30 Unseen Directors

God, I miss film. It seems my film-viewing has trickled to a near stand-still in the past few months. Through hair-tearing tracts of time mismanagement and a general blood-curdlingly hectic schedule, it feels like casting my eyes over some quality cinematic images is becoming some kind of mythic quest.

The only thing that keeps me going in these bleak times of my own GFC (Ginormous Film Crisis) is using any tiny snippet of time to stay plugged in the cinema world. I can either graze on a film magazine, sift through film news on the net, or draft list after list of films that could all be lumped under the heading “Films To Watch When Some Semblance Of Time Management Takes Hold In My Life.”

It’s odd, but lists of films to watch keeps the engine running. It keeps the desire fuelled. To cast my eyes over screeds and screeds of “must-watch” films provides a heady mixture of overwhelm and yearning.

One new list I conjured up, in between frantic bouts of just being me, is of directors who I’ve never seen. It’s alarming to find the gaps in my cinema viewing, amazing to see what slips between the cracks. Once upon a time I think I would have hidden this out of some dumb form of embarrassment at “not keeping up” with the cinephile world, but really why hide this? So I haven’t seen Louise Feuillade yet, or Mikio Naruse. Big deal. I have something to look forward to – and once I ‘conquer’ a few films by these directors, I’m damn certain there will be new names popping up to replace them.  It’s great, really - there is always something new to pursue, always new epiphanies potentially around the next corner.

To be transparent, I’ve provided a selected list below of 30 directors who I haven’t seen yet, whose films frequent my “must-have-a-look-at-this-some-time” lists. Here’s to the future of film-viewing.

1.       Louis Feuillade

2.       Kira Muratova

3.       Boris Barnet

4.       Jon Jost

5.       Nathaniel Dorsky

6.       Jean Epstein

7.       Alexander Kluge

8.       Stephen Dwoskin

9.       Jonas Mekas

10.   Mikio Naruse

11.   Werner Schroeter

12.   Joao Cesar Monteiro

13.   Guru Dutt

14.   Sharunas Bartas

15.   Marco Bellocchio

16.   Bill Douglas

17.   Sacha Guitry

18.   Luis Garcia Berlanga

19.   Marcel L’Herbier

20.   Lav Diaz

21.   Mark Rappaport

22.   Alan Rudolph

23.   Alain Tanner

24.   Johan van der Keuken

25.   Mario Monicelli

26.   Alexei German

27.   Jacques Audiard

28.   Francois Ozon

29.   Krzysztof Zanussi

30.   Alain Robbe-Grillet

[pic: Louise Feuillade]