It all seemed so simple. The “Auteurs Five by Five”. The plan was to watch five semi-randomly chosen films by five different auteur directors in five days. For instance, my Monday thru Friday could consist of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, with reviews/analyses of each one.
Well, that’s a lot of film watching—maybe it’s not for you, but it certainly is for me. Thus, the idea was inconceivable.
But now I’ve got a better idea. Instead of five films by five different directors in five days, how about: random auteur films, good or bad, with no time constraints at all! That’s far more feasible and something I’m happily obliged to do.
But the Auteurs Five by Five moniker sticks. It’s too catchy to let it go by the wayside and simply call this section “Film Reviews”. Nay, I’m sticking with auteurs, even if the “Five by Five” has no inherent meaning anymore. Also, it can be shortened to Auteurs 5×5, which is extremely catchy and fun to say.
The raison d’etre of Auteurs 5×5 (or maybe even A5x5, when shorthand is necessary) is that I not only look at the masterpieces—the Clockwork Orange’s and the Vertigo’s of the world—but I also want to see the auteur-in-question’s lesser known back catalogue as well (the Fear and Desire’s and Rope’s of the world). Hey, if you watch “masterpieces” all the time, then things that are merely “good” or “great” will eventually seem like crap, and that’s a terrible thing to do. How do you know if something is good if you’ve never seen something bad?
Hence, Auteurs Five by Five: perceived cinephile snobbery with a kick-ass title.
Link to all Auteurs 5×5 reviews
Director List
DW Griffith
Charlie Chaplin
Buster Keaton
FW Murnau
Fritz Lang
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Sergei Eisenstein
Jean Renoir
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
Billy Wilder
Luis Bunuel
Orson Welles
Yasujiro Ozu
Akira Kurosawa
Kenji Mizoguchi
Roberto Rossellini
Federico Fellini
Nicholas Ray
Douglas Sirk
Robert Bresson
David Lean
Stanley Kubrick
Ingmar Bergman
Jean-Pierre Melville
Michelangelo Antonioni
Preston Sturges
Jean Cocteau
John Huston
Satyajit Ray
Francois Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Alain Resnais
Andrei Tarkovsky
Jacques Tati
Luschino Visconti
Samuel Fuller
Sam Peckinpah
John Cassavetes
Martin Scorsese
Francis Ford Coppola
Robert Altman
Woody Allen
Werner Herzog
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Sydney Lumet
Steven Spielberg
Louis Malle
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Hayao Miyazaki
Spike Lee
David Lynch
Terrence Malick
Ridley Scott
The Coen brothers
John Hughes
Steven Soderbergh
Quentin Tarantino
David Fincher
Robert Zemeckis
Michael Haneke
Spike Jonze
Alexander Payne
Christopher Nolan
Wes Anderson
Richard Linklater
Paul Thomas Anderson
Alfonso Cuaron
Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu
Dennis Villenueve
