Best Director by Genre

Started by w/o horse, August 24, 2008, 11:09:51 AM

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w/o horse

A difficult aspect of making this list is categorizing the director.  It seems one quality of a great director is defying conventions and working across a broad area.  Minimizing them to a single genre seems traitorous and unfair.  I know.   That reluctance is what makes the question interesting to me, and also much harder to answer than a list of favorite genre films.

I think the closest you can get to an easy answer is suspense.

SUSPENSE
1.  Hitchcock.
Clouzot
Palma
Polanski

And I'd say crime too.

CRIME
1.  Melville.
A gigantic list.

After that, every genre, and even filling out the rest of suspense and crime, is an incredibly difficult process that brings about much hardship.  It's even kind of difficult to separate superb writing from great direction and energy from talent.  That genre so easily spans cultures further complicates the question.

What about westerns?  Think about ordering these names:

WESTERNS
Peckinpah
Leone
Ford
Hawks
Corbucci

And then some directors have made significant single entry contributions to a genre which makes it difficult to place them.  Horror and sci-fi are common examples of this I think.

HORROR
Bava
Romero
Argento
Raimi
Fulci
Carpenter

SCI-FI
Scott (Tony)
Cameron
Lucas
Kubrick

Kubrick would be tough to place in any genre he worked in.  I mean I think Dr. Strangelove is the best war film of all time, but so many directors made so many serious attempts at a war film.

The same for Lynch.

Period pictures.
Martial arts films.
Comedy.
Documentary.
Etc.

I hope this conversation can get going.
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Alexandro

I agree about suspense. It's easier to think of because those guys that are great at it do it a lot. Hitchcocl and Clouzot have no rivals in my opinion.

I guess Howard Hawks has a special place in crime films, along with Coppola and Scorsese. Sometimes one film is enough to earn a spot in a specific genre, as Michael Mann has with Heat.

Horror should have in the running the works of Murnau and Tod Browning. And Lynch too, definetely. Guillermo del Toro is slowly earning his spot too. Kubrick should be considered only for The Shinning alone. That film still scares me...i would say it scares more each time i see it. What about Michael Haneke?

Where do we put someone like Kurosawa? Westerns? War films? Everything?

Spielberg is definetely a sci fi director. Every time he tackles the subject he excels: Close encounters, e.t., a.i., minority report...of all the projects he wants to do, Interstellar is the one with the most potential to be a masterpiece.

Dr. Strangelove would be a comedy more than a war film. And Woody Allen is probably the best comedy director. Lubitsch, Stanley Donhen, Jaques Tati...