Finalmente, Don Luis has made the cut. Not "slicing up eyeballs", I want you to know, but Luis Buñuel finally has an entry in the Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. If you're not familiar with Great Directors: A Critical Database, it's quite possibly the best and most thorough historical, biographical, and critical survey of movie director you're likely to find on the web. Here, you're likely to find Bob Clampett elbow to elbow with Jean Cocteau, Lucio Fulci sitting next to Sam Fuller, Keaton right beside Kiarostami, just to pick up semi-random pairings from the database's alphabetical listing (and looking over these pairings again, I find that there may be more simularities between these pairs than may have met the eye --but that's for another time). Let's here it from the Senses people themselves: "Importantly, the database does not endorse any sort of classical “Director canon”. The profiles present Directors from across the intellectual spectrum: those praised, those reproached, those not considered, those unheard of. Common to them all is a unique vision and meaningful contribution to cinema."
Also this: "...the database is concerned with bodies of work and an auterist approach to experiencing cinema: that one can seek out films according to their directorial credit and that this endeavour results in an aggrandised fascination with the films – and subsequently cinema in general – as one encounters ideas, themes, statements, faces, gestures and formal devices repeated, augmented, reversed or illuminated by those in the Director's other works. The underlying principle is that such an approach yields a kind of cinephilic “multiplier effect”. For those lucky enough to be discovering cinema, the Great Directors profiles can provide a good structuring framework with which to manoeuvre through this most labyrinthine of artforms."
Get thee there now, if you've never been.
More Buñuel soon....
No comments:
Post a Comment