![]() ![]() The films with which he made his name in the 1940s, including his debut In Which We Serve (1942) and Brief Encounter (1948), were anything but epic instead, they were intimate but nonetheless immensely powerful stories of Britain and Britons at war. Indeed, Lean’s career was so long that he almost seems to have had two or three different careers. However, just as Ryan’s Daughter itself has now been largely critically rehabilitated, so Lean himself should be regarded as one of the master directors, and not just of epics. Made at the height of the First Cold War, when Tarkovsky himself was dying of cancer, it may be the definitive “end times” film, and as such it remains horribly relevant in the 21st century.ĭavid Lean’s star may have fallen from its high point at the end of the 1960s when he capped a trilogy of truly epic films - The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965) – with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), which was so savaged by critics that Lean did not make another film for nearly 15 years ( A Passage To India (1984)). In Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), and Nostalghia (1983), he almost became his own genre, both pioneering and perfecting a uniquely individual and idiosyncratic style of filmmaking in which images were arguably subjected to more “processing” and even warping than at any time since the Silent Era, when there were only images (and not sound as well) to manipulate.įinally, there was The Sacrifice (1986), a cinematic updating of the story of Abraham in which a man tries to negotiate with God to prevent nuclear Armageddon. ![]() However, it was with his next three films that Tarkovsky really sealed his reputation as one of the true cinematic greats. ![]() It continued with Andrei Rublev (1966), a biopic not of the current Russian tennis player but the 15th-century Russian painter of the same name and Solaris (1972), the finest Soviet sci-fi film ever made. Tarkovsky’s magnificent seven films began with Ivan’s Childhood (1962), one of the greatest films ever made about both childhood and war. Nevertheless, this pair of late Altman classics reminded everyone of his sheer shaggy genius.Īndrei Tarkovsky is the James Joyce of cinema: a man who directed relatively few films (only seven features in total), just as Joyce wrote relatively few books, but, just like Joyce, every one of his works was a masterpiece. Again like Hollywood, Altman’s second golden age in the early 1990s was significantly shorter than the first, really consisting of The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993). The first was nearly a decade long, taking in almost the entire 1970s when he produced a trilogy of apparently sprawling but in reality meticulously plotted classics in M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Like Hollywood itself, Altman enjoyed two golden ages. And yet it is arguable that at the end of the 20th century no other director produced such a succession of great films that captured so much of the messiness and even monstrosity of late Western civilization. ![]() Some would dispute Altman’s right to be on a list of the two hundred best directors of all time, let alone the top 20 because they do not like his uniquely individual and genuinely iconoclastic style, the trademarks of which included unlikely or anti-heroes, overlapping dialogue, and historical revisionism. ![]()
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