I’ve gotta get a shout in here for British director Terence Davies – director of The Terence Davies Trilogy (‘Children’, ‘Madonna and Child’ and ‘Death and Tranfiguration’), ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’, ‘The Long Day Closes’, ‘The Neon Bible’, ‘The House of Mirth’ and the just released ‘Of Time and the City’.
He’s been working since 1976 and this is his entire back catalogue. He’s arguably Britain’s greatest living director, a true auteur and continually struggles to raise funding despite the fact that his budgets are miniscule.
It’s 8 years since his last film (because of funding issues) and I can’t tell you how excited I am that ‘Of Time and the City’ will (fingers crossed) be arriving at a theatre near me soon!!
There’s the German director Ulrike Ottinger. She did a spectacular film called “Joan of Arc of Mongolia,” starring Delphine Seyrig and Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann. I had the pleasure of seeing that film twice, and have read about some of her other works. She needs greater attention.
QUAY BROTHERS
Terence Davies… I watched all his movies at the last San Sebastian Film Festival and he is amazing. A real artist!
Criterion must to do something about him!
I really like the Chinese director Jia Zhangke. He’s actually done a number of films, and even caught the attention of Scorsese, but for some reason he is still largely unknown.
zelimir zilnik needs to be known. a serbian director who won the golden bear at berlin in 1969 for his first feature film, “rani radovi” (early works).
throughout the 60s he made formally-inventive and hard-hitting socially-relevant documentary shorts (“nezaposleni ljudi” [the unemployed] won the grand prize at the oberhausen film festival in 1968).
forced into television work in the 70s and 80s because of the politically-challenging views in his films. began making low-budget feature films again in the 90s, fully-embracing digital video.
he’s a very prolific director who will leave behind a huge body of work when he’s gone. zilnik deserves a lot of critical attention.
I have to throw my scandinavian hand in the air and proudly proclaim Aki Kaurismaki. I think he’s brilliant, and while he was recently the focus of a Criterion Eclipse set, he’s still flying below the radar for a lot of people. Go and watch his films!
I used to feel this way about James Mangold prior to WALK THE LINE. His Cop Land and Identity had my attention of his prowness.
Also
Alejandro González Iñárritu, prior to 21 Grams
Also
Peter Jackson pre LotR
I guess these days I’m looking at Nick Cassavetes and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo these days.
Wow! There’ are enough films to discover here to keep me going for a year! You people are really knowledgeable!
I know his films are not rare but I never hear him discussed as a film-maker with a body of work: John Dahl.
His camera work is beautiful, his films intriguing:
Kill Me Again,
Unforgettable,
Red Rock West (brilliant!),
The Last Seduction (superb!),
Rounders,
- even Joyride
He’s my favourite Director.
Anyone else like him?
I personally dig Japan’s Shozin Fukui. Very avant-garde films!
and perhaps Shane Ryan who did the Amateur Porn star Killer films. I think his shorts were great and his features were promising.
I love Johnnie To also and one of my fav’s Sion Sono. I think Sono is one of the best directors around and he’s doing everything I would like to see in film.
Umbriel I did not know the same director did joyride and rounder. I enjoyed both of those films very much.
Kazuo Hara, documentary-maker, especially Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, includes two onscreen births, nuff said.
Some other noteworthy filmmakers to check out would be:
Mark L. Lester….His films are soo dreamy.
Glauber Rocha (BLACK GOD, WHITE DEVIL and TERRE EM TRANSE are getting DVD re-releases and his film ANTONIO DAS MORTES will be released sometime in ‘09)
Jacques Rivette (He just had a film come out in ’08 entitled: THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS and it’s had a US DVD release. If you search I’m positive you will be able to find other films of his)
Nagisa Oshima (Best known for the film IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES which I believe has a DVD release. Also May 1-31 there will be a Oshima retrospective at the Wexner Center for the arts in Columbus, OH.
Check there website: http://www.wexarts.org/
I’ve been promoting Filipino cinema a lot these days. We have quite a few Filipino directors who are relatively unknown in the international film circuit. Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon and Ishmael Bernal are probably the most highly regarded among them.
HAL HARTLEY, fer Crissakes!
this is a good topic with great information. any other favorite directors suffering from a lack of attention?
I’ve brought him up before. Jonathan Glazer is an extremely talented filmmaker, and i haven’t heard of him coming up with anything!
Glauber Rocha, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, man. I think Cinema Novo in general is over looked. I really love early political rudimentary film making like this.
I forgot.. but, Mario Bava. I really like him, and he’s popular in the avid horror buff community..but not so much with the cinephiles. It’s unfair because he had such brilliant vision for color, juxtaposition, and framing. I think he was a flower arranger and a painter before becoming a director later in life, so I think that’s where a lot of the beauty in his films came from. One of the most elegantly shot black and white films that I have ever seen is Black Sunday.
i agree about cinema novo. its really underappreciated. i’ve hardly seen any of the films myself. maybe one or two. but it needs to be studied along with the other more well-known new cinema movements of the 60s.
“Frank Borzage: another classical Hollywood director, greatly ignored . . . "
There’s a nice appreciation of Borzage in the context of the Murnau Borzage and Fox box by Michael Atkinson over at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source:
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/silent-light-20081216
“Murnau may be seen as the presiding seminal force in this scenario, but clearly the hero of the era was Borzage, who took the dreamy, multilayered Sunrise palette and infused it with human complexity and romantic seriousness . . . I have a sense Borzage has become over the last few decades one of the auteur theory’s more beloved salvations (though his name is still often mispronounced). As the retrospective testaments to, say, Cukor, Von Sternberg, Vidor, and Preminger dissipate, relative to their rediscovery heydays, the figures of Minnelli, Sirk, Boetticher, and Borzage have only grown more embraceable and formidable with time.”
Raul Ruiz is certainly under appreciated by most of the film-loving community. He has his followers, and I think gained greater recognition with his adaptation of Proust’s work – Time Regained – but his other films, and especially his Chilean work, seem overlooked. He has Bunuelian techniques, and his use of avant-garde style narrative and gorgeous camera work put him on the list of top directors still working.
Also, some silent directors that are relatively unknowns are Jean Epstein and Jean Gremillon, yet their approach to the medium was both revolutionary in their technique and visual style.
Hong Sang-Soo is a Korean director who employs Rohmer-esque social comedies to delve into human relationships and his characters are largely universal representations of the problems men and women face.
Ramin Bahrani haven’t seen his third but “Chop Shop” and “Man Push Cart” are very good neorealist looks at the American immigrant experience. He’s able to take the charged emotion out of his subject and get down to some real core unvarnished experience.
Hiroshi Shimizu
Manoel de Oliveira
Alice Guy-Blaché
Quay brothers
Yuri Norstein
Ritwik Ghatak
and Chinese cinema of the 30s and 40s
(bergmanfellinitruffautscorsesedesicablablabla- new horizons, new discoveries)
good to see a mention of Epstein by JPBelmondo- he and others in the 20s like Germaine Dulac are often overlooked when attention is paid to Deren, Brakhage and the American avant-garde. I’ve not seen nearly enough Ruiz.
But even Mizoguchi is barely known by many who claim to be film buffs
“Manoel de Oliveira”
Yes, definately.
I would also say that—although this is changing as we speak with the recent retrospectives and the Criterion DVDs—Mikio Naruse is underknown.
Well, things have certainly made big strides with Naruse in the last year or two; it’s Shimizu now who could do with more attention, good that he’s now got a (superb) set. Then again, i could do with seeing lots more Naruse too, especially from the 30s
Theo Angelopoulos: only 1 film available on UK DVD. Absolutely scandalous.
Sticking to Japanese directors: Mizoguchi yes, Shimizu and Naruse too. Far too much attention given to Kurosawa and despite my username Ozu. They even got referenced on Extras.
@WONDER6789, RE: PHIL HARTLY—
Henry Fool was good. There’s also a dvd of his short films. I didn’t really “get” them, but The Kimono was interesting, with its segments of mismatched audio-visual where we hear sounds from a public swimming pool as the woman wanders around the house — a simple but weirdly effective device.
What about Kei Kumai? I adore The Sea is Watching, widely regarded by critics (if Rotten Tomatoes is anything to go by) as mediocre (BASTARDS). I see from the IMDb site and Wiki a substantial filmography, but The Sea is Watching is the only one of his available at my local video rental place, which has quite a decent Japanese section.
Savage Steve Holland…where is he now?
Better Off Dead
One Crazy Summer
How I Got into College
The pefect anti-Hughes teen angst films
Sid Arfaan
One director that should be in the Auteurs list is the late Chang Cheh. Chang Cheh had established the Shaw Brothers studio as the leader of Kung fu cinema since the 1960’s. His films such as ‘Boxer From Shangtung’ (where John Woo served as assistant director), ‘Vengenace’, ‘Blood Brothers’ and the classic ‘One Armed Swordsman’ had all set new standards in Eastern filmmaking. Even in his later career he had made some amazing films like the Venoms Anthology, ‘Chinese Super Ninjas’ and the classic ‘Ten Tigers From Kwantung’. I was surprised that he was not available to add onto my list of favourite auteurs…