(Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

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djross
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(Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by djross »

x
Last edited by djross on Thu Jul 20, 2023 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

MmzHrrdb
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by MmzHrrdb »

I like this. I'm going to give it a shot.

TheDenizen
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by TheDenizen »

I lack the dedication to make as detailed a list as djross has, but here's my top 10, same format.

93.78 - Akira Kurosawa (9 films)
92.0 - Liu Chia-Liang
89.83 - Stanley Kubrick (6 films)
87.5 - Chan Wook Park (6 films)
87.0 - Sergio Leone (5 films)
84.9 - Quentin Tarantino
84.8 - Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
83.0 - Sergio Corbucci (5 films)
82.8 - Kihachi Okamoto (5 films)
82.5 - tie between Chang Cheh and the Coen brothers, both with 10 films

Hm, plenty of Samurai, kung fu and western flicks represented there. Good stuff.

Just missing the top 10: Peter Jackson, Sergio Sollima, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roman Polanski

MmzHrrdb
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by MmzHrrdb »

Okay, I used this method with a few modifications to generate my top 100. I'm pretty happy with the results. The top 9 especially are exactly how I would rank them without using any numbers.

Modifications:

* for Stan Brakhage (112 films seen), I averaged the top 30
* for directors with 9 to 11 films seen, I averaged the top 8
* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say
* for certain directors, I removed the lowest film from the average when I considered it to be an anomalous stinker in their career
* I included directors with 3 or 4 films seen, but deducted 10% from the average
* minor adjustments to rank directors with the same score
* selective trimming at the bottom of the list

Ingmar Bergman - 95.20
Satyajit Ray - 94.60
Akira Kurosawa - 93.00
Terrence Malick - 91.60
Alfred Hitchcock - 91.10
Ming-liang Tsai - 90.88
Luis Buñuel - 90.30
Werner Herzog - 89.80
Woody Allen - 88.90
François Truffaut - 88.50
Martin Scorsese - 88.40
Kenji Mizoguchi - 88.20
Krzysztof Kieslowski - 87.20
Fritz Lang - 86.90
Pedro Almodóvar - 86.63
Michael Winterbottom - 86.00
Emir Kusturica - 85.50
Peter Greenaway - 85.31
Joel and Ethan Coen - 85.30
Apichatpong Weerasethakul - 85.25
Aki Kaurismäki - 85.20
Masaki Kobayashi - 85.17
Béla Tarr - 85.13
David Lean - 85.12
Stan Brakhage - 84.80
David Lynch - 84.71
Robert Bresson - 84.70
Stanley Kubrick - 84.60
Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne - 84.60
Agnès Varda - 84.50
Alain Resnais - 84.25
Steven Soderbergh - 83.90
Orson Welles - 83.81
Anthony Mann - 83.80
Yasujiro Ozu - 83.79
Elia Kazan - 83.50
Hayao Miyazaki - 83.38
John Sturges - 83.20
Quentin Tarantino - 83.10
Roman Polanski - 83.00
James Lee - 82.80
Michelangelo Antonioni - 82.63
Allan King - 82.60
Jules Dassin - 82.40
Ritwik Ghatak - 82.38
Abbas Kiarostami - 82.38
Robert Siodmak - 82.25
Frank Capra - 82.25
Ermanno Olmi - 82.00
F.W. Murnau - 81.71
Anh Hung Tran - 81.67
Kon Ichikawa - 81.60
Buster Keaton - 81.25
Michael Powell - 81.20
Billy Wilder - 81.10
Louis Malle - 80.90
Douglas Sirk - 80.63
Guy Maddin - 80.57
Yimou Zhang - 80.50
Jean Renoir - 80.40
Lars von Trier - 80.38
Federico Fellini - 80.30
Wes Anderson - 80.25
Andrei Tarkovsky - 80.17
Mike Leigh - 80.00
Michael Curtiz - 79.88
Nobuhiko Obayashi - 79.75
Max Ophüls - 79.75
Wen Jiang - 79.65
Milos Forman - 79.52
Josef von Sternberg - 79.51
Jean-Pierre Jeunet - 79.50
Jacques Demy - 79.40
Jacques Tati - 79.33
Francis Ford Coppola - 79.25
Roy Andersson - 79.20
John Huston - 79.10
Mohsen Makhmalbaf - 79.10
Shohei Imamura - 79.00
John Cassavetes - 78.88
Marco Ferreri - 78.88
Howard Hawks - 78.81
William Wyler - 78.80
Nicholas Ray - 78.75
Phil Karlson - 78.57
Kar Wai Wong - 78.50
John Brahm - 78.40
Gus Van Sant - 78.38
Sergio Leone - 78.33
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - 78.33
Hiroshi Teshigahara - 78.13
Carl Theodor Dreyer - 78.00
Eric Rohmer - 77.90
Anthony Asquith - 77.83
Jean-Pierre Melville - 77.63
Djibril Diop Mambéty - 77.40
Zhang Ke Jia - 77.21
Michael Haneke - 77.13
Carlos Saura - 76.75
Victor Erice - 76.20
Last edited by MmzHrrdb on Sun Oct 16, 2011 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

PeaceAnarchy
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by PeaceAnarchy »

FitFortDanga wrote:* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say

Who are these mystery directors and why do the numbers lie?

CMonster
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by CMonster »

There are a couple questions I think need be addressed when reviewing your approach. One is mathematical and the other is conceptual.
1) What if a direct has done so many movies that there are more bad than good, but his best 10 are great. Can it be said that he is a great director or everything other than him came together to make a great movie regardless of directorial talent? With this question in mind to you strongly subscribe to the Auteur Theory? What if the the best direction was actually written in the script?

2) Can a systematic approach such as this truly divine the nature of what makes you feel a director is great? Should your personal favorite be determined by numbers or should you follow your heart/instinct/guy/etc. on such a subject?

Don't get me wrong, I think that this is probably the best empirical way to determine a good director I've seen. I just feel that one must be able to address these questions if using this approach, specifically the first.

ShogunRua
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by ShogunRua »

CMonster wrote:1) What if a direct has done so many movies that there are more bad than good, but his best 10 are great


Exactly. I enjoy djross's numerical topics and feel this particular one is a decent approach.

However, its failing is that it doesn't punish directors enough for making bad films, and rewards them too much for making lots of pictures.

Who is a better director; Director A, who had 30+ movies in an incredibly long career, of which 10 were good, and the other 20+ sucked, or Director B, who only made 8 pictures, of which 7 were good and 1 was lousy?

Most would say Director B, but by your numerical method, Director A would have a distinct advantage.

How to solve this? I have an idea; calculate both the average rating for all movies by a director, AND calculate the average by djross's approach above.

Then, add these two averages together and order the results. That way, BOTH approaches are factored equally into the final equation; the best movies of the director, but also an indication of how good all their movies were, on average.

djross
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by djross »

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Last edited by djross on Thu Jul 20, 2023 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

MmzHrrdb
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by MmzHrrdb »

PeaceAnarchy wrote:
FitFortDanga wrote:* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say

Who are these mystery directors and why do the numbers lie?


The one that stands out is Spielberg. He has three films that I genuinely consider "favorites" (Raiders, Last Crusade, and Close Encounters) and a small handful I would call enjoyable. Taking the average of just the top 10 was enough to put him in my top 100. But I don't consider this an accurate representation of how I feel about him as a filmmaker, which is characterized as much by his bad/mediocre work as his successes. If I were to "finalize" this list in some way, I'd probably include him, but close to the bottom.

The other one that I can recall is Peter Jackson... I'm just not as fond of LOTR as I used to be, need to update my scores at some point. And I imagine his early films would drag the average down, if I were to bring myself to watch them (I saw enough of Meet the Feebles to know I can't stand it).

djross wrote:As a further aside, I was a little disappointed with FitFortDanga's list: a very interesting list without doubt, from which I can certainly learn much. But it seemed a little over-engineered to me, to the point that it seemed pretty much just the list of this user's favourite directors. I would have been interested to see the outcome if the simpler procedure I outlined had been followed to the T. But hey, that's me.


There was some cherry-picking to be sure, but for most part the adjustments I made stuck to the mathematical spirit of your original model.

avgcrtckr
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Re: (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

Post by avgcrtckr »

Here's a list of top 60 directors with at least 5 films in the avgcrtckr's voting list (so far). The first number is the average rating, and the second is the number of films in the list.

Satyajit Ray 83.80 5 Luchino Visconti 75.29 7
Masaki Kobayashi 83.00 6 Louis Malle 75.29 7
Sergio Leone 81.20 5 Jean Renoir 75.25 8
Carl Theodor Dreyer 80.40 5 Emeric Pressburger 74.88 8
Krzysztof Kieslowski 79.67 9 Frank Capra 74.83 6
Akira Kurosawa 79.44 16 Chuck Jones 74.79 19
Andrei Tarkovsky 79.25 8 Orson Welles 74.73 11
Kenji Mizoguchi 78.29 7 Vittorio De Sica 74.67 6
Henri-Georges Clouzot 78.00 5 Fritz Lang 74.60 15
Yasujiro Ozu 77.79 14 Sidney Lumet 74.44 9
F.W. Murnau 77.67 6 Ernst Lubitsch 74.36 11
Ingmar Bergman 77.50 20 Agnès Varda 74.33 6
Jean-Pierre Melville 77.33 6 Michael Powell 74.30 10
Charles Chaplin 77.17 12 Preston Sturges 74.17 6
John Cassavetes 76.63 8 Jan Svankmajer 73.80 10
Max Ophüls 76.60 5 Alain Resnais 73.70 10
Nicholas Ray 76.40 5 Rainer Werner Fassbinder 73.57 14
Emir Kusturica 76.40 5 Sergei M. Eisenstein 73.50 6
Michelangelo Antonioni 76.14 7 Terrence Malick 73.40 5
Wim Wenders 76.00 7 Abbas Kiarostami 73.38 8
Andrzej Wajda 76.00 5 Jean-Luc Godard 73.00 11
David Lean 75.83 6 Samuel Fuller 73.00 7
Buster Keaton 75.77 13 Otto Preminger 73.00 5
Eric Rohmer 75.71 7 Sam Peckinpah 73.00 5
Luis Buñuel 75.63 16 Stanley Kubrick 72.92 12
Roberto Rossellini 75.60 5 Werner Herzog 72.75 20
Robert Bresson 75.50 12 Mike Leigh 72.71 7
Elia Kazan 75.50 6 John Ford 72.70 10
Federico Fellini 75.38 8 Edward F. Cline 72.20 5
Hayao Miyazaki 75.33 9 Chan-wook Park 72.20 5

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