The deaths this week of two of the world's greatest film directors - Ingmar Bergman, 89, and Michelangelo Antonioni, 94 - are a reminder that the history of cinema is the history of personalities, societal forces and technical evolution.
Both directors, one a master of faces and the other a master of landscapes, came from the golden age of the long take, of contemplation and despair and intellectual cachet that has been eclipsed, replaced by immersive spectacles, aggressive editing, corporate branding and multiplexes, and an audience trained to the rhythms of television and video games.
Yet, Bergman and Antonioni's influence continues to be felt in direct and indirect ways. Bergman's impact can be seen, for example, in such films as Todd Field's In the Bedroom and Sarah Polley's Away from Her. Antonioni's influence is present in directors as diverse as Béla Tarr, and through him Gus Van Sant, as well as Mexico's Carlos Reygadas ( Japon, Battle in Heaven) and China's Jia Zhangke ( The World).
Who among living directors could exercise a comparable impact? There are quite a few contenders. Most of the names below are picked from existing critics' polls, the famous Sight and Sound once-a-decade survey, the Village Voice, the Cannes International Film Festival and the useful They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (a sort of poll of other film polls).
I've divided the list into a cross-section of film artists of different generations - and have picked a leading figure who, arguably, stands for each generation.
The Grand Masters
Among these directors now in their 80s, the core group are French, most associated with the rupture of the New Wave originating in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s. The names of still-working directors include Eric Rohmer (87), Chris Marker (86), Alain Resnais (85), Agnès Varda (79), Jacques Rivette (79), and Jean-Luc Godard (76). Also from Europe: Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira, who, at 98, is incredibly still working; Roman Polanski (73) , who is appearing as an actor in the upcoming Rush Hour 3; and fellow Pole Andrzej Wajda, now 81. Greece's Theo Angelopoulos ( Ulysses' Gaze) is a master of complex austere films. From Japan, the latest major figure from the Japanese new wave of the 1960s is 75-year-old Nagisa Oshima ( In The Realm of the Senses).
Among the Hollywood directors, Sidney Lumet, 83, was once the embodiment of socially conscious Hollywood, with films such as The Pawnbroker and Serpico. Canada's Norman Jewison ( In the Heat of the Night, The Hurricane), who is 81, is similarly associated with Hollywood's social conscience. England's Nicolas Roeg (78), who directed Performance and Bad Timing, has slipped in reputation, although he's directing a new film, Puffball (based on a Fay Weldon novel), that is scheduled to be released this year. Meanwhile, another septuagenarian, Clint Eastwood, 77, once an icon of whispery vengeance in the seventies, has taken on the mantle of American master in the new millennium with such films as Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. Finally, there's Woody Allen, who at 71 continues to be productive, earning his best reviews in years with Match Point in 2005; and Ken Loach (also 71), who took a Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.
Representative director
Jean-Luc Godard
As a key theorist and practitioner of the French New Wave, Godard broke down and revolutionized the language of filmmaking, with jump cuts, hand-held camerawork, natural lighting and allusions to cinema and literature. His key impact was a sequence of 15 movies between Breathless (1960) and Weekend (1967). He shaped the future direction of cinema, influencing such filmmakers as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Wong Kar-Wai.
The Masters
These are a block of directors now in their 60s. They represent the impact of American cinema of the late sixties and early seventies, rising in the shadow of the French New Wave and evolving to the world of the multiplex and the blockbuster. They include Francis Ford Coppola (68), George A. Romero (67), Brian De Palma (66), Stephen Frears (66), Martin Scorsese (64), Tobe Hooper (64), Mike Leigh (64),Terrence Malick (63), George Lucas (63), Jonathan Demme (63), Peter Weir (62), David Lynch (61) and Steven Spielberg (60).
Non-American directors of master status include Italy's Bernardo Bertolucci (67), leader of the new Iranian cinema Abbas Kiarostami (67), Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (66), Italy's horror king Dario Argento (66), the Chilean Raul Ruiz (66), and Austria's chronicler of contemporary anxiety, Michael Haneke (65). From the German new wave of the late 1970s come Werner Herzog (64) and Wim Wenders (61). In the past 25 years, Canada's David Cronenberg (64), with his strange spiritual horror stories, and Taiwan-based Hou Hsiao-Hsien (60), were selected by the influential Village Voice as the narrator directors of the era.
Representative director
Martin Scorsese
Francis Ford Coppola may have sparked the American New Hollywood wave, and made at least three of the seventies masterpieces ( The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II and Apocalypse Now), but Scorsese has shown more staying power and stylistic influence. With important movies in at least three decades ( Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas), he's been hailed as America's best almost since the beginning. Some critics doubt his obsessive mannerism, but his fluid, fatalistic romanticism has shaped cinema from the streets of New York to Hong Kong, with a synthesis of sensational pulp and classic Hollywood elegance.
The Contenders
These are directors now in their 50s. They emerged in the 1980s, and represent a different era in filmmaking, when blockbusters ruled and the art house dwindled. But in its place, the festivals celebrated outsider American directors and a few foreign-language stars. The biggest story internationally was the rise of American indie films, while international filmmakers are more obviously trans-national in style and influences. The leading Americans include Errol Morris (59), Gus Van Sant (55), Gillian Armstrong (56), Whit Stillman (55), Jane Campion (53), Jim Jarmusch (54), Abel Ferrara (56), Michael Moore (53), Joel Coen (52) and Ethan Coen (49). Brad Bird and John Lasseter, two of the masterminds behind the Pixar computer-generated movies, are 49 and 50, respectively.
Internationally, there's Wong Kar-Wai (49), Ang Lee (52), Catherine Breillat (59), Claire Denis (59), Chantal Akerman (57), Deepa Mehta (57), Pedro Almodovar (57), Russia's Aleksandr Sokurov (56), China's "fifth generation" directors Zhang Yimou (55) and Chen Kaige (54), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (53), Béla Tarr (52), Emir Kusturica (52), Walter Salles (51), Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang (49), Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf (50), and Finland's Aki Kaurismaki (50).
Representative directors
The Coen Brothers
Typically, critics are impressed by their skills and immense cleverness, and dubious about the Coen brothers' insistent lack of sincerity as they parody, pastiche and play with the conventions of film. The boys can't help it: They were born jaded and too hip for the movie house, although once every few years ( Miller's Crossing, Fargo and the upcoming No Country for Old Men), there's a shock of moral power and human feeling in their films that confounds their detractors. In an era when ennui and imitation rule, they're the best at it.
The Ascendants
These are directors who emerged in the troubled movie climate of the 1990s, when pundits were widely declaiming the dumbing down of cinema and predicting its death. Most are described as idiosyncratic, and a handful of them have gone on to perpetuate the tradition of the blockbuster spectacles. Many of them have relied on film festivals to bring them attention, in careers that leap from one slippery rock of precarious financing to the next.
They include Mira Nair (49), Tim Burton (48), Michael Almereyda (48), Todd Solondz (48), Atom Egoyan (47), Sam Raimi (47), Michael Winterbottom (46), Todd Haynes (46), Alfonso Cuaron (45), Steven Soderbergh (44), Quentin Tarantino (44), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (43), Guillermo Del Toro (43), and Bryan Singer (41). Cult Japanese director Takashi Miike (46) bucked the trend by not working in English.
Representative director
Quentin Tarantino
Having arrived with more acclaim than any director since a young Orson Welles, Tarantino, with his brash mixture of art and exploitation cinema, and a talent for fast-paced dialogue worthy of Howard Hawks, created a galvanic synthesis of styles called Tarantino-esque. For too long a period, every other independent movie featured smart-alecky dialogue, crazy violence and tricky time frames. Some time soon, perhaps, he'll get over his fetish for homages and settle down and write the great comedy of which he's capable.
The Future
The under-thirty Americans include a collection of clever, ironic stylists: David O. Russell (39), Wes Anderson (38), and Paul Thomas Anderson (37). Internationally, standout names include Sweden's Lukas Moodyson (38), Denmark's Thomas Vinterberg (38), Scotland's Lynne Ramsay (37), and China's Jia Zhangke. Mexico's Carlos Reygadas ( Japon, Battle in the Sky) is 36, the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin is 33, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's daughter, Samira Makhmalbaf, whose first film debuted at Cannes when she was 18, is now a veteran at 30.
Representative director
Jia Zhangke
China is expected to exercise a global cultural influence, and Jia Zhangke has a lot to tell us about what that's going to be like. Unlike the directors of China's "fifth generation" (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige), he eschews the mythic and historical for gritty realistic stories with a style of long takes influenced by Yusujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Michalangelo Antonioni.
With such films as Still Life, Platform, Unknown Pleasure and The World, he has become the international voice of youthful alienation in the age of globalization.
Liam Lacey