Why Nobody Knows What Film Directors Do

A video essay about the belief that every good film is automatically well directed and every bad film has got to be poorly directed. Why does this misunderstanding exist? What's the truth? What actually makes a good director?

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The video is divided into 4 parts:

00:00 It's the screenplay, dummy.
06:37 Blame it on Andrew
12:33 Yes, I,m a good director. Yes, i make bad movies. We exist.
17:07 Funny how?

In the first part, I tell you why directors must be judged exclusively based on the shots in the film. That's what they do: they make shots. Direction must be analyzed based uniquely on the picture's audiovisual elements.

Too many people refer to screenplay elements as the director's making. Indeed, credits get confusing the more you look into individual films. Examples like "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Chinatown", "Taxi Driver" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" blur the line between who came up with what. But one must learn to separate narrative matters (the screenwriter's) from audiovisual ones (the director's).

The second part is a rather snarky attack (I couldn't resist it) on Auteur Theory, as created by François Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinéma, and popularized by Andrew Sarris in his book "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968". The belief that the director is responsible for every single creative choice in a movie needs to be stopped. I wish I had spoken more about David Kipen's Schreiber Theory.

In the third part I talk a bit about how a film's direction can be great despite the screenplay's quality, briefly mentioning great directors of bad movies such as (and I know this is dangerous ground, but so is everything else here) Vittorio Cottafavi, Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Seijun Suzuki. Osgood Perkins' "Longlegs" is also a terrific example of a strong director overcompensating a defectful screenplay.

In the fourth and final part I analyze a scene from Woody Allen's "Love and Death" and show how the scene could be done in different ways (citing Powell & Pressburger, Billy Wilder, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Quentin Tarantino and nobody... Dogme 95 states the director gets no credit...). This finale is to reveal how a strong screenplay does not depend on the director to achieve a good effect (Orson Welles is on my side in that subject) and the quality of the film's direction is related to how the audiovisual language is used.


#videoessay #filmdirecting #filmmaking

Danse Macabre by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
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Canon in D Major by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
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