Saturday 24 September 2022

The Current Cinema and Streaming on Netflix - THE STRANGER (Thomas M. Wright, Australia, 2022)

Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, The Stranger

SPOILER ALERT (A big plot point is given away here)

Hard to know if there are better Australian films released or to be released this year, distribution and exhibition being what it is, but I doubt that there will be anything better, even near as good, as Thomas M. Wright’s The Stranger. It’s a film so full of constant surprise, so full of foreboding and mystery. It also has a moment to moment exactitude and authenticity unlike almost anything else made here. I’m hardly alone. There is already plenty of critical enthusiasm for the film both local,  following screenings at MIFF, and from the international trade press.

 

Where does it settle. Your mind goes to Melville for its policier  elements and to Antonioni for its refusal to be explicatory. These are not the usual sources for Oz film-makers so maybe I’m just guessing, letting my imagination give Wright credit for a deep cinephilic sensibility that may or may not be there. It is after all applied to what is ultimately a very elaborate police procedural, something in the manner of those European crime shows that SBS shows where it takes any number of hour long episodes before the parts finally knit together.


Sean Harris
 

For starters consider the two story lines – Henry Teague (Brit actor Sean Harris) is seemingly inadvertently given a job with hints of it being outside the law. “I don’t do violence” is his only qualifier. He’s brought in at the bottom of a ring of drug dealers and early on we learn that his immediate boss Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton) is an undercover cop. We are led to believe that the story arc is to be about the bringing down of the drug ring. Parallel with this, two police (one of them played by Jada Alberts, no idea about the other) are pouring over a kidnapping and murder case involving the disappearance of a child. 

 

There are two separate narratives operating and what seemed to be the activities of an oafish and threatening drug syndicate is in fact an elaborate police operation designed to entrap. Cops and crooks all speak the same language. All are ineffably vulgar, badly dressed and foul-mouthed. They seem to threaten violence constantly. The actors relish the opportunity and I’m sure that Wright, primarily an actor himself until his two recent features, would have encouraged them. You might even be reminded of Joseph Losey’s The Criminal, another exercise which examines a criminal milieu and allows its actors to relish their parts.

 

Except in The Stranger  there is no violence on the screen at all. Wright’s script, adapting a novel based on a real-life incident talks in whispers, deflections, apologies. Henry constantly says “Sorry, mate” and promises to do better next time 

 

Accompanying this, apart from some drone shots of a mysterious location, is a mise-en-scene devoted to close-ups, blackness, angles that keep characters almost hidden.  It’s a piece of bravura film-making and noteworthy  here especially for its singularity in a national cinema too prone to the safe and straightforward methods of telling a story. 

 

The Stranger  is going to have some theatrical screenings in October before it heads off to Netflix. See it in a picture theatre to get the best effect of its darkness and its complex sense of mystery and dread.

Wednesday 21 September 2022

CHANNEL SURFING - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison uncovers - THE FLYING SCOTSMAN (Castleton Knight, UK, 1929), SHADOWED (John Sturges, USA, 1946), WHAT DID JACK DO? (David Lynch, USA, 2017) and more

Ray Milland (centre), The Flying Scotsman

I’ve been dipping into DVDs and on air material, if for no other reason, to remind myself that I’m never going to get to the end of my movie viewing. In fact, with the current deluge, the horizon is even further away. 


I got around to watching 1929’s The Flying Scotsman which offers one of the few accessible glimpses of early British sound film making, by some measures their first sound feature, clocking in just under an hour and competing with Journey’s End, Escape and Blackmail. In this one, it’s a jolt when the first reels of inset title dialogue and music give way to the location noises of the railway social club.

 

Another of the film’s claims to our attention is the on-screen debut of Ray(mond) Milland, who had already experienced Arthur Robison’s silent version of The Informer, when the producers recruited him from his regiment as a marksman for their shoot-up action. Milland was rather hard on himself (“I couldn’t act worth a damn” he told me in the sixties) Not unlike other beginner performers of the day - John Wayne - he registers better than the trained players around him and already has his recognisable ironic delivery.

 

Pauline Johnson, The Flying Scotsman

We note that pre WW2 European movie trains were continually menaced by murderous staff (Gance’s La Roue, Adrien Brunel’s Without Warning, Bernard Vorhaus’ The Last Journey) in the way that jet liners now contain mad bombers. This film generates a lot of its interest from railway detail - the prestige Flying Scot service priding itself on making the London-Edinburgh Waverley journey on schedule, the actors dwarfed by the giant locomotive wheels, carriage material filmed while the cars are moving, footplate scenes and the striking sequence of heroine Pauline Johnson (above) clambering along the side of the speeding train without safety roping.

 

The script is dim melodrama, with retiring veteran driver, Will Hay side kick Moore Marriott no less, getting his fireman Alec Hurley dismissed for drinking on the job. Meanwhile Hurley’s replacement, young Milland contrives to pick up Marriott’s daughter Johnson at a two & sixpence Dance Palais, before he discovers the connection. A mirror is smashed foreshadowing misfortune. Hurley plots his revenge on Marriott’s last run, which of course comes with the obligatory montage of rails speeding past, filmed from the train.

 

The train footage, it’s place as a marker in the arrival of sound film and seeing Milland’s career begin, all contribute to The Flying Scotsman’s interest. Director Castleton Knight worked in newsreels and won another spot in movie history for his feature film of the fifties coronation. The handling is competent. It unconsciously projects the familiar drabness of the British scene. I do however like the little old lady presenting Marriot a chocolate bar to thank him for completing her trip on time.

 

The Filmrise DVD is good enough.

 

There’s also a minimally ambitious 1957 support movie called The Flying Scot or The Mailbag Robbery made by Herbert Compton Bennet, of 7th Veil fame, which gets the odd run on Channel 92.


 

I saw Shadowed on its 1940s initial release, one of the first films I ever watched, and I was intrigued to find that I still remembered Lloyd Corrigan finding the body in the railway culvert and the very noir image of Anita Louise on the shadowed (get it) stairs. This one departs from the usual mean streets, being set in a leafy suburb where the golf course sprinklers spray on cue.

 

It is mainly notable as early John Sturges, less interesting than his The Man Who Dared  and The Walking Hills.His talent doesn’t really assert till we get to his thrillers at Dore Schary’s MGM.

 

Widowed Corrigan is a prosperous gardening implements business owner, the father of girls Louise and teenaged Terry Moore. He’s first seen rehearsing his “Good fences make good neighbors” speech for the district lodge Wednesday Club. However, as we expect in one of these, sinister forces enter his ordered life complete with bullet-riddled body, counterfeit currency plates and an incriminating golf ball. Brenda Weisberg’s script is weak and the sub-plot with Moore and her would be criminologist admirer is embarrassing. Patience-playing heavy Paul E. Burns totally lacks menace. In fact, the film’s one class element turns out to be portly Corrigan's reluctant hero best performance.

 

However, the texture is impressive for a B movie - resembling Anthony Mann’s Republic crime films, similarly done in by feeble scripts. Cameraman Henry Freulich, son of famous stills man Roman Freulich, also did Blake Edwards’ first movie, antagonising his director, who turned round as one of their more complex movements was descending into chaos, to find Freulich practicing his golf swing. Edwards had his operator, Philip Lathrop, promoted for their next film, launching a couple of major careers. The anonymous score turns out to be by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

 

The YouTube copy is just all right.

 


And for those who have seen everything, what about What Did Jack Do? directed, written, edited, sound & design by David Lynch in 2017? Absolutely Lynch - perverse, funny, surreal and, at seventeen minutes, a treat. In B&W, with film dirt visible on the image, detective Lynch faces a talking monkey (remarkable effects work) who became obsessed with a chicken (“there were feathers everywhere!”) while off-screen trains pull out of the rail station where the interrogation is taking place. Railway waitress Emily Stofle delivers a coffee and the monkey breaks out in song before the final pursuit.

 

"...detective Lynch faces a talking monkey..."
What Did Jack Do?

Whether this one has any intent beyond disorienting the audience and indulging its author is speculative but the process is richly enjoyable.

 

Curiously funded as an art project, what we would think of it without Lynch’s participation is irrelevant. No one else would have considered it. His set construction credit is a match for Sissy Spacek’s on Phantom of the Paradise.

 

The copy on Netflix is suitably grungy.

 

The Italian Film Festival currently offers films by Gabriele Salvatores, Pif, Eduardo Leo, Silvio Soldini, Gianni Amelio & Giuseppe Tornatore - pretty well the top Italian cinema heavyweight contenders. The ones I’ve seen so far haven’t fulfilled that promise and a Pasolini retrospective reminds me I’m sorry I watched his films the first time. Events like that prop up the notion that Italian films start with Bicycle Thieves when it’s the Genina-Blassetti-Camerini era we know the least about.

Monday 19 September 2022

SixtyYears of International Art Cinema - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Notes on methods, canons, national cinemas and more.

The series on the 60 years international of art cinema 1960-2020 by Bruce Hodsdon continues with summary notes in a supplement (unnumbered) on the background to the formation of the series and related issues (see below).

These notes are intended to accompany the summary table and decadal lists of art film directors 1970-2020 (click to link)  which contain 5 lists 1970-2020 including a list of women art film directors over the full 60 years from 1960),  The sixties is the subject of an on-going separate annotated listing of directors in part 6 divided by nation-states in multiple sections.  

The notes in this instalment are on methods of selection, criteria for canons, national versus nation-state cinemas, second versus third cinema, and the question of “a new kind of cinema”?

The annotated list for the 1960s will continue with Part 6 (2) Hitchcock, Romero and art horror.

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Moving into 'the main game', part 6, an annotated grouping, by country, of filmmakers placed in geopolitical groupings identified as active directors of art films during the 60s. These  are designed to match the summary table (linked above) showing numerically the distribution of these directors covering  six decades 1960-2020. A director appears once in the decade in which they first made some critical impact. 


Method                                                                                                                                  

    The identification of filmmakers is made in global databases, primarily Wikipedia and IMDB, where entries of basic career information is the potential field from which more than 800 filmmakers have been listed.  

In the selection of names with which to search the databases I have not followed any systematic process, it is an impressionistic mix of memory, retention of information, reviews and analysis available in print  and online. It is also cumulative (one filmmaker identification tends to lead to another) over the course of a number of years, becoming a specific project c 2017.  

As both discussed and implied throughout the survey, collected identification of the expressive presence of the director is at the core of the selection for listing. The sign of major change with the postwar rise of art cinema is the full crediting in the anglo-sphere of the director’s role also in the writing if applicable, in line with the general practice in European cinema where the director generally shares writing credit.  This marked not just a change in the previously guild-imposed rules in Hollywood but also reflects the increasing proportion of emerging and established writer-directors following the end of the studio system and the rise of independent production .   

With newly discovered filmmakers an impression is formed from available reviews (mostly online) and recognition of film festivals, giving provisional weight to recognition of formal and thematic innovation, identifying an emerging creative presence in international cinema. In general terms an oeuvre including theatrical release of at least three fictional or semi-fictional art features in narrative form is required for listing. 


Canonical Criteria

What I’m attempting to do in this survey is to provisionally identify individual filmmakers from available evidence online and in print, as already indicated, from a loosely defined stream of filmmaking, chronologically and geographically located, but otherwise free of intra group hierachy.  Implicit is that a canon of individual art films is contained in the sum total of their combined filmographies. While Galt & Schoonover in ‘Global Art Cinema’ are concerned mainly with setting parameters within which art cinema might best fulfil its role between mainstream and avant-garde cinema,  Paul Schrader's focus in his ‘Film Comment’ essay in 2006 was on setting a framework in which judgement can be made, systematically applying nominated criteria in the placement of individual art films in the canon.  

Paul Schrader

Polls most often base their appeal on the arguable premise that the relative quality of individual films can be determined by assembling the preferences from a constituency that is usually ill-defined or hardly defined at all. Some meaning can be restored by giving definition to the constituency ranging from a single individual to a defined group, eg the Sight & Sound’s decennial world poll grouping of voters into critics (including scholars and film programmers) and film directors. Since digitisation, the BFI has also made available online, in their groups, individually identified choices of ‘ten best films’ in addition to the votes of the  combined constituencies.  A canon of (art) film directors is then assembled from the voting for individual films. In the 2022 poll soon to be published it seems that a new (readers?) category of voters has been introduced. 

Schrader was commissioned by a publisher to write a film version of 'The Western Canon' (1994) which literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom applied to literature. Following the Bloom model Schrader determined that the selection of criteria should be elitist, not personal and popular, focused on art rather than mainstream films, based on criteria that transcend taste. Schrader soon realised that to draw up such a list required setting criteria for selection. This in turn required not only knowing about cinema history but also the history of canon formation in the other arts. This sent him back to school taking classes in the history of Aesthetics (“like the canon, a narrative”), of Art and by extension, on the history of Ideas, only to finally  abandon the project (“my foray into futurism had diminished my appetite for archivalism”). He formulated seven criteria for judgment which are set out below in edited form. 

It's much easier to make a list than to give reasons why...Standards of taste do not restrict art; the work of art will work around rules . They do, however, establish a necessary framework for judgement. Seven may be too many or too few. 

Beauty is the bedrock of all judgements of taste...The solution to the problem of beauty is not to deny its powers but to expand its parameters...Beauty is not defined by rules and attributes but by its ability to transform reality...Seeking to free “beauty' from its cliché-ridden contemporary usage, is to relocate it in disparate cultures (Sartwell). 

Strangeness is the type of originality that we can “never altogether assimilate” (Bloom).The concept of strangeness enriches the traditional notion of originality, adding connotations of unpredictability, unknowability, and magic...Originality is a prerequisite for the canon- it is the addition of strangeness to originality that gives these works their enduring status. Strangeness is the Romantic's term and Hegel's and everyone else's thereafter – until supplanted by the more recent “defamiliarization.”  

Unity of form and subject matter. It's hard to argue with this traditional yardstick of artistic value.  “The greatness and excellence of art,” Hegel states in Aesthetics, will depend upon the degree of intimacy with which... form and subject matter are fused and united.” Mechanically reproduced art greatly – and deliciously -  complicates the possibilities of this unity. Motion pictures are multiform, juxtaposing real and artificial imagery, music, sound, décor, and acting styles to contrasting effect. Film does not have a “significant  form.,” it has significant juxtapositions of form...In a “great” film the frictions of form join to express the interplay of functions in a new “strange” way. It's impossible to discuss the form of Rules of the Game without also describing its subject matter.  

Tradition. T.S.Eliot argued that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” Bloom picks up the argument in The Western Canon. Tradition is not only handing down the process of benign transmission,” he writes,”it is also the conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion.” This argument is particularly applicable to the fast moving history of cinema. In a hundred years the movies have redefined themselves a dozen times...One of the pleasures of film studies is stacking those filmmakers atop each other, seeing them reprocess their predecessors and fellow directors...The brief span of film history makes the task described by Eliot and Bloom more immediate. The greatness of a film or filmmaker must be judged not only on its own terms but by its place in the evolution of film. 

Repeatability. Timelessnes is the sine qua non of the canonical...Films were not originally designed to “hold up.”...The ability of certain films to retain their impact after repeat viewings is a textbook example of what makes a “classic.”  

Viewer Engagement. A film specific criterion that derives not from history but from the passivity of the filmgoing experience...A primary appeal of the movies may be in fact that they ask so little of us...A great film is one that to some degree frees the viewer from this passive stupor and engages him or her in a creative process of viewing. The dynamic must be two-way.The great film not only comes at the viewer, it draws the viewer toward it... A great film, a film that endures, demands the viewer's creative complicity.  

Morality. Schrader admits his reluctance to introduce the oldest (and hoariest) artistic creation stretching from Plato through Kant to Ruskin and Leavis. He admits Triumph of the Will to the argument (or it could be 'Birth of a Nation?) as a work of moral resonance good or bad. Most agree that [ Riefenstahl's film] is evil. That's beside the point Schrader insists. It is arguably the quintessential motion picture, the fulcrum of the century of cinema, combining film's ability to document with its propensity for narrative... The point is that no work that fails to strike moral chords can be canonical.  

Filmmakers in the canon fall into at least three categories:  those whose body of work has already attracted sufficient consensus, those gaining or losing ground in the process of doing so, and those that have recently attracted attention. 

I have further summarised the above seven criteria in their order as a framework for judgment of a director’s films :    

  • Beauty measured by its ability to transform reality 
  • When originality cannot be fully assimilated by the viewer
  • The degree of intimacy with which form and subject matter are fused and united 
  • The film’s place in the evolution of cinema 
  • When the film’s impact on the viewer is retained over repeated viewings
  • When the viewer’s creative complicity is demanded    
  • No work that fails to strike moral chords can be canonical

I have not attempted, in the listings, to set up a ranking of directors’ oeuvres in order of relative ‘greatness’ globally or even in their decadal nation-state groupings. Schrader’s criteria are put forward here to suggest a possible framework for canon formation - “seven [criteria] may be too many or too few” - of individual oeuvres that are immediately applicable as benchmarks established by the expressive formal and thematic originality of the narratives making up the body of work, for example, of Bresson, Ozu, Dreyer, Tati, and Straub-Huillet. 

Schrader, a practicing filmmaker writing in 2006, is certain that cultural and technological forces are at work that will change the concept of “movies” as we have known them... The century of cinema is but a transitional phase, a canon should acknowledge that fact by (1) evaluating movies in the context of a transitional moment; and (2) by embracing a multiplicity of aesthetic criteria.      

The above canonical framework is condensed from Schrader’s  ‘Preface’. In an appendix he sets out his own 60 film canon drawn from what he sees to be the ‘transitional’ century of cinema.

National versus nation-state cinemas 

I need to acknowledge here the limitations of my system of classification based as it is on linking the notions of the author and the national in seeking to provide a brief chronicle and review of postwar cinema’s globalisation gathering momentum in the 60s of which the statistical table of my selections provides some indication of its spread over time. These are issues that the IFG with the piecemeal annual contributions to its world production survey from a range of nationally based correspondents sought to document. Due recognition has been given by the editors of ‘Global Art Cinema’, for this pioneering work quoted in my introduction and in a summary essay on the scope of the International Film Guides’s 48 annual issues 1964-2012 linked to the AFI-RMIT Research Library and available online. There is some irony in the fact that the IFG appeared to be entering a new phase when the founding editor Peter Cowie retired in 2003 to be replaced by Daniel Rosenthal (2004-6), and after a year’s break, by Hayden Smith (2008-12). In fact as previously mentioned it was struggling with the loss to the internet of advertising revenue.

In the 60s, noted above as a watershed decade, postwar decolonisation was applying increasing pressure on the decolonised nation’s retention of its previous imposed political unity, culture, and economy. In the decades from the 70s onwards the speed, scale and volume in the free global movement of people, finance, technology, and electronic media images arising in this fluid environment  transformed the concept of the post-national in a multipolar world. Stephen Crofts in his essay ‘Concepts of National Cinema’ (1998) notes the implications of these shifting hierarchies of power for the study of national cinemas. Such disjunctive relationships are most epitomised by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, with its “five nations, three religions, four languages, and two alphabets… standing as a grim emblem of the role of the state in suppressing cultural differences.” As a result Crofts chooses “to write of state and nation-state cinemas rather than nations and national cinemas while clearly differentiating  states within a federal system,” and without collapsing all into totalitarian states (386) . 

Second versus Third Cinema

In this geopolitical landscape subject to the growing forces of globalisation, the role of the state was most often directed to subsidising production but not distribution or exhibition within the nation-state ( as was the case in the Australian film revival) which internationally shifted to the state importing the film. The space for anti-state cinemas in Latin America for example was very limited emerging from the underground in the case of the onscreen polemic for a Third Cinema initially in Argentina or the cross subsidisation of art films by the Fifth Generation filmmakers that was possible in China in the 80s, pre -Tiananmen.  Art films offer the most consistent prospects for international exposure for a national cinema initially through film festivals while being subjected in this exhibition to the vagaries of cross-cultural readings. A successful mainstream film in the home market becomes an art film (with sub titles) in the importing country.

 

Fernando Solanas

Inspired by the Cuban Revolution (1959) and Brazil’s Cinema Novo, the notion of the Third Cinema was first put forward as a rallying cry both onscreen in La Hora de los Hornos (1968), and  in a subsequent manifestoThird Cinema was conceived by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino as a ‘guerilla’ cinema oppositional to the First (mainstream ‘Hollywood’) and Second (‘European’ auteurist) Cinemas, transforming the mode of production from industrial to artisanal, and reception from a passive socially fragmented audience to an often clandestine but participatory community-based one involving mobile projection units and locally led discussion.  

Third Cinema filmmakers are listed in this survey as outliers within the Second Cinema umbrella on historiographic grounds. The New Latin American Cinema was in fact closely linked with the European new waves sharing stylistic similarities and travelling the same festival paths while being adopted by a number of European film critics. Third Cinema inspired filmmaker and theorist Bolivian Jorge Sanjines was led to remark that the NLAC was better known in Europe than in Latin America. Hanlon notes that Sanjines, despite his dismissive critiques of art cinema and his commitment to making films “with the people,” the dialogue between Second and Third cinemas in his critiques and films was central to his project of creating a new cinematic language (Hanlon 352). Burton-Carvajal further comments that in the 80s, with new generations less ideologically inclined  “and the recognition that marginal and mainstream, dominant and oppositional film cultures are inextricably mixed, the impetus for manifestos declined (589).”   

Satyajit Ray

A new kind of cinema?

In the early sixties there was definite sense that a new kind of cinema was developing, though there was little agreement on what its specific characteristics actually were. For myself as a 20 year old emerging cinephile, although I had yet to master the appropriate terminology,  there was ‘de-dramatisation’ (L’Avventura), a more ‘direct approach to reality’ in fictional narrative (Umberto DThe World of Apu), ‘reflexivity’ (The Testament of Orpheus) ‘psychological’ time-driven plot (Hiroshima mon amour)  and a rapidly increasing sense of censorship-driven denial (BreathlessThe Virgin Spring). Above all, the director’s name began appearing with increasing frequency before the title indicating singular expressive agency when the film was spoken or written about. So the question became: “Have you seen the latest Bergman?” Within a year or two this form of identity-based criticism, initiated by a small minority of Paris and New York based critics, was being  applied to genre films produced by the studio system in Hollywood:  

It was relatively easy to locate art cinema as ‘not being Hollywood’: engagement of the look in terms of individual point of view rather than institutionalised spectacle, suppression of action, a tight causal chain being replaced by an episodic structure, more nuanced characterisation. Art cinema could be more ambiguous, reflexive and stylised and at the same time more naturalistic. Lacking strict parameters and with an ambiguous critical history it could be “identified for its impurity without losing its place as an alternative cinema between the mainstream and the avant-garde… Such difficulty of categorisation can be as productive to film culture as it is difficult for taxonomy” (G&S). 

Art cinema began to be discussed as a concept in anglophone circles in the late 70s. David Bordwell classified five forms of film narrative, three being classical (the ‘invisible’ Hollywood style), historical materialist  (Soviet montage) and art cinema with the innovations of Italian neo-realism extending through various European new waves. The latter culminated in a range of variations in film modernism reaching a peak across 13 European countries in the sixties to mid-seventies.  Andras Kovács describes this modernism as inspired by the art-historical context of the two avant-garde periods in the 20s and 60s, art cinema becoming a cinematic practice different from commercial entertainment as well as from the cinematic [non-narrative] avant-garde. 

Saturday Night Fever 

Classical narrational mode was not subsumed by art cinema, it continues to co-exist with it. Bordwell notes that art cinema became a coherent mode partly by defining itself as a deviation from classical mode. When the narrative is tightly driven by causality (cause and effect) classical narration is dominant. Narrative coherence and patterning is a measure of classicism in a hybrid mix. When prepossessing visuals, bold use of music and the dominance of a single driving idea (‘high concept’ ) with plot and psychology secondary, as typified by Saturday Night Fever (1976) American Gigolo (1980) and Flashdance (1983)for exampleclassicism can assume a postclassical mode (Bordwell Hollywood Tells 5). 

In the late 70s and early 80s  Kovács notes there was a weakening in modern art cinema coinciding with the decline in cinema attendances in the face of great inroads made by videotape into home audio-visual entertainment, preceding the further seismic transformation of image production, distribution and exhibition progressively erasing the distinction between film and electronic technologies.  

To extend the breadth of its spectrum of inclusion to acknowledge, in art film terms, directors of a select few mainstream blockbuster genre pictures such as Black Panther (2018) as outliers at one end, and Latin American political Third Cinema at the other, is to acknowledge G&S’s recognition of art cinema’s “elastically hybrid character” to explore central questions for current media scholarship. They further claim art cinema as “a critical category best placed to engage pressing contemporary questions of globalisation, world culture, and how the economics of transnational flows might intersect with trajectories of film form” (3).

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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith  “Art Cinema” Oxford History of World Cinema 1996

Steve Neale “Art Cinema as Institution”  Screen v.22/1 1981

Paul Schrader  “ Preface The Book I didn't Write  Film Comment September-October 2006

Rosalind Galt & Karl Schoonover “Introduction” The Impurity of Art Cinema Global Art Cinema 2010

Stephen Crofts “Concepts of National Cinema”  The Oxford Guide to Film studies Hill & Gibson eds.

Murray Smith  “Modernism and the avant gardes”  Oxford Guide ibid                                                                                                       David Andrews “Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema”  Global Art Cinema.

 Dennis Hanlon  “Jorge Sanjines, New Latin American Cinema, and European Art Film”  Global Art Cinema op cit  pp 351-65.

Julianne Burton-Caravajal  “South American Cinema”  The Oxford Guide ibid

David Bordwell  Narration in the Fiction Film 1985;  The Way Hollywood Tells It  2006


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Previous entries in this series can be found at the following links


Part One - Introduction


Part Two - Defining Art Cinema


Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism


Part Four - Authorship and Narrative


Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror


Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

 

Saturday 17 September 2022

Streaming on AppleTV+ - Rod Bishop watches "one of best series of the year"- FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL (Carlton Cuse, John Ridley, USA, 2022)


One thing you learn very quickly in post-Katrina New Orleans is don’t mention Katrina. 

If you do, you aren’t met with hostility, nor are you shunned. You will just receive a look of pain and a thousand-yard stare: a moment of unmitigated sadness, quickly followed by “let’s move along, shall we?”

Most screen work on the drowning of New Orleans has been feature-length documentaries, documentary series or television series. The only feature film I know of isHours(Eric Heisserer, 2014) and the titan of the docos is Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts(2006): 4 hours and 15 minutes of searing condemnation of how New Orleans was effectively regarded as a disposable city.

In Spike Lee’s film, seeing the levees look like sheets of corrugated iron stuck into mounds of dirt is as sobering as the fatuously incompetent remarks from those officially in charge, the Army Corps of Engineers. This is how they maintained the levees to stop large areas of below-sea-level New Orleans from being devastated by catastrophe?

Treme (Eric Ellis Overmyer, David Simon, 2010-2013) has been the stand-out television series dramatization, a celebration of all that makes that city the most beguiling in the USA and one of the most unique cities in the world. It’s a heartfelt love song; and the greatest compliment I’ve ever heard for Treme came from a seasoned music-and-film writer who defiantly stopped watching after the first season “because David Simon killed off the best character”.

And so, to the latest television series Five Days at Memorial, an eight-part dramatization of Sheri Fink’s account of life in the Memorial Hospital after Katrina. It’s five days of despair before staff and patients could be evacuated and as the final boat and helicopter departs, they leave behind 45 corpses in the hospital’s chapel.

In the first few episodes, hospital staff are interrogated by unseen inquisitors: how did this happen? What caused the high body count? Why was it far higher than comparable health facilities that faced comparable issues under the rampant floods coming from Lake Pontchartrain?

There’s a lot of hedging, a lot of obfuscation, but essentially these poor souls can’t find the words to explain how the power failed, the hospital flooded, the heat became unbearable, the toilets blocked and the medical care became rudimentary and, in the end, undeliverable. When evacuation help finally arrived on day five, not everyone could be saved.

Decisions had to be made. The able-bodied went first. The most seriously bedridden and the do-not-resuscitates were left to last. Dr. Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga, never better) leads the team to make these abandoned patients “more comfortable”.

The final shot of episode 5 shows the face of a patient turning towards some footsteps coming toward him – it’s one of the subtlest, most horrifying moments I’ve seen on film or television.

As episode 6 opens, we are introduced to the previously unseen inquisitors as they start investigating and interviewing the survivors. Incomprehension at how any health professional could have agreed to these drastic measures is met with self-laceration but also with feisty combativeness – we were left to die, how dare you come and question our decisions.

A very hard watch, but one of best series of the year. 

 


Friday 16 September 2022

Pondering Jean-Luc Godard's death - MADE IN USA (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966)


Pondering Godard’s death  I watched Made In USA  (J-L G, 1966) again yesterday.  Incoherent narrative, as usual, but brilliant ending with a speech about politics by Karina/Paula Nelson that still rings true. 

The DVD had an intro of about 3.5 minutes by Godard biographer Colin McCabe which I think gets one important piece of the narrative completely wrong!

Extras include excellent 10 min interview with Anna Karina.

Absolutely beautiful colour photography by Coutard.

Another appearance by Ernest Menzer, as Edgar Typhus. We used to think he must have been Godard’s father judging by the frequency of his cameo roles, usually as some kind of nuisance.

Marianne Faithfull is credited as a lead. She gets to sing 'As Tears Go By' unaccompanied. That's it.

  • Kyôko Kosaka as Doris Mizoguchi, Anna Karina as Paula Nelson, Made in USA

As far as I know it was never commercially released in Australia. It is  the least known of the pre-1970 winning streak. This arose because Godard credited a novel by Donald Westlake as the source but didn’t bother to buy the rights. Westlake held up the US release for decades. The film finally opened in 2009, after Westlake died. Not that anyone would have the remotest idea of the ‘source’ novel but for it being specifically stated in the credits.

Subtitles at one stage translate a loudspeaker announcement asking for “Daisy Canion to come to the front desk…” 

I say no more.  

Antenna Documentary Film Festival - The Sydney premiere of SENSES OF CINEMA (Tom Zubrycki & John Hughes, Australia, 2022)


Senses of Cinema, a 
documentary about the Filmmaker Co-operatives (1966-1986), will have its Sydney premiere on October 15th at the Chauvel Cinema as part of the Antenna Documentary Film Festival. The film is the product of a 12 year-long collaboration between filmmakers Tom Zubrycki and John Hughes.

The Co-ops nurtured Australia’s cinema renaissance and created new markets for strikingly innovate Australian content - experimental shorts, documentaries and dramas that gave voice to groups and issues that were denied expression in the mainstream media.

Here’s a link to the trailerhttps://vimeo.com/730219863

Senses of Cinema will screen on October 15th at 3pm, and again on October 23 at 6.30pm

You can book via this link:  https://tix.antennafestival.org/Events/Senses-of-Cinema/Sat-Oct-15-2022-15-00

[The film’s] generosity is exacting, thoughtful, a homage to those who shifted the limits of our screen culture…whose work provoked fundamental questions about Australian society, and the practice of filmmaking itself. There are trailblazers, ingenues, stalwarts, provocateurs here – an impressive cast, to be sure.   Al Cossar, director of Melbourne International Film Festival

Made by two of Australia’s most important and, at times, maverick documentarians in the twilight of their careers, Senses of Cinema speaks, in every way, to the importance of collaboration and the necessary recognition and resurrection of often-forgotten parts of our film history and culture. Adrian Danks “The Conversation”

Sunday 11 September 2022

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 Note:The following three tables are intended to accompany Bruce Hodsdon's series on the history of International Art Cinema.  Where appropriate in those essays a link will be provided to these tables.  However the tables also stand alone as statistical and factual information about directors who worked in the period from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Part One - World Art Film Directors 1960-2020


Countries/

Regions

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s-2000s

2010s

Total

USA

7

22

17

32

31

109

GB

6

5

6

11

21

49

Other (*1)

0

9

8

10

15

42

TOTAL

13         8%

36      31%

31      24%

53      27%

67      30%

200    25%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

France

20

13

14

22

16

85

Italy

14

6

4

4

6

34

Germany

6

7

3

5

9

30

Scandinavia (*2)

7

2

9

5

9

32

Other Western Europe (*3)

5

11

3

9

17

45

TOTAL

52      34%

39      35%

33      26%

45     23%

57      26%

226    28%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eastern Europe (*4)

37

11

5

15

20

88

USSR/Russia

11

2

8

3

3

27

TOTAL

48      33%

 13     11%

13      10%

18         9%

23      11%

115    14%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Japan

14

2

5

7

1

29

China

1

0

7

6

7

21

India

5

6

9

4

8

32

Other Asia (*5)

0

9

13

16

21

59

TOTAL

20      13%

17      14%

34      27%

33      17%

37    17%

141    17%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Middle East (*6)

2

5           2%

3       3%

22      11%

12     5%

44        5%

Latin America (*7)

16      11%

3           3%

5       4%

10        6%

20      8%

54        7%

Africa (*8)

1           1%

5           4%

8       7%

12        6%

7       3%

33        4%

GRAND TOTALS

152      100%

118      100%

127      100%

193      100%

223      100%

813     100%


The 90s and 00s have been combined as marking the two decade transition to digitisation.

 

1  Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland

2  Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland

3  Belgium, The Netherlands, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, 

4  Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Georgia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, 

5  Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, The Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Nepal

6  Iran, Turkey, Kurdistan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia

7  Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico

8  Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Angola, Cameroon, Guinea-Bisseau,  South Africa

Attach with Womens Director list to Table-  these lists immediately under the table 

Part Two - Art Film Directors by Decade 1970-2020

                                                   

IFG ‘5 Directors of the Year’ in brackets. 

*Female Director


The 1970s                                                        

USA 

Robert Altman (75) b.25    Jerry Schatzberg b.27   James Ivory (74) b.28    Hal Ashby (80) b.29    Bob Rafelson (83) b.29    John Cassavetes (76) b. 29    Clint Eastwood (95) b.30    Elaine May* b.32       Monte Hellman b.32    Barbara Loden* b.32    Woody Allen b.35 (77)    Joan Micklin Silver* b.35   Michael Ritchie b.38    Francis Ford Coppola (76) b.39    Brian De Palma b.40    Martin Scorsese (79) b.42    Terrence Malick (12) b.43    Alan Rudolph b.43    Charles Burnett b.44   Jon Jost b.43    Mark Rappaport b.42    Victor Nunez b.45  

Great Britain 

Nicolas Roeg (81) b.28    Ken Loach (95) b.28   John Boorman(74) b.33    Derek Jarman b.42    Terry Gilliam  b.40

Australia 

Rolf de Heer b .41   Peter Weir (80) b.44   John Duigan b.49    Gillian Armstrong*(96) b.50 Paul Cox b. 1950

New Zealand 

Jane Campion*(95) b.54    

Canada 

Claude Jutra b.30    Jean Beaudin b.39    David Cronenberg (06) b.43

 


France 

Walerian Borowczyk b.23     Claude Sautet (77) b.24     Maurice Pialat (82) b.25    Nelly Kaplan* b.31    Claude Faraldo b.36     Jean Eustache b.38      Bertrand Tavernier (80) b.41     Claude Miller b.42     Eduardo de Gregorio b.42    Jean-Louis Bertuccelli b.42    Jacques Doillon b.44     Diane Kurys* b.48          France/Switzerland Anne-Marie Miéville* b.45

Italy 

Marco Ferreri (75) b.28    Lina Wertmuller* (77) b.28     Ermanno Olmi (81) b.31   Ettore Scola b.31    Paolo & Vittorio Taviani b.31    Liliana Cavani* b.36     

West Germany 

Hans-Jurgen Syberberg b.35    Reinhard Hauff b.39    Werner Herzog (79) b.42    Margarethe von Trotta* b.42   Wim Wenders (80) b.45   Werner Schroeter b.45    Rainer Werner Fassbinder(76) b.45       

Austria 

Michael Haneke (06) b.42   

Belgium 

Chantal Akerman* b.50   André Delvaux b.26      

Switzerland 

Claude Goretta (78) b.29   Alain Tanner b.29     

Netherlands 

Paul Verhoeven (97) b.3

Spain 

Carlos Saura (78) b.32   Pedro Almodόvar (99) b.49   Victor Erice b.40 

Portugal 

Manuel de Oliveira b.08      

Greece 

Theo Angelopoulos (97) b.35  


 

Denmark

Henning Carlsen (80) b.27   Nils Malmros b.44 

 


Poland 

Kazimierz Kutz b. 29    Krzysztof Zanussi (76) b.39    Krzysztof Kieslowski (81) b.41    Agnieszka Holland*   

Czechoslavakia 

Jan Hřebejk (04) b.6 

Yugoslavia 

Krsto Papić b.33    Bata Čengić b.31   Kristo Zivco Nikolić b.41   Goran Paskajević b.47   Goran Marković b.46    Rajko Grlć b.47   

USSR 

Gleb Panfilov b.34   Nikita Mikhalkov b.45


 

Japan

Kasuhiko Hasegawa b.46     Mitsuo Yanagimachi b.45   

India 

M.S. Sathyu b. 30    Shyam Benegal (78) b.34    G. Aravindan b.35    Girish Karnad b.38    Kumar Shahani b.40    Mani Kaul b.4 

Sri Lanka 

Lester James Peries (83) b.19   

Hong Kong 

King Hu (78) b.32 

South Korea 

Im Kwon-taek b.36 

Philippines 

Eddie Romero b.24   Ishmael Bernal b.38    Lino Brocka b.39    Kidlat Tahimik b.42       

Indonesia 

Sjuman Djaja b.33    Teguh Karya b.37

 


Turkey 

Yilmaz Güney (83) b.37

Iran 

Bahram Beyzai b.38    Dariush Mehrjui b.39    Abbas Kiarostami (96) b.40    Sohrab Shahid Salees b.44


 

Mexico 

Arturo Ripstein b.43  Alejandro Jodorowsky b.29 

Argentina 

Héctor Olivera b.31

 


Tunisia 

Selma Baccar* b.45    

Algeria 

Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina b.34 

Ethiopia  

Haile Gerima b.46  

Angola 

Sarah Maldoror* b.29   

Cameroon 

Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa b.40

                                                          

The 1980s 

USA 

David Lynch b.46   Paul Schrader b.46  Wayne Wang (97) b.49  John Sayles (09) b.50  Abel Ferrara (94) b.51   Kathryn Bigelow* (10) b.51   Gus van Sant (99) b.52   Julie Dash*b.52   Jim Jarmusch b.53     Joel b. 54 & Ethan Cohen b.57 (98)   Ang Lee (98) b.57   Spike Lee (00) b.57   Tim Burton b.58   Hal Hartley b.59    Steven Soderbergh (01) b.63   Nina Menkes* b.65    Paul T Anderson (03) b.70    

Great Britain

Alan Clarke b.35   Peter Greenaway (98) b.42    Stephen Frears (02) b.41   Mike Leigh (05) b.43   Terence Davies (12) b.45    Christopher Nolan (04) b.70        

Australia 

John Hillcoat (10) b.60 

New Zealand 

Vincent Ward b.56    Gaylene Preston* b.47  

Canada

Léa Pool* b.50    Denys Arcand b.41   Atom Egoyan b.60     

Ireland 

Neil Jordan (01) b.50   Jim Sheridan b.49

 


France 

Alain Cavalier b.31   Oscar Iosseliani b.34   Bertrand Blier (94) b.39   Raúl Ruiz b.41   Andre Techiné b.43   Patrice Chéreau (06) b.44   Claire Denis*(10) b.46   Jean-Jacques Bieneix b.46   Philippe Garrel b.48   Coline Serreau* b.47   Jacques Audiard (03) b.52   Leos Carax b.60   Gasper Noé (03) b.63 France/Martinique Euzhan Palcy* b.58   

Italy 

Carmelo Bene b.37   Nanni Moretti (97) b.53   Gianni Amelio b.45   Giuseppe Tornatore b.56 Germany 

Helke Sander*b.37   Helma Sanders-Brahms*b.40   Ulrike Ottinger*b.42   

Belgium 

Jean-Pierre b.51 & Luc Dardenne b.54 (12)   Harry Kümel b.40   

Netherlands 

Marleen Gorris*b.48

 


Sweden 

Liv Ullman*b.38 (02)   Lasse Hallström (01) b.46   Lukas Moodysson (04) b.69   Tomas Alfredson (12) b.65

Denmark 

Bille August (94) b.48   Lars von Trier (95) b.56   Susanne Bier*b.62 (08)    

Finland 

Aki b.57 & Mika Kaurismaki b.55 (95)      

Iceland 

Fridrik Thor Fridrikkson b.54 

 


Czech Republic 

Jan Svankmajer b.34   Jiri Sbvoda b.45          

Serbia 

Emir Kusterica b.54  

Poland 

Wojciech Marczewski b.44  Ryszard Bugajski b.43 

USSR  

Tengiz Abuladze b.24   Lana Gogoberidze*b.28   Elem Klimov b.33   Larisa Sheptiko*b.38    Alexei German (Gherman) b.48    Vadim Abdrashitov b.45 & Alexander Mindadze b.49    Alexander Sokurov b.51   Andrei Zvyagintsev b.64    

 


Japan 

Jûzõ Itami b.33   Isao Takahata b.35   Hayao Miyazaki (09) b.41   Takeshi Kitano (00) b.47   Morita Yoshimatsu b.50  

China  

Wu Tianming b.39    Zhang Nuanxin*b.40    Zhang Yimou (94) b.51   Chen Kaige b.52   Tian Zhuangzhuang b.52    Huang Jianxin b.54   Jia Zhangke (08) b.70   

India  

John Abraham b.37    Govind Nihalani b.40    Saeed Akhtar Mirza b.43    Buddhadeb Dasgupta b.44    Adoor Gopalakrishnan b.41     Deepa Mehta*b.50 (06)     Jahnu Barua b.52    Ketan Mehta b.52    Mira Nair*b.57 (03)  

South Korea  

Kim Ki-duk (05) b.34    Jang Sun-woo b.52    Yong-kyun Bae b.51    Kim Je-woon (04) b.64    Park Chan-wook b.63 (10)   

Taiwan      

Hou Hsaio-Hsien (96)   Edward Yang (01)   

Hong Kong  

Wong Kar-wai (02) b.58    Stanley Kwan b.57    Ann Hui*b.47   

Thailand 

 Apichatpong Weerasethakul b.70 (11)    

Indonesia  

Slamet Rahardjo b.49    Eros Djarot b.50

 


Iran 

Mohsen Makhmalbaf b.57   Amir Naderi b.46    

Turkey 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan b.59 (09)    


 

Brazil 

Héctor Babenco b.46   Walter Salles (03) b.56   

Argentina 

Eliseo Subiela b.44    

Mexico  

Guillermo del Toro b.64 (08)   Alejandro González Iñárritu b.63 (11) 

 


Egypt 

Youssef Chahine b.26  

Morocco 

Souheil Ben Barka b.42   

Senegal 

Ababacar Samb-Makharam b.34    Djibril Diop Mambéty b.45     

Burkino Faso 

Idrissa Ouedraogo b.54   

Mauritania 

Med Hondo b.36    

Mali 

Souleymane Cissé b.40                         

Guinea-Bisseau 

Gomes* b. 49

 

The 1990s & 2000s

USA 

Larry Clark b.43   Paul Haggis b.53   Allison Anders* b.54   Sara Driver* b.55   David O.Russell b.58   Gregg Araki b.59    Todd Solondz b.59    Richard Linklater b.60   Todd Haynes b.61   Alexander Payne (05) b.61   Darren Aronovsky (11) b.69    David Fincher b.69    Lisa Cholodenko* b.64   Nicole Holofcener* b.60   Wes Anderson b.69     Spike Jones b.69    Michel Gondry b.63    Bennett Miller b.66   James Gray b.69    Noah Baumbach b.69   Kelly Reichardt* b.64   Kenneth Lonergan b.62    Andrew Stanton b.65    Tom McCarthy b.66    Jem Cohen b.62    Pete Docter b.68     Ben Affleck b.72        Miranda July* b.74   Ramin Bahrani b.75   Andrew Bujalski b.77   Jeff Nichols b.78   Lee Isaac Chung b.78         

Great Britain

Sally Potter* b.49    Peter Mullan b.59   Lynne Ramsay* b.69    Michael Winterbottom b.61  Jonathan Glazer b.65   Andrea Arnold* b.61    Steve McQueen b.69  Sylvain Chomet* b.63   Amma Asanti* b.69  Andrew Haigh b.73   Peter Strickland b.73  

Australia 

Ana Kokkinos* b.58  Ray Lawrence b.48  Ivan Sen b.72  Tracey Moffatt* b.60  Shirley Barrett* b.61  Sue Brooks*b.53   Margot Nash*

Canada 

Sarah Polley*b.79   Stéphane Lafleur b.76   Philippe Falardeau b.68


 

France 

Catherine Breillat* b.48   Jean-Pierre Jeunet b.53   Robert Guédiguan b.53   Philippe Grandrieux b.54   Olivier Assayas b.55   Bruno Dumont b.58   Arnaud Desplechin b.60   Laurent Cantet b.61  François Ozon b.67  Jean-Paul Civeyrac b.64   Philippe Ramos b.66   Mathieu Kassovitz b.67   Christophe Honoré b.70   Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche   Lucile Hadzihalilovic*   Mia Hansen-Love* b.81   Erick Zonca      Philippe Claudel   Bertrand Bonello   Stéphane Brizé   Dominik Moll        France/Iran Vincent Paronnaud & Marjani Satrapi*

Italy 

Antonio Capuano b.40   Uberto Pasolini b.57   Matteo Garrone b.68   Paolo Sorrentino (09) b.70   

Germany 

Angela Schanelec* b.62  Tom Tykwer b.65   Fred Kelemen b.64   Valeska Grisebach* b.68   Fatih Akin b.73 (08) 

Belgium 

Lucas Belvaux b.61    

Switzerland 

Ursula Meier* b.71    

Spain 

Alejandro Amenábar b.72   Julio Medem b.58   Jaime Rosales b.70      

Portugal 

Pedro Costa b.58   Cristina Villaverde* b.66   Miguel Gomes b.72     

Greece 

Athina Rachel Tsangari* b.66   

  

 

Denmark 

Roy Andersson b.43    Lone Scherfig* b.59    Thomas Vinterberg b.69    Nicolas Winding Refn (12) b.70

Norway 

Hans Petter Moland b.55   


 

Hungary 

Béla Tarr b.55   Iidikó Enyedi*  György Pálfi b.74     

Romania 

Cristi Puiu b.67   Cristian Mungiu b.68   Corneliu Porumboiu b.75   Cătălin Mitulescu b.72   Radu   Muntean b.71   Radu Jude b.77

Poland 

Pawel Pawlikowski b.57   

Ukraine 

Kira Muratova* (see Russia 60s)  Sergei Loznitsa b.64    

Lithuania 

Šarūnas Bartas b.64     

Slovenia 

Damjan Kozola b.64   

Bosnia

Danis Tanović b.69 

Russia 

Alexander Rogozhkin b.49   Aleksei Balabanov   Sergei Soloviev    


 

Japan 

 Kōhei Oguri b.45   Miike Takashi b.60   Nobuhiro Suwa b.60   Hioyuki Tanake (Sabu) b.64   Kore-eda Hirakazu b.62    Aoyama Shinji b.64      Naomi Kawase*b.69  

India 

Aparna Sen*b.45   Murali Nair b.66   Pan Nalin   Aamir Khan b.65     

China  

Huang Shuqin*b.39   Ning Ying*b.59   Li Shaohong*b.65   Wang Xiaoshuai b.66    Xu Jinglei*b.74   Diao Yinan b.69      

South Korea 

Hong Sang-soo b.60    Lee Chang-dong b.54    Bong Joon-ho b.69     

Hong Kong 

 Eddie Fong    Clara Law*b.57   Fruit Chan b.59    

Taiwan 

Tsai Ming-liang b.57

Philippines

Lav Diaz b.58    Brillante Mendoza b.60   

Vietnam 

Tran Anh Hung b.62   Minh Nguyen-Vo*b.56      

Cambodia 

Rithy Panh b.64   

Indonesia  

Garin Nugroho     

Thailand 

Pen-ek Ratanaruang b.62     

Kazakhstan 

Sergey Dvorisevoy b.62   Rashid Nugamanov

 


Iran 

Rakhshan Banietemad*b.54    Behrooz Afkhami b.56   Majid Majidi b.59    Jafar Panahi b.60    Sepideh Farsi*b.65    Asghar Farhadi b.72      

Israel 

Uri Zohar b.35    Amos Gitai b.50    Ari Folman b.62    

Palestine 

Michel Khleifi b.50   Hany Abu-Assad b.61   Elia Suleiman b.60   

Lebanon 

Maroun Bagdadi b.50    Ziad Doueiri b.63   

Afghanistan

Atiq Rahimi 

Turkey 

Metin Erksan b.29    Derviş Zaim b.69    Pelin Esmer*b.72   Reha Erdem b.60    Semih Kaplanoğlu b.63    

Iraq 

Mohamed Al-Daradji b.78    Õzcam Alper b.75


 

Brazil 

Rogério Sqanzerla b.46    Fernando Meirelles b.55     

Argentina 

Lisandro Alonso b.75   Pablo Trapero b.71   Lucretia Martel*b.66    Marco Beehis b.55      

Chile 

Pablo Larrain b.76  

Mexico 

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo b.42    Carlos Reygadas b.71    Alfonso Cuarόn b.61 


 

Egypt 

Daoud Abdel Sayed b.46    

Tunisia 

Nejia Ben Mabrouk*b.49   Raja Amari*b.71   Nori Bouzid b.45    

Burkina Faso 

Gaston Kaboré b.51   

Senegal 

Safi Faye*b.43    

Mauritania  

Abderrahmane Sissako b.61                           

Ivory Coast 

Désiré Ecaré*b.39 

Chad 

Mahamat-Salem Haroun b.61   Moufida Tlatli*b.47    

Zimbabwe 

Ingrid Sinclair*b.48    

South Africa

Oliver Hermanus b.83  

 

The 2010s

USA 

Whit Stillman b.52   Tom Ford b.61   Debra Granik*b.63   Ira Sachs b.65    Mike Mills b.66    Roberto Minervini b.70     Sean Baker b.71    Ava DuVernay* b.72    David Robert Mitchell b.74    Radha Blank* b.76    Jordan Peele b.79    Eliza Hittman* b.79    Barry Jenkins b.79    Marielle Heller* 79    David Lowery b.80     Josephine Decker* b.81    Amy Seimetz* b.81    Chloé Zhao* 82     Benh Zeitlin b.82     Lulu Wang* b.83  Robert Eggers b.83    Greta Gerwig*b.83    Damien Chazelle b.85    Desiree Akhavan* b.84   Trey Edward Shults b.88    Benny b.86 & Josh Safdie b.84    Ari Aster b.86    Chinonye Chukwu* b.85    Kitty Green*   Shaka King b.90   Joe Talbot b.90    

Great Britain 

Stephen Knight b.59    Joanna Hogg* b.60    James Marsh b.63    Armando Iannucci b.63    David Mackenzie b.66    Francis Lee b.69     Richard Billingham b.70    Martin McDonagh b.70    Sarah Gavron* b.70    Ben Wheatley b.72     Paddy Considine b.73     Johannes Roberts b.76     Mark Jenkin b.76    Emerald Fennell* b.85     Ben Sharrock     William Oldroyd    Rose Glass*    Clio Barnard*    Hope Dickson Leach*    Debbie Tucker Green*   Daniel Kokotajlo

Ireland  

Christine Molloy* & Joe Lawlor   Lenny Abrahamson b.66    Lisa Barres D'Sa* & Glenn Lyburn    

Australia 

Warwick Thornton b.70   Jennifer Kent* b.69    David Michǒd b.72   Justin Kurzel b.74   Shannon Murphy*   

Canada 

Zacharias Kunuk (Inuit) b.57    Philippe Falardeau b.68    Denis Coté b.73    Xavier Dolan b.89     Miriam Verrault*    Kazik Radwanski 

New Zealand 

Taiki Waititi b.75 


 

France 

Eugène Green b.47    Robert Guédiguan b.53     Robin Campillo b.60      Abdellartif Kechiche b.60    Alain Guiraudie b.64    Frédéric Jardin b.68     Bertrand Bonella b.68     Serge Bozon b.72    Valérie Massadian* b.72    Samuel  Benchetrit b.73     Alice Wincour* b.76    Céline Sciamma* b.78     Ladj Ly b.78    Houda  Benyamina* b.81    Mati Diop* b.82    Julia Ducournau* b.83      

Italy 

Michelangelo Frammartino b.68    Alice Rohrwacher* b.80    Pietro Marcello b.76    Luca Guadagnino b.71    Andrea Segre* b.76    Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza 

Germany 

Christian Petzold b.60    Sherry Hormann* b.60    Andreas Dresen b.63    Sebastian Schipper b.68      Markus Schleinzer b.71     Maren Ade* b.76     Jan-Ole Gerster b.78     Leonie Kippendorff* b.85     

Visar Morina 

Spain 

José Luis Guerin b.60    Pablo Berger b.63    Sebastián Lelio b.74    Albert Serra b.75    Antonio Méndez Esparza b.76    Alberto Morais b.76    Carlos Vermut b.80    Oliver Laxe b.82   Rodrigo Sorogoyen b.81   

Belgium  

Felix von Groeningen b.77   Bas Devos b.83    

Switzerland 

Ursula Meier* b.71   

Austria 

Ulrich Siedl b.52   Jessica Hausner* b.72    João Rodrigues b.66     

Greece 

Yorgos Lanthimos b.73  Athina Rachel Tsangari* b.66


 

Sweden

Ruben Östlund b.74     

Denmark 

Isabella Eklöf* b.74     

Denmark/Sweden 

Ali Abbasi b.81 

Norway 

Eskil Vogt b.74   Joachim Trier b.74   

Finland 

Juho Kuosmanen b.79    

Iceland

Hlynur Pálmason b.84    Benedikt Erlingsson b.69    Rúnar Rúnarsson b.77   


 

Poland 

Andrzej Zulawski b.40   Jan Komasa b.81   

Hungary 

Lászlo Nemes b.77   Kornél Mundruczó b.75

Czech Republic 

Vaclav Marhol b.60   Ivan Ostrochovský b.72   

Bosnia 

Aida Begić*  Jasmila Žbanić*    

Serbia 

Miroslav Terzić b.69   Ognjen Glavonic b.85      

Croatia 

Ognjen Sviličić b.71 

Romania 

Calin Peter Netzer b.75    Alexander Nanau b.79    

Bulgaria 

Milko Lazarov b.67    

Ukraine 

Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi b.74   Sergei Loznitsa b.64   Valentyn Vasyanovych b.71     

Estonia 

Vieko Ȭunpuu b.72     

Georgia 

George Ovashvili b.63   Alexandre  Koberioze b.84

Russia 

Kantemir Balagov b.91    Kirill Serebrennikov b.69     Aleksi Fedorchenko b.66   


 

Japan 

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi b.78   

China 

Zhang Yang b.67    Pema Tseden b.69    Ying Liang (HK/Taiwan) b.77   Zhenfan Yang b.85    Bi Gan b.89     Hu Bo b.88     Xiaogang Gu b.88        

India 

Nagraj Manjule b.73    Sanal Kumar Sasidharan b.77    Konkana Sen Sharma b.79    Amit Masurkar b.81   Rima Das* b.82   Chaitanya Tamhane b.87   Hansal Mehta b.93      Ivan Ayr  

South Korea 

Jang Joon-hwan b.70    Lee Su-jin b.77    Kim Kyung-mook b.85   

Taiwan 

Midi Z b.82     

Hong Kong 

Peter Chan b.62   Derek Tsang b.79       

Sri Lanka 

Vimukthi  Jayasundara b.77  

Malaysia 

Yeo Joon Han b.69      

Singapore 

Anthony Chen b.84    

Thailand 

Anocha Suwichakompong* b.76    Phuttiphong Aroonpheng b.76     

Vietnam 

Ash Mayfair*b.85    

Nepal 

Min Bahadur Bham b.84     

Indonesia 

Riri Riza b.70    Mouly Surya* b.80      

Bangladesh 

Mostofa Sarwar Farooki b.73    

Mongolia 

Byamba Sakhya b.62       

Kazakhstan 

Emir Baigazin b.84   Adilkan Yerzhanov b.82    

Afghanistan 

Shahrbanoo Sadat* b.91   Roya Sadat* b.81

 


Iran 

Bahman Ghobadi (Kurd) b.69    Mohammed Rasoulef b.72    Vahid Jalilvand b.76     

Israel 

Nadav Lapid b.73    Alma Har'el* b.76    Elite Zexer*      

Palestine 

Annemarie Jacir*     

Lebanon 

Nadine Labaki* b.74   Ziad Doueiri b.63       

Saudi Arabia 

Haifaa al-Mansour* b.74     

Turkey 

Zeki Demirkubutz b.64   Kaan Müjdeci b.80


 

Brazil 

Anna Muylaert* b.64    Kleber Mendonça Filho b. 68 & Juliano Dornelles    Maya Da-Rin* b.79    Gabriel Mascaro b.83    Beatriz Seigner*

Argentina 

Pablo Giorgelli b.67    Mariano Llinás b.75    Santiago Mitre b.80    Alejandro Fadel b.81    Sofia Quiros Ubeda* b.89    Eduardo Williams b.87      

Guatemala 

Jayro Bustamante b.77      

Colombia

Jorge Navas   Ciro Guerra b.81   Alexandra  Landes*  Franco Lolli b.83      

Peru 

Claudia Llosa* b.76      

Mexico 

Michel Franco b.79       

Haiti 

Raoul Peck b.53

 


Egypt 

Abu Bakr Shawky   

Tunisia 

Hinde Boujemaa*   Mohamed Ben Attia b.76     

Zambia 

Rungano Nyoni*      

Rwanda 

Kivu Ruhorahoza      

Senegal 

Alain Gomis b.72      

South Africa/Lesotho 

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese  b.80


Part Three - Women Art Film Directors 1960-2020

                              Including as a percentage of the total directors selected by decade 

60s (number in total)

% of total

Country/Directors

11

7

USA  Shirley Clarke   

France   Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras

Germany/Italy   Danièle Huillet  (with Jean-Marie Straub)

Sweden   Mai Zetterling

Hungary   Judit Elek,  Marta Mészáros

Czechoslavakia   Vera Chytilova 

USSR/ Ukraine   Mura Murotova

Japan    Kinuyo Tanaka

Cuba   Sara Gomez

 

70s

 

 

17

15

USA  Elaine May, Barbara Loden, Joan Micklin Silver, Claudia Weill, Yvonne Rainer

Australia  Gillian Armstrong     

New Zealand  Jane Campion

France  Nelly Kaplan, Diane Kurys   

France/Switzerland  Anne-Marie Miéville

Italy  Liliana Cavani,  Lina Wertmuller

Germany  Margarethe von Trotta 

Belgium  Chantal Akerman

Poland  Agnieska Holland 

Angola  Sarah Maldoror

Tunisia  Selma Baccar

 

80s

 

 

18

14

USA  Kathryn Bigelow,  Nina Menkes

New Zealand  Gaylene Preston

Canada  Léa Pool

France  Claire Denis,  Coline Serreau

Germany  Ulrike Ottinger, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahm

Sweden  Liv Ullman

Denmark  Susanne Bier,

Netherlands  Marleen Gorris

USSR  Larisa Sheptiko

China  Zhang  Nuanxin

India  Deepa Meta,  Mira Nair

Hong Kong  Ann Hui

Guinea-Basseau  Flora Gomes

 

90s-00s

 

 

46

23

USA  Alison Anders,  Lisa Cholodenko,  Sara Driver,  Nicole Holofcener,  Miranda July,  Kelly Reichardt,   Julie Dash                      

GB  Andrea Arnold, Amma Ashanti, Silvain Chomet, Sally Potter, Lynne Ramsay

Australia  Ana Kokkinos,  Tracey Moffatt,  Shirley Barrett,  Sue Brooks,  Margot Nash  

Canada  Sarah Polley              

New Zealand  Niki Caro

France  Catherine Breillet,  Lucile Hadzihalilovic,  Mia Hansen-Love   

France/Iran Marjan  Satrapi                                               Germany  Valeska Grisebach,  Angela Schanelec

Denmark  Lone Scherfig 

Switzerland  Ursula Meier

Portugal   Cristina Villaverde

Greece  Athina Rachel Tsangari

Hungary  Iidikó Enyedi

Japan  Naomi Kawase

India   Aparna Sen

China  Xu Jinglei, Li Shaochung,  Huang Shuquin,  Ning Ying

Hong Kong   Clara Law

Iran  Rakhshan Banietemad, Sepideh Farsi

Argentina  Lucretia Martel

Tunisia   Raja Amari,  Nejia Ben Mabrouk

Senegal  Safi Faye

Ivory Coast  Desire Ecaré

Chad  Moufida Tiatli

Zimbabwe  Ingrid Sinclair

                  

2010s

 

 

55

25

USA   Desiree Akhaven,  Radha Blank,  Chinonya Chukwu,  Ava DuVernay,  Debra Granik,  Kitty Green, Josephine Decker,  Greta Gerwig,  Marielle Heller,  Eliza Hittman,  Amy Seimetz,  Lulu Wang,  Chloe Zhao

GB    Clio Barnard,  Sarah Gavran,  Rose Glass,  Emerald Fennell,  Joanna Hogg,  Hope Dickson Leach,  Debbie Tucker Green 

Ireland   Lisa Barres D'Sa (& Glenn Wyburn),  Christine Molloy (& Joe Lawlor)

Australia   Jennifer Kent,  Shannon Murphy

Canada  Miriam Verrault                    

France   Houda Benyamina,  Mati Diop,  Valerie Massadian,  Alice Wincour,  Céline Sciamma, Julia Ducournau                                

Italy   Alice Rohrwacher,  Andrea Segree

Germany   Maren Ade,  Sherry Hormann,  Leonie Kippendorff

Denmark   Isabella Eklöf

Austria   Jessica Hausner

Bosnia   Aida Begic,  Jasmila Žbanic

India   Rima Das

Thailand   Anocha Suwichakompong

Afghanistan    Shahrbanoo Sadat,  Roya Sadat

Israel   Alma Har'el,  Elite Zexer

Palestine   Annemarie Jacir

Lebanon  Nadine Labak

Saudi Arabia   Haifaa al-Mansour                

Brazil   Anna Muylaert,  Maya Da-rin

Argentina   Sofie Quiros Ubeda

Colombia   Alexandra Landes 

Peru   Claudia Llosa

Zambia  Rungano Nyoni

 

Total 147

18%