The five
I generally try to avoid those social media things that instruct you to copy and paste something and then forward it on to everyone you ever knew. It just seems a pointless exercise, you know, to pick a common example, to express your most heartfelt feelings by pasting someone else’s words and then clicking on a send button. Never mind all the non-essential, pointless traffic it creates for the internet.
As you’ve probably already guessed, the above was basically an introduction to me telling you about how I wound up participating in one of those social media exercises. Basically, I was trapped. The challenge was irresistible. I got tagged on Facebook by Keyvan Sheikhalishahi, the talented young French filmmaker whose short movies include Vesper and Nox and whom I interviewed in these very pages nearly three years ago. He also has a new thriller in the can starring Kellan Lutz and Torrey DeVitto that I absolutely can’t wait to see. It’s called Divertimento. So there was no way I could ignore a request from Keyvan.
The challenge was to post photos of five filmmakers qui ont influencé mon regard et mon amour du cinéma au fil des années et qui m’ont donné l’envie d’aller voir leurs films, so basically the ones who have had a major influence of one’s love of cinema through the years and which inspired one to follow their work. No long-winded justifications or dissertations. Just the photos tagged with the names. Keyvan chose Christopher Nolan, Alfred Hitchcock, David Fincher, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Quite a nice list, eh? All are excellent choices especially for someone who is actually practicing the craft of filmmaking himself.
So I came up with my quintet, as you can see below.
My answer to the Facebook five-film-directors challenge
Obviously, this is a great game to play with one’s cineaste friends, relatives and acquaintances, but some of us have a fairly wide cross-section of Facebook friends with whom our connections range from lifelong to very recent and whose interest in cinema veers from fanatically obsessive to only passively and vaguely aware. I immediately began getting comments like “I don’t get it” and asking me to explain what this was all about. And here I was thinking that I was the past person on the planet who still got confused by things on Facebook. If only I had a place where I felt free to explain myself. If only I had a venue where I could hold forth on anything and everything about movies. Oh wait…
So, for the record, here are the names of the people in the photos, beginning in the lower right-hand corner and proceeding counter-clockwise: Ettore Scola, Lina Wertmüller, Wim Wenders, Sergio Leone and Terry Gilliam. I suppose it says something about me that, in a list limited to a mere five, I managed to squeeze in no fewer three Italians. It further says something that I included only one of my fellow countrymen (Monty Python alum Gilliam) and at that he turns out to be, like myself, an expat. If anything, this only illustrates the futility of such lists since by rights there should be a whole bunch of countries represented.
Sadly, two of the five are no longer with us, Leone having died in 1989 at the age of 60 and Scola having passed away four years ago at the age of 84. Happily, I have so far had the chance to see two of my chosen quintet in the flesh. At the 1998 Edinburgh International Film Festival, I got to see Gilliam interviewed by BBC film critic Mark Kermode. At the 2007 Dublin International Film Festival I got to see Wenders speak after a screening of his film Land of Plenty.
How did I come up with that list? It basically comes down to this. I thought back to the movies I saw—mainly when I was younger and more impressionable—which stirred something in me and made me sit up and think, you know, that was amazing and I want to see everything this filmmaker has ever made or will ever make. These are the names on a movie poster that matter more to me than a title, a source book, or an actor.
In the case of Leone, it was Once Upon a Time in the West. When I was hitchhiking around France and staying in youth hostels in my student days, I made a friend named Thierry. We met up in Paris and went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which was followed by (what else?) a conversation about movies. He told me about a flick he called Il était une fois dans l’Ouest. When I finally saw it myself, I was hooked. The sweeping landscapes and Ennio Morricone’s operatic score stirred something in me that I didn’t want to end.
When it comes to Gilliam, the magic work was Brazil. The dystopian story, the humor and, mostly, the imagery that poured out of Gilliam’s disturbingly fertile visual imagination was nothing short of hypnotic. I always enjoy this man’s movies, but perhaps the one that has touched my heart and soul the most is his loose remake of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys.
As for Wenders, I had seen a few of his flicks before I realized what a genius he is. Kaspar Hauser was intriguing. The American Friend was a solid thriller with a metaphysical dimension. Paris, Texas was haunting and beautiful to look at. It was, however, his exquisite black-and-white masterpiece Wings of Desire that made me realize belatedly that the man is an artistic titan.
The remaining two names illustrate that, while this is about an artist’s work, the way a fan connects with it can have an awful lot to do with what is going on in one’s life at the time. I became hooked on Lina Wertmüller upon seeing her Love and Anarchy on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. It was about life, death, love, politics and everything else. It fit into my life so perfectly, I felt it had been made explicitly for me and the person I was seeing it with. I credit Wertmüller with making me love Italian cinema so much that all these years later I included her and two other Italians on my list.
Ettore Scola is a similar story. I did not know him at all when I went to see his We All Loved Each Other So Much in a cinema in Pinochet-era Chile. Its story about three friends whose shifting friendships and love affairs are profoundly affected by war echoed François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, but it had a whole different feel to it that said so much about relationships, human nature and life. My reaction and emotional connection to this movie has everything to do with the person I saw it with. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Picking my five filmmakers was definitely an interesting exercise, but there is a downside to this sort of thing. For one thing, after you’ve done it once, your Facebook friends may start challenging you to do other things. Already I’ve been dragged into something about selecting seven favorite records albums.
-S.L., 20 May 2020
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