All Right, Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready For My Close-Up ... It's The ILXOR's Top 101 Director Poll Results Thread

but odd man out is so clueless about belfast that it makes me very sceptical of vienna

it's only a movie, Ingrid

My Ballot:

Edward Yang
Hayao Miyazaki
John Cassavetes
Akira Kurosawa
Andrei Tarkovsky
Billy Wilder
Yasujiro Ozu
Robert Altman
Ingmar Bergman
Jean Renoir
Fritz Lang
David Lynch
Joel and Ethan Coen
Werner Herzog
Alfred Hitchcock
Federico Fellini
Robert Siodmak
Chantal Akerman
Jia Zhangke
Charles Laughton
Seijun Suzuki
Guy Maddin
Kenji Mizoguchi
Paul Thomas Anderson
Kelly Reichardt
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Orson Welles
Michelangelo Antonioni
Otto Preminger
Terrence Malick
Roberto Rosselini
Francis Ford Coppola
Park Chan-Wook
Oliver Assayas
Stanley Kubrick
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Johnnie To
Martin Scorsese
Isao Takahata
Fei Mu
Kon Ichikawa
Frank Capra
John Huston
Jean Pierre Melville
Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Nicholas Ray
Paul Schrader
Mia Hansen Love
Miguel Gomes

Worst: Edgar Wright

good shout on Edgar fucking Wright

okay what

which films?

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 20 January 2018 13:02 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

la bete humaine and le dejeuner sur l'herbe

I'm glad you didn't vote, plax! In part bcz you referred to Lee Marvin as "someone."

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 20 January 2018 14:18 (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i DID vote, I just didn't get to post this week.

I had regretted not voting for phillip scheffner, but this wasn't a poll where you could push your top choices onto the main even singlehandedly so I have no regrets

"charmless male leads" in Sturges, why i oughta...

Eddie Bracken is *ssupposed to be* charmless, he's brilliant at it.

Part of the multiplex crew, don’t @ me.

Herzog, Werner
Tarkovsky, Andrei
Cronenberg, David
Gordon, Stuart
Murnau, F.W.
Scorsese, Martin
Wenders, Wim
Wong Kar-wai
Yang, Edward
Kubrick, Stanley
Miyazaki Hayao
Anderson, Paul Thomas
Cassavetes, John
Chow, Stephen
Coppola, Francis Ford
Fellini, Federico
Korine, Harmony
Lynch, David
Malick, Terrence
Wilder, Billy
Welles, Orson
Kieslowski, Krzysztof
Kopple, Barbara
Reed, Carol
Lang, Fritz
Dreyer, Carl Theodor
Bergman, Ingmar
Raimi, Sam
Griffith, D.W.
Roeg, Nicholas
Morris, Errol
Laughton, Charles
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner
Bunuel, Luis
Coen, Joel & Ethan
Mann, Michael
Spielberg, Steven
Von Trier, Lars
del Toro, Guillermo
Burton, Tim
Romero, George A.
Kaufman, Charlie
Browning, Tod
Downey Sr., Robert
Brakhage, Stan
Jarmusch, Jim
Meyer, Russ
Linklater, Richard
Solondz, Todd
Lewis, Herschell Gordon
Nolan, Christopher
Noé, Gaspar

1. Farocki, Harun
2. Akerman, Chantal
3. Wiseman, Frederick
4. Hitchcock, Alfred
5. Loach, Ken
6. Straub, Jean-Marie & Daniele Huillet
7. Godard, Jean-Luc
8. Murnau, F.W.
9. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner
10. Resnais, Alain
11. Kiarostami, Abbas
12. Hawks, Howard
13. Minh-ha, Trinh T.
14. Petzold, Christian
15. Ray, Nicholas
16. Dickinson, Margaret
17. Almodovar, Pedro
18. Guiterrez, Thomas
19. Bitomsky, Hartmut
20. Keiller, Patrick
21. Griffith, D.W.
22. Trecartin, Ryan
23. Berkeley, Busby
24. Welles, Orson
25. Denis, Claire
26. Cukor, George
27. Marker, Chris
28. Biemann, Ursula
29. Minnelli, Vincente
30. Sirk, Douglas
31. Frampton, Hollis
32. Waters, John
33. Haneke, Michael

those Charles Laughton votes are indeed irritating, esp at the expense of Jean Vigo and Elaine May

I've tried w/ Straub & Huillet. Not so far.

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Ingmar Bergman
3. Nicolas Roeg
4. David Lynch
5. Stanley Kubrick
6. Charlie Kaufman
7. Andrei Tarkovsky
8. Robert Downey Sr.
9. Robert Altman
10. Kelly Reichardt
11. Pedro Almodóvar
12. Coen Brothers
13. Akira Kurosawa
14. Douglas Sirk
15. Michael Cimino
16. John Waters
17. Todd Haynes
18. Paul Thomas Anderson
19. Chantal Akerman
20. Jim Jarmusch
21. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
22. John Cassavetes
23. Bob Fosse
24. Orson Welles
25. Quentin Tarantino
26. Robert Bresson
27. D.A. Pennebaker
28. William Friedkin
29. Alexander Payne
30. Olivier Assayas
31. Yasujiro Ozu
32. Nicholas Ray
33. Roman Polanski
34. Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
35. Sofia Coppola
36. Stan Brakhage
37. David Gordon Green
38. Jonathan Demme
39. Agnès Varda
40. Penelope Spheeris
41. Todd Solondz
42. Harmony Korine
43. Spike Lee
44. Robert Aldrich
45. Luis Bunuel
46. Eliza Hittman
47. Martin Scorsese
48. Lars Von Trier
49. Billy Wilder
50. Sean Baker

WORST DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick

where should I start with Preston Sturges?

Sullivan’s Travels

Non-placers in bold.

I definitely would have swapped out a bunch of my unranked section for other directors had I not just thrown it together at the last minute. Like, why do I have Jess Franco on there and not Mario Bava???? There are some others where I've seen a couple of films and liked them and obviously just figured "yeah, I'll throw them a vote" when I probs could've picked someone with a way more solid body of work. Oh well.

1. Vera Chytilova
2. Wojciech Has
3. Jane Arden
4. Roy Andersson
5. Andrei Tarkovsky
6. Roman Polanski
7. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
8. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
9. Luis Bunuel
10. Werner Herzog
11. Juraj Herz
12. Sergei Parajanov
13. Dario Argento
14. Ingmar Bergman
15. Maya Deren

Georges Melies
Germaine Dulac
Agnes Varda
Hans Richter
Peter Strickland
Bela Tarr
Wong Kar-wai
Jan Svankmajer
Lars Von Trier
John Waters
Jesus Franco
Sergei Eisenstein
Michelangelo Antonioni
Jean-Luc Godard
Michael Haneke
Alfred Hitchcock
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Fritz Lang
David Lynch
Russ Meyer
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Peter Watkins
David Cronenberg
Chantal Akerman
Lindsay Anderson
Andrzej Zulawski
Rosa von Praunheim
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Federico Fellini
Kenneth Anger
Alice Guy Blache
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Andy Warhol
Shohei Imamura
Hayao Miyazaki

I'm gonna go try and rent Miracle of Morgan's Creek later.

This poll is also indicating to me that I have a lot of Murnau to catch up on.

VHAS i would go with the great Sturges period in chron order, beginning with The Great McGinty. (For one thing, the first scene in Morgan's Creek will make more sense that way.)

emil.y, i don't know Chytilova aside from Daisies; have you seen much?

kudos on Has as well

I wish I'd voted for Warhol too, which probably would have pushed him onto the list. Of the 10-15 films I've seen, only one or two flat-out bored me; the rest had me laughing at a minimum, most confounded me in a really interesting way, and there's beauty in The Chelsea Girls and the screen tests.

Murnau’s Faust is obviously incredible but Emil Jannings makes me too sick.

emil.y, i don't know Chytilova aside from Daisies; have you seen much?

Yeah, strongly recommend Fruit of Paradise as the next one to check out if you like Daisies. Even her lesser '90s films are pretty good.

https://wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/fruit-2.png

Checking the spreadsheet, Warhol wouldn't have made it with a vote from me. But I did notice a blank for Andrea Arnold in my column--with my points, she would have moved up to the low 100s, five points short of the big list. I don't know the calculation that then turned points into weighted points, but Arnold might have ranked with that adjustment. (This isn't criticism--I messed up points on all four polls I oversaw, leaving out a whole ballot once.)

Herzog, Werner
Roeg, Nicholas
Bunuel, Luis
Tarkovsky, Andrei
Antonioni, Michelangelo
Powell, Michael & Emeric Pressburger
Hitchcock, Alfred
Akerman, Chantal
Altman, Robert
Kubrick, Stanley
De Palma, Brian
Malick, Terrence
Scorsese, Martin
Tarr, Bela
Ophüls, Max
Godard, Jean-Luc
Kiarostami, Abbas
Renoir, Jean
Hogg, Joanna
Bergman, Ingmar
Kurosawa Akira
Dreyer, Carl Theodor
Andersson, Roy
Lynch, David
Argento, Dario
Romero, George A
Rohmer, Eric
Kore-eda Hirokazu
Friedkin, William
Cronenberg, David
Arnold, Andrea
Haneke, Michael
Von Trier, Lars
Leone, Sergio
Strickland, Peter
Ceylan, Nuri Bilge

Forgot a bunch tho eg murnau, lang and bresson. Had has on my mind but loved hourglass sanatorium and wasn't so hot on saragossa manuscript

here's mine. Order is a bit arbitrary in retrospect, and if I hadn't forgotten Murnau, he'd be on and Capra would be off

1. Powell, Michael & Emeric Pressburger
2. Lubitsch, Ernst
3. Hitchcock, Alfred
4. Renoir, Jean
5. Sturges, Preston
6. Miyazaki Hayao
7. Lynch, David
8. Keaton, Buster
9. Ophüls, Max
10. Tati, Jacques
11. Malick, Terrence
12. Ray, Satyajit
13. Welles, Orson
14. Lang, Fritz
15. Bunuel, Luis
16. Kurosawa Akira
17. Brakhage, Stan
18. Reed, Carol
19. Altman, Robert
20. Hawks, Howard
21. Kubrick, Stanley
22. Wong Kar-wai
23. Vigo, Jean
24. Ozu Yasujirō
25. Kieslowski, Krzysztof
26. Eisenstein, Sergei
27. Linklater, Richard
28. Satoshi Kon
29. Clair, Rene
30. Laughton, Charles
31. Tarkovsky, Andrei
32. Conner, Bruce
33. Yang, Edward
34. Mackendrick, Alexander
35. Woo, John
36. Kalatozov, Mikhael
37. Cocteau, Jean
38. Jones, Chuck
39. Roeg, Nicholas
40. Sirk, Douglas
41. Pontecorvo, Gillo
42. Wilder, Billy
43. Pabst, G.W.
44. Melville, Jean-Pierre
45. Dreyer, Carl Theodor
46. Hu, King
47. Mamoulian, Rouben
48. Bergman, Ingmar
49. Capra, Frank
50. Hark, Tsui

Xp voted polanski somewhere around 19 but he's missing for some mysterious reason

Did I miss the spreadsheet link?

All Right, Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready For My Close-Up ... It's The ILXOR's Top 101 Director Poll Results Thread

Eric, thanks so much for doing this! Been a hoot. Ballot:

1. Kiarostami, Abbas
2. Roeg, Nicholas
3. Tarkovsky, Andrei
4. Bergman, Ingmar
5. Fellini, Federico
6. Deren, Maya
7. Lynch, David
8. Teshigahara, Hiroshi
9. Pasolini, Pier Paolo
10. Pakula, Alan J.
11. Bunuel, Luis
12. Brakhage, Stan
13. Stillman, Whit
14. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner
15. Kurosawa, Akira
16. Resnais, Alain
17. Kubrick, Stanley
18. Jodorowsky, Alejandro
19. Rohmer, Eric
20. Haneke, Michael
21. Tarr, Bela
22. Ghobadi, Bahman
23. Snow, Michael
24. Coppola, Francis Ford
25. Wertmuller, Lina
26. Godard, Jean-Luc
27. Franco, Jesus
28. Makhmalbaf, Mohsen
29. Medem, Julio
30. Cronenberg, David
31. Antonioni, Michelangelo
32. Akerman, Chantal
33. Dardenne, Jean-Luc & Pierre
34. Duras, Marguerite
35. Welles, Orson
36. Farhadi, Asghar
37. Lelouch, Claude
38. Kieslowski, Krzysztof
39. Almodovar, Pedro
40. Rollin, Jean
41. Borowczyk, Walerian
42. Sokurov, Aleksandr
43. Tati, Jacques
44. Shahid-Saless, Sohrab
45. Ōshima, Nagisa
46. Linklater, Richard
47. Metzger, Radley
48. Cassavetes, John
49. Sarno, Joe
50. Verhoeven, Paul

I haven't looked at the spreadsheet b/c it wants me to download it rather than opening in a tab.

Xxpost bless you

Well it tells you, for one, that you and I are the only ones voting for Jesus Franco :)

xp

I will personally guarantee--backed up by the Molinari Family on the Coast--the safety of the spreadsheet.

Here's my list!

1. Kubrick, Stanley
2. Welles, Orson
3. Tarkovsky, Andrei
4. Wong Kar-wai
5. Murnau, F.W.
6. Bresson, Robert
7. Von Stroheim, Erich
8. Coen, Joel & Ethan
9. Bergman, Ingmar
10. Ozu, Yasujiro
11. Hitchcock, Alfred
12. Kiarostami, Abbas
13. Renoir, Jean
14. Powell, Michael & Emeric Pressburger
15. Herzog, Werner
16. Hawks, Howard
17. Lynch, David
18. Keaton, Buster
19. Anderson, Wes
20. Panahi, Jafar
21. Dreyer, Carl Theodor
22. Fincher, David
23. Fellini, Federico
24. Kurosawa Akira
25. Malick, Terrence
26. Anderson, Paul Thomas
27. Godard, Jean-Luc
28. Lang, Fritz
29. Van Sant, Gus
30. Chaplin, Charles
31. Bunuel, Luis
32. Wilder, Billy
33. Dardenne, Jean-Luc & Pierre
34. Ray, Satyajit
35. Antonioni, Michelangelo
36. Morris, Errol
37. Ophüls, Max
38. Mizoguchi Kenji
39. Lonergan, Kenneth
40. Lumet, Sidney
41. Scott, Ridley
42. Scorsese, Martin
43. Spielberg, Steven
44. Tarantino, Quentin
45. Linklater, Richard
46. To, Johnnie
47. Polanski, Roman
48. Coppola, Francis Ford
49. Miyazaki Hayao
50. Lean, David

Chytilova (I'd forgotten Fruits of Paradise, reasoned her out by telling myself I'd only seen Daisies) (who reminds me that I also forgot Kira Muratova) and Visconti are other regrets.

There are more than 50 great directors don't @ me.

Fruit Of Paradise and Jane Arden's Other Side Of Underneath on my to buy list now.

1. Tsukamoto Shin'ya
2. Lynch, David
3. Argento, Dario
4. De Palma, Brian
5. Quay, Stephen & Timothy
6. Russell, Ken
Burton, Tim
Garanina, Ideya
Kovasznai, Gyorgy
Jankovics, Marcell
Tanaka, Tokuzo
Sono, Sion
Shorina, Nina
Nakagawa, Nobuo
Barta, Jiri
Serebryakov, Nikolai
Murnau, F.W.
Cronenberg, David
Raimi, Sam
Hung, Sammo
Carpenter, John
Hooper, Tobe
Powell, Michael & Emeric Pressburger
Hark, Tsui
Zulawski, Andrzej
Herz, Juraj
Hitchcock, Alfred
Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Miller, George
Gilliam, Terry
Chan-wook Park
del Toro, Guillermo
Cheh, Chang
Strickland, Peter
Corman, Roger
Coppola, Francis Ford
Polanski, Roman
Wise, Robert
Jires, Jaromil
Hu, King
Imamura Shōhei
Brass, Tinto
Satoshi Kon
Romero, George A.
Friedkin, William
Christiansen, Benjamin
Cocteau, Jean
Ishii, Gakuryū
Roeg, Nicholas
Rollin, Jean

Lynch would have been first in terms of the overall power of his work but I wanted to boost Tsukamoto and I like a bigger percentage of his work and I don't care for most of Lynch's later short films (the early ones are great though). Tsukamoto has a few disappointments but they usually have something really striking about them (I've been unable to find a few of his films).

De Palma being placed so high is just my current enthusiasm after loving a few films recently.

Quay Brothers for giving you something to get lost in parts of your brain you don't visit often enough.

I'm sad to see so few voted Ken Russell because he's got these moments where everything comes together and fly beautifully.

Burton being the first director to make my brain ejaculate.

Garanina made some fucking gorgeous animations and she had a nice variety of style.
Kovasznai for his lovely layered filmed painting and a really odd romance musical.
Jankovics for the burning coloured fantasy.

Tanaka for some 60s horror films that badly need discovered outside Japan.

Nina Shorina just for the grotty Room Of Laughter.
Barta for his Pied Piper film.
Serebryakov for strange morphing grotesquerie.

Hung for some of the funnest films I've ever seen. If people love entertainment so much why aren't his films more famous?

Herz for beautiful gothic fantasies.

I don't actually love Chang Cheh but he's a game changer that probably wouldn't be voted by anyone else.

Brass for having the good sense to put a camera on Caprioglio for a whole film.

Rollin for being so indulgent and cutting the shit that other horror directors feel obliged to do. He's not amazing but I respect those things.

Forgotten Mario Bava (for his visual styling) and animator Keita Kurosaka (totally unlike most anime and beautifully textured) and maybe should have included Richard Blackburn and a few other one hit wonders.
Thought of voting for a bunch of softcore fetish stuff but who would care?

Didn't submit this due to holidays + the ILM EOY poll sucking up ballot-related will-to-live, but for posterity:

01. Jiang Wen
02. Tsai Ming-Liang
03. Akira Kurosawa
04. Yevgeni Bauer
05. Vsevolod Pudovkin
06. Stephen Chow
07. Jackie Chan
08. Alexander Dovzhenko
09. Juraj Herz
10. Buster Keaton

Abbas Kiarostami
Aleksei German
Alice Guy-Blaché
Billy Wilder
Busby Berkeley
Chen Kaige
Chuck Jones
Edward Yang
Ernst Lubitsch
F.W. Murnau
Farah Khan
Fritz Lang
Georges Méliès
Gustavo Serena
Hayao Miyazaki
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Jacques Tati
James Bidgood
John Woo
Kenji Mizoguchi
King Hu
King Vidor
Maya Deren
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Nino Oxilia
Ousmane Sembène
Raj Kapoor
Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Sammo Hung
Satyajit Ray
Takashi Miike
Tsui Hark
Věra Chytilová
Walter Ruttmann
Wong Kar-Wai
Wu Nien-jen
Xie Jie
Yasujirō Ozu
Zhang Yimou

Clem, sorry about the Argento thing. I assure that it was probably from the ballot of the person in one of the adjacent columns.

No problem at all. Out of curiosity, you might want to check Andrea Arnold, though--she may have made the Top 101.

I could be wrong, of course, but judging by the user names on the spreadsheet I am not the only (semi-) lurker to vote in this poll...

Bresson was my #1. Rivette my #2. Went back and forth a few times between them.

Pialat was #3 - my highest-ranked director not to place. And of the ranked portion of my ballot (15 directors) he was the only one not to place.

Of the other directors I voted for, the following did not place:
Andersson, Roy
Berkeley, Busby
Browning, Tod
Dardenne, Jean-Luc & Pierre
Dumont, Bruno
Fuller, Samuel
Has, Wojciech
Klein, William
Laughton, Charles
Maysles, Albert & David, and Charlotte Zwerin
McLaren, Norman
Oliveira, Manoel de
Pakula, Alan J.

Of those, I fully expected to be the only vote for several of them, but it turns out that William Klein was the only director for whom I cast the sole vote.

Nice to see that four others voted for Laughton on the basis of that one great film.

McLaren must have been my introduction to experimental film techniques, as I first saw his films in school and on TV at a very young age, and I watched a lot of his work as a teenager/young adult as well.

I was a little surprised, but not really dismayed, to see Wiseman (my #5) place but not the Maysleses (to whom I gave an unranked vote).

Thanks to Eric H. for running the poll. Like all attempts to rank art it is ultimately meaningless, but that doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment of the attempt.

Thanks for the rollout, Eric. I especially enjoyed slowly revealing the images to see if I would guess from the still who the director was. Oddly I seemed to have more difficulty in the top 20 than I did much of what came earlier — maybe the choice of images got more rarefied, and I"m a bozo cinephile.

I was the #1 vote for Joe Dante. I guess he's my Joe Shlabotnik. I didn't dwell on my ranking that much, but at the top I thought in terms of "whose films would I most regret never being able to see again?" And he was the sentimental childhood favorite. His films show show such an affection for movie history — they're really smart, but they aren't really trying to improve on or be more important than what they love — and yet his best films are better than most of their genre antecedents. They're really generous.

Then my #2 was Bresson who disavowed most of cinema as such. There you go.

Confession time: I've never watched any films from these directors.

35. Satyajit Ray (834.5 points; 11 votes)
63. (tie) Hou Hsiao-hsien (554 points; 7 votes)
69. Frederick Wiseman (513.5 points; 6 votes; 1 first-place vote)
76. Aki Kaurismäki (480 points; 7 votes)
86. Ousmane Sembène (435.5 points; 6 votes)
96. Sergei Parajanov (385 points; 5 votes)

Satyajit Ray is good stuff! Apu trilogy is great but you can go to The Hero if you want something less in accordance to stereotypes of what dude's movies would be like.

I'm a Parajanov virgin too, tbh.

I considered renting Color of Pomegranates yesterday, but opted for a couple Renoirs. This poll's given me a lot to check out.

wiseman was my highest ranked american director.

true, but I'm only mentioning it to annoy morbs

Of those, I fully expected to be the only vote for several of them, but it turns out that William Klein was the only director for whom I cast the sole vote.

Another that I actually had in my ballot but left it out in the end. Have quite a bit of time for his documentaries

Contrast ...

https://www.cinematary.com/writing/2018/7/9/the-2018-shmight-shmound-poll

01. David Lynch (188 total votes)
02. Stanley Kubrick (183)
03. Alfred Hitchcock (146)
04. Abbas Kiarostami (99)
05. Chantal Akerman (96)
06. Akira Kurosawa (92) [tie]
06. Andrei Tarkovsky (92) [tie]
08. Terrence Malick (88)
09. John Ford (85)
10. Paul Thomas Anderson (82)
11. Francis Ford Coppola (80)
12. Martin Scorsese (78)
13. Edward Yang (77) [tie]
13. Ingmar Bergman (77) [tie]
13. Wong Kar-wai (77) [tie]
16. Jean-Luc Godard (75)
17. Orson Welles (74)
18. Howard Hawks (73)
19. Yasujiro Ozu (72)
20. Carl Theodor Dreyer (70)

High showings for Kiarostami, Akerman and Yang aside, our list is better.

huh guess this happened during my sabbatical. oh well.

that list is better aside from fanboys' #1, and would prefer Preston Sturges supplanting Malick

I wouldn't put Lynch ahead of Welles or Hitchcock or Kubrick either. On the whole I'd say our list was better, otoh points off for both lists putting Tarkovsky in the top 10.

yeah eric otm that list is booooring, lmfao at PTA in the top 10

xp I think Lynch was my #10... also Shakey you don't like Tarkovsky??