Exam 3 - Directors

Question 1

Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)

Answer 1

Director of Where is the Friend’s Home (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), The Taste of Cherry (1994)

Background: was an accomplished director of commercials who was asked to start filmmaking branch of the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults; wrote and directed short films

Style: his screenplays gives room for the actors to improvise dialogue that were directed by him

Question 2

Sergei Parajanov (Russia and the Former Soviet Union)

Answer 2

Director of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)

Film Style: Lyrical explosion disguised as a movie; combination of realism and mythology evokes what is at once a vivid natural power of characters who are both simple and bigger than life and with psychological and supernatural forces erupt into wild daylight; formalism (demon of old Stalinist censors) and promoting Ukarian nationalism; concentrates intensely and iconically rich frame and de-emphasizes movement and dialogue

Question 3

Jane Campion (New Zealand)

Answer 3

Director of Films: Sweeties (1989); The Piano (1992); The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

Style: women whose means of expression are met with rejection and incomprehension

Question 4

Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia and the Former Soviet Union)

Answer 4

Director of Ivan’s Childhood (1962); Andrei Rublev (1966; Soviet Release 1971), Solaris (1972); and Stalker (1979)

Style: astounding creator of worlds and worlds that could never be; worlds transformed by imagination; focus studies of relations between suffering of grime of the world and the transcendent; slow, intensely meditative, magically evocative

Question 5

Alexander Sokurov (Russia and Former Soviet Union)

Answer 5

Director of Mother and Son (1997), made “dictator trilogy” Moloch (1999), Taurus (2001), and The Sun (2009)

Style: muted colors, distorted perspectives, and slow tempo; images seems to come from another world; a telling in black in white in the context of the 1990s revolutionary

Question 6

Joel and Ethan Coen (The Return of Myths)

Answer 6

American Filmmakers
Directed/Produced Fargo (1996) & The Big Lebowski (1998)

Style: each of the genres they parody and enrich becomes a jumping-off place for their twisted comic imaginations; formulas of action and dialogue and opportunities; parody of noir and no genre dictates or constrains eruptions of cockeyed Expressionism in their work; calls attention to their clever camera work, rich detail, and self-conscious distance from their subjects; movies are genuine, effective genre work with strongly defined characters; recreation of cinematic modes with breezy modernity

Question 7

David Lynch (The Return of Myths)

Answer 7

American Filmmaker
Director of Blue Velvet (1986), Eraserhead (1977)

Style: bizarre approach to aesthetic challenges of narrative tone and structure; world he presents is a strange place; experimental; unexplained images presence is a mystery, but to related mysteries traced back to the poetic device of avant-garde cinema; sound composites perfectly complement haunting images

Question 8

Robert Zemeckis (The Return of Myths)

Answer 8

American Filmmaker
Director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); Back to the Future Part II (1989); Forrest Gump (1994)

Style: comedies are intricately plotted, full of zingy jokes and impressive sound effects; juxtaposes versions of the same character from different temporal continua; alternative realities

Question 9

Quentin Tarantino (The Return of Myths)

Answer 9

Director of Reservoir Dogs (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994)

Style: unfettered by big messages (cinematically intense), self-consciously autereist; charged with physical energy; rhythm in actions, music, and editing

Question 10

Spike Lee (The Return of Myths)

Answer 10

Director of She’s Gotta Have It (1986) & Do The Right Thing (1989)

Style: set and shot in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn; tackle cliches about black character and experience that pervade the American culture, investigating and radicializing them until the cliches are dismantled and personal and social realities; explodes racial stereotypes and poses essential questions

Question 11

John Carpenter

Answer 11

American Filmmaker
Films: Halloween (1978); The Thing (1982); They Live (1988)
Style: Horror films with contemporary vision and complexity

Question 12

Chen Kaige

Answer 12

Chinese “Fifth Generation” Filmmaker
Films: Yellow Earth (1984); Farewell My Concubine (1993); The Emperor and the Assassin (1998)
Style: Confrontations of new and old ways

Question 13

Zhang Yimou

Answer 13

Chinese “Fifth Generation” Filmmaker
Films: Red Sorghum (1988); Raise the Red Lantern (1991); Hero (2002)
Style: Use of color, intense scenes

Question 14

Ang Lee

Answer 14

Taiwanese Filmmaker
Films: The Wedding Banquet (1993); Sense and Sensibility (1995); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Style: Co-productions with US, most accessible comedies of manners

Question 15

Im Kwon-Tek

Answer 15

Korean Filmmaker
Films: Genealogy (1978); Sop’yonje (1993)
Style: 2 main currents – Genre blockbuster films and works meditating on ordeals of modern Korean history (70 features in 15 years)

Question 16

Edward Yang

Answer 16

Taiwanese Filmmaker
Films: That Day, On the Beach (1983); A Confucian Confusion (1994); Yi Yi (2000)
Style: Films often cover a large number of characters who are interrelated by a converging plot

Question 17

Hou Hsaio-hsien

Answer 17

Taiwanese Filmmaker
Films: City of Sadness (1989); Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996)
Style: Films that examine what it means to live in a country that is continually changing hands, with backgrounds that are diverse but not shared, where urban life is a maze of contradictions

Question 18

Neil Jordan

Answer 18

Irish Filmmaker