Aria

An iconoclast whose work acutely attacked the conventions of genre filmmaking, Altman both satirized and revitalized such warhorses as the Western, the musical, and the crime drama, waging war on the sterile artifice of mainstream storytelling by creating a singularly sprawling and deliberately messy cinematic world bursting at the seams with sounds, images, characters, and plot lines. Famed for his inventive brand of overlapping (and often improvisational) dialogue and an acknowledged master of modern camera technique, Altman’s quixotic career has been uneven at best, yet he remains a pivotal figure of contemporary cinema, a true maverick responsible for many of the defining motion pictures of his times. Born February 20, 1925, in Kansas City, MO, Altman was educated in Jesuit schools prior to joining the Army at the age of 18; over the course of WWII, he flew over 50 bombing missions in Borneo and the Dutch East Indies. Upon his discharge in 1947, Altman studied engineering at the University of Missouri. He entered filmmaking only as a whim, selling to RKO the script for the 1948 picture The Bodyguard, which he co-wrote with Richard Fleischer. Altman’s immediate success encouraged him to move to New York City, where he attempted to forge a career as a writer; he enjoyed little luck, however, and after a similarly fruitless trip to the West Coast, he returned to Kansas City, accepting a job as a director, writer, cameraman, and editor of industrial films for the Calvin Company.

After helming some 65 industrial films and documentaries, by 1955 Altman had secured over $60,000 dollars in financing from local backers to make his own feature; two years later, the finished product, titled The Delinquents, was purchased by United Artists for 150,000, dollars and while primitive, it contained the foundations of his later work in its use of casual, naturalistic dialogue. He next co-produced 1957’s The James Dean Story, a documentary rushed into theaters to capitalize on the actor’s recent death and marketed to the cult following emerging in the wake of the tragedy; while a box-office disappointment, it brought Altman to the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who tapped him as a director for his CBS television anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. After just two episodes, 1957’s “The Young One” and the next year’s “Together,” Altman was fired, but the exposure enabled him to mount a successful TV career in series including Bonanza, Combat!, and The Kraft Television Theater. Television allowed Altman the chance to experiment with narrative technique as well as develop his trademark overlapping dialogue, all the while learning to work with speed and efficiency on a limited budget. Though frequently fired for his refusal to conform to network mandates as well as his insistence upon injecting his material with political subtexts and antiwar sentiments, Altman never lacked assignments in an industry desperate for experienced talent; he even formed his own production company, Lions Gate Films, although his gambling debts nearly brought about its demise. In 1964, one of his episodes for The Kraft Television Theater was expanded for commercial release under the name Nightmare in Chicago; two years later, he accepted an invitation to direct the low-budget space travel feature Countdown, but was fired within days of the project’s conclusion because of his refusal to edit the film down to a manageable length.

Altman did not direct another movie until 1969’s That Cold Day in the Park, a critical and box-office disaster. For his next project, he agreed to adapt a little-known Korean War-era novel satirizing life in the armed services; the film had already been passed over by over a dozen other filmmakers, and production was so tumultuous that stars Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland even attempted to have Altman fired over his unorthodox filming methods. Upon its 1970 release, however, M*A*S*H was widely hailed as an immediate classic, winning the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and netting six Academy Award nominations. Now recognized as a major talent, Altman fielded countless offers to direct big-budget studio films, but instead opted to develop the surreal and experimental Brewster McCloud under his own Lions Gate imprint; issued in 1970, the ambitious but flawed film was the victim of poor box-office returns and mixed criticism, although the director himself claimed it to be his favorite among his features. With the 1971 revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, Altman returned to form in stunning fashion. Still, regardless of widespread media acclaim (in particular for Vilmos Zsigmond’s beautifully hazy cinematography), it met with commercial indifference, and despite the success enjoyed by M*A*S*H. Only the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen managed to produce work of a similar caliber to Altman during the early ‘70s, from the atmospheric, idiosyncratic Raymond Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye to the Depression-era romantic caper Thieves Like Us to the gambling study California Split. In film after brilliant film, he created one of the most provocative and original bodies of work in contemporary American cinema, yet audiences stayed away in droves; perhaps most emblematic of Altman’s box-office woes was California Split, which was already running on television only two years after its theatrical release.

With his 1975 masterpiece Nashville, however, Altman reentered the American cultural consciousness; his finest film to date, it was hailed from many corners as one of the decade’s greatest works, earning five Oscar nominations. A sprawling, intricate meditation on show business and politics featuring some two dozen major characters, Nashville not only restored the director’s box-office lustre, but it also brought his newly-developed Lion’s Gate eight-track sound system to its full realization, allowing Altman to record sound live on the set with microphones instead of more cumbersome equipment, eliminating post-dubbing and making possible later mixing and unmixing to achieve a dense, multi-layered soundtrack. Released during the nation’s July 1976 bicentennial celebration, Altman next unveiled Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, starring Paul Newman. As widely savaged as Nashville was widely acclaimed, it was subsequently re-edited for German consumption by producer Dino de Laurentiis, and upon winning the Grand Prix at the Berlin Film Festival, Altman refused the honor on the grounds that the de Laurentiis cut misrepresented his vision.

The public feud with de Laurentiis ended Altman’s hopes of directing the feature adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, and also put the skids on a long-planned filmization of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Instead, Altman turned to 1977’s 3 Women, a dreamlike, Bergman-esque drama, followed a year later by A Wedding, a complex black comedy with close to 50 major roles. Yet again, audiences failed to relate to the material, and after 1979’s futuristic Quintet opened and closed after just one week, both the romantic comedy A Perfect Couple and the satiric Health ran into insurmountable distribution problems and barely even surfaced in theaters. Altman next mounted Popeye, a musical based on the classic E.C. Segar comic strip with comedian Robin Williams in the title role and a script by Jules Feiffer; when the highly-anticipated production failed to live up to commercial or critical expectations, he responded by selling Lions Gate, effectively bringing to an end his career as a mainstream Hollywood filmmaker for over a decade.

Altman then turned to the stage, forming Sandcastle 5 Productions and agreeing to direct Ed Graczyck’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on Broadway; in 1982, he also helmed a feature version for the cable network Showtime. David Rabe’s Vietnam War drama Streamers followed a year later, and like its predecessor rejected the freewheeling flair of the director’s 1970s work in favor of a more restrained and measured style closer in spirit to the theater; still, Altman remained as idiosyncratic as ever, directing 1984’s Richard Nixon docudrama Secret Honor in a campus dormitory with the aid of student assistants while serving as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. An adaptation of Marsha Norman’s The Laundromat, commissioned by Home Box Office, followed in 1985, with a rendering of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love appearing a year later. Altman then enjoyed a remarkably prolific 1987 with two feature films, Beyond Therapy and O.C. and Stiggs, as well as two hour-long presentations for ABC television, The Dumb Waiter and Room.

Altman’s return to television after an absence of over two decades continued in 1988 with The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and the HBO miniseries Tanner ‘88, a scathing and well-received satire of the year’s Presidential election penned with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. The 1990 Van Gogh portrait Vincent and Theo earned similarly strong notices, prompting many to wonder if Altman was about to make a comeback; 1992’s The Player, a brutal attack on Hollywood morality brimming with major stars, answered their questions; Altman was indeed back, with strong box-office receipts and three Oscar nominations to prove it. Suddenly finding himself again on the A-list, he mounted 1993’s Short Cuts, adapted from short stories by Raymond Carver, a brilliantly provocative look at contemporary Los Angeles society similar in execution and tone to Nashville and the recipient of almost as much acclaim. However, both 1994’s Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter) and 1996’s Kansas City were dismally received, and with 1998’s John Grisham adaptation The Gingerbread Man, Altman found himself at the center of controversy when producers re-cut the picture following a disastrous preview screening. It finally appeared in its intended form to decidedly mixed reviews and lackluster box office. However, Altman enjoyed greater success a year later with Cookie’s Fortune. An ensemble piece about the denizens of a small Mississippi town, the film received a generally amicable reception.

Altman’s next project, Dr. T & the Women (2000), a fanciful comedy about a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere) who becomes overwhelmed by the women in his life, marked Altman’s second collaboration with screenwriter Anne Rapp after Cookie’s Fortune. It also earned mixed but generally positive reviews, many concluding that despite his previous missteps, the director had still not lost his distinctive touch. Altman’s next film, the comedic period murder-mystery, Gosford Park (2002), marked a late-career high point. A direct homage to Renoir’s Rules of the Game, the film enlisted a five-star cast including Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emily Watson; adored by critics and the public alike, it subsequently culled a myriad of Oscar nominations including nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (by Julian Fellowes), losing the first two but winning the latter. 2003’s The Company dramatized one year in the life of the Joffrey Ballet and starred Neve Campbell (who doubled as screenwriter); critics responded enthusiastically, even if the picture maintained a far lower profile than Gosford.

Meanwhile, the octogenarian Altman, a longtime fan of 30-year-plus radio humorist Garrison Keillor, devised with Keillor the idea for a filmization of his venerable Minnesota-based radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. Thrilled with Keillor’s draft of the script, the director stepped behind the camera once again in 2005, and made full use of a once-in-a-lifetime cast that included Altman standby Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, and Keillor himself. It opened in early summer, 2006, to wide praise for its warm geniality and folksy charm. With more than a trace of bittersweet, poetic irony, this film, with its ruminations on the end of life, indeed proved to be Altman’s last, marking a fitting cap to a masterful career. The 81-year-old director passed away, of complications from cancer, not five months after Prairie debuted, and eight months after receiving his Lifetime Achievement Oscar. He died in a Los Angeles hospital on November 20, 2006.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:79456~T1)

Perhaps the least lionized of the Australian New Wave filmmakers, Bruce Beresford has developed a reputation for drawing extraordinary performances from his actors, as well as enjoying great success making stage plays work on film. Much-acclaimed for historical dramas of social and moral conflict, he surprisingly first made his name with low comedy, delighting in juvenile scatology that horrified critics while regaling the Australian public. Though he had always wanted to make films, he had to leave his native country to do so, and when England proved inimical, he applied for and got a job as a film editor (and sometime cameraman) in Nigeria, remaining there until the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. Returning to England, he secured a position as a films officer for the Production Board of the British Film Institute, but on a visit to Australia in 1971, he found its film community in a state of high excitement over the formation of the Australian Film Commission. Within a matter of weeks he was back in Sydney, ready for action.

Beresford convinced the Commission that economic success was far more important than cultural prestige during the incipient stage of their venture and secured backing for his first feature, “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie” (1972). Co-written with star Barry Humphries, who had created the character in a comic strip in the British satirical magazine PRIVATE EYE, the film presented a gross caricature of a beer-swilling, sex-crazed Aussie innocent on his first visit to England, accompanied by his very proper Aunt Edna (Humphries in drag). A shot in the arm to the fledgling industry, it pigeonholed Beresford as “that lout who makes those low comedies,” and he turned to TV to rehabilitate his image, beginning his love affair with historical drama. He directed two feature-length films, “Poor Fella Me” (1973, which he also scripted), about the destruction of the Aboriginal culture at the hands of the white man, and “The Wreck of the Batavia” (1974), telling the story of a religious fanatic’s murderous control over a shipload of castaways on the West Australian coast in 1629.

After the broad strokes of the sequel “Barry McKenzie Holds His Own” (1974) and the even more disreputable “Side by Side” (1975), Beresford got his first chance to adapt a successful stage play to the screen. Though five other directors had passed on “Don’s Party” (1976), assessing the material as hopelessly stage bound, he recognized the virtue in not opening up David Williamson’s play. The grim comedy-drama about a group of chums whose friendly veneer vanishes in the drunken wake that ensues after national election results run counter to expectations was a big box office success, “The Getting of Wisdom” (1977) brought more attention outside Australia, displaying his sure handling of actors and confident recreation of the stuffy world of Victorian Melbourne, but he faltered with “The Money Movers” (1978), a caper film which failed commercially, despite a cast peopled with many popular Australian TV actors.

Inspired by Kenneth Ross’ play about the turn-of-the-century cause celebre once dubbed Britain’s Dreyfus Case, Beresford brought his own meticulous research to “Breaker Morant” (1980), which became the greatest box-office success in the history of the Australian cinema (to that time) and earned the Australian Film Institute’s Best Film award and an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (to which the director had contributed). The powerful account of a true incident of sanctioned murder during the Boer War evoked memories of My Lai, not to mention Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957), and though the three individuals tried for their atrocities were clearly guilty, the film also made it abundantly clear that they were “Scapegoats of Empire”, the title of an account written by George Witton, the only one of the three to escape the firing squad. 1980 also saw him team with Williamson again, adapting his play “The Club” about the power struggles within a major Australian soccer team. Reversing his “hands off” approach applied to “Don’s Party”, he attempted to expand “The Club”, but most critics felt his tampering dissipated the dramatic power of the play.

The enormous success of “Breaker Morant” brought Beresford many offers to direct in the United States, and he finally settled on “Tender Mercies” (1982), a subtle, superbly realized drama scripted by Horton Foote, the first of several projects which would immerse him in the culture of the American South. Robert Duvall won the Best Actor Oscar as an alcoholic country singer who finds the inspiration to put his life back together when he meets an attractive young widow and her little boy, and Beresford garnered an Academy Award nomination for his directing. After returning to Australia to helm “The Fringe Dwellers”, a study of the racism confronting aborigines, he found much less success with his second US offering, the vapid, large-scale rendering of the life of “King David” (both 1985), though critics noted his attempt to infuse life into the moribund genre of religious spectacle without praising the effort. He fared better with the much smaller-scaled “Crimes of the Heart” (1986), adapted from the play by Beth Henley and featuring fine performances from Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek as three slightly off-center Southern sisters.

Following the uninspired action romance “Her Alibi”, Beresford was back in top form with the Oscar-winning (Best Picture) adaptation of Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Driving Miss Daisy” (both 1989), scripted by the playwright. A sensitive portrait of an aging Southern woman (Jessica Tandy in an Oscar-winning turn) and her gently wise black chauffeur (Morgan Freeman), it raked in a ton of money on its small investment and reinforced the director’s reputation for eliciting superb performances in intense, small-scale drama. Amazingly, the Academy failed to recognize Beresford with an Oscar nod, perhaps under the mistaken assumption that the movie directed itself. Refusing to go Hollywood, he next helmed “Mr. Johnson” (1990), an adaptation of a Joyce Carey novel set in 1923 Africa, which drew on his own experience of Africa during the 60s, and followed with the haunting, graphically violent “Black Robe” (1991), a much more realistic depiction of Indian life than “Dances with Wolves” (1990). Set in mid-17th Century Canada and devoid of revisionist apologies, “Black Robe” told the bleak story of the first contact of the Huron Indians with the Jesuit missionaries who would ultimately betray them to their enemies.

Beresford attempted to recreate the depth and intimacy of his best work with the “Daisy” producing team of Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck in “Rich in Love” (1993) but didn’t quite succeed in weaving another evocative Southern tale, though there were many fine moments and great performances by the likes of Albert Finney and Kathryn Erbe in the leading femme role. He continued his interest in the clash between “native” cultures and the forces of “civilization” that invade them in a more satirical vein with “A Good Man in Africa” (1994), combining sexual intrigue and political corruption, but to mixed reviews. He also helmed that year’s well-made, but lackluster thriller “Silent Fall”, featuring Richard Dreyfuss as a psychiatrist working with an autistic child who witnessed a murder. Though his next venture, “Last Dance” (1996), suffered by comparison with the similarly-themed “Dead Man Walking” from the year before, it boasted a strong central performance by Sharon Stone in the deglamorized role of convicted murderess and represented the director’s best outing in awhile.

Hearing a tape recording of a musical choir recreating a concert that took place in a Japanese prison camp for women during World War II gave Beresford the idea for “Paradise Road” (1997), which he wrote as well as directed. This lushly-filmed, true account of a group of European women who formed a choir to cope with their confinement was certainly inspiring and its performances moving but lacked the bite and requisite story arc to make a completely satisfying movie. Beresford then returned to the land of the thriller for “Double Jeopardy” (1999), a movie as full of holes as Swiss cheese, which despite its deficiencies took in more than $65 million in its first three weeks. A patch-work pastiche packaged as a quasi-remake of “The Fugitive” (complete with arguably Tommy Lee Jones’ best work since that pic), it was not one of the director’s better efforts, but its well-acted hokum (particularly the fierce turn by star Ashley Judd) appeased the bottom line and left Beresford free to flex his artistic muscles helming productions of operas like “The Crucible” (1999, based on the Arthur Miller play) and “Rigoletto” (2000). —TCM

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)

Derek Jarman (January 31, 1942- February 19, 1994), British film director, artist, and writer.

Jarman’s first films were experimental super 8mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further (in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last Of England (1987) and The Garden (1990)) as a parallel to his narrative work.

Jarman made his debut in “overground” narrative filmmaking with the groundbreaking Sebastiane (1976), arguably the first British film to feature positive images of gay sexuality, and the first (and to date, only) film entirely in Latin. He follwed this with the film many regard as his first masterpiece, Jubilee (shot 1977, released 1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I of England is transported forward in time to a desolate and brutal wasteland ruled by her twentieth century namesake. Jubilee was arguably the first UK punk movie, and amongst its cast featured punk groups and figures such as Wayne County, Jordan and Adam and the Ants.

Jarman was a forthright and prominent gay activist.

After making the unconventional Shakespeare adaptation The Tempest in 1979 (a film praised by several Shakespeare scholars, but dismissed by some traditionalist critics), Jarman spent seven years making experimental super 8mm films and attempting to raise money for Caravaggio (he later claimed to have rewritten the script seventeen times during this period). Finally released in 1986, it attracted a comparitively wide audience (and is still, barring the cult hit Jubilee, probably his most widely-known work), partly due to the involvement, for the first time, of the British television company Channel 4 in funding and distribution. This marked the beginning of a new phase in Jarman’s filmmaking career: from now on all his films would be part-funded by television companies, often receiving their most prominent exhibition in TV screenings.

The conclusion of Caravaggio also marked the beginning of a temporary abandonment of traditional narrative in Jarman’s work. Frustrated by the formality of 35mm film production, and the institutional dependence and resultant prolonged inactivity associated with it (which had already cost him seven years with Caravaggio, as well as derailing several long-term projects), Jarman returned to and expanded the super 8mm-based form he had previously worked in on Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation.

The first film to result from this new semi-narrative phase, The Last of England tolled the death of a country, ravaged by Thatcher’s conservatism. “Wrenchingly beautiful…the film is one of the few commanding works of personal cinema in the late 80’s—a call to open our eyes to a world violated by greed and repression, to see what irrevocable damage has been wrought on city, countryside and soul, how our skies, our bodies, have turned poisonous,” The Village Voice

During the making of The Garden, Jarman became seriously ill. Although he recovered sufficiently to complete the film, he never attempted anything on a comparable scale afterwards, returning to a more pared-down form for his concluding narrative films, Edward II (perhaps his most politically outspoken work, informed by his Queer activism) and the Brechtian biographical study Wittgenstein, a delicate tragicomedy.

The film Blue was his last testament as a film-maker. At the time when he made the film, he was blind and dying of AIDS related complications. Blue consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack composed by Simon Fisher Turner featuring original music by Coil (band) and other artists, where Jarman describes his life and vision. —Biographybase.com

Francis George “Franc” Roddam (born 29 April 1946) is an English film director, businessman, screenwriter, television producer and publisher. He is married to photographer Leila Ansari and has six children from previous marriages. He currently lives in London.

Roddam’s films include “Quadrophenia”, “K2”, “Aria”, “Lords of Discipline” and “War Party”. He created the worldwide TV phenomenon, “Masterchef”, which is shown in 150 countries worldwide, and there are 20 locally-produced versions. He also produced formats for “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet”, “Making Out”, and “Harry”, all of which were highly successful TV dramas. He directed the award-winning TV drama “Dummy”, which won the prestigious Prix Italia Drama Prize. He directed the Grammy-nominated/Golden Globe nominated US mini-series Moby Dick and Cleopatra. He won awards for his BBC documentaries, “Mini” and “The Family”. He is the founder and Chairman of Ziji Publishing, whose many titles include The Last Templar which sold over 5 million copies worldwide. He is a sponsor and former Governor of the London Film School and is an active member of the Greenworld Campaign. —Wikipedia

London-born Nicolas Roeg served in the military as a projectionist, and entered the movie industry immediately after World War II as a gofer and apprentice editor. He joined MGM’s British studios in 1950, and eventually became a cinematographer in 1959, working on a multitude of films of all types, from second unit work on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to primary photography on the rock & roll exploitation films Just for Fun (1963), Every Day’s a Holiday (1965), and The System (1966). He moved into the director’s chair with Performance (1970), which he co-directed with Donald Cammell, and made a major impression with the low-keyed, eerily compelling drama Walkabout (1971). By the mid-‘70s, Roeg was one of England’s most respected filmmakers, responsible for the unsettling thriller Don’t Look Now (1973), and the sci-fi drama The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). With the possible exception Insignificance (1985) and the compellingly obscure Track 29 (1988) Roeg’s output throughout the 1980s unfortunately failed to maintain the inspired creativity of his output in the previous decade.
In 1990 Roeg showed promise for the new decade with what was perhaps his most successful film to date, the visually lavish family fantasy The Witches. A wonderfully creative take on acclaimed author Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book, the film showcased Roeg’s remarkable visual flair in a format suitable for the whole family. Unfortunately the film wasn’t a true indicator for his output in the remainder of the decade. Despite the fact that his pace lagged somewhat after The Witches, 1994’s Heart of Darkness did offer an interesting take on Joseph Conrad’s novel, and those who suspected Full Body Massage was nothing more than made-for-cable softcore were actually treated to a thoughtful meditation on intimacy and human relations. In 2004 Roeg was set to make a return to the horror genre with the philosophical chiller Adina. Nicolas Roeg’s son has gained fame in the film industry in his own right as the producer of such efforts as The Matchmaker (1997) and Spider (2002).—allmovie guide

British director Ken Russell started out training for a naval career, but after wartime RAF and merchant navy service he switched goals and went into ballet. Supplementing his dancing income as an actor and still photographer, Russell put together a handful of amateur films in the 50s before being hired as a staff director by the BBC. Russell made a name for himself (albeit a name not always spoken in reverence) during the first half of the ‘60s by directing a series of iconoclastic TV dramatizations of the lives of famous composers and dancers. And if he felt that the facts were getting in the way of his story, he’d make up his own — frequently bordering on the libelous. If he had any respect for the famous persons whose lives he probed, it was secondary to his fascination with revealing all warts and open wounds.

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969’s Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director who staged a scene in a mainstream movie in which two men wrestled in the nude could escape notice, and thus Russell became more of a “star” than his actors. While some viewers had their sensibilities shaken by Women in Love, others had their sensibilities run through the blender with Russell’s next film, The Music Lovers. Predicated on the notion that Peter Tchaikovsky and his wife were, respectively, a homosexual and nymphomaniac, the film’s much discussed “highlight” is a scene in which Nina Tchaikovsky (Glenda Jackson) allows the inmates in the cellar of an insane asylum to reach up and play with her privates. But this was kid’s stuff compared to Russell’s The Devils (1971), an ultraviolent and perversely anachronistic adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Russell returned to his musical theater roots with The Boy Friend (1971), a bloated version of Sandy Wilson’s intimate 1920s pastiche, and then went back to biography with the insanely inaccurate Lisztomania (1974) and Valentino (1975). The latter film not only suggested that Rudolph Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) performed totally nude in his silent films, but also offered up the spectacle of Huntz Hall as producer Jesse Lasky. At this point, even some of the most devoted fans of Russell’s outrageous (but undeniably brilliant) visual sense were fed up with his shock-for-shock’s-sake approach and his all-consuming narcissism. Following the mind-bending horrors of Altered States in 1980, Russel maintained momentum with Gothic, a visually lavish retelling of the weekend of debauchery that gave birth to the Frankenstein mythos in the mind of a young female author named Mary Shelley. Though the film may have had its fair share of detractors due to Russel’s signature departure from historical fact, it nevertheless aquired a cult following thanks to its heavy atmosphere and dark fantasy. After detailing the exploits of yet another famed author (this time Oscar Wilde) in the 1988 comedy drama Salome’s Last Dance, Russel turned out another curiousity in the form of that same year’s Lair of the White Worm. Based on Dracula author Bram Stoker’s short story of the same name of featuring a memorable performance by a pre-romantic comedy stalwart Hugh Grant, Lair of the White Worm’s outrageous, sex vampire excess and near surreal humor earned the effort a proud spot in many a cult movie aficionado’s collection. He was back in his old form with 1991’s Whore, which conveyed several times over that life on the streets is hell — then for good measure, said it a few more times. Backed by a childishly slavering ad campaign, Whore brought Russell into the spotlight again for what would be the last time in some while.

Dabbling in television for much of the 1990s, may of Russel’s efforts during the decade were fairly unmemorable despite featuring such noteworthy actors as Richard Dreyfuss (Prisoner of Honor) and Bryan Brown (Dogboys). Just when it seemed as if Russel’s career may have lost steam for the last time, the ever unpredictable director struck back in 2002 with the unhinged comedy horror musical The Fall of the Louse of Usher. Brimming with the director’s trademark debauchery and offering a curious meld of various stories by timeless horror author Edgar Allan Poe, the film may have found Russel back in proper form, but still somehow managed to elude audiences due to both its independent origins and a virtually nonexistant advertising campaign. —allmovie

Charles B. G. Sturridge (born 24 June 1951) is an English screenwriter, producer, stage, television and film director.

Personal life

Sturridge was born in London, England to Alyson Bowman Vaughan (née Burke) and Jerome Sturridge. He was educated at Stonyhurst College. and University College, Oxford. Sturridge married Brideshead Revisited actress Phoebe Nicholls on 6 July 1985, with whom he has three children, Tom, Arthur, and Matilda Sturridge, who all act.

Career

Sturridge began his career as an actor. In 1968 he played Markland in Lindsay Anderson’s film if…. and portrayed the young Edward VII in Edward the Seventh. Directing episodes of Coronation Street, Strangers, World in Action, Crown Court and The Spoils of War by his late twenties, he gained international recognition for the eleven part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited which won over 17 awards including 2 Golden Globes and 6 British Academy awards.

Since then he has directed such films as Runners, A Handful of Dust, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Fairy Tale: A True Story, based on the Cottingley Fairies story which won the BAFTA for Best Children’s film 1998. In 2009 he wrote and directed a remake of Eric Knight’s children’s classic Lassie. He also direct the black-and-white segment “La Forza del Destino” from Aria.

Other television work includes Soft Targets (1982), A Foreign Field (1985) and Gulliver’s Travels (1996), which won 6 Emmy’s including Best Series and the Royal Television Society’s Team award.

In 2001 he wrote and directed Longitude, based on Dava Sobell’s best selling life of the clockmaker John Harrison which won the BANFF TV Festival Best Series award, two PAWS awards and five BAFTA’s. In 2000 he formed Firstsight Films whose first production was an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition which Sturridge wrote and directed. The film Shackleton (2002) starred Kenneth Branagh and was shot on location in the Arctic winning the BAFTA for Best Series and Best Costume , and the Radio Times Audience award for ‘Best Drama 2002’, it was also nominated for 7 Primetime Emmys, winning for music and photography.

Sturridge also contributed to Beckett on Film, part of a collaborative effort to film all of Samuel Beckett’s plays with Anthony Minghella, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and Neil Jordan and Patricia Rozema. Following Minghella’s death in 2009, Sturridge became a director for his final project, the television series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency starring Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose.

In 2010 he returned to Manchester and Coronation Street to direct the story of the making of its first episode The Road to Coronation Street it won both the RTS and BAFTA awards for Best Single Drama 2011 and a Gold Medal at the New York Film and TV Festival in Las Vegas.

In 2011, Sturridge directed a seven-minute short film, “Astonish Me”, written by Stephen Poliakoff to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund. The film was shown in Odeon Cinemas in August 2011 and made available on the WWF website and YouTube.

His first professional theatre production was a musical version of Charles Dicken’s Hard Times which he co-wrote and directed at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry, since then occasional theatre work includes in 1985 The Seagull (also co-translator) with Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson and Jonathan Pryce and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (2006) with Kenneth Cranham and Peter Dinklage which opened at the Gate Theatre, Dublin on Samuel Beckett’s 100th birthday and later transferred to the Barbican. He has also directed Handel’s Tolomeo (1998) for Broomhill Opera.

In 2006 Sturridge was one of a number of film and television directors who met at the Century Club to discuss their rights and representation and who subsequently became known as the ‘Century Group’. As a result of this meeting in 2007 Sturridge and other members of the group joined the board of the “Directors & Producers Rights Society” which in 2008 widened its responsibilities and changed its name to Directors UK. The DUK currently has over 4000 members and represents the creative and economic rights of UK Film and Television directors with Paul Greengrass as President and Sturridge as the elected Chair. —Wikipedia