Maverick director Juzo Itami didn’t direct his first feature—the alternately bawdy and bittersweet satire THE FUNERAL—until the age of fifty, but it announced the arrival of a fully formed sensibility unafraid of skewering the most sensitive aspects of Japanese society. Though his follow-up, the ...

The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are j...

A founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. In an abundant career in which she never stopped expanding the noti...

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating study of bourgeois Italian life LE AMICHE), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force i...

One of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time, Hiroshi Teshigahara distinguished himself in the 1960s with a series of sinuous, atmospheric, and daring films. With enigmatic art-house touchstones like the existential ghost story PITFALL, the shocking erotic fable WOMAN IN THE DUNES, an...

Trailblazing independent filmmaker Kathleen Collins was just forty-six at the time of her sudden death, but she left behind a rich legacy as a writer, academic, and filmmaker. This program presents her masterpiece LOSING GROUND, a perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, alongside the s...

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of renowned Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, and tech...

Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, the poignant, self-reflexive films of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami illuminate complex human truths with elegant and playfully deceptive simplicity. Beginning his career at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults...

In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Luis García Berlanga revitalized his country’s film industry by puncturing the sanctimony of Franco-era culture. Though less well-known internationally than his iconoclastic compatriot Luis Buñuel or his filmmaking disciple Pedro Almodóvar, Berlanga—who would...

Overlooked for too long, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) should be seen as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African cinema. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, AFRICA ON THE SEINE, a movin...

One of cinema’s great iconoclasts and mischief makers, Spanish master Luis Buñuel combined surrealist non sequiturs with taboo-shattering attacks on the bourgeoisie, the church, and social hypocrisy to create some of the most incendiary films of the twentieth century. Perpetually on the cutting e...

The boy wonder who became the great, wandering titan of international cinema, writer-director-actor and all-around force of nature Orson Welles began his filmmaking career with some of the most dazzling and innovative opuses ever made within the Hollywood studio system—but his vision was always t...

No director pushed the boundaries of the Czechoslovak New Wave further than Věra Chytilová, an uncompromising individualist whose fiercely antiauthoritarian attitude courses through every frame of her work. Though she remains best known for her feminist touchstone DAISIES—a patriarchy-exploding M...

Dryly deadpan, stylishly minimalist, and effortlessly cool, the films of American indie pioneer Jim Jarmusch are so idiosyncratic that they practically constitute a genre unto themselves. Forging his singular sensibility amid the creative ferment of New York’s downtown scene, Jarmusch emerged as ...

Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund—who has made waves in recent years with his art-house sensations FORCE MAJEURE and the Palme d’Or–winning THE SQUARE—began his career with these three fearlessly unflinching studies of uneasy social dynamics, codes of masculinity, and the tension between the grou...

New German Cinema renegade Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived fast and made films even faster, directing more than forty features, miniseries, and TV movies before his untimely death at age thirty-seven. With both cutting irony and profound empathy, Fassbinder exposed the moral hypocrisy of German so...

Shocking, confrontational, and made with white-hot fury, these radical documentaries—directed by Kazuo Hara and produced by his wife and longtime creative partner, Sachiko Kobayashi—give voice to the outsiders and iconoclasts who wage war with the conformism of modern Japanese society. From a wom...

Regarded as one of Japan’s three most important golden-age filmmakers (alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu), Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society. Though he’d already directed dozens o...

The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and the popular-front Gorky adaptatio...

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of dir...

The foremost pioneer of silhouette animation, German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger brought enchanting storybook worlds to life through her intricate cutouts and groundbreaking use of a proto-multiplane camera that she developed a decade before the technique was made famous by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks...

Wim Wenders is cinema’s preeminent poet of the open road, soulfully tracing the journeys of wanderers and drifters searching for themselves. Over the course of his incredible five-decade career, Wenders has traversed the landscapes of his native Germany (ALICE IN THE CITIES, KINGS OF THE ROAD), t...

Though he would find himself at the forefront of the radical New German Cinema movement, Volker Schlöndorff got his training in France. Apprenticed to such trailblazers as Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle, he became fascinated by the possibilities of filmmaking as a political ...

“Not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon,” observed Akira Kurosawa with regards to the Indian master who would have turned one hundred this May. Influenced by the poetic humanism of Jean Renoir and the Italian neorealist movement,...