Introducing: Audient Auteurs

Before this blog gets completely consumed with 2017 retrospective material – t-minus 18 days until
my rankings are revealed – I thought it would be a good idea to look ahead a bit to 2018. And that entails me telling you about my new monthly viewing series.

As I teased in my post closing out last year’s series, Asian Audient, this year’s series is going to involve twice the viewing – two movies per month rather than one. I think you’ll see why that’s necessary in a moment.

It’s a calculated risk. When I started these monthly viewing series back in 2010, I actually had three viewings per month, something I kept up until scaling back to just one in 2013. Part of the reason I scaled back was that I found myself falling behind, sometimes watching the final movie of the month as late as ten days into the new month. I decided this was something I wanted to avoid in the future.

But I can’t familiarize myself with the work of respected auteurs by watching just one of their films, can I?

And that’s what I’ll be doing in 2018, as much because it’s something that always begs doing as because I couldn’t resist the title: Audient Auteurs.

This is not dissimilar to the Getting Acquainted series I did in 2011 and 2012, when I watched three movies featuring a cinematic luminary with whom I was unfamiliar. But in that series I watched the work of as many actors as directors, or even in some cases, producers or movie studios. And in that series, I watched three movies per month rather than two. Two is more manageable.

So yes indeed, I will be spending the year watching two movies per month by directors whose names I know but whose work is unfamiliar to me. We can quibble with whether you would really consider them “auteurs” or not. The point of this post and this series is not to create a dialogue with the contentious auteur theory. For my purposes, they’re auteurs if I consider them to be revered directors with a body of work that is either of a certain size or a certain distinction.

Sourcing will be an issue. These may be revered directors, but the fact that I have yet to see anything they’ve made means they are at least somewhat obscure. If they were truly the most important directors out there, chances are I would have stumbled over something they’d made before now. But the 12 I’m choosing for this series are all brand new to me. Which means I may have a hard time easily getting my hands on one of their movies, let alone two. I’m resolved to avoid piracy but I may have to get creative.

The 12 I have selected are:

Chantal Akerman

Robert Bresson

Jean Cocteau

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Hal Hartley

Ernst Lubitsch

Jacques Rivette

Eric Rohmer

Bela Tarr

Agnes Varda

Lina Wertmuller

Frederick Wiseman

That’s in alphabetical order by last name.

I suspect I will not be able to find two films by all these directors – not without going to undue lengths, anyway – so I may have to work up a list of alternates, which should be easy enough.

There’s not a single Asian name in there, in part because I just tackled a few previously unseen Asian masters in Asian Audient, and in part because I’ve actually seen exactly one (minor) movie by Takeshi Kitano, who otherwise would have made this list. The French may be a bit overrepresented, but oh well. “Auteur” is a French word, after all.

I’m not really sure who I will start with this month. It’s a bit tricky as I plan to be watching mostly 2017 films right up to the 23^rd of the month. That leaves little time for two films from another director. It almost worked perfectly for me to kill two birds with one stone and start with Agnes Varda, one of only two directors on this list with a 2017 film (also one of the only ones who’s still alive), but Faces Places, sadly, does not open until the 25^th, meaning it will miss the cutoff for my rankings. That’s doubly a shame as I am very low on documentaries this year. I could still watch it as her second movie, and I may, but I usually try to take a break from movies from the previous year after closing my list.

So, I’ll keep you in suspense. Chances are you are not going to watch along with me, anyway, and even if you are, I don’t plan to publicize which titles I’m watching in advance. It’ll help with the sourcing if I can at least take my pick from the available titles I can find.

Come join me on this journey, won’t you?