I love films, not only watching it but also reading and knowing it. I can read anything that has Cinema as the background. This is what attracted me to MK Raghavendra's "Director's Cut: 50 Major Filmmakers of the Modern Era."
Director's Cut is a take on the film making styles of the greatest directors of the modern era. The book starts with an introduction section,which explains the pattern using which Mr. Raghavendra chose the most influential 50 directors among all the great filmmakers we have ever watched.
The Pattern is actually very intelligent, he chose 1960 as a cut-off date as he believes the french new wave, which is one of the most influential movements in cinema commenced around this time and cinema became Modern only during this era.
Since the title of the book contains the term Modern Era; we shouldn't have any grudges with the Author for not including legendary filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles as their greatest works was witnessed before the 1960s. Instead he put the spotlight on directors like Luis BuĂąuel, Werner Herzog and Béla Tarr.
There are 50 chapters in this book, each dedicated to a director. Beneath the name of the director, there is a tagline defining the basic theme they have followed in almost all of their films. For example, below Steven Spielberg, you will see the words "Family Matters."
Spielberg always portrayed family as a valuable entity in most of his films like there was a family that struggled together in "Jurassic Park", hundreds of Polish families were saved in "Schindler's List", a mother and son was reunited in "Saving Private Ryan". A Mecha [Robot] was given the love of a mother in "Artificial Intelligence" and a man returns to his family in "The Terminal."
MK Raghavendra also included legendary directors Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, David Lean, Satyajit Ray and many other legends. It's good to see inclusion of acclaimed regional film directors from India such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan from the Malayalam Cinema and Ritwik Ghatak from the Bengali Film Industry.
This book does ignore great filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski and contemporary master directors Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson but still the 50 that it talks about are very aptly chosen and you will love understanding the approach with which they make/made films.
This Book Review is also Published on my Personal Blog
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