Favourite Directors

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I haven't seen a thread on here talking about the greatest genius' of cinema. So this is a thread to discuss and listr your favourite directors. I can probably chart about 9 of my favourites, but my top 5 is probably more accurate:

1. Yasujiro Ozu (Top 5: Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Early Summer, Tokyo Twilight, Late Autumn)
2. David Lynch (Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Wild At Heart)
3. Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Permanent Vacation, Mystery Train, Night On Earth)
4. Roman Polanski (Chinatown, The Tenant, Repulsion, Knife In The Water, Rosemary’s Baby)
5. David Cronenberg (Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, A History Of Violence, Crash)

[neilhere]

Larry Clark (Kids, Bully)
Ken Loach (Wind That Shakes The Barley, Sweet Sixteen)
John Carpenter (Halloween)
Neil Jordan (The Butcher Boy)
Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy)
Rainer Fassbinder (Fear Eats The Soul)
Agnes Varda (Vagabond)
John DeBello (Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes)
Gaspar Noe (Irreversible, Carne)

[Pogue]

Quentin Tarantino
Ken Loach

[Sasha]

most of my fav films are 1 ofs (rest of the movies of the same director suck) like "dark city" from alex proyas

but some consequently good directors i can come up with are

takaishi mike
tarantino (excluding death proof)
robert rodriguez
guillermo del toro
peter jackson
cronenberg
Mamoru Oshii
(looking at this list till now, i seem such a geek)
Sergei Eisenstein
Dziga Vertov
ken loach

and ofcourse alan smithee ;)

[Pirate Utopian]

1. Stanley Kubrick
A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey

2. John Waters
Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Cecil B. Demented, Polyester, Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs

3. David Lynch
Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet

4. Federico Fellini
La dolce vita, Roma, Satyricon

5. Kenneth Anger
Invocation Of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, Fireworks, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising

Honourary mentions: Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Otto Preminger, Francis Ford Coppola, Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi, Quentin Tarintino, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl and last but not least Spike Lee.
May have missed some good directors.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

1. Stanley Kubrick
A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey

2. John Waters
Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Cecil B. Demented, Polyester, Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs

3. David Lynch
Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet

4. Federico Fellini
La dolce vita, Roma, Satyricon

5. Kenneth Anger
Invocation Of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, Fireworks, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising

Honourary mentions: Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Otto Preminger, Francis Ford Coppola, Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi, Quentin Tarintino, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl and last but not least Spike Lee.
May have missed some good directors.

I'm loving that list. Anger, Fellini, Kubrick and Lynch are all some of my favourites. Only seen Pink Flamingos by Waters but it was really good.

[Pirate Utopian]

Watch the other Waters movies too. Mondo Trasho might not be for everybody though, it makes Pink Flamingos look high budget. But still it has Divine and she's great.

[Hoxhaist]

Quentin Tarantino
Fritz Lang
Darren Aronofsky
Martin Scorsese

[Bandito]

Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and the one and olny Terry Gilliam.

http://www.cinemastrikesback.com/news/directors/terry%20gilliam.jpg

[Pinko Panther]

Hayao Miyazaki. Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, all amazing.
And, of course, Terry Gilliam.

[Young-and-angry]

Stanley Kubrick
Martin Scorsese
Ruggero Deodato

Thats the shortlist....

[Vanguard1917]

Martin Scorsese, Ken Loach, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, the Coen brothers.

[TheCultofAbeLincoln]

Tarantino (including Death Proof)
Coppola
Guy Ritchie (pre-Madonna. Hopefully his work will improve now that he's no longer with that ho)
Kubrick
Sergio Leone

and the Grandmaster of them all

http://www.moviegrooves.com/images/argentosamples/argento7.jpg

Dario Argento

Gilliam is great too. I like both 7 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas especially.

And some I forgot to mention in the first round:

Alfred Hitchcock
Blake Edwards
Clint Eastwood

[x359594]

In no particular order: Mizoguchi Kenji, Roberto Rosellini, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Oshima Nagisa, Peter Kubelka, Maya Deren, Marie Mencken, Andre de Toth, Samuel Fuller, Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, Josef von Sternberg, Charles Burnett, John Ford, Frank Borzage, Robert Aldrich, Alfred Hitchcock, Shinoda Masahiro, Howard Hawks, Sue Freidrich, Stan Brakhage, Anthony Mann, Imamura Shohei and about 20 others.

[Pirate Utopian]

Samuel Fuller is pretty good, I saw White Dog a while back.

[x359594]

Samuel Fuller is pretty good, I saw White Dog a while back.

He was always ahead of the curve on race issues. In The Steel Helmet (1951) the American sergeant calls a Korean boy a "gook" and the boy answers back, "I'm not a gook, I'm a Korean." There's also discussion between a black soldier and a Japanese-American soldier about the racist discrimination they've suffered at the hands of the country for which they're fighting.

Fuller was a combat veteran who was very anti-war and hated any war movie that functioned as a "recruitment poster". His favorite scene in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was where the Vietnamese girl sniper expresses her hatred for the American invaders with her dying breath.

All those directors I listed flirted with the Left at some time in their lives or were otherwise lifetime Leftists. A few who came from poor working class backgrounds exhibited class resent in some of their movies. For example, in Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) all the Nazi sympathizers and fifth columnists are from the bourgeoisie, and the wrongly accused hero, a factory worker, is helped by other working class characters. In Lifeboat (1944) the hero is a communist seaman who the other working class characters rally around (including a black sailor), while his opponents are once again representatives of the bourgeoisie who want to follow the orders of a captured Nazi U-boat captain.

Josef von Sternberg came from a poor background (the "von" was added to his name by a Hollywood producer), and his version of An American Tragedy (1931) was one of the most class-conscious Hollywood movies of the 1930s.

The great French director Jean Renoir made the anti-war classic The Grand Illusion (1937), the revolutionary La marseillaise (1938) and a film for the PCF La vie est à nous (1936).

All of the Japanese directors were radicals from the Old Left (Mizoguchi) or the New Left (Oshima).

[Black_Flag]

Some of the few I can think of, in no particular order:

Stanley Kuberick
Martin Scorsese
Kevin Smith
Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later)
Ken Loach
George A. Romero

[berlitz23]

I am quite surprised people listed Quentin Tarantino and Scorsese both bourgeois directors who are both adept purveyors of diversion and ideology with their gratitously violent films and dispassionate analysis on historical settings through the film medium. I am wondering why most people on here are neglecting the asian or european directors like:

Jean Luc Godard
Bela Tarr
Dardenne Brothers
Fatih Akin
Sergei Eisenstein
Dziga Vertov
Abbas Kiarostami
Luis Bunuel
Tsai-Ming Liang
Andrej Wajda
Jacques Rivette
Tsai-Ming Liang

These are some of the greatest directors, and it is quite disillusioning to see the leftist film discourse is excluding their names from the repository of filmmakers listed on the website.

[Sarah Palin]

David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, and Lars Von Trier

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I am quite surprised people listed Quentin Tarantino and Scorsese both bourgeois directors who are both adept purveyors of diversion and ideology with their gratitously violent films and dispassionate analysis on historical settings through the film medium. I am wondering why most people on here are neglecting the asian or european directors like:

Jean Luc Godard
Bela Tarr
Dardenne Brothers
Fatih Akin
Sergei Eisenstein
Dziga Vertov
Abbas Kiarostami
Luis Bunuel
Tsai-Ming Liang
Andrej Wajda
Jacques Rivette
Tsai-Ming Liang

These are some of the greatest directors, and it is quite disillusioning to see the leftist film discourse is excluding their names from the repository of filmmakers listed on the website.

Godard and Bunuel are very much in my top ten. And I have to say I love Kiarostami, he reminds me a lot of my all time favourite director Yasujiro Ozu.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, and Lars Von Trier

Nice another Jarmusch fan. What's your favourite?

[MarxSchmarx]

Some that aren't my favorite but haven't been mentioned:

Krzysztof Kieslowski (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001425/)
Cliched but whatever
Alfonso Cuarón (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0190859/)
If this guy's films aren't social realism I don't know what is.
Laurent Cantet (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0134559/)
Trite but come on, it's why we go to the movies, to be inspired.
Michael Apted (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000776/)
Well the last guy has some real crap but when he's good (like the incident at oglala and coal miner's daughter) holy molly is he good.

[Pirate Utopian]

I am quite surprised people listed Quentin Tarantino and Scorsese both bourgeois directors who are both adept purveyors of diversion and ideology with their gratitously violent films and dispassionate analysis on historical settings through the film medium.
Oh god, what is it with people who see politics behind everything?
Cant you enjoy a movie without thinking about the shit behind it?

[Bandito]

No, especially not about this matter, because Hollywod is influential.
Nobody said that their talent sucks, it's just because they serve a purpose that oposses ours.

[Pirate Utopian]

Entertainment?

[YSR]

I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned Woody Allen. His examinations of the individual in society have been some of the best since his idol Bergman.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned Woody Allen. His examinations of the individual in society have been some of the best since his idol Bergman.

Allen is also in my top ten. Amazing film maker.

[Bandito]

He's better in writing books ;)

[Holden Caulfield]

Gus Van Sant

Stanley Kubrick

Guillermo Del Toro

[JohannGE]

Peter Watkins, but obviously not commercial enough for RevLeft tastes!

http://www.revleft.com/vb/peter-watkins-t106553/index.html

;)

[berlitz23]

Pirate Utopian don't you realize these films are hampering and blighting our hopes in accomplishing a new dynamic in film, left/political/topical films are mostly negated and deliberately excluded from canonical discourse. The directors and the companies contracting them are economically committed to the prevailing system making fodder for their public entertainment machine. This is leading to a general habit of judging works of art by their suitability for the apparatus;We are free to discuss any innovation that does not threaten any ssocial funcion yet we are not free to discuss those which threaten to change its function possibly by fusing it with the education system of with the organs of mass communication. Most of the directors mentioned on this board YOUR entertainment films are trite, blight, vacuous and your derision directed towards me and this communtiy seems antithetical to what we represent here. No i am not implying suppression of your opinion, in fact I am happy you brought this up because I think on this board we need to have a constructive dialogue on what the purpose of cinema is and its emergence in concurrence with the industrial revolution.

[Sam_b]

Andrzej Wajda

Jan Nemec

Jiri Menzel

[Pirate Utopian]

A bunch of dull rethoric that comes down on "without them there would be more political movies."
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

[x359594]

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Well, one person's play is another person's work, and for left cinephile's it's work watching Scorsese, Allen and Hollywood mainstream because their chief interest for us is how they reproduce the dominant ideology, and our pleasure comes from those filmmakers who go beyond that ideology and enter realms of truth, beauty and the possibilities of revolution.

But to each his or her own!

[Pirate Utopian]

Seriously have you watched Taxi Driver or Annie Hall?
That's top entertainment. And even though it's mainstream and/or apolitical it can be quite challenging.

For example the most popular movie last year The Dark Knight.
There were lots of questions about ethics and "good and evil" to be asked from it.

Says a major cinephile like me.

P.S. Say do you know which movie I referenced when I said all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?

[Sarah Palin]

Dead Man was unbelievably great, as was Broken Flowers.

I can't wait for his new film coming out later this year; The Limits of Control.

[TheWaffleCzar]

David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, and Lars Von Trier

Exactly same for me. They are great.

I also liked Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, but thats the only film of hers I've seen.

[x359594]

Seriously have you watched Taxi Driver or Annie Hall?...P.S. Say do you know which movie I referenced when I said all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?

I've seen both movies projected and I've watched them on TV. Ineed, they were entertaining. I have nothing against entertainment, but I like something extra, some attention mise-en-scene, cutting, camera placement, and for those reasons I prefer Hitchcock to Scorsese and Jerry Lewis to Woody Allen.

I'm guessing the refernce was to The Shinning.

[Pirate Utopian]

You should watch Cecil B. Demented.
You'd love it.

Also correct on The Shining.

[Invader Zim]

Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave)
Sergio Leone (The Good the Band, the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West)
David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Zodiac)
The Coen Brothers (Blood Simple, The Hudsucker Proxy)
Edgar Wright (Shawn of the Dead, Spaced, Hot Fuzz)
Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Time Bandits)
Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien)

[Pirate Utopian]

I've seen every feature film (all three) by Marry Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page).
She's quite good, American Psycho being her absolute best so far.