who is your favorite/the best director from this top directors TSHDT list?

Tarkovsky Vs. Ozu for me

all of these guys are pretty awesome imo. perhaps a few seem outclassed, namely ridley scott.

oh look they're all men

not gonna not vote for bunuel here as is my duty but idt this poll is necessary or good rly

jean-pierre gorin

first woman on the list:

98. Claire Denis (187) 2 films in the 1,000 Greatest / 10 other films cited / The 21st Century's Top 50 Directors

The Great Serious White Male Auteur List.

*and Asian

which black/woman should be in the list and isn't you think?

Glancing fast I have 6 asians in the top 50, 9 in the top 100. First animation filmmaker is (obviously) Miyazaki at #95, first documentarist is (less obviously?) Marker at #55.

I am an hypocrite because if I do a list for this year it will probably follow that trend, but I maintain it's dumb. I'm dumb.

people that would have been out of my list for sure:

David Lean
Steven Spielberg
Sergio Leone
Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Ridley Scott

not for me to say who 'should' be in a list created by polling a large number of people - this is more about opportunity than anything else, about who makes the movies in the first place. there are way, way fewer female and black directors to start off with, at least making widely-distributed films

that's true

Being fair to the list-makers, it's more of a systemic problem about females being shut out here - I could rustle up a list of amazing female directors given some time, but the majority of them wouldn't actually be able to compete with a Bergman or a Hitchcock: not because they're not as good, but because they weren't allowed to have those careers. It's not "I'm making a list and am going to ignore these people", it's a history of "I am not going to finance a film if a woman is at the helm" (or similar). This stuff is changing, could definitely do with changing faster, and I'm sympathetic toward the attitude that says we don't need to retread these same old guys, but come on, everyone loves a list.

Also, would like to see imago's list of best female directors. Genuinely.

(this post xposted with the last few, which kind of say what I was saying but I'm posting anyway)

Sembene deserved a mention.

going to be entirely honest and say that I have no such list, hence my problem not being with these listmakers but with the movie machine in the first place

ffs go make a list imago

I feel like Campion is worthy at this point but I know a lot of people aren't down w/ large chunks of her filmography.

here's my list, fwiw:

maya deren
jane campion
agnes varda
vera chytilová
mary harron

just picking 5 from the list, in order:

welles
polanski
chaplin
bergman
powell & pressburger

maya deren
jane campion
agnes varda
vera chytilová
mary harron

Deren, Varda and Chytilová were the first three I thought of as well. Amazing, all three. Don't know Harron, don't like Campion.

Oh wait, just checked Mary Harron - I have seen American Psycho (it was okay) and the Notorious Bettie Page (it was also okay).

Marker at #55.

Would've been my easy vote had he been deemed greater than ... the one at #50.

don't forget Chantal Akerman

I haven't seen any of hers, I don't think, but was reading about Jeanne Dielman a while ago - sounds awesome.

Don't think I could do this intuitively, weighing my favourite films by somebody against the ones I don't care for. And if I ignored the bad and mediocre ones, I'd just end up ranking my favourite films.

Borrowing from baseball, if you could quantify a WAR figure for directors--someone like Ron Howard being the replacement-director benchmark--I suspect Godard would come out on top.

Agnes Varda had 4 films in the top 1000 but presumably fewer citations than Scott, etc. No Samira Makhmalbaf though, which might be a surprise. Maybe Iranian cinema isn't as in vogue as it was ten years ago.

Predictably between Bergman, Tarkovsky and Godard for me.

I get that Eisenstein and Griffith are important but are the films that better than Campion's or Varda's?

Voted Bergman.

Yes for E, no for G

Xpost

One of these:

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Orson Welles
3. Stanley Kubrick
6. Jean Renoir
13. Carl Theodor Dreyer
14. Luis Buñuel
17. Robert Bresson
19. F.W. Murnau
21. Michelangelo Antonioni
22. Fritz Lang
26. Roberto Rossellini
28. David Lynch
31. Steven Spielberg
32. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
38. Roman Polanski
40. Alain Resnais
44. Robert Altman
46. Abbas Kiarostami

Eric p much otm, except for omitting Ford, Chaplin, Bergman, Hawks and Keaton

Tough choice for me between Kubrick, Bergman, Ozu.

Jane Campion has made one great film by my reckoning, Griffith and Eisenstein (and Varda) several.

(Sembene too, but then again African film is about as close to invisible as you can get in the West)

kurosawa

Thought about this a bit more, and it's Altman for me. There are five films of his I love with almost no reservations: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Nashville, and Short Cuts. If you were to add Tanner '88, that's six. There's no one else on that list who has six films I love.

You really don't love at least six Hitchcocks?

Lubitsch kicks 2/3 of these directors' ass btw

Love, no--Rear Window, Psycho, Shadow of a Doubt. Like/enjoy, many. (xpost)

Fassbinder at #51, P Sturges at #62: crazy fuckin crazy

much love for american movies on this thread

Renoir, Chaplin, or Keaton

boring canons are boring

Objectively, the five on this list that most surprise me are Huston, De Sica, and Lean (because I thought their critical support had waned over the years); Kelly and Donen (because you're essentially talking about one film--two, maybe; Vigo with two is less surprising); and Ridley Scott.

Huston probably would've been 25 places higher a few decades ago.

I don't understand how this is calculated, but if Kelly and Donen are counted alone AND together, they're pretty significant.

yeah nostormo, ILX p much hates Classic Hollywood entertainment, as every poll ever shows. TSPDT doesn't seem far behind.

boring canons are boring

'exciting' canons are usually full of second-rate filmmakers

It says Kelly and Donen placed two films in the top 1,000, so I assume that means as co-directors only (On the Town seems more likely than any of Donen's films). But I don't know how the rankings were calculated either--they don't really explain this in the intro. They do say that Charles Laughton had enough points to make the list, but there's a two-film minimum.

well I like all 3 of the films they directed together, but ranking them above Vincente Minnelli is insane.

also:

Directors that fell off the list (with previous ranking in brackets)-: William Wellman (195), Sam Raimi (200), Lewis Milestone (202), John Landis (205), John Frankenheimer (210), Jonathan Demme (211), Cecil B. DeMille (213), John Sturges (215), Irvin Kershner (216), Bill Forsyth (223), Stanley Donen (228) [see no. 43], Philip Kaufman (230), George Miller (233), John Sayles (234), Richard Lester (235), Wes Anderson (236), Laurence Olivier (241), Sacha Guitry (243), René Clément (245), Takeshi Kitano (246), Vsevolod Pudovkin (247), Joseph H. Lewis (248), Stephen Frears (249), Robert Rossen (250).

ILX p much hates Classic Hollywood entertainment

'exciting' canons are usually full of second-rate filmmakers

Leave it to you to make me feel like Dwight MacDonald.

i do what i can

(and i probably haven't read a word of him since you were a toddler, so idgi)

MacDonald hated Hollywood back when Hollywood was still "good," as you know it.

underestimating Griffith is very tiresome; the guy fucking invented narrative cinema, and most of his major films hold up fine.

subtract:
spielberg
wong kar-wai
scott
donen/kelly
keaton

add:
rivette
cronenberg
tarr
haneke
herzog

fellini places v. highly here, and 8 1/2 made the BFI top ten, but i always get the feeling his films are not much loved, these days

it's weird that some of the directors are also in the top 50 directors of the 21st century list, and that the lists are so wildly different (e.g., lynch at #2 in the top 50 of 21st century list and #28 in the top 250 list)

boring canons are boring

'exciting' canons are usually full of second-rate filmmakers

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Sunday, January 19, 2014 10:32 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no doubt. i think i would take breadth - even of quality - over quality, though! like i think a big chunk of what makes cinema a cool thing is just its diversity & transportiveness. there was that spike lee syllabus of like ... rossellini jams. hey kids, have you seen ... rossellini. that's nice. but canon as periodic table is just so much less valuable than canon as infectious map, i think. there's a narrowness to "classics", for me, whereas there's an appetite to seeing just diversity of interpretation. that a canon can be "what is film" rather than "what is the best film". i know it's meant to be the second thing but don't you feel like after a certain point it's better to push for it being the first. we aren't scientists. like a gorin film & a tahimik film & an off-key euro new wave film & a minor Burt Lancaster noir & a three minute short & 84 Charing Cross Road & then for some reason Philadelphia - that feels like a really useful prescriptive canon to me. i'm arguing past the obvious correct thing about this phrase here but listmaking feels sort of forensic to me, like it's the wrong priority.

it's like amy taubin voting for cosmopolis in her s&s top ten, just so inspirational, the film is such garbage & it feels so correct

nobody is trying to limit anybody to watching the top 50/100/250 whatever.

no, for sure - & the mechanics of polling will mute everybody's outliers. so i am arguing against mathematics.

now all we have to do is ban lists and polls from the board

Altman by a nose above Lynch and Polanski. Or by quite a bit more than a nose, really.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.