Who are the most literary filmmakers?

Orson Welles was unquestionably one of the best-read film-makers. His films aren't blatantly "literary" the way some are but it's still clear enough, I think.

Of course his precocious reading is well-known (Shakespeare at 10, etc) but here's one amusing anecdote that shows he kept it up.

He was hired just to act in Catch-22 (he should have directed it, obviously) and one of his co-stars said that every day he arrived on the set with a pile of books and he just read through them steadily while waiting to be needed (most film acting is waiting). This co-star said Welles must have got through a hundred books during the shoot.

Not sure what you mean by "literary" filmmakers, though Badlands and Tree of Life are certainly some of the most poetic kino ever made.

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A literary director is someone who makes films using the same type of aesthetic vision a poet uses when he writes poetry. One has to be very sensitive to the smallest aspects of movement, color and sound. Literary directors will often employ long takes, close-ups of the actor's faces, and either a very refined dialogue or else an almost non-existent one, sometimes preferring to make their films silent, or even just using the dialogue of literary works (Percival le gallois; Passione second Matteo). An example of that can be seen in Bresson's film 'A Man Escaped', in which, amid the general silence of confinement, the objects in the prison are often the only things to make sounds, which gives them a completely new character which they would never have acquired in your usual movie, much like a poet will use a metaphor to let you see an object in a different and new way. Or you can take Tarkovsky's floating scene in which artistic allusion is made in much the same way Pound made them in The Cantos, or Einsenstein's use cinematic techniques in order to make religious and political comparisons which are also similar to the poetic metaphor.

A literary director is not necessarily one who will use words, but rather one who will use images, movement, color and sound with the care a poet uses his words.

Yes, Welles is another good one.

Mostly, however, people should avoid Americans. American cinema is made for lazy viewers. There are exceptions, but that's usually how it is.

I am not anti-American, and I believe the American novel is a marvelous things, and also that Pound and Eliot were the two great poets of the past century. American cinema, however, is for lazy people. It's best moments are in comedy: Chaplin, Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton.

>thing
>its

Fix'd.

Forgive me. I have just arrived home from an unpredicted and entirely unwanted favela visit (took the wrong bus) and I am very tired.

I wonder which movies gigantic masters like Dostoyevsky, Proust or Cervantes would've liked?

Occupy your mind with more worthwhile thoughts, faggot

Mel Gibson

Not Malick.

Stop being homophobic, you alt-right Trump-Supporter

Nothing to wonder here, as many great writers have left their testimony on their favorite filmmakers.

Names like Jean Cocteau, Sergei Eisenstein and Ingmar Bergman tend to be popular among people who enjoy the beauty of poetry and its capacity to turn the old and usual into the new and unusual.

Watch Sayat Nova, by Parajanov, if you want to understand the artistic potential of cinema.

(With all that said, TS Eliot was a Marx Brothers fan and Wittgenstein loved Westerns, but they obviously didn't see cinema as a serious art; Pound was smarter and enjoyed Berlin: Symphony of a City.)

I think it's a bit harsh to say American cinema should be avoided. I would agree, though, that Hollywood is very much concerned with things being entertaining and not at all "difficult". If a film won't appeal to not-overly-bright teenagers, it probably won't get made.

They can still make great films but these have to be great films that are also very entertaining on a superficial level. So you'll get a Star Wars, a Goodfellas, a King Kong, a Singin' in the Rain; but you won't get a Cries and Whispers or a Solaris (yeah I know they remade it but I don't care, my point holds).

>not liking Malick
Plebs really aren't welcome on this board.

I really hope you aren't American.

so the directors that deviate more from literature are the most literary? I don’t see it. The more ‘visual’ and ‘audible’ a movie is the less literary it becomes... To me at least

I like Malick but he isn’t ‘literary’ at all. How do you replicate Lubezki’s flow on a book?

>t. freshman who just took an introductory film studies class.

I am Brazilian.

Read again what I wrote.

>Literary directors will often employ long takes, close-ups of the actor's faces, and either a very refined dialogue or else an almost non-existent one, sometimes preferring to make their films silent, or even just using the dialogue of literary works (Percival le gallois; Passione second Matteo).

It can be full of dialogue, and also have an interesting and complex story-line. Think of the two movies mentioned, or Bergman's Wild Strawberries, of Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel.

However, it can be still literary even if it has no words, in the sense that it can be poetical. It is known that poetry doesn't demand words since at least the times of Mallarmé, when the potentials of the blank page started to be noted. Cinema can have poetry even when it has no words. If you don't believe me, you can watch Dreyer and judge for yourself.

Of course that means we have to extend the meaning of poetry to include many things, such as music and painting, or sceneries and more. However, this is somewhat imposed by the question itself. Cinema will never be literary in the typical sense of the word literary, because it has things literature lacks just like literature has things which cinema lacks, but it can still be poetical in the ample sense of the word 'poetry'.

I am a Law student. I would never do film studies. It is useless. You can learn it from the movies themselves or from reading books written by the great directors.

Shane Carruth
Richard Linklater

>Herzog whe he's at his best
Examples?

Malick is the definition of pleb.

And what do you think of his writing? Herzog himself thinks it is better than any film he has done.

Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Fata Morgana (he uses the text of the Popol Vuh), Stroszek.

Herzog is a very erudite man who reads Homer and Virgil in the original and isolates himself in a shed for one week, reading those authors, whenever he's about to start working on his screenplays. Kinski was a genius actor and helped to make the first two movies eternal. Aguirre is Harold Bloom's favorite movie.

The Conquest of the Useless, right?

I never bought the book.