The five most important directors in cinema history, according to science
At the risk of rage-baiting, let’s take a moment to turn cinema – one of the greatest art forms in the history of human culture – into the factual, objective world of cold, hard science.
Yes, I know, you are probably quivering with fury already and prepared to throw a punch or two. But bear with me for a moment, because methodology is everything, and also, shooting the messenger is frowned upon by most people (especially the messenger).
How can you possibly determine, scientifically, who the best directors are? Well, according to one research paper from scientists at Washington State University, you do it by looking at contemporary reviews from critics, praise from industry professionals and audiences, and more recent critical discussions.
For example, the Robert Z Leonard musical The Great Ziegfeld was the highest-grossing movie of 1936 and received rave reviews, but it was also very bad and has since been disregarded as the showy, bloated, simplistic bit of schlock that it is. As a result, neither the film nor Mr Leonard makes it anywhere near the list of cinematic achievements.
To make their categorical claims, the researchers of the paper drew from a sample size of 1,277 films released from 1929 to 1991. They took into account, among other things, the number of books written about certain directors, the inclusion of the films in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movies ever made, and the ones that made it onto the National Film Registry. You can probably already see where this is headed. The study is extremely biased towards American cinema, which is just something we’ll have to get over in the name of getting to the results of their findings.
So, who are the most important filmmakers?
When all the numbers were crunched, the researchers created a list of 27 filmmakers who had retrospectively acclaimed films, Academy Award nominations, and books written about them. Every single one of them, you may not be surprised to learn, was either American or worked extensively in Hollywood, and not one of them was female.
The top five were Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler, in that order. Congratulations to those men. Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and the entire cohort of French New Wave directors didn’t even make the list of 27, nor did Chantal Akerman or Agnes Varda. But sure, let’s take those findings at face value and chalk it up to science.
Hitchcock is hardly surprising. We may be experiencing a bit of a backlash to his veneration these days, but he did help to pioneer some of the foundational devices and cliches in cinema. John Ford is a director’s director, inspiring everyone from Orson Welles to Martin Scorsese. Steven Spielberg needs no introduction. Even if you’re just evaluating his importance based on his pre-1991 catalogue (no Jurassic Park, no Schindler’s List, etc), there is still an embarrassment of riches.
Billy Wilder and William Wyler were knocking about Hollywood at the same time, and between them, they shaped a massive chunk of the industry’s golden years from the 1940s through to the ‘70s. Wilder was behind classics like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Wyler, on the other hand, gave us The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday and Ben-Hur – just to name a few.
Have we found an airtight, objective list? Nope. Absolutely not. But it’s hard to argue against any of these directors, either. I won’t say that science is subjective (not in this anti-science world), but I will go back to the indisputable fact that methodology is everything.
