Complete Control

Today I wanted to talk about the filmmakers who have left their mark on cinema, and some of the trends we see in todays filmmakers.

It takes many people, resources, days, months, years, money and ideas to create any sort of film and brought to the audience. We usually see the fame and fortune given to a select number of people involved in the making of a film and it's usually the lead actors and the director. The role of the actors is more industrial, as it is their faces and personalities that are harnessed to sell and market a film to an audience, whereas the directors actions are singular in his or her purpose in making the film.

The term auteur was placed on the filmmakers who have their hands in every frame, every shot, and every word of the film by Cahiers du Cinema back in the 1950s. Cahiers du Cinema was a film magazine in France and really ignited the French New Wave of filmmakers like Godard, Melville, Trufaut and Varda.

The term auteur should not be given to just any filmmaker. An auteur, like a painter has a certain style and must build a certain pattern in their films that can be referred to from one film to the next. Now, every filmmaker has his or her style filmmaking and builds upon that, but what an auteur filmmaker does is lend their style to the story to his or her filmmaking style. For example, Stanley Kubrick's films his characters are often distanced from societal expectations like Private Pile in Full Metal Jacket or Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

 Auteur films generally lend themselves to certain film genres like dramas, crime, and historical films, because these genres center on interpersonal stories and interactions between people that the audience can relate to in their daily lives. Because of this I question those who dub directors who make comic book movies and high budget Hollywood films as auteurs. So now I will open the floor to discussion and list the ten best auteurs in Cinema history and a list of promising auteurs today.

Today's Best

1. Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich)
2. Gaspar Noé (Irreversible)
3. Wes Anderson (Life Aquatic) 
4. Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream)
5. Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum)

All Times

1. Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Rear Window)
2. Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai, Ran)
3. Stanley Kurbrick (A Clockwork Orange, Doctor Stangelove)
4. Orson Wells (Citizen Kane, A Touch of Evil)
5. Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, The Departed)
6. Jean Renoir (The Rules Of The Game, Grand Illusion)
7. Fredrico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2)
8. Roman Polanski (Chinatown, The Pianist)
9. Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather II, Apocalypse Now)
10. Milos Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

Colin T. Landon