What I might consider to be the most important guiding influence, which helped me to understand the breadth of the world of film that exists..?
It’s The Auteurs/Mubi. Really! I’ve learned more here in the past two years than in most of my film-viewing life. I’m oh so grateful to all you pedants, vitriol spewers, criticules, poetasters and all-around snobs. I’ve come home.
What I might consider to be the most important guiding influence, which helped me to understand the breadth of the world of film that exists..?
It’s The Auteurs/Mubi. Really! I’ve learned more here in the past two years than in most of my film-viewing life. I’m oh so grateful to all you pedants, vitriol spewers, criticules, poetasters and all-around snobs. I’ve come home.
Forget to mention what Captain did, i also read that quote from Haneke about Kiarostami, plus his quote about cinema how “poor” countries have something to say. For curiosity i saw all his films from the 80’s and still watching some of the 90’s.
He is definitely interesting, but i prefer Haneke much more.
double post sorry
Order of Film Snobbery (Roughly)
I can name a director:
Steven Spielberg
I visited IMDB:
Ridley Scott
David Fincher
Christopher Nolan
Quentin Tarantino
Martin Scorsese
I looked up a top ten list once:
Alfred Hitchcock
Orson Welles
Francis Ford Coppola
Stanley Kubrick
I perused an elite IMDB message board:
Akira Kurosawa
Federico Fellini
Ingmar Bergman
I visited the Criterion Collection section at B&N:
Jean-Luc Godard
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Michelangelo Antonioni
Alain Resnais
I visited MUBI:
Andrei Tarkovsky
Béla Tarr
Name dropping because your opponent knows Tarkovsky as well:
Sergei Paradjanov
Theo Angelopoulos
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Aki Kaurismäki
Stan Brakhage
Chantal Akerman
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Now I’m just naming movie directors you’ve never heard of:
Horace Xenakis
Dmitri Moncur
Vincent Corea
Rémy Argerich
It was through this site that I found out about 3 Women by Robert Altman. I’ve rented the DVD and plan to watch it this week. I never knew that Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall starred together in a film until I heard of this. Shelley and Sissy in the same film—swoons—the world doesn’t deserve such riches.
@Mark: If you love it as much as I do, listen to the commentary by Altman too. Most commentaries to me seem to either be too boring (just discussing various elements of production), or scholarly (though their insights can be, well, insightful, they are often very monotone and uber-serious). Altman gives a good mix of both of these plus a nice dose of personal reflection.
And on the subject of commentaries (which has absolutely nothing to do with this thread), the commentary for Sideways is hilarious!!! :)
My favourite filmmaker stumbleupon is Andrea Arnold – Andrei Tarkovsky. The two Andrei/a’s. I like the poetic irony. I think they both would.
@mark — hope u enjoy the film, both shelley and sissy are fantastic in it. shelley’s best performance imo and one of the greatest performances i have ever seen in a film. one of oscar’s biggest crimes as well -not a single nomination, although shelley won at cannes and the LA film critics award and sissy the NY film critics best supporting
^ oh also i should mention the incredible avant-garde score by gerald busby. don’t think it was ever released, i have a fan-made bootleg with dialogue but it rules
As someone who has been alive for less than two decades, I would have a hierarchy with Quentin Tarantino at the top: he led me to about four different directors, who each led me to different directors, etc.
Say what you want about him, but I have Tarantino to thank for my love of cinema
Like many in my generation, I once had affinity for Tarantino. Then, I discovered two of his influences and found them to be of greater merit than he, one of them being Paul Schrader, and he was (and still is) a gateway to many other fantastic directors. Aside from that, the more I got into film in the last few years, I researched my initial favorites (Schrader, Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Scorsese, Lumet, Nolan, etc.) and began studying what they found to be influential. They lead me to John Ford, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, a greater appreciation (but still no idolitry) of Kubrick, love of Bresson, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Bergman (I must admit, with my first being The Virgin Spring he took a bit of time to warm up to, until he won me over with Persona and Through a Glass Darkly), and eventually these filmmakers’ influences and admirations came to intersect here and there, and more so with those who were opposed to each other (Schrader’s 1968 review of Teorema wherein he basically called Pasolini “stupid” and "unoriginal*, Wenders’ horror and subsequent walkout from the Cannes premiere of Haneke’s Funny Games, Godard at the beginning loving everyone and then rejecting everyone for the sake of Communism, Pasolini’s dislike of his protege Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, which along with Teorema is a dearly held favorite of mine, Imamura’s distaste for his predecessor Ozu’s style).
Now the idea in my mind is to unify these opposing forces and understand why it is I am attracted to and inclined to identifying with them.
Thanks Doofu. I’m lucky to have had such an epiphanic conversion into the world of cinema—usually we just seem to gradually fade into these things without quite realizing it.
Now I’m just naming movie directors you’ve never heard of:
Horace Xenakis
Dmitri Moncur
Vincent Corea
Rémy Argerich
Ha! You are right. I knew all of them up until this point.
Parajanov just turned me onto three films I have not seen.
You tie together films into a trilogy in order to win a Lenin Prize — and enjoy public acclaim! This happened to (Tengiz) Abuladze and his three films: his outstanding Prayer (1969), The Wishing Tree (1977), and Repentance (1986) — but they are not really connected at all. They have nothing in common. They were linked together as an excuse to award him the Lenin Prize. They tied them together because of their similar styles, because of their graphic strength of expression.
De Palma to Hitchcock. I know that it should be the other way around, but after seeing Obsession, I just had to see Vertigo. And Vertigo is unarguably the better film, of course
captain
The only example I can think of is:
Haneke—→Kiarostami
I had heard of some Kiarostami films, but never made any effort to check them out. But I had started to get into Haneke, and read his quote about Kiarostami: “My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that’s so difficult to attain.” That really pushed me to go ahead and check out Kiarostami, and I’m very glad I did!!!