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Young Directors: Where Do They All Come From?
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15493 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
1,018 Words |
| Author
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Wendy Keys
Wendy Keys is executive producer/programming for the Film
Society of New York. |
Since the inception of the motion picture nearly a hundred years ago, young people have been attracted to the film medium as a form to express their vision of the world. This vision has ranged from such diverse films as The Battleship Potemkin, made by 25-year-old Sergei Eisenstein in 1927, to The 400 Blows by 26-year-old Francois Truffaut in 1959, to most recently, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, by 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh.
Certainly these debut films by Eisenstein and Truffaut radically affected the work of the filmmakers who followed them. The impact of Soderbergh's film has yet to be tested by time, but his auspicious debut will surely spawn at least a generation of imitators.
Prior to making The Battleship Potemkin, young Eisenstein attended a film workshop in 1923, and he helped edit the Russian version of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse. While considered "too artistic" when it was first released in its native land, Potemkin has since been considered one of the best films ever made by film scholars and critics around the world. It is considered not merely a cult film, but is required study in film courses everywhere. A recent homage was paid to it by Brian De Palma in his film The Untouchables when he recreated the famous "Odessa steps" sequence. Instead of the White Guards shooting as the baby carriage wildly careens down the steps, De Palma has Al Capone's henchmen firing away in a Chicago train station. Audiences laughed knowingly throughout the scene, testifying to the durability of Eisenstein's image.
Sheer Passion
Francois Truffaut was
... (1996 of 5975 Characters)
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