The Four Director-leaf clover.

Now the following Directors may or may not be the best ones the world has ever come up with. I won't debate that. And it is not like a hierarchy list I have prepared with a list with legitimate rankings. I haven't put in that much effort. Just a post about some of the Directors who have influenced me.

Again a director's task may or may not be greater an ordeal than a writer's. I suppose both have their inner demons, and I suppose there could be a necessary aversion between the two. One being a graphic artist, the other, not quite as much.

But then the vision is what counts, yes?

Tarkovsky.

Tarkovsky, a Russian director, directed seven feature films. Yes that is him and Kurosawa in the first picture.

I came across his work a few years back with 'Ivan's Childhood'. The other movies, all of which I loved enough to talk about him the first, are
Andrei Rublev, Stalker, Solaris, Nostalgia, Offret, The Steamroller and the Violin.

He mostly worked in black and white, because "films in color are like moving paintings or photographs, which are too beautiful to be a realistic depiction of life."

Each of his films is a special offering like no other. He co-wrote most of the scripts. And he deals with complex subjects like critique and the wants of people very well.

The creative person is a recurring element in most of his movies. It goes well with my own thought process that though creativity might be an end unto itself, it is probably one of the most complex ones and there is much that has been left unsaid by both the creative person himself and the creative person as an artist.

He took long beautiful takes to help the viewer reflect on the beauty of world, with and without the corruption of life and the other one of intelligence. An example would be like in Stalker where he takes a long take with water as the main protagonist while three characters discuss the most prosaic and difficult subject of all, 'purpose'.

All his characters remain with you long after the credits have rolled.

Memorable shots would include from Andrey Rublev with a cow being set on fire, a nun who is caught in the same shed getting speared for her trouble, a horse stumbling down stairs and getting speared too, a mentally challenged girl braiding a dead woman's hair after she is the only one left alive in a church after a raid.

Hitchcock

I don't suppose I take a very great unpardonable liberty when I say everyone who has ever seen a film has seen an original scene or a re-hashed scene which can be credited to Hitchcock.

Point in case being the shower curtain being yanked open and an anonymous dagger being plunged repeatedly into naked victim's naked body (hehe, I wonder where exactly). In most re-hashings, the soundtrack is kept the same, and so is the the bloodied water swirling down the sinkhole.

There is much I have learned from his movies (having seen almost all of them, repeatedly). Like I had no idea what a shower curtain was, being blessed with a birth in a country where don't have ventilation problems, until the scene came along. It was damn straight awesome.

Plus it was great fun to pick him out because he almost always had a very brief guest appearance. The one I love the best would be The 39 Steps, because I had read the book too. And Hitchcock's rendition was exactly what most directors don't just get right!

The recommended list out of the 50 plus movies he has directed(!) in chronological order would be The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964)

But enough fan worship. Why do I and millions of other who have seen him love his work?

Because way before cinema became that advanced to allow for it, his camera work easily trounces the now-popular running camera, hand-cam camera movements, his camera work displayed an easy power of the individualistic point-of-view that made him so famous. Like in Psycho's stairs incident. Because every frame conveyed the latent beauty of the moment, and so he recreated a collage of constantly superimposing images. A technique that has been whored out so by so many directors since him, that it almost seems tacky.

Because, in Rear Window, when we get stared back, there runs a shiver down your spine even if you guessed that would happen or have seen the scene 12,000 times.

Because he could create magic on film for any given situation.

And that seems rare.

Stanley Kubrick

Why Kubrick after Tarkvosky and Hitchcock you may ask? Because the three represent three different standpoints of good cinema. While you can easily guess now what Tarkovsky and Hitchcock spoke of, it is harder to categorize Kubrick.

To say he was the finest 'tongue-in-cheek' director there ever was would be a bit too presumptuous, like a bumpkin who has seen a ten seconds of a movie, and guess what the ending is. Now though the ending may not be wrong or inaccurate, variable change theory predicts that he is just being stupid.

I don't want to be or seem stupid.

Moving on, the first movie I saw of Kubrick was either Full Metal Jacket or A Clockwork Orange or Dr. Strangelove. The others followed soon enough. It is simply impossible to pick and choose and say that this Kubrick I like the best.

The most highly recommended ones would be: The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

The thing with Kubrick is that he moved with the times and lived with the much (rightly) maligned American movie industry and still created such masterpieces like these. He moved from the film noir to war-pics to epics to soliloquies to science-fiction to satire to horror and ending in a surrealist view of modern intimacy and privacy.

So he ended up telling very varied stories with very many different styles, and still managing to win the much sought after critic-approval every single time!

As for the technical expertise, he pioneered the front projection to hide shadows and give superimposing of real action over pre-filmed locations, and the use of lenses meant for NASA to film in candle-light for Barry Lyndon. But again we cannot generalize his technique, because that would mean having to deal with each feature.

He created fantastic real-world characters even though a marked disdain for real life is clear to see in his sarcasm. And though he would seem more interested in the mechanics and how humans function en masse, his personal touch always reaches outwards and into the viewer's soul. The best examples of this would be Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.

Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa's act is flawless. I would like my critique to sound good enough to critique him, but it is pointless, I get the feeling I cannot write as well as he could direct. Gut feelings like this one usually turn out to be true.

Kurosawa was not a director who directed and made films for the elitist pricks of the world, numerous as they are now. He made them for the common man, probably the Japanese brand of common man.

Truffaut, is is said, walked out of Pather Panchali while it was being screened at the Cannes film festival. He called it an amateur attempt. Someone who has seen a Bergman and a Kurosawa and a Ray would understand why he thought so. It was of an alien world, something unaccapteble to the point of caricature, unless of course we have seen India. Like many South Asian writers, Ray's work was a rooted one. This meant it meant less to the average 'consumer' of cinema.

However when Kurosawa was discovered, I can easily imagine how the established directors of his time must have shifted uncomfortably in their seats. He got inspired by Shakespeare's work, and he inspired Sturges, Leone and Lucas, and even Sholay and so on. His accessibility remains his strongest point.

At an extremely broad view, his movies have a certain pleasant je ne sais quoi quotient that is nigh unmatchable.

The movies I recommend would be : Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Red Beard (1965) and Ran (1985).

My first Kurosawa movie was The Seven Samurai, and it worked extremely well for me. The haplessness of the peasant conveyed was very moving, not unlike Andrey Rublev and The Seventh Seal. That the villagers would pay their hired samurai by offering them rice three times a day while they themselves ate millet, that they would rush to lock up their daughters to protect them from the necessary evil, the guardian samurai was like a breath of fresh air after having seen so much poorly rendered sensationalist anguish.


Kurosawa worked a lot with a very cool actor, Toshiro Mifune, who played the juiciest roles Kurosawa's epics had to offer. The association turned to be important for both of them. Toshiro was the original rogue and Kurosawa was the original visionary.

I should mention how Kurosawa worked. He too took long beautiful shots that in no way hindered the progress of the tale. In Roshomon, characters in a largely forest setting where the light lighting their faces is completely natural (this was the first movie to do so), it conveyed ambiguity, uncertainty, good and perhaps yin and yang, I cannot say. Better qualified people than me have dealt with it in the Roshomon Effect!

The narrative is never very clear with many different sets of explanations, and everyone concealing something darker looming around with certain gloominess. It goes into the league of 'cult' movies that should not be re-made but apparently it has been.

He gave especial care to ensuring his movies were perfect in almost all the ways he could control. Weather played a very big role in his creation. He even took care to dye the rain water black so it would be captured properly on the lens. When I saw the movie and before I knew he had done this, I was struck by the dense downpour and the close proximity it conveyed.

He had an entire castle set constructed on Mount Fiji's slopes only to have it burned down for a climax for Ran. Everyone who was something of a director aspired to be as good as him.

With a fan base that included George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, where did he ever go wrong?

Oh right, he was a six-foot tall perfectionist that never got to direct his own Godzilla movie, and apparently, ins spite of all the comparisions laid out between the two, he loved Ray's work.

Oh and John Ford.