BEDA #9: Favourite Directors and Filmography

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this post in the last few days and I've come to a conclusion. I do not have one favourite director... I have multiple.

So here goes nothing:

Honourable Mention: The German Expressionist Movement.

Not a director... but a movement in film history.

I love this stuff. While the US was busily trying to make movie magic make sense and be as close to real life as possible, the crazy German filmmakers decided, you know what. Let's take our crazy fever dreams and put them up on the big silver screen.

German Expressionist film is obsessed with light versus dark and good versus evil.It's characterized by it's wacky sets and overacting. These guys were so dedicated to creating their dark and twisted worlds they went as far as painting objects shadows on the ground because they couldn't manipulate the light to do what they wanted.

German Expressionism went on to influence Hollywood popping up in things like detective movies and influencing current directors like Tim Burton.
 
I RECOMMEND: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Calligari & Metropolis

Christopher Nolan

I really like Nolan's obsession with gritty city scapes. The first movie I ever saw by Christopher Nolan was Memento. It had been recommended to me by a few people when I first started making noise that I wanted to go into film. It wasn't until my first year at university did I finally sit down and watch it.

Stop and think about movies for a moment. There is a certain language to cinema that we're all fairly accustomed to. As a viewer you know that if the screen is showing a man looking at something and then it cuts to an object that it is telling you: hey, that man is looking at that object. As we've grown up with movies and tv we've been taught this language.

In Memento Nolan throws all of that out the window. The story is told backwards, trust me it makes a lot of sense when you watch it. At the same time it always reminds me of this xkcd comic:

http://xkcd.com/270/

Since the Batman movies, Nolan hasn't really done anything too experimental. The closest he's come to that being Inception, but that was more story than playing with the actual medium of film. I'm interested to see what he comes up with now that he's able to go off and do his own stuff again. Only time will tell.

I RECOMMEND: Inception, Memento

Guillermo del Toro

I love del Toro's style. I don't even know how to put it into words. Pan's Labyrinth got me through my Lord of the Rings withdrawal in high school. I love how he uses symbolism throughout the film. I'm not going to go too much into Pan's Labyrinth now and save that for my next post, look at that all of my posts are starting to connect! 

del Toro is passionate about what he does and his passion shines through in his movies. Look at Pacific Rim. That film new exactly what it was, it was giant robots fighting giant monsters. It was big, it was dumb and it was lots of fun. If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend you watch this one on a large screen to get the full experience.

I RECOMMEND: Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy 2 & Pacific Rim

Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick directed my favourite film in the whole wide world: Full Metal Jacket. I don't generally like war movies but my fourth year seminar was in war in fiction and film and because of that I've developed a grudging respect for the genre. I was assigned to give a presentation on combat film with a list of movies I needed to look at. I had watched FMJ before, but it had been years. Over the course of my research I watched the film at least four times. On my final watch through, the night before the presentation I was sitting on my couch almost in a trance from exhaustion and that's when I saw it. I saw the pattern of the shots in the film, the poetry of scene length, and how everything blended together into one perfect whole.

Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist when it came to his films.There are many stories about how he harassed his actors (read anything about the Shining) and how they would spend days only focuses on specific scenes.

It's really cool to spot the influences that 2001 still has on science fiction movies.

2001 A Space Odyssey on the left and Elysium on the right

I RECOMMEND: Full Metal Jacket, 2001 A Space Odyssey & Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb