Several of those directors are mentioned in the book. Cousins also acknowledges other filmmakers that rank amongst his personal favourites who also aren't included in the book, since the intention was to highlight innovation and the development of cinema as a story across the world.
I would also say that it's more important to acknowledge the influence filmmakers like Guru Dutt, Farough Farrokhzad, Ousmane Sembene, Xie Jin, Youssef Chahine, Alice Guy-Blache, Ritwik Ghatak and Helma Sanders-Brahms amongst others, who are not only as great as the directors you listed but had a much greater influence on the development of their own national cinema.
These directors are barely spoke of, while most of the directors you mention are already supported and remembered. There are far more important and obscure filmmakers unaccredited than the likes of Kubrick, Carpenter, Romero, Pollock, etc, such as the Portuguese filmmakers Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa and Joao Cesar Monteiro, the Indian Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the English Peter Watkins and the Filipino Lav Diaz, not to mention only a brief mention of Tengiz Abuladze.
Just attempting to bring these filmmakers to greater prominence is more important than further canonising directors already firmly established in the mind of the culture.
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fluffhead34
10 years ago
Very well said ThreeSadTigers!
For one thing each chapter is only 62min. It would be literally impossible to include EVERY director. Not to mention the lengths some of these haters go to find and list anyone who they didn't hear mentioned. Like you said: "...the intention was to highlight innovation and the development of cinema as a story across the world." What is so obvious seems totally lost on so many! I thought he summarized the intention and purpose of this project in the 1st chapter so well and very clear to me. I went back and wrote down his introduction that he speaks in the first 10min. of episode one:
"The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a global road movie to find the innovators, the people in films that give life to this sublime ineffable art form cinema."
"Much of what we assume about movies is off the mark. It's time to redraw the map of movie history that we have in our heads. It's factually inaccurate and racist by omission."
"The Story of Film could be an exciting, unpredictable one. Fasten your seat belts it's going to be a bumpy ride."
It was very clear to me, and I understood every word. Those opening lines made it pretty obvious that this was not going to be a traditional documentary. You were notified in advance.
----Gary
Do you remember the spell?
Asa Nisi Masa... Asa Nisi Masa... sh!
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TrevorAclea
10 years ago
Sounds like an excellent description for the show, where Cousins dismisses entire countries' output as worthless and then proceeds to get his facts wrong time and time again even on the films he does choose to focus on from outside and inside the US. Nothing bumpy, just clumsy, wildly inaccurate and shoddily made for all its hyperbolic determination to outrage.
"Security - release the badgers."
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dalbrech
10 years ago
His quick dismissile of Scandanavian cinema in a couple of sentences is freaking unbelivable.
I'll Teach You To Laugh At Something's That's Funny
Homer Simpson
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mnoe
10 years ago
I didn't find his discussion of Victor Sjöström (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0803705/reference) and Benjamin Christensen (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159725/reference) to be a "dismissal" at all. He spent considerably more than two sentences on those two filmmakers.
I think some of you are being petty: inaccurate in your complaints of "inaccuracy," and leaving large gaps in your claims of "omission."
Or are these pioneering directors "not Scandinavian enough" for you?
last 2 dvds: La ley de Herodes (1999) & La haine (1995)
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