I scoured the internet for "best-of" lists to narrow down my potential candidates, but in the end it wasn't too tricky. There aren't that many directors who have a very large ouevre, are extremely critically-acclaimed, and are mostly-unwatched-by-me. The ones I did find were mostly white(ish) males, but that group has held the overwhelming majority in this 100-year old industry so I guess that shouldn't have surprised me. In the end I got it down to 13 candidates and decided I could bleed into 2016 if need be. Here they are in alphabetical order, although I've been choosing which one to watch at random:
- Pedro Almodovar
- All About My Mother
- Talk To Her
- Volver
- Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown
- Robert Altman
- The Long Goodbye
- MASH
- McCabe and Mrs. Miller
- Nashville
- Shortcuts
- Ingmar Bergman
- Cries and Whispers
- Fanny and Alexander
- Persona
- Through A Glass Darkly
- Wild Strawberries
- Francis Ford Coppola
- American Graffiti
- Apocalypse Now
- The Outsiders
- Rumble Fish
- Federico Fellini
- 8 1/2
- Amarcord
- La Dolce Vita
- La Strada
- Satyricon
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Alphaville
- Contempt
- Pierrot le Fou
- Vivre Sa Vie
- Michael Haneke
- Amour
- The Piano Teacher
- Time of the Wolf
- The White Ribbon
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
- The Holy Mountain
- Santa Sangre
- El Topo
- Spike Lee
- Bamboozled
- Clockers
- Crooklyn
- He Got Game
- She's Gotta Have It
- Summer Of Sam
- Terrence Malick
- Badlands
- Days of Heaven
- The Thin Red Line
- Roman Polanski
- Carnage
- Frantic
- The Ghost Writer
- The Pianist
- Repulsion
- François Truffaut
- The 400 Blows
- Day For Night
- Jules and Jim
- The Last Metro
- Shoot the Piano Player
- Wong Kar Wai
- Chungking Express
- The Grandmaster
- In The Mood For Love
Whew- that's quite a list! There are a few I maybe saw when I was very young, but they qualified because I cannot remember a single thing about them. I also have seen a number of great movies by these directors (Do The Right Thing, Breathless, Chinatown, etc.) but clearly still missed a lot of their work. Most of them I don't have any excuse for not seeing yet- and that's why I'm doing this! Hooray for filling knowledge gaps!
Once I got started I noticed that many of these directors were from different parts of the world and I decided to try to pair some cuisine with my cinema- that half of the experiment hasn't been going so well (although I'm still trying to make it work). The movie watching has been going swimmingly however; in January I knocked out Godard and Wong Kar Wai, in February (short month) I watched Malick, and earlier this week I wrapped up Jodorowsky. I'll do a full post per director after this initial post (I owe them that much) and then hopefully post more regularly as I go along. Next up: Robert Altman!
Once I got started I noticed that many of these directors were from different parts of the world and I decided to try to pair some cuisine with my cinema- that half of the experiment hasn't been going so well (although I'm still trying to make it work). The movie watching has been going swimmingly however; in January I knocked out Godard and Wong Kar Wai, in February (short month) I watched Malick, and earlier this week I wrapped up Jodorowsky. I'll do a full post per director after this initial post (I owe them that much) and then hopefully post more regularly as I go along. Next up: Robert Altman!
