The Auteur Project: Part One
CONGRATULATIONS!
A famous director wants to make a short film about a memorable moment of your life. You'll need to learn about their approach to filmmaking, their style, and common themes in their films so that you know that they can do your memory justice.
The Auteur Project
For the Auteur's project, you will become the expert in the work of a film director that you like (or you will learn to like). We will research, analyze, deconstruct their films, and construct our own.
Our first step, therefore, is to choose our directors.
Rules
- No Tarantino or Ari Aster. You can't afford that much fake blood, and you know how IB is about excessive language & violence.
- No Michael Bay. If you need an explanation as to why, please see your guidance counselor about switching classes.
- No doubling up. There are plenty of directors to go around.
- Choose someone with a cohesive body of work and an strong visual style. Choose someone who leans towards formalism and less towards realism. For example, James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic, Avatar) has made some of the century's highest-grossing films, but it would be harder to analyze his style than someone like Jean Jeunet (Amelie) or Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth).
- You can choose someone from the list below or check with me on a director you choose for yourself.
Which Director Should I choose?
Here are some (very imperfect) lists of directors to choose from:
Since most 'best director' lists tend to be freakishly male and white (although Forbes does a pretty good job at being a little more inclusive) , you might also want to look at:
| Spike Lee | Ava DuVernay | Barry Jenkins | Rick Famuyiwa |
| Mira Nair | Tran Anh Hung | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Chen Kaige |
| Maya Deren | Stephen Chow | Julie Dash | Zhang Yimou |
| Julie Taymor | Wong Kar Wai | Ryan Coogler | Akira Kurosawa |
| Miranda July | Bong Joon-ho | Agnes Varda | Park Chan-Wook |
| Claire Denis | Jafar Panahi | Lina Wurtmuller | Yasujiro Ozu |
| Kidlak Tahimik | Satyajit Ray | Chloe Zhao | Jia Jianke |
You could also ask an AI for some advice (Claude, chatGPT, Gemini, etc.) You might want to be nice and say something like:
Hello! I would like you to recommend 10 film directors to me. I like films that are formalist and have a strong visual style. I also like (genre/specific films/film movements, other directors, etc). Thank you very much!
(Apparently, AI requests work better if you're nice to it).