List o' Auteurs

I have been away. I have been moving, unpacking, the works. I have been between places. I am getting settled in - may even see a movie or two soon! Hooray!

I am going to play the auteurist game a bit - I am going to post a list of my top 20 favorite directors. I am posting it because I suspect it is going to change. The top 20, possibly the top 10 is going to change in the next month - there is a nice Mikio Naruse series coming to Boston (a nicer one coming to New York, I think) - I have seen three of his films (Late Chrysanthemums, Mother, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) - all masterpieces. Seeing another dozen or so should push him well up this list...

So without further ado - here it is:

1 Yasujiro Ozu
2 Frank Capra
3 Jean-Luc Godard
4 Kenji Mizoguchi
5 Howard Hawks
6 Jean Renoir
7 Shohei Imamura
8 Sir Alfred Hitchcock
9 Robert Altman
10 Hou Hsiao Hsien
11 Robert Bresson
12 Werner Herzog
13 David Lynch
14 Sergei Eisenstein
15 John Cassavetes
16 Akira Kurosawa
17 FW Murnau
18 Buster Keaton
19 Satyajit Ray
20 John Ford

Some of these change every time I try to write a list - the order of course, and the last 2-3 of them. Ray and Ford aren't very safe - Griffiths, Bergman, Rosselini, Welles - Kieslowski and Ichikawa - are all close. I have little doubt, though, that Naruse will make the "safe" list.

I also hope to report back on the Naruse series as I see it. I have been lax in writing here - I hope to make that up in the coming weeks.