of the 1940's-1950's. So many of the movies made during this period are as good, if not better, than the American movies being made. And I say that as someone who loves the American movies! One of the Cine's greatest directors, if not the greatest, is Ismael Rodriguez. An endlessly inventive director who always came up with extremely cinematic and clever ideas to populate his movies, Rodriguez directed some of the greatest Mexican movies of all time. Almost all of them starred the incomparable Pedro Infante. The still below is from one of their earliest collaborations Los Tres Garcia, a hilarious comedy in which three cousins vie for the love of the same woman while being constantly beaten and disciplined by their cigar smoking grandmother. There's a joke in Los Tres Garcia that my wife and I quote endlessly. Rodriguez does a great montage of how the three cousins see themselves (then hilariously shows how inept they are in real life). When it comes to Infante, he has a fantasy/dream where he is seducing the woman. In the distance she sees a group of women shrouded in black, weeping. She asks who they are. Infante says "Los abandonados" (the abandoned women), implying they're all weeping about losing him. Rodriguez seemed to be one of those directors who crammed every scene with grace notes/touches almost for fear he wasn't entertaining his audience enough. But boy could Rodriguez entertain. In this programmer's humble opinion, Rodriguez is a master entertainer and has a body of work that stands comparison with Steven Spielberg. Once my wife (who is Salvadoran) introduced me to these movies, I started to notice the ones I loved all starred Infante and were all directed by Rodriguez. Do yourself a favor and check out Los Tres Huastecos, A Todo Maquina, Dos Tipos De Cuidado, Nosotros Los Pobres (possibly the most famous of all) to name just a few. All these movies brim with a kind of cinematic exuberance we could use more of.
ERNEST SCHOEDSACK & MERIAN COOPER (1892-1979) & (1893-1973)
Schoedsack and Cooper directed two of the greatest silent documentaries ever made: Grass and Chang. They then went on to partner on two of the greatest action-adventure-horror movies ever made: The Most Dangerous Game and the original King Kong (both shot on the same sets within a year of each other). Adventurers in the truest sense of the word, Schoedsack and Cooper actually followed the Bakhtiari Tribe in Grass on their annual death-defying migration across raging rivers on inflated goat bladders, up a vertiginous snow covered mountain, etc. In Chang, they film an elephant stampede through a Southeast Asian village with insert shots of the family's pet monkey running away in terror (!). Game and Kong still remain, for this programmer, two of the most strangely pulpy, propulsive, gripping adventure yarns ever made. There's something so thrilling in Kong about the fact that the story seems to keep one upping the "thrill" factor of the scene before it. Okay these guys are on a strange island in the Pacific. Okay there are dinosaurs on this island. Okay. . .there's a 50 foot ape! Okay. . .the Ape is now in New York City and in love with a woman! The Most Dangerous Game, though endlessly copied/imitated/stolen from, is still the Original Gangster! A man and woman get shipwrecked on the private island of a seemingly sophisticated urbane big game hunter. Only to learn he causes the shipwrecks so he can hunt the "Most Dangerous" game-human beings. If you want to learn about how to generate and sustain a thrilling scenario, go to the source and check out these movies!
RICHARD LINKLATER (b. 1960)
Linklater has, in that laid back Austin way of his, quietly been proving himself to be the greatest moviemaker of his generation for the past 30 years. This programmer doesn't say this without some acknowledgement of Linklater's limitations: his movies are not as visually dynamic as you sometimes wish they would be, his output has been uneven. And yet, Linklater has that most important quality that many of his contemporaries never have felt completely comfortable with: genuineness. In movies like Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy (possibly his masterpiece), Everybody Wants Some!, and Boyhood, Linklater DOES achieve a kind of sublime visual humanism as he shows very relatable characters at very critical moments in their lives. And the moments Linklater somehow captures beautifully-your last days of high school, key moments in an evolving romantic relationship, young adulthood, and in Boyhood, all of the above, are so profoundly observed you WANT to go back to these movies again and again and again. They're like beacon flares for people who are going to hit these milestones later. Like so many great artists as well, Linklater leaves the door open for you to come in. He doesn't grab you by the collar and force your face in it. A Linklater movie has the profundity of an easy going barroom philosopher. They want to have a drink with you, hear your story, maybe tell a few themselves. But most important of all, they want to make sure you're both enjoying the moment. Because life is made up of moments. And the wise folks make sure to be present in those moments when they're happening. That, in a way, feels like the essence of Linklater's cinema.
Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.