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As a writer, director, actor, producer, author, and entrepreneur, Spike Lee has revolutionized the role of black talent in Hollywood, tearing away decades of stereotypes and marginalized portrayals to establish a new arena for Afro-American voices to be heard. His movies, a series of outspoken and provocative socio-political critiques informed by an unwavering commitment toward challenging cultural assumptions not only about race but also class and gender identity, both solidified his own standing as one of contemporary cinema’s most influential figures and furthered the careers of actors including Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, and Laurence Fishburne. Born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, GA, on March 20, 1957, he was raised in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. After attending Atlanta’s prestigious Morehouse College, returned to New York to make his first movie, 1977’s Last Hustle in Brooklyn, a portrait of the area’s Black and Puerto Rican communities. Later, he enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earning his Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. His senior feature, 1982’s Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, was the first student effort ever showcased in Lincoln Center’s “New Directors, New Films” series, and also garnered the Student Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

His 1986 comedy She’s Gotta Have It, took the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes and earned close to 9 million dollars at the box office. Soon Hollywood came calling, and in 1988, he released his major studio debut School Daze; however, it was his third film, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, which launched Lee to the forefront of the American filmmaking community. A provocative, insightful meditation on simmering racial tension, it was among the year’s most controversial and talked-about films and went on to net an Oscar nomination for “Best Screenplay.” The jazz world was the subject of ‘90s Mo’ Better Blues, which opened to lukewarm press; however, with his next film, Jungle Fever, Lee was again at the center of controversy over the picture’s subject matter, interracial romance. Afterwards he started his dream project, 1992’s Malcolm X. Shot at various points across the globe, the three-hour biopic of the slain civil-rights leader reached theaters in its intended form only after celebrities including Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Prince helped defray financing costs in the wake of Warner Bros.’ mandate that Lee trim the film’s running time by half an hour. Lee next shot the change-of-pace Crooklyn, a relatively light serio-comedy based largely on his own experiences growing up in Brooklyn in the early ‘70s and written in tandem with his sisters Joie and Cinqué. Next up was 1995’s Clockers, a highly regarded urban crime drama based on the novel by Richard Price. In 1996, Lee released two very different feature:. Girl 6, looked at the world of a young actress forced to accept work as a phone-sex operator,and Get on the Bus, paid tribute to the historic Million Man March. Upon signing a three-year, first-look production contract with Columbia, he then began work on He Got Game, a study of the politics of high-school basketball. Lee’s next film, Summer of Sam, set in Brooklyn during the long, hot summer of 1977 when serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz terrorized the city.The director’s subsequent project, Bamboozled (2000) was another testament to Lee’s status as one of the most complex and divisive filmmakers of both the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

In the following years Lee would tackle a quartet of more personal projects with A Huey P. Newton Story, Come Rain or Come Shine, Jim Brown: All-American, and a ten-minute segment of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet before again turning to feature films with The 25th Hour. The film found Lee branching off to surprising effect, even if it didn’t score a direct hit at the box office. After stepping behind the camera to direct the Showtime gang drama Sucker Free City in 2004, Lee moved back into feature territory with the 2004 comedy drama She Hate Me. In addition to his primary work as a filmmaker, Lee has also written a number of books about filmmaking, as well as the 1997 Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir. Additionally, he directed a number of commercials, most famously a series of Nike spots in which he appeared (in the guise of his She’s Gotta Have It character, Mars Blackmon) alongside basketball superstar Michael Jordan, as well as music videos for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, and Prince. To aid aspiring filmmakers, Lee also founded the 40 Acres and Mule Film Institute on the campus of Brooklyn’s Long Island University

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:99175~T1)

Arthur Hiller Penn (born September 27, 1922) is a film director and producer. Although best known as the director of the iconic Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Arthur Penn amassed a critically acclaimed body of work though the 1960s and 1970s, keenly focusing on leftist themes relevant to the times.

fter making a name for himself as a director of quality television dramas, Penn made his feature debut with a Western, The Left Handed Gun (1958). A re-telling of the Billy the Kid legend, it was notable for its sharp portrayal of the outlaw (played by Paul Newman) as a psychologically troubled youth (the role was originally intended for the archetypal troubled teen James Dean).

Penn’s next film was The Miracle Worker (1962), the story of Anne Sullivan’s struggle to teach the blind and deaf Helen Keller how to communicate. It garnered two Academy Awards.

In 1965 Penn directed Mickey One. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, it was the dream-like story of a stand-up comedian (played by Warren Beatty) on the run from sinister ambiguous forces. Ambitious, startlingly shot and elliptically edited, it baffled critics and audiences alike. It may be worth noting that Mickey One’s atmosphere of sweaty paranoia foreshadows some of the conspiracy thrillers of the 70’s- not least Warren Beatty’s later Parallax View. (Penn himself later contributed to the genre with Night Moves.)

Penn’s next film was The Chase (1966) a thriller following events in a small corrupt Southern town on the day an escaped convict returns (played by Robert Redford). Although not a major success, The Chase nonetheless caught the mood of the turbulent times, a ‘state of the nation’ tale of racism, corruption and the violence endemic in American society. The film is also notable for an extended brutally violent scene where Marlon Brando’s sheriff is beaten to a bloody pulp.

Re-uniting with Warren Beatty for the rural gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Penn once again showed that he had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, perfectly catching the youthful disenchantment of the late ’60s. Although depression-set, it was very much in the spirit of the counter-culture. Bonnie and Clyde went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, at the same time (along with Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch a year later) pushing the limits of acceptable screen violence with its bloody machine-gun climax.

Once again the film drew strong influence from the French New Wave and itself went on to make a huge impression on a younger generation of film-makers. Indeed there was a strong resurgence in the “love on the run” sub-genre in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, most notably Badlands (1973) (where Penn received acknowledgement in the credits).

Next came Alice’s Restaurant (1969), based on one of Arlo Guthrie’s songs, a satirical account 1960’s counter culture. His next film after this was a return to the western, Little Big Man (1970), a shaggy dog account of one man’s life (played by Dustin Hoffman), a white man adopted into Native (Cheyenne) society.

In 1973 Penn provided a segment for the Olympic film Visions of Eight along with several other major directors such as John Schlesinger and Miloš Forman. The director’s next film was a paranoid L.A.-set thriller, Night Moves (1975) about a private detective (played by Gene Hackman) on the trail of a runaway.

Next came another comic western which reunited him with Marlon Brando, The Missouri Breaks (1976), a ramshackle, eccentric story of a horse thief (Jack Nicholson) facing off with an eccentric bounty hunter (Brando).

Four Friends (1981) was a traumatic look back at the ’60s, returning to the old themes of Vietnam, civil rights, sexual politics, and drugs. Penn’s career subsequently lost its momentum: Target (1985) was a mainstream thriller reuniting the director with Gene Hackman. Dead of Winter (1987) was a horror/thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock.

Since then Penn has returned to work in television, including an executive producer role for the crime series Law & Order. —Wikipedia

Though born a citizen of Norway, Liv Ullmann did not set foot in her homeland until she was seven years old. The daughter of a Norwegian engineer stationed in Japan at the time of her birth, Ullmann moved to Canada when World War II broke out, then relocated to Norway in 1946, where she received the bulk of her education. Deciding upon an acting career, she studied at the Webber-Douglas academy in London. Ullmann began her stage work in Stavanger and Oslo, and in the late ’50s, she starred in the Norwegian production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

In films from 1959, Ullmann’s breakthrough role was catatonic actress Elisabeth Vogler in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), a part she landed primarily because of her striking resemblance to co-star Bibi Andersson. Bergman became Ullmann’s mentor and paramour; they lived together for several years, during which time Ullmann bore the director a daughter named Linn Ullmann, who has occasionally appeared in her mother’s films. Ullmann was honored with numerous New York Film Critics Awards during the early ‘70s; she also earned Oscar nominations for her work in The Emigrants (1971) and Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), and has received eight honorary college degrees.

An attempt to establish herself in Hollywood films was largely unsuccessful, though Ullmann received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in 40 Carats (1973). She fared rather better on Broadway, starring in a 1977 revival of Anna Christie and a 1979 musical adaptation of I Remember Mama. In 1977, she wrote her memoirs, Changing, prematurely as it turned out, since she had many years’ work ahead of her. During the ’90s, Ullmann turned to directing, helming the theatrical features Sofie (1992) and Kristin Lauransdotter (1995) (both of which she also scripted), and the 1996 Swedish TV miniseries Enskilda Samtal. —allmovie guide

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for American movies. Not all that interested in big-budget products, he, instead, developed a fascination with B-movies, notably melodramas and Westerns. After studying Medicine and Philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art in Paris (a mecca for viewing American films), and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich’s Academy of Film and Television. Like many of his French movie-fan brethren, Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own, and, in 1970, he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders’ first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside of Germany. The film included many accomplishments, most notably coaxing a superb performance from Senta Berger as Hester Prynne, and managing to make the landscapes of Spain resemble 17th century New England.

At this point, Wenders began his road movie cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976). For his first English-language picture, The American Friend (1977), Wenders cast three of his American movie idols: actor Dennis Hopper (director/star of Easy Rider) and “cult” directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet). Wenders would later co-direct Lightning Over Water (1980) with Ray.

Wenders’ American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place, and the director could certainly have continued quite satisfactorily in Hollywood. However, he seemed to prefer activity in Europe, even though he was always one step ahead of his creditors — especially when running his own studio, Gray City. Wenders’ return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Der Himmel Über Berlin, or Wings of Desire. The story of an angel who wants to become human after finding earthly love met with an enthusiastic international response, culminating in a slew of honors for Wenders (including a 1987 Cannes Best Director award, a 1988 European Film Academy award for Best Director, and a host of awards from the New York Film Critics Circle) and an eventual 1998 American remake, City of Angels.

In the 1990s, Wenders’ love of on-the-road location filming was again manifested in such films as Until the End of the World (1991) (filmed on four continents and designed to be “the ultimate road movie”), and Faraway, So Close (1993), a marathon experience (which originally ran 164 minutes) wherein an angel wanders about to observe the changing scene in a newly unified Germany. In 1995, Wenders made a road movie of a different sort with Par-Dela les Nuages/Beyond the Clouds, which he co-directed with legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Set in various European countries, the film explored the vagaries of love and lust through the experiences of several principle characters. Receiving decidedly mixed reviews, it differed strongly from Wenders’ next effort, Die Gebrüder Sklandanowsky/A Trick of the Light, a 1996 historical tribute to some of the more neglected developers of moving picture technology. Wenders returned to the States the following year with The End of Violence, a film that explored the effects of violence on the intertwining of people’s lives. Featuring Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell, and Gabriel Byrne, it was not a great commercial or critical success, but Wenders did win acclaim the following year for The Buena Vista Social Club. A documentary about Cuban music, the film was the result of a successful collaboration between Wenders and musician Ry Cooder, who had previously supplied the score for the director’s Paris, Texas. —allmovie guide

Zhang Yimou is one of the best-known directors of the Chinese Fifth Generation and one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers working today. Zhang was born in 1950, in the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province, to a future in Communist China that seemed unpromising; his father was an officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Army and one of his brothers was accused of being a spy, while another fled to Taiwan. During the 1950s, his family’s background was suspect and during the convulsive tumult of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it was criminal. Zhang was pulled out of high school and sent to toil with the peasants. Later, he transferred to a textile factory. While working there, Zhang reportedly sold his own blood to buy his first camera.

In 1978, at the age of 27, Zhang passed the entrance exam for the Beijing Film Academy but was rejected on account of his age. After an appeal to the Ministry of Culture, however, he was enrolled in the B.F.A.‘s class of 1982. His classmates included Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Junzhao, filmmakers who would eventually form the core of the Fifth Generation. Zhang, along with three others, with government permission, formed the Youth Team and began making their own films. Zhang worked as a cinematographer on a number of significant films, including Zhang Junzhao’s groundbreaking One and Eight (1984) and Chen Kaige’s masterpiece Yellow Earth (1984), which took the Hong Kong Film Festival by storm and brought worldwide attention to Chinese cinema. Later, Zhang was transferred to his hometown of Xi’an and served as both cinematographer and lead actor in Wu Tianming’s Old Well (1987), which won him a best actor award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. After this initial success, Zhang’s fortunes improved significantly when he was permitted to direct his first film, Red Sorghum (1987), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and achieved critical and commercial success, both internationally and domestically. But Zhang’s biggest stroke of luck turned out to be his discovery of a vivacious 21-year-old named Gong Li at the Central Drama Academy in Beijing. Their professional and well-publicized personal relationship would shape Chinese cinema for the better part of a decade. His movies made her an international star and her presence gave his films an exoticism and feminist-edged sex appeal that pulled in audiences.

After the thoroughly forgettable Codename Cougar (1987), Zhang made Ju Dou (1989), which won Best Film at the Chicago Film Festival and garnered an Academy Award nomination. Zhang’s first film after the Chinese government’s bloody 1989 crackdown at Tianamen Square was a thinly veiled political allegory about a young woman who is forcibly married to an abusive, sexually impotent old man who runs a dye-house. His next film, Raise the Red Lantern (1992), widely considered his finest, also concerned a woman married into a controlling, abusive patriarchal world. Both movies were seen everywhere but China, thanks to government censors. Both were set in the 1920s before the Communists came to power; and both featured sumptuous photography and a formal, controlled style that made heavy use of montage. In each film, Zhang meticulously explored the interiors that these women are forced to inhabit, creating settings that radiated repressed sexuality as much as oppression.

Just as critics seemed to have identified a specific Zhang Yimou style, he released The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), about a pregnant peasant women seeking legal justice after her husband is beaten by a village leader. Although setting a film in contemporary China was a significant political risk, the government approved of The Story of Qiu Ju, largely because it coincided with an anti-corruption campaign. Zhang’s previous masterpieces were taken off the blacklist and the director was hailed as a hero. But Zhang’s fortunes dissipated after Shanghai Triad (1995). The Chinese government pulled the film from the New York Film Festival after it learned that Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), a scathing documentary about the Tianamen Square massacre, was also programmed. He directed Puccini’s opera Turandot with an international cast in 1996 and released the comedy Keep Cool in 1997, featuring Jiang Wen, who starred in Red Sorghum. In 1999, though, Zhang caused some controversy at the Cannes Film Festival when he suddenly withdrew his two most recent films from competition. His film Not One Less (1999) won the coveted Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Zhang’s other 1999 effort, the poignant drama The Road Home, also took home numerous film awards including the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Zhang’s next film Happy Times lightened the mood a bit with its humorous tale of an ageing bachelor who transforms a schoolbus into a no-tell motel in hopes of gaining the funds to marry his true love, and given the controversy surrounding his subsequent film a little lightening of mood would be much in order. A historic, period action film dealing with an assassination attempt on the powerful ruler of China’s Northern Province, Hero teamed the acclaimed director with such notable onscreen talent as Jet Li, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Of course for Zhang fans it likely goes without saying that the film is undeniably gorgeous thanks cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s masterful eye for detail, and the beautiful landscapes combined with remarkable costume detail placed the lavish action epic towards the top of Zhang’s cinematic oeuvre. Regardless of the fact that the film was both an Oscar and Golden Globe nominated for Best Foreign Film in addition to sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards with an impressive seven wins and becoming the highest grossing film in Chinese history, American distributors Miramax inexplicably sat on the major release even though the rest of the world had seen the 2002 film by early 2003. By the time Miramax’s tentative April 2004 release date rolled around, it would be nearly two-full years since Hero’s original 2002 release date in mainland China. As if to add insult to injury, Miramax subsequently announced plans to edit the film for American distribution, which combined with Miramax’s similar treatment of such Asian imports as Shaolin Soccer, resulted in a notable “Appeal to Disney for Respectful Treatment of Asian Films” campaign by concerned online film buffs.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:117624~T1)

Thanks to the content of his films, American director James Ivory has spent much of his long career being mistaken for an Englishman. Few filmmakers have been more closely associated with a particular type of genre than Ivory and his longtime collaborator, producer Ismail Merchant. The very mention of the hyphenate Merchant-Ivory effortlessly conjures up heavily stylized images of Edwardian England, replete with stiff upper lips, effete aristocrats, and young women confined by both corsets and repressed desire. However, although much of Ivory’s reputation has been built on his E.M. Forster-adapted period dramas, he has also earned considerable respect for the insightful examinations on the interplay of different cultures inherent in almost all of his work — particularly his earlier films about India — and his and Merchant’s ability to make quality films on a minimal budget.

Born in Berkeley, California, on June 7, 1928, Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where his father ran a sawmill. Having decided at the age of 14 that he wanted to go into film as an art director, he attended the University of Oregon, where he majored in fine arts. Following graduation, Ivory traveled to Tours, France, to study the language, but he soon lost interest in his studies. He relocated to the University of Southern California, where he entered the film department. It didn’t take Ivory long to realize that he hated film school, so he took a leave of absence to travel to Venice, where he worked on his masters thesis, Venice: Themes and Variations. However, his work was interrupted by the Korean War, for which he did two years service in Germany; his time there was mainly spent putting on Soldier Shows, which, as he would later remark, gave him his introduction to show business.

While working on Venice, a 28-minute documentary that juxtaposed contemporary views of the city with paintings by the masters, Ivory was introduced to art from India’s golden age. His ensuing fascination with the country’s culture was manifested in his next film, a documentary on Indian artifacts called The Sword and the Flute (1959). The film was hailed by a number of critics, as well as New York’s Asia Society, and it was during a visit to New York for a screening of the film that Ivory met Ismail Merchant. A young Indian who had been sent to the United States for business school, Merchant was passionate about film. He and Ivory became fast friends, and in 1961 they formed Merchant Ivory Productions. The two also became acquainted with novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala around this time; Jhabvala would become irrevocably associated with the two, acting as the screenwriter for all but a handful of their films.

The trio’s first films were set in India, dramas concerned with questions of cultural interplay, personal identity, and physical and emotional isolation. All of these films were made independently (only one, the poorly received The Guru (1969), has been made for a studio during the course of Merchant and Ivory’s years together), and ably demonstrated the kind of technical expertise the filmmakers were capable of achieving with a very limited budget. Their first film, The Householder (1962), was an adaptation of a novel by Jhabvala about an Indian couple experiencing the travails of an arranged marriage. It was shot in black and white by Subrata Mitra, otherwise known as Satyajit Ray’s cameraman; Ivory had befriended Ray, who reportedly acted as the film’s uncredited editor and music supervisor.

Shakespeare Wallah (1965), the trio’s second film, was the one that first gave the filmmaking team international recognition. A sensitive, thoughtful portrayal of a family of English actors traveling through India, it helped to establish Ivory as a director adept at capturing particular moods through visual representation, much in the style of Ray or Jean Renoir. The film was a critical and financial success, winning an award at the Berlin Film Festival and grossing four times what it cost to make.

Following the disastrous The Guru (1969) (a production reportedly ill-fated from start to finish) and Bombay Talkie (1970), Merchant-Ivory relocated to the wilds of upstate New York for Savages (1972). A black and white allegory about the nature of modern “civilization,” it represented a complete departure from Ivory’s earlier work. The film received mixed reviews, all of which were incredibly favorable when compared to those that greeted Ivory’s next effort, The Wild Party (1974). Based upon the infamous Roscoe \“Fatty\” Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe case, the film was such a badly edited mess that Ivory subsequently disowned it.

Roseland (1977), a series of vignettes set in New York’s legendary dance hall, saw Ivory back in form, and it received a standing ovation when it premiered at the 1977 New York Film Festival. The film was praised for the sort of naturalism and keenly portrayed sense of isolation apparent in Ivory’s earlier films about India. It was followed by another widely praised Indian excursion, Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978), and then by a 1979 adaptation of Henry James’ The Europeans. A richly detailed picture that maintained an intense — some would say exhaustive — faithfulness to the book, The Europeans was the sort of literary adaptation with which Merchant-Ivory would become synonymous. After Quartet (1981), which was based upon the relationship between Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford, and Heat and Dust (1982), adapted from Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel, another James adaptation, The Bostonians, followed in 1984. A love triangle set against the backdrop of the early stages of the suffragette movement, it featured another strong script by Jhabvala, minutely detailed period authenticity, and an Oscar-nominated performance from Vanessa Redgrave.

Although The Bostonians was moderately successful, Ivory’s reputation was sealed the next year with his adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. A romantic comedy set during the Edwardian period, it was a lush, witty affair, one that proved to be enormously popular with critics and audiences alike. Nominated for eight Academy Awards (it won three, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Jhabvala), it was praised for its beauty and its fidelity to the spirit (and content) of Forster’s novel. Another Forster adaptation, Maurice, was released the following year. Taken from Forster’s posthumously published novel about homosexual love during the early 1900s, it earned a respectable amount of praise, although a number of critics felt that Ivory’s extraordinary adherence to the novel made for a painfully long, slow film.

Ivory’s third Forster excursion, the 1992 Howards End, was undoubtedly his most accomplished film to date. Another exploration of the repercussions of class collision in the early part of the 20th century, it featured gorgeous detail (made all the more remarkable by a modest budget) and all-around stellar performances from the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Emma Thompson, the last of whom won a well-deserved Oscar for her work. In total, Howards End earned nine Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director, and a multitude of international honors.

Ivory’s next film, The Remains of the Day (1993), also earned a lavish dose of critical acclaim. Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about an emotionally stunted butler (superbly played by Anthony Hopkins) who refuses to admit his love for a housekeeper (another great performance from Thompson) or the error of his employer’s ways, the film was essentially an emotionally wrenching character study. It earned a number of international award nominations, including Oscar nominations for Thompson, Hopkins, Jhabvala, and Ivory.

Ivory subsequently turned away from literary adaptation, though he remained immersed in the period drama genre. Jefferson in Paris (1995), which proved to be a substantial disappointment, focused on the public and personal affairs of the American President, while Surviving Picasso (1996) — which also failed to draw critical or commercial favor — was a detailed epic about Picasso and his long-suffering lovers. In 1998, Ivory ventured into a more modern milieu with A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. Based upon a novel by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of novelist James Jones, the film was a poignant study of an expatriate family straddling two worlds (Paris and the U.S.) and coping with change and alienation. Ivory’s most celebrated film since The Remains of the Day, it combined a sterling lead performance by Leelee Sobieski with the director’s usual talent for graceful, studied detail. —allmovie guide

David Lynch is the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking, an acclaimed and widely recognized writer/director as well as television producer, photographer, cartoonist, composer, and graphic artist. Walking the tightrope between the mainstream and the avant-garde with remarkable balance and skill, Lynch brings to the screen a singularly dark and disturbing view of reality, a nightmare world punctuated by defining moments of extreme violence, bizarre comedy, and strange beauty. More than any other arthouse filmmaker of his era, he has enjoyed considerable mass acceptance and has helped to redefine commercial tastes, honing a surrealistic aesthetic so visionary and deeply personal that the phrase “Lynchian” was coined simply to describe it.

Born January 20, 1946, in Missoula, MO, David Keith Lynch grew up the archetypal all-American boy. The son of a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist, he was raised throughout the Pacific Northwest, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout and even serving as an usher at John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration. Originally intending to become a graphic artist, Lynch enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1963, falling under the sway of expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka and briefly studying in Europe. By the early weeks of 1966, he had relocated to Philadelphia, where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and began his first experimentation with film.

The violence and decay which greeted Lynch in Philadelphia proved to have a profound and long-lasting effect, as his work became increasingly obsessed with exploring the dark corners of the human experience. From his first experimental student film (1967’s “moving painting” Six Men Getting Sick, which its creator described as “57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit”) onward, his vision grew more and more fascinated with the seedy underbelly of everyday life. Awarded an American Film Institute Grant, The Alphabet, a partially animated 16 mm color film, followed later in the year, but Lynch soon turned away from the cinema to renew his focus on fine art. His next short film, The Grandmother, did not appear until 1970.

In 1972, Lynch began work on his first feature effort, Eraserhead. A surreal nightmare borne of the director’s own fears and anxieties of fatherhood, the film took over five years to complete, finally premiering in March 1977. An instant cult classic, it was also a tremendous critical success, launching Lynch to the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking. Financed with the aid of boyhood friend Jack Fisk, a noted production designer as well as the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, Eraserhead not only established Lynch’s singular world view but also cemented the team of actors and technicians who would continue to define the texture of his work for years to come, including cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, and actor Jack Nance.

The success of Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of Mel Brooks, who was seeking projects to produce besides his own comedies. He recruited Lynch to helm 1980’s The Elephant Man, the tale of John Merrick, a hideously deformed member of 19th century British society. Complete with a cast including such celebrated talent as John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and John Gielgud, the film marked Lynch’s acceptance into the Hollywood mainstream, even netting an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture as well as a nod for Best Director.

After launching the weekly comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World in 1982, he began adapting the Frank Herbert science fiction novel Dune for Dino de Laurentiis. The first of Lynch’s films to star actor Kyle MacLachlan, who quickly emerged as the director’s cinematic alter ego, the 1984 big-budget effort was a commercial and critical disaster – Lynch himself even disowned the project after it was re-edited for release without his consent.

Lynch had agreed to make Dune for de Laurentiis in order to film 1986’s Blue Velvet, a long-simmering tale exploring the dark underbelly of small-town life. Insisting upon complete artistic control, he made the picture for under seven million dollars, casting actors ranging from MacLachlan to model Isabella Rossellini to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, former stars whose popularity had suffered in recent years. The completed film was an unqualified masterpiece, a hypnotically violent creep show which earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination as well as boosting the careers of all involved. Hopper, in particular, won raves for his bravura turn as the sociopathic killer Frank Booth, the movie’s vision of evil incarnate.

At the peak of his powers, Lynch turned away from motion pictures to concentrate on other forms of media. First, in 1989 he staged Industrial Symphony No. 1, an avant-musical performance piece created with composer Angelo Badalamenti. Then, in 1990 he mounted his most commercially successful work, the ABC television series Twin Peaks. A surrealist soap opera created in conjunction with former Hill Street Blues producer Mark Frost, Twin Peaks became a cultural phenomenon, spurred by the mystery of “Who killed Laura Palmer?,” the series’ central plot thread. Suddenly, Lynch was a cultural figure of considerable renown, a filmmaker perhaps more famous than any of his actors. His fame was bolstered when his fifth feature, 1990s hallucinatory road movie Wild at Heart, grabbed the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

As quickly as the media had built Lynch up, however, they tore him down. Wild at Heart received mixed reviews from American critics, while Twin Peaks was scuttled off to a poorly suited Saturday-night slot, leading to its demise in early 1991. Two other Lynch-created series, the documentary anthology American Chronicles and the situation comedy On the Air, also met with premature deaths. In 1992, he released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a feature-film prequel to the television series. An ambitious, fractured work featuring Sheryl Lee as the ill-fated Laura Palmer, the picture was savaged by critics, leaving a wounded Lynch to plot his next move. He spent the next few years away from the limelight. Apart from 1994’s Images, a book collection of photographs and paintings, little was seen or heard from him for close to half a decade.

Finally, in 1997, Lynch resurfaced with the enigmatic Lost Highway, another experimental, dream-like effort that polarized viewers’ responses. He enjoyed more renown in 1999 when The Straight Story was released at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, based on a true story, marked a departure from Lynch’s previous subject matter; the simple tale of a man (Richard Farnsworth) who gets on his tractor and drives 350 miles to see his brother, it offered few of the dark undertones and twisted subtext that had come to be known as the director’s trademarks. It was released at Cannes to generally positive reviews – and earned Farnsworth his second Oscar nomination – causing more than a few to observe that Lynch was once again back on track.

That notion would continue with 2001’s Hollywood-set thriller-melodrama, Mulholland Drive. Like Twin Peaks, the project was originally developed with ABC as a series pilot; unlike Lynch’s first foray into television, however, Mulholland was scrapped before it could make a prime-time premiere. Although Lynch tinkered with the two-hour pilot several times in an attempt to satisfy the network brass, they remained unsatisfied. The frustrated director then turned to European financing in order to sculpt a feature film out of his material. Premiering at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Mulholland garnered much acclaim, snagging Lynch the fest’s Best Director award (which he shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There), and cementing his career resurgence.

Never one to stop throwing aesthetic curve balls, Lynch spent the next few years immersed in the world of digital video, first on his exclusive website – members of which were allowed access to never-before-seen short films – and then on the highly experimental feature Inland Empire. Crafted over a series of years using a light, mobile video camera and very few crew members, the film was Lynch’s declaration of true artistic independence; the director himself heralded it as a breakthrough. The meandering, non-narrative, 3-hour opus, however, left critics and fans sharply divided as they tried to make sense of such disparate elements as a tortured, ghostly ingenue (played by Laura Dern), a Polish film crew, and Justin Theroux wearing a rabbit’s-head mask. Dissatisfied with the response from possible buyers at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Lynch chose to distribute the film himself, even mounting his own Oscar campaign – stationing himself on various L.A. streetcorners, no less – for Dern.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:100454~T1)

Youssef Chahine (born in Alexandria, Egypt, 1926) started studying in a friars’ school, and then turned to English College until the High School Certificate. After one year in the University of Alexandria, he moved to the U.S. and spent two years at the Pasadena Play House, taking courses on film and dramatic arts. After coming back to Egypt, cinematographer Alevise Orfanelli helped him into the film business. His film debut was Baba Amin (1950): one year later, with Ibn el Nil (1951) he was first invited to the Cannes Film festival. In 1970, he was awarded a Golden Tanit at the Carthage Festival. With Le moineau (1973), he directed the first Egypt-Algeria co-production. He won a Silver Bear in Berlin for Iskanderija… lih? (1978), the first installment in what proved to be an autobiographic trilogy, completed with adduta misrija (1982) and Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman (1990).

In 1992, Jacques Lassalle proposed him to stage a piece of his choice for Comédie Française: Chahine chose to adapt Albert Camus’ “Caligula,” which proved hugely successful. The same year he started writing Al-mohager (1994), a story inspired by the Biblical character of Joseph, son of Jacob. This had long been a dream-project, and he finally got to shoot it in 1994. In 1997, 46 years and 5 invitations later, he was again selected Hors Competition in Cannes with Al-massir (1997). —IMDb

Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves. His films are now screened in all international film festivals, from Cannes to Hong Kong. He won a Pulitzer for his photography in Chad. —IMDb

An avant-gardist who earned surprising access to the mainstream, Peter Greenaway is among the most ambitious and controversial filmmakers of his era. Trained as a painter and heavily influenced by theories of structural linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, Greenaway’s films traversed often unprecedented ground, consistently exploring the boundaries of the medium by rejecting formal narrative structures in favor of awe-striking imagery, shifting meanings, and mercurial emotional tension; fascinated by formal symmetries and parallels, his material displayed an almost obsessive interest in list-making and cataloguing, earning equal notoriety for its provocative eroticism as well as its almost self-conscious pretentiousness. Born April 5, 1942, in Newport, Wales, Greenaway was raised primarily in nearby Chingford. After deciding at the age of 12 to become a painter, he entered the Walthamstow College of Art. By 1965, Greenaway had begun working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information, where within a year he started making his own experimental short features. The first of Greenaway’s experimental short films to gain widespread distribution was 1969’s seven-minute Intervals. He continued releasing work sporadically throughout the first half of the 1970s, ranging in length from 1974’s four-minute Windows to 1976’s 40-minute Goole by Numbers. With 1978’s A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake, Greenaway first garnered festival notice, and with 1980’s The Falls, a “documentary” set in the future, he made his long-awaited feature debut. The 1982 17th century drama The Draughtsman’s Contract was his critical breakthrough, and the film launched him to the forefront of the global experimental film community.

In 1983, Greenaway helmed documentaries on the American composers Robert Ashley, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk for Britain’s Channel Four television network. Over the next two years he produced only short films and did not return to feature filmmaking prior to 1985’s superb A Zed and Two Noughts. Two years later he released The Belly of an Architect, its focus on themes of obsession clearly mirroring Greenaway’s own persona. Even more detailed was 1988’s Drowning by Numbers, which stuffed its blackly comic tale of a murderous family with numerological references ranging in tone from broad visual puns to nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy. With 1989’s more accessible The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway made his American breakthrough. A corrosive allegory of life in contemporary England, the film became the subject of much controversy in the U.S. when it fell subject to the MPAA’s new “NC-17” rating, consequently winning the biggest audiences of the director’s career. The follow-up, 1991’s Prospero’s Books, was his most experimental feature yet. A radical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it employed a revolutionary new device called an electronic paintbox which allowed Greenaway to fill the screen with an intricate series of intertextual double exposures and transparent overlays, eliciting some of his most extreme viewer response yet. Greenaway then returned to television for the next two years, helming 1991’s M Is for Man, Music, Mozart and the 1993 revisionist biopic Darwin. Also in 1993 he returned to feature films with the highly controversial The Baby of Macon, a grim, violent satire of life in the 17th century which failed to find an American distributor. Two years later Greenaway directed Stairs 1 Geneva, a documentary commissioned for Swiss television, as well as The Pillow Book, an erotic fable again utilizing the electronic paintbox first seen on Prospero’s Books. In 1997 the film was finally picked up for American release, where it garnered some of Greenaway’s most favorable response to date. In 1999, he released 8 1/2 Women, a black comedy about the roots and consequences of male sexual fantasy.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:92456)

The Russian theatre and film director Andrei Konchalovsky is an elder brother of Nikita Mikhalkov, born August, 20, 1937. As a youngster he planned to pursue a career of a musician and learned to play piano but his love for cinema outweighed and he entered VGIK-the major state film school where he studied under Mikhail Romm. At VGIK he met Tarkovsky, they collaborated on Ivan’s childhood and Andrei Rublev. For his length feature debut The First Teacher (1961), he chose the book by Chingis Aitmatov about the post-1917 Revolution period in the southern Russia. His next film, a black and white Asya Klyachina’s Story although made in 1966 was not released until a decade later because it failed to comply with the strict requirements of the Russian censorship of the period. A Nest of Gentry (1969) – a study of the 19 c. aristocracy – was praised for its visual beauty but attacked by critics as mannered. Konchalovsky’s powerful Uncle Vanya (1970) from the play by Chekhov is regarded by many people as one of the best films in the Russian language ever but it was not until he made his next two films that he became a worldwide famous film maker. A larger than life love story Romance for Lovers (1974) won an honor at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and Sibiriade (1979) – a dramatic and realistic story of the lives of the people of Siberia – was internationally acclaimed and brought Konchalovsky to the attention of American and European producers. From then onwards his career has been international in scope. Pleasing critics and cinema-goers worldwide he made English language artful films Maria’s Lovers (1984), Runaway Train (1985), Duet for One (1986) (praised for Max von Sydow’s brilliant performance), and Homer and Eddie (1989) starring Whoopi Goldberg.

Much to his fans disappointment Konchalovsky moved to the mainstream territory with the action packed Tango and Cash (1989). Charasteristically he still insists that this work is no less laudable than any of his others. He also directed plays and operas in a number of European cities. In the early 1990s he returned to Russia and directed several theatre productions most notably The Seagull by Chekhov and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Currently residing in Moscow Konchalovsky sometimes makes short excursions to Hollywood to make mainstream TV productions The Odyssey (1997) and The Lion in Winter (2003) in which Glenn Close gave an award-winning performance. His Russian-French co-production House of Fools (2002) – a story set in an asylum that stands on the border between Russia and Chechenya during the war in Chechenya – was warmly received in Europe and won an honor at the 2002 Venice Film Festival. However the film antagonized the critics in Russia who accused Konchalovsky of being a war-monger. In the very beginning of his career he used a double surname and was credited in his early films as Mikhalkov- Konchalovsky. Later he adopted his mother’s maiden name to distinguish himself from his younger brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, who was rapidly becoming a well known film maker. —IMDb

Born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris to a Jewish family of Algerian origin, Lelouch won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 for Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), as well as two oscars including best foreign language film. The 1981 musical epic Les Uns et les Autres is widely considered as his masterpiece, and his credits now add up to 50 or so films. His father gave him a camera to give him a fresh start after his failure in the baccalaureat. He started his career with reportage – one of the first to film daily life in the U.S.S.R., the camera hidden under his coat as he made his personal journey. He also filmed sporting events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Tour de France. His first full length film as director, Le Propre de l’homme, was decried by the critics – ‘Claude Lelouch, remember this name well, because you will not hear it again’ – Cahiers du Cinema said. La Femme Spectacle (1963), following prostitutes, women shopping, going for nose-jobs, was censored for its misogynist tendency. Un homme et une femme changed his fortunes and was met with favour even by the Cahiers group. Legend has it that Lelouch found himself one morning on the beach at Deauville when he caught sight of a young woman and her child on the sand. He thought about her story, tried to put together the story of how she had arrived at that moment. The scenario for the film was born. Lelouch set in place here some of the techniques of his filming he will use all his career. He used the locations for decor (here, the Grand Hotel at Deauville), recycled images from his old films (here, the 24 Hours of Le Mans), and used product placement as a means of financing his work (here, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his Ford Mustang.)

Lelouch is known for making movies based heavily on improvised dialogue.

He was arrested after his 1976 film, C’était un rendez-vous, reportedly at the time featuring a Ferrari 275 GTB being illegally driven at speeds approaching 140 km/h through the streets of Paris by a Formula 1 driver, was first shown publicly.

Recent claims made by the director himself, however, suggest he drove his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 in the film and dubbed the sound effects of a Ferrari 275GTB.

In recent years the public and the critics have seemed less interested in the director. The first part of his intended trilogy ’ Le Genre Humain’, ‘Les Parisiens’ was described in Paris Match as one of the most resounding flops of French cinema. Perhaps a director like Cedric Klapisch had replaced him in the hearts of the younger generation? Lelouch responded, ’It’s true no doubt, my public has grown old. It stays home and watches television.’

He has collaborated on no fewer than 28 occasions with the composer Francis Lai. They scored a great hit with the piece ‘chabadabada’ for the film Un homme et une femme sung by Nicole Croisille and Pierre Barouh, and more than 300 versions of the song exist.

He is the father of 7 children and is currently married to Alessandra Martines. —IMDb

Cheerfully wishing his audience a “disturbing evening” at a London retrospective of his films, director Michael Haneke insists that he is an optimist at heart, despite all of the relentlessly bleak carnage and deeply disturbing imagery so vividly painted and seared into the mind of anyone who has had the uncomfortable experience of viewing his work.

Practically born into show business, to an actress mother and director father, in Munich in March 1942, Haneke spent his early years in a working class suburb of Vienna before an early attempt at fame as an actor and pianist. Failing to achieve early success, Haneke attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy and psychology, and became a film critic and stage director before making his eventual debut as a television director with After Liverpool in 1973. Setting in motion a television career specializing in literary adaptations and small screen films, Haneke would work successfully in that medium until his feature debut with The Seventh Continent in 1989.
Laced with the theme of muted emotions resulting in stark violence that would become his calling card, The Seventh Continent’s bleak and austere portrayal of a family deadened and ultimately destroyed by modern convenience served as a deeply disturbing cautionary tale, made all the more effective by the final revelation that it was based in reality. The first of an agonizing trilogy on the same theme, including Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology Chance (1994), it offered a telling contrast to the Hollywood-manufactured attempts at shock in the form of slimy aliens and supernatural chills. These films were horrific and they were all too real in their implications and actions, the distortion of reality so common among typical horror films was abandoned in Haneke’s works in favor of the infinitely more terrifying affects of urban alienation.

Haneke took the modern obsession with cinematic violence to a level rarely attempted in 1997, with the tale of a happy family relentlessly tortured in Funny Games. Violence is not fun in Haneke’s world and this is where his optimism comes into play. Though shocking and repulsive on a number of levels, Haneke’s goal to shatter the numbness instilled by countless depictions of inconsequential violence in modern media is something the director views as positive and uplifting, even if the means to that end induce shock and anger. Haneke took home the Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival for The Piano Teacher, a compelling tale of sexual repression that also won that film’s stars, Benoit Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards at the festival.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:93329)