Chapter 19

Ten Film-Makers You Need to Know Better

In This Chapter

Rating the most underrated film-makers

Encountering new voices and visions

Stepping outside the mainstream

One of the great joys of practising film studies is coming across a film-maker you’ve never heard of, but who just blows your socks off. As you dig deeper into film studies, I hope that you find some yourself, but in the meantime, here are a few film-makers I think are well worth getting to know.

I stay away from the best-known directors (who are nearly all men from Hollywood, as I discuss in Chapter 14), and try to share the spotlight with women film-makers and those from less well-charted areas of world.

I present these film-makers in no particular order, so dip in and out of the list as you please. However, please don’t be put off if the names here are ones that you’ve never heard of – that’s the point of this chapter. As you may expect with less well-known directors, some of these films are widely available, and some less so, but all can be tracked down if they take your fancy.

Feng Xiaogang

Feng Xiaogang is China’s most commercially successful film director of the last 20 years, earning him the accolade of ‘the Chinese Spielberg’. He trained in television before making popular films of a specifically Chinese genre: the New Year celebration film. Since then Feng has made Chinese/Hong Kong co-productions and ‘Main Melody’ films, sanctioned by the Chinese government and reaffirming traditional values. Despite these patriotic successes, he continued to struggle with issues of censorship in the state-controlled film industry of mainland China.

Several of Feng’s slick and popular films are now available on DVD outside China:

• Be There or Be Square (Bu jian bu san) (1998): A romantic comedy about two migrants living in the US. It features Feng’s favourite male star, You Ge, and the actress who became Feng’s wife, Fan Xu.
• A World Without Thieves (Tian xia wu zei) (2004): A hit action comedy featuring Hong Kong action star Andy Lau. Set on a train travelling across China, it offers fight sequences, romantic subplots and visual spectacle made with high production values.
• Aftershock (Tang shan da di zhen) (2010): About the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, combining blockbuster computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects with an intimate story of twins separated by the disaster. A huge box-office success in China, it was entered for the foreign-language Oscar category in 2011.

Alice Guy-Blaché

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that film history suffers greatly by ignoring the contributions of female film-makers. So what if I told you that one particular woman was instrumental in the early film industry, went on to direct and produce more than a thousand films throughout a long career, and even set up and ran her own successful movie studio?

That woman is Alice Guy-Blaché. She started out as a secretary for Gaumont Film Company, became a director in 1896 and worked prolifically in Paris and later New York for the following 25 years. So why isn’t she celebrated alongside the Lumière Brothers or Georges Méliès? Well, it isn’t called film his-story for nothing.

As is common with early cinema, the majority of Guy-Blaché’s films are lost forever. But the following are a few that survive (and which you can view online):

• La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy) (1896): A simple scene of a fairy birthing babies from a cabbage patch that may well be the first fiction film ever made. It depends which historical source you consult and how you define a ‘fiction film’. In any case, it certainly predates the much more celebrated films of Georges Méliès.
• La Vie du Christ (The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ) (1906): An ambitious production with a large budget that was obviously spent on spectacular sets and hundreds of costumed extras. It was released specifically to compete with a similar film from rivals Pathé, demonstrating Guy-Blaché’s keen business sense.
• A House Divided (1913): A lively comedy telling the story of a married couple living in separate areas of the same house, which sounds very much like Tim Burton and Helena Bonham-Carter’s ‘modern’ arrangement. It was made in New York by Guy-Blaché’s extremely successful Solax studio.

Ousmane Sembène

Can you name a single film made by an African film-maker? Or name an African film-maker for that matter? At least after reading this section you know one: Ousmane Sembène.

Sembène was born in Senegal in 1923 but moved to France to find work. He began to write novels, but seeking a better way to communicate with people in Africa, where literacy rates remain low, he turned to film-making. His films were sometimes supported by French subsidies and found favour at European film festivals (see Chapter 11), but they were often critical of French colonialism. He remained a prolific writer and occasional film-maker until his death in 2007.

Sembène’s notable films include:

• La Noire de … (Black Girl) (1966): Tells the story of a girl from Senegal who moves to France seeking a better life. Instead her French employers abuse her and treat her like a slave. The film was the first feature film by an African director to gain international recognition.
• Xala (1975): Xala is a Wolof (that is, a Senegalese language) word meaning temporary sexual impotence, which is important in this satire about failed masculinity among the wealthy business class in Dakar.
• Moolaadé (2004): Film-makers from several French-speaking African nations co-produced this powerful and disturbing film protesting against female genital mutilation. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Roger Corman

In cult cinema circles, Roger Corman is a colossus. In his autobiography he claims to have directed or produced well over a hundred films without ever losing money, which (if true) is a remarkable feat. Most of his movies were low-budget genre films made in the 1950s and 1960s, shot very quickly and distributed as exploitation films to low-rent movie houses. He’s a notable champion of young film-making talent and gave early opportunities to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron. Now into his late 80s, he shows no sign of retiring and is still working in Hollywood as an executive producer.

Corman’s back catalogue is enormous, but the following are a few representative titles:

• Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957): One of Corman’s earliest hits. This black-and-white sci-fi-comedy-horror film was made for just $70,000 but reportedly grossed more than $1 million in the US.
• The Tomb of Ligeia (1964): Part of Corman’s series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, which are among his most critically respectable films. Robert Towne, later an Oscar winner for Chinatown (1974), wrote the script. Corman shot the film in England, in a spooky ruined castle in rural Norfolk.
• Piranha (1978): A loving tribute to/rip off of Jaws (1975), this schlocky B-movie itself sparked several increasingly postmodern remakes, most recently in 2010. Corman produced it, John Sayles wrote the screenplay and Joe Dante directed before becoming one the most successful directors of the 1980s.

Lynne Ramsay

Okay, so Lynne Ramsay has made only three feature films in 15 years. But what a trio of films they are! Ramsay’s lack of productivity isn’t for want of effort or ambition. She spent several years developing an adaptation of The Lovely Bones before it became a bestselling hot property and she was dropped from the project in favour of Peter Jackson. Most recently she mysteriously walked away from a project starring Natalie Portman just as it was about to begin shooting. In interviews Ramsay has spoken out against the hypocrisy and sexism of the film industry on both sides of the Atlantic, which makes her even more worthy of support.

Not difficult to choose three films this time, but each one is true to Ramsay’s style:

• Ratcatcher (1999): Sounds on paper like a typical ‘Brit grit’ flick, but it goes off into such weird and unexpected directions that Ramsay’s unusual talent was evident from the word go. It’s a film of few words where the images speak for themselves. Look out for the mouse that flies to the moon in a balloon.
• Morvern Callar (2002): An abstract and expressionistic film about a young woman living in rural Scotland who finds unexpected financial freedom and squanders it. Samantha Morton is as magnetic as ever, and the film showcases Ramsay’s careful attention to soundscapes as well as visual beauty.
• We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011): With an American setting, a bigger budget and well-known character actors, this film seems superficially a more commercial prospect. But in Ramsay’s hands it stays true to the pitch blackness of the original source novel. It has amazing performances and touches of the great horror movies of the 1960s and 1970s.

Abbas Kiarostami

Middle Eastern cinema is a particular blind spot on the imaginary world-cinema map. Regional conflicts of previous decades and the negative portrayal of Islamic nations in the West post-9/11 certainly haven’t helped. So Iranian Abbas Kiarostami’s understated but beautifully constructed films are a wonderful surprise. His work is embedded in a culture unrecognisable from the images of the region that Western news channels show, and all his films are accessible and engaging.

If you don’t know where to start with Kiarostami, try these:

• Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e guilass) (1997): The unexpectedly life-affirming story of a middle-aged man attempting to find someone to help him commit suicide. The film’s structure is minimalist but effective, and its cinematography has a low-key beauty. The ending is sure to get you thinking.
• Ten (Dah) (2002): Simply ten sequences featuring exchanges between a driver and the passengers in her car. Through these miniature portraits, the film illuminates the role of women and family in contemporary Iran. Watch for the mother’s brilliant reaction to her son’s extended outburst.
• Certified Copy (Copie conforme) (2010): Kiarostami’s first film set outside Iran is an examination of the relationship between a male writer and a woman, played by French star Juliette Binoche. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear; they may be lovers, former partners or just strangers engaging in elaborate role-play. Either way, what unfolds is intriguing.

John Waters

John Waters is a true auteur of the underground. In his early career, he was inspired by the American avant-garde films of Kenneth Anger (see Chapter 7) and Russ Meyer’s exploitation movies. His trashy aesthetic of bad taste reached its zenith in his films of the 1970s, which attracted cult audiences on the ‘midnight movie’ circuit in the US.

As an openly gay film-maker, his films predate the ‘New Queer Cinema’ of the 1990s by some 20 years (see Chapter 15 for more on queer film theory). In his later career he found some commercial success and looked to have mellowed. But his recent choices indicate that he continues to do his own thing whether it brings him to wider attention or not.

• Pink Flamingos (1972): Perhaps the perfect example of a cult film in its mode of production, style and reception. It became infamous for a scene in which his provocative drag-queen star Divine appears to eat dog excrement. If you’re not shocked, you may need some therapy.
• Hairspray (1988): Began to bring Waters to a wider audience, and later became a hit Broadway musical and film remake. Here Divine plays the mother of Ricki Lake’s Tracy, a plump teenager who wants to dance on TV. Hairspray is the John Waters movie you can watch with your mother.
• Cecil B. Demented (2000): Proved that the media-friendly Waters could still split critics right down the middle. Although this satire of independent film-making didn’t perform well on cinema screens, its ‘failure’ only endears it to Waters. He describes all his movies as like his children – and this one is arguably his most mentally challenged.

Christine Vachon

I include Christine Vachon, a producer rather than a director, on this list of underrated film-makers because her role as a creative producer challenges the auteurist assumption that the director is the only voice worth listening to (see Chapter 14). Her list of credits contains many of the most significant films of the industry sector known as ‘Indie-wood’, that blurry zone between independent and mainstream film-making.

Although the number of female film directors is still too small, Vachon serves as a reminder of the many other vital roles that have to be filled in this highly collaborative industry.

• Go Fish (1994): As a ‘lesbian rom-com’, this film signalled an important shift for queer film-makers towards more mainstream projects. Director and writer Rose Troche later became a force behind the hit TV drama The L Word (2004–9).
• Boys Don’t Cry (1999): The harrowing tale of a transgender teenager with a show-stopping (and Oscar-winning) performance from Hilary Swank. Vachon was crucial in financing and finding distribution for this extremely risky project.
• Far From Heaven (2002): A glossy melodrama set in the 1950s and shot in the style of Douglas Sirk. Vachon has produced all Todd Haynes’s films as well as his TV adaptation of Mildred Pierce (2011), demonstrating that partnerships are key in independent film-making.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Cinema has an important place in the history of Soviet culture during the 20th century (see Chapter 13). In its earliest years, Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein helped to define the cinematic avant-garde.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s position, poised between Soviet and European cinema, makes him the major film-maker of the Cold War era. With his elliptical, enigmatic narratives and steady pacing, he’s a key influence upon the so-called slow cinema movement of contemporary art film. But he also plays with film genre, particularly sci-fi, in ways that bring him closer to cult film status than many of his peers.

• Solaris (Solyaris) (1972): This film takes science fiction seriously. Many scholars see it as a Soviet mirror image of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), although its central idea – of a planet that creates hallucinations of mental desires – has striking similarities to an old episode of Star Trek (1966–9). Steven Soderbergh remade Solaris in 2002.
• Stalker (1979): Another sci-fi film with such an odd visual experience that it veers towards the territory occupied by David Lynch and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The story, about a future dystopia and a mythical redemptive space, is impossible to unravel, but it looks and sounds so interesting that you don’t care.
• The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986): Tarkovsky’s last film, made in Sweden, is long, slow and meditative. If you’re an impatient viewer, probably best to stay away. But why rush around all the time?

Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai’s films look gorgeous. You perhaps expect that from contemporary art cinema, but you may not also expect a rollicking pace, eye-popping colours and exquisite costume design. Wong began his career in the hectic, productive genre films of the Hong Kong film industry. His early films have a reckless, improvised energy, whereas his more recent work has gone in the opposite direction, towards painstakingly choreography and careful composition. He directed one film in America (My Blueberry Nights (2007)) but has since returned to work in Hong Kong.

Here are three Wong films to get you started:

• As Tears Go By (Wong gok ka moon) (1988): Wong’s directorial debut is a gangster film displaying his genre film training. But it also contains moments of visual experimentation that signal his artistic ambitions.
• Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam) (1994): Brought Wong to the attention of Western festival and art-house audiences – somewhat ironically because he made it quickly and cheaply. It contains a visual device where characters stand frozen in time as crowds rush past them, which many independent films have imitated.
• In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa) (2000): Cemented Wong’s international reputation with a delicate story of impossible love between two married neighbours. Wong uses bold colours, slow motion and lush orchestral music to reach a romantic intensity that rivals Hollywood melodrama.