The greatest director of the 1970s, according to science
Making an argument about who can lay claim to the title of the greatest movie director of the 1970s is like catnip to cinephiles. After all, there are so many options because this was the New Hollywood era, and so many directors working in that decade changed the cinematic landscape forever. However, ask the average cinephile to tell you who the greatest director of that hallowed decade was, but with the proviso that they must use science to back up their claim, and things get a lot harder.
How do you quantify something like that, which is mostly a subjective opinion? Well, a 2018 academic paper endeavoured to evaluate the answer once and for all. On the surface, its conclusion was surprising, but it ultimately stands up to scrutiny.
In their snappily titled paper “Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective”, Ruggero G Pensa and Livio Bioglio from the University of Turin laid out their method. They argued that they couldn’t simply use box-office figures or critical reviews to ascertain the identity of the best director of the ’70s because these things “may be influenced by external factors, such as advertisement or trends, and are not able to capture the impact of a film over time”.
Instead, they crunched the numbers of four centrality indexes – in-degree, closeness, harmonic and PageRank – to find out how much each movie of the decade influenced the films that came after it, in both artistic and financial terms. Now, we don’t know what “centrality indexes” are when they’re at home and have even less idea of how they can lead to an understanding of something like influence, which is often hard to pin down. There’s also a part of us that thinks, in the words of the immortal Homer Simpson, “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of all people know that.”
However, the results of all this science are undoubtedly fascinating. Pensa and Bioglio concluded that five directors stood above all others in the ’70s.
Fifth place belonged to Sidney Lumet, who had three films in that decade that ranked in the Top 5% of influence. Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t list these films by name, but we’d wager they are Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network – all stone-cold classics.
In fourth place is Francis Ford Coppola, which we’d argue is the first real shock of the data. According to the study, he directed four films in the Top 5% of influence. They must be The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now – because they’re the only four films he made between ’70 and ’79. Imagine making four of the greatest motion pictures of all time in the same decade, yet you’re not considered the best director in the game. Science. Who needs it?
Coming in at number three is Clint Eastwood, whose four films of Top 5% influence are likely Play Misty for Me, High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and The Gauntlet. However, he also made one picture ranked in the Top 10%, and that’s more than likely The Eiger Sanction.
Number two with a bullet is Brian De Palma, who scored a whopping five films of Top 5% influence. This is another quirk of the dataset that surprised us, as we would have pegged De Palma’s greatest decade to be the ’80s. The five ’70s pictures that won him this spot, though, are likely Carrie, Obsession, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and The Fury.
So, who is the greatest director of the 1970s, according to science?
According to Pensa and Bioglio’s no-doubt flawless science, the greatest director of the ’70s is Robert Altman, who had five films in their Top 5% of influence, plus one in the Top 10% and one in the Top 15%. Once again, this took us by surprise—until we thought about it and realised it made perfect sense.
In the ’70s, Altman directed four films which are now part of the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry because they were deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Those pictures are M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Nashville. The fifth one of Top 5% influence is likely Images, the only horror film Altman ever made, while the two of Top 10% and Top 15% may be Quintet, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi with Paul Newman, and the revisionist western Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.
It’s got to be Altman’s diversity that landed him the top spot. In the ’70s, he tackled several different genres and made defining movies in each. He approached the war movie from a blackly comic angle, made revisionist westerns that subverted the tropes of that hallowed genre and also nailed a neo-noir mystery and a musical drama. These leftfield approaches to tried-and-tested genres undoubtedly influenced countless filmmakers who came after him, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Richard Linklater, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Noah Baumbach, and Wes Anderson.
