Jeffrey Wells over at HE has posted a fascinating graph of the most referenced/taught film directors in US film schools: (1) Hitchcock (2) Welles (3) Kubrick (4) Spielberg (5) Kurosawa (6) Vertov (7) Lee (8) Chaplin (9) Godard (10) Scorsese
I won’t lie that my three years at film school taught me just about as much as I would have learned by just reading about film history online. Nevertheless, lots of great movies were screened and I don’t regret anything.
The above results show how Spike Lee (#7) has recently climbed the echelon of most taught filmmakers in college. Lee is referenced more by film professors than Charlie Chaplin, Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard. Sacrilege.
It’s been more than a decade since my last semester, but I don’t really remember a Spike Lee movie being screened, let alone many references to him. I vaguely, maybe, remember “Do the Right Thing” being shown, but I had already seen Lee’s masterpiece numerous times before and might have just skipped that screening.
I’m not surprised that Dziga Vertov is #6. Vertov directed “The Man With the Movie Camera” which is the prime example of montage and editing. That movie must have been screened around half a dozen times in my classes. Ditto the other quintessential montage classic, Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.”
Back to Lee. I’m a huge fan, but is he really as important as the other names on this list? Maybe, over time, he will be. “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X,” “The 25th Hour,” “Summer of Sam,” “Jungle Fever,” are all GREAT.
Ridley Scott (#11) just missed the top 10. That’s another surprise. Then again, in his five decades of prolific filmmaking Scott managed to produce many classics that shapeshifter various different genres, especially “Alien,” and “Blade Runner.”
I also don’t see Leni Riefenstahl‘s name on the list. The amount of times we were shown clips of “Triumph of the Will” is innumerable. College professors have probably tamed down their Riefenstahl admiration over the years due to her, you know, glamorizing Nazism in her films.