Great Directors
Lorber Films, $29.95Pasolini. De Sica. Bergman. Fassbinder. Fellini. Hitchcock. Nope, those aren’t the great directors that mark the subject of first-time director Angela Ismailos’ documentary. Rather, they are the great directors these other great directors – the title’s “Great Directors” – cite as the major influences and inspirations on their own varied bodies of work, and it’s interesting to trace the connective thread between, say, Richard Linklater and French provocateur Catherine Breillat.
Interesting, if never quite illuminating. Ismailos has corralled an admirably disparate group of filmmakers here: four Americans, all of whom cut their teeth in independent film (Todd Haynes, David Lynch, John Sayles, and Linklater, whose interview was taped at Austin Studios); two Brits (Stephen Frears and Ken Loach); two Frenchwomen (New Wave godmother Agnes Varda and the “bad girl” Breillat); and two Italians (Bernardo Bertolucci and Liliana Cavani).
One might quibble with the assumed greatness of a few of the filmmakers (ah, but isn’t that the fun of making lists?). Still, they all know how to work a camera, both on and off the screen. They’re instructive on their beginnings in the industry and passionate about their forebears. But one can glean from the sound bites the questions Ismailos floats her subjects, and they’re far from incisive. (She further tested this viewer’s patience by inserting non sequitur slo-mo shots of her staring off moodily into the distance. Off-topic much?) The film has the occasional aha! moment – or ha! moment in the case of Sayles’ candid estimation of The Patriot as “a beautifully photographed, very, very well-made lying piece of shit in some ways, if you care at all about American history” – but as a piece Great Directors feels like little more than a series of unrelated musings strung together to a rousing classical soundtrack.
The bonus features help right the film’s frustrating abstractions; indeed, they make a good case for the potential of a longer-form series. What fan of these directors wouldn’t want to leisurely revel in Lynch, all fluttery fingers, reflecting on Transcendental Meditation and film stock, that “beautiful dinosaur,” or Haynes – in the most fascinating interview of the bunch – ranging about on anorexia, glam rock, Oscar Wilde, and the formative female iconography of his youth, Lucille Ball, Diana Ross, and Joni Mitchell? That’s where the great – or at least really good – stuff can be found.
This article appears in November 4 • 2011.
