This is a dangerous game, and it seems twice as dangerous when you play it with movies–for an art form that barely existed 100 years ago, how can anyone know what will survive 100 years from now?
As recently as 30 years ago, when the most honored moviemakers in America were Stanley Kramer, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens, few critics suspected that the names that would live would be those of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford–all regarded at the time as mere commercial hacks.
Because the cinema is so young, many of the important figures in its history, in both its classical and modernist phases, are still with us. And it seems unfair to count on a list such as this such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Budd Boetticher, Frank Capra, Manoel de Oliveira, Federico Fellini, Samuel Fuller, Akira Kurosawa and Michael Powell, all of whom are at or near the end of significant careers. Time, to some degree, already has passed its judgment.
It`s a far giddier pleasure to guess who, among those moviemakers in the midst of their creative lives, will still be around when ”2001” looks as quaint as ”1984.” With all of this exercise`s inevitable omissions and injustices, here are 10 who seem likely to me:
Bernardo Bertolucci. After a spectacular start that extended from
”Before the Revolution” (1964) to ”Last Tango in Paris” (1972), this talented Italian filmmaker seems to have bogged down in some middle period blahs. Neither ”1900” (1976) nor ”Luna” (1979) ignited the passions of critics, though both hold up better than many people expected. His ”Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” (1981) was given only a clandestine release in America. Bertolucci`s subject is the intersection of social and psychological forces–the ways in which political action can be a projection of subconscious desires, and the ways in which desires are shaped by the times in which we live. If Bertolucci is quiet now (he is shooting a new film–a biography of the last emperor of China), it may be because these are quiet times, a period of complacency and retreat. Such periods do not last for long, and it seems a good bet that Bertolucci will be back.
Robert Bresson. At age 80 (some say 84), Bresson is the oldest director on this list, but his creativity is undiminished–as his most recent film, 1983`s ”L`argent,” makes abundantly clear. From his first experiments in the 1940s, Bresson has sought to purify his art, to the point of stripping away many elements–spectacular action, expressive acting, literary dialogue
–that strike many people as crucial. ”The cinema is interior movement,”
Bresson has said, and there are moments in his movies when you can see the fluttering of a soul.
John Cassavetes. Cassavetes` work, from ”Shadows” (1959) to ”Love Streams” (1984), is proof that formlessness can become a form in itself, of considerable beauty and expressiveness. The most original American filmmaker of his generation, he brought the techniques of newsreel documentary and theatrical improvisation to filmed fiction. Although his later work has been more tightly scripted, it retains an openness to risk and chance happening that makes it tremendously exciting.
Though frequently mistaken for a realist–because he films in natural settings and shows little concern for craftsmanly polish–Cassavetes actually works on the fringes of delirium, in a dreamlike world of outsized emotion and shifting subjectivities. His two great subjects are madness (”A Woman Under the Influence,” 1975) and the theater (”Opening Night,” 1978). His genius is to see no difference between them.
Jonathan Demme. It has been said that American movies are always about
”America” in a way that French movies, say, are almost never about
”France.” Jonathan Demme in ”Citizen`s Band” (1977), ”Melvin and Howard” (1980) and ”Something Wild” (1986) has created a rich vision of America through a close study of its more singular citizens. Demme is fascinated by both the promise and problems of American individualism–the unparalleled opportunity for self-definition that our country offers, and the violence that results when self-determination runs unchecked.
Clint Eastwood. As both movie director and movie star, Eastwood represents an assured, unselfconscious continuation of the classical tradition of Hollywood filmmaking. The way he handles a camera and the way he handles a gun both reflect his taste for the clear, elegant gesture.
Oddly, Eastwood`s popularity is held against him even as Steven Spielberg`s wild success is held as a mark of his genius. Yet it is Eastwood who shows concerns far beyond the immediate object of pleasing a crowd. Film for Eastwood functions equally as popular mythology and personal exploration, as he continues to plumb the depths of his wary, withdrawn screen persona.
Jean-Luc Godard. Part clown and part visionary, Godard continues to expand the boundaries of film language. His radical rethinking of film form in the `60s–through such films as ”Contempt” (1963), ”Alphaville” (1965) and ”La Chinoise” (1967)–was followed in the `70s by a long and often frustrating period of political radicalism. His relative return to the mainstream in 1980, with ”Every Man for Himself,” has since produced a stimulating series of reflections on the relationship between classical unity and modern fragmentation, each marked by anarchic humor and breathtaking passages of lyrical beauty.
Sergio Leone. The maestro of the spaghetti western, he unveiled Clint Eastwood in ”For a Fistful of Dollars” and has since continued his own exploration of American mythology, as seen from the distanced vantage point of Europe. Only Leone, in his magisterial gangster epic ”Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), has found a way to carry over into the `80s the scope and ambition of Hollywood in its most expansive phase. Leone, like his Roman ancestors, operates with the intention of creating a world. His films are the prodigious feats of a compulsive imagination.
Nagisa Oshima. Most filmgoers will remember Oshima for his succes de scandale of 1976, ”In the Realm of the Senses,” but that notorious, quasi-pornographic film is only the most conspicuous point, and far from the most distinguished, in a prolific career. Oshima`s films of the early `60s find him proceeding along the same iconoclastic lines as Godard, though Godard`s films were not shown in Japan until much later. The harsh criticism of Japanese society expressed in such films as ”Boy” (1969) and ”The Ceremony” (1974) is framed by a stunning formal precision, a control of framing, cutting and camera movement that establishes Oshima as one of the medium`s true virtuosi. Jacques Rivette. Like Godard, Rivette was a member of the group of critics-turned-filmmakers who, as the ”New Wave,” provided the cinema with its first genuine mass revolution. But Rivette`s inability to conform to any of the strictures of commercial filmmaking has left him virtually unknown outside of the most ferociously avant-garde circles. Still, if there are movies in 2087, they will probably look more like Rivette`s work than Sylvester Stallone`s. Searching for a truly free cinema, Rivette overturns the authoritarian relationships of director to actor and movie to audience by designing his films as games. After he lays out the rules, Rivette allows his actors and audience to play along, as the action moves out in unpredictable and often enigmatic directions.
Martin Scorsese. The most talented member of the American New Wave that emerged in the early `70s, Scorsese combines a heightened, instinctive emotionalism with an absolute formal control–a contradiction that makes him the Baudelaire of the movies.
Of all the young American filmmakers, it is Scorsese who has dealt most effectively with the trauma of coming after a golden age, searching Old Hollywood for stylistic concepts and narrative structures that he can turn to his own ends without ever falling into the trap of blind imitation that has claimed many of his contemporaries. The compromises built into ”The Color of Money” suggest that Scorsese is finding it difficult to cross the merciless commercial terrain of `80s Hollywood, but his is a spirit tough enough to endure.
