General Discussion : (Yet) another approach to the question of greatest directors

[djross]

Several approaches to the question of using Criticker to gauge the greatest directors have been tried, and I would now like to advance another. One problem has been that just using the raw average score for any particular director can greatly disadvantage prolific directors, who may have released many great movies, yet still find their averages brought down by the sheer volume of also-rans populating their long careers. My solution is thus, as follows:

(a) only consider directors where I have seen at least five of his or her movies;
(b) where I have seen between five and ten movies by a particular director, take the raw average;
(c) where I have seen greater than ten movies by the director, take the average from their ten highest-ranked movies.

The problem of course is that there is no method of figuring this out other than doing the maths for the directors to whom point (c) applies. So naturally I understand if others can't be bothered with this approach. Nevertheless here are my results, listing all directors with an average above 80 (tier 9) using this method (number of films indicated where less than ten):

92.20: Terrence Malick (5 films)
91.10: Ingmar Bergman
90.60: Patricio Guzmán (5 films)
89.90: Woody Allen
89.10: Lars von Trier
88.50: Martin Scorsese
88.38: Adam Curtis (8 films)
87.50: Abbas Kiarostami
87.40: Eric Rohmer
87.20: Orson Welles (5 films)
87.10: Robert Altman
86.60: Werner Herzog
86.43: Andrei Tarkovsky (7 films)
85.40: Mark Sandrich (5 films)
85.20: Stanley Kubrick
85.17: Luis Buñuel (6 films)
84.33: Robert Bresson (6 films)
82.60: David Lynch
82.00: Masaki Kobayashi (5 films)
82.00: François Truffaut (5 films)
82.00: Alain Resnais (5 films)
81.80: Alfred Hitchcock
81.80: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (5 films)
80.83: Preston Sturges (6 films)
80.83: Akira Kurosawa (6 films)
80.78: Federico Fellini (9 films)
80.10: Coen brothers

I like the results produced by this rubric. In some cases the averages are vastly different, for example:

Woody Allen: 72.34 (38 movies)
Martin Scorsese: 72.26 (31 movies)
Robert Altman: 72.20 (30 movies)
Werner Herzog: 68.89 (44 movies)
David Lynch: 66.00 (21 movies)

[FitFortDanga]

I like this. I'm going to give it a shot.

[movieboy]

I think Average Tiers would work better than average ratings. I had asked for this change in the calculations long back - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2654

[TheDenizen]

I lack the dedication to make as detailed a list as djross has, but here's my top 10, same format.

93.78 - Akira Kurosawa (9 films)
92.0 - Liu Chia-Liang
89.83 - Stanley Kubrick (6 films)
87.5 - Chan Wook Park (6 films)
87.0 - Sergio Leone (5 films)
84.9 - Quentin Tarantino
84.8 - Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
83.0 - Sergio Corbucci (5 films)
82.8 - Kihachi Okamoto (5 films)
82.5 - tie between Chang Cheh and the Coen brothers, both with 10 films

Hm, plenty of Samurai, kung fu and western flicks represented there. Good stuff.

Just missing the top 10: Peter Jackson, Sergio Sollima, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roman Polanski

[FitFortDanga]

Okay, I used this method with a few modifications to generate my top 100. I'm pretty happy with the results. The top 9 especially are exactly how I would rank them without using any numbers.

Modifications:

* for Stan Brakhage (112 films seen), I averaged the top 30
* for directors with 9 to 11 films seen, I averaged the top 8
* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say
* for certain directors, I removed the lowest film from the average when I considered it to be an anomalous stinker in their career
* I included directors with 3 or 4 films seen, but deducted 10% from the average
* minor adjustments to rank directors with the same score
* selective trimming at the bottom of the list

Ingmar Bergman - 95.20
Satyajit Ray - 94.60
Akira Kurosawa - 93.00
Terrence Malick - 91.60
Alfred Hitchcock - 91.10
Ming-liang Tsai - 90.88
Luis Buñuel - 90.30
Werner Herzog - 89.80
Woody Allen - 88.90
François Truffaut - 88.50
Martin Scorsese - 88.40
Kenji Mizoguchi - 88.20
Krzysztof Kieslowski - 87.20
Fritz Lang - 86.90
Pedro Almodóvar - 86.63
Michael Winterbottom - 86.00
Emir Kusturica - 85.50
Peter Greenaway - 85.31
Joel and Ethan Coen - 85.30
Apichatpong Weerasethakul - 85.25
Aki Kaurismäki - 85.20
Masaki Kobayashi - 85.17
Béla Tarr - 85.13
David Lean - 85.12
Stan Brakhage - 84.80
David Lynch - 84.71
Robert Bresson - 84.70
Stanley Kubrick - 84.60
Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne - 84.60
Agnès Varda - 84.50
Alain Resnais - 84.25
Steven Soderbergh - 83.90
Orson Welles - 83.81
Anthony Mann - 83.80
Yasujiro Ozu - 83.79
Elia Kazan - 83.50
Hayao Miyazaki - 83.38
John Sturges - 83.20
Quentin Tarantino - 83.10
Roman Polanski - 83.00
James Lee - 82.80
Michelangelo Antonioni - 82.63
Allan King - 82.60
Jules Dassin - 82.40
Ritwik Ghatak - 82.38
Abbas Kiarostami - 82.38
Robert Siodmak - 82.25
Frank Capra - 82.25
Ermanno Olmi - 82.00
F.W. Murnau - 81.71
Anh Hung Tran - 81.67
Kon Ichikawa - 81.60
Buster Keaton - 81.25
Michael Powell - 81.20
Billy Wilder - 81.10
Louis Malle - 80.90
Douglas Sirk - 80.63
Guy Maddin - 80.57
Yimou Zhang - 80.50
Jean Renoir - 80.40
Lars von Trier - 80.38
Federico Fellini - 80.30
Wes Anderson - 80.25
Andrei Tarkovsky - 80.17
Mike Leigh - 80.00
Michael Curtiz - 79.88
Nobuhiko Obayashi - 79.75
Max Ophüls - 79.75
Wen Jiang - 79.65
Milos Forman - 79.52
Josef von Sternberg - 79.51
Jean-Pierre Jeunet - 79.50
Jacques Demy - 79.40
Jacques Tati - 79.33
Francis Ford Coppola - 79.25
Roy Andersson - 79.20
John Huston - 79.10
Mohsen Makhmalbaf - 79.10
Shohei Imamura - 79.00
John Cassavetes - 78.88
Marco Ferreri - 78.88
Howard Hawks - 78.81
William Wyler - 78.80
Nicholas Ray - 78.75
Phil Karlson - 78.57
Kar Wai Wong - 78.50
John Brahm - 78.40
Gus Van Sant - 78.38
Sergio Leone - 78.33
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - 78.33
Hiroshi Teshigahara - 78.13
Carl Theodor Dreyer - 78.00
Eric Rohmer - 77.90
Anthony Asquith - 77.83
Jean-Pierre Melville - 77.63
Djibril Diop Mambéty - 77.40
Zhang Ke Jia - 77.21
Michael Haneke - 77.13
Carlos Saura - 76.75
Victor Erice - 76.20

[PeaceAnarchy]

* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say

Who are these mystery directors and why do the numbers lie?

[CMonster]

There are a couple questions I think need be addressed when reviewing your approach. One is mathematical and the other is conceptual.
1) What if a direct has done so many movies that there are more bad than good, but his best 10 are great. Can it be said that he is a great director or everything other than him came together to make a great movie regardless of directorial talent? With this question in mind to you strongly subscribe to the Auteur Theory? What if the the best direction was actually written in the script?

2) Can a systematic approach such as this truly divine the nature of what makes you feel a director is great? Should your personal favorite be determined by numbers or should you follow your heart/instinct/guy/etc. on such a subject?

Don't get me wrong, I think that this is probably the best empirical way to determine a good director I've seen. I just feel that one must be able to address these questions if using this approach, specifically the first.

[ShogunRua]

1) What if a direct has done so many movies that there are more bad than good, but his best 10 are great

Exactly. I enjoy djross's numerical topics and feel this particular one is a decent approach.

However, its failing is that it doesn't punish directors enough for making bad films, and rewards them too much for making lots of pictures.

Who is a better director; Director A, who had 30+ movies in an incredibly long career, of which 10 were good, and the other 20+ sucked, or Director B, who only made 8 pictures, of which 7 were good and 1 was lousy?

Most would say Director B, but by your numerical method, Director A would have a distinct advantage.

How to solve this? I have an idea; calculate both the average rating for all movies by a director, AND calculate the average by djross's approach above.

Then, add these two averages together and order the results. That way, BOTH approaches are factored equally into the final equation; the best movies of the director, but also an indication of how good all their movies were, on average.

[djross]

1) What if a direct has done so many movies that there are more bad than good, but his best 10 are great. Can it be said that he is a great director or everything other than him came together to make a great movie regardless of directorial talent? With this question in mind to you strongly subscribe to the Auteur Theory? What if the the best direction was actually written in the script?

2) Can a systematic approach such as this truly divine the nature of what makes you feel a director is great? Should your personal favorite be determined by numbers or should you follow your heart/instinct/guy/etc. on such a subject?

In relation to (1):

If a director has made ten great movies, in my view he is a great director. Very few have done so. Examples I would cite (from my perspective) are Woody Allen, Lars von Trier, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese. I would also add as an aside that often we try to see the better movies by a particular director rather than the lesser films. As a consequence, for example, I may have seen most of Bergman's best movies, and even though he has an extremely good average over the 22 movies I've seen by him, if I were to see the remaining 29 Bergman movies that Criticker has in its database (including many early ones), no doubt his average would suffer. But he's still a great director, even if those 29 movies were all bombs. The point here is that the average is affected by which movies we have seen by any particular director, a flaw which remains but is lessened by the Djross Procedure. And I'm not sure that anybody has in fact directed much more than ten movies that I would consider "great."

I don't subscribe strongly to any theory, but in a general sense I tend to believe that most of the time nobody is more significant than the director. There are extremely few writers who it seems to me have penned a large number of great movies, unless they also happened to be the director. But the latter is an important point: many of the best directors also wrote most or all of their movies.

In relation to (2):

It goes without saying that art is not reducible to calculation, just as artists are not reducible to algorithmic functions (though this has been tried, for instance with Shakespeare). And, of course, critical opinion, too, is irreducible to calculation. Nevertheless, the very premise of this website is the quantification, or perhaps "numericalization," of opinion, and it is a premise that, however limited, makes it possible to play around with numbers in a sometimes diverting way. And I would also add that, even though opinion is not reducible to calculation, it does not therefore follow that "following one's heart" suffices for a worthwhile critical opinion either: to the synthetic viewing experience we ought to apply an analytical apparatus (and some of the best movies force us to do so), and analysis always has something "calculative" about it.

That said, I am always glad when a user who seems to have numerical opinions that are of potential interest, chooses to supplement those with "mini-reviews," and even gladder when effort is expended to make those reviews say something about those opinions in an interesting or writerly way.

As a further aside, I was a little disappointed with FitFortDanga's list: a very interesting list without doubt, from which I can certainly learn much. But it seemed a little over-engineered to me, to the point that it seemed pretty much just the list of this user's favourite directors. I would have been interested to see the outcome if the simpler procedure I outlined had been followed to the T. But hey, that's me.

[FitFortDanga]

* I removed certain directors that I would never consider among my top 100, no matter what the numbers say

Who are these mystery directors and why do the numbers lie?

The one that stands out is Spielberg. He has three films that I genuinely consider "favorites" (Raiders, Last Crusade, and Close Encounters) and a small handful I would call enjoyable. Taking the average of just the top 10 was enough to put him in my top 100. But I don't consider this an accurate representation of how I feel about him as a filmmaker, which is characterized as much by his bad/mediocre work as his successes. If I were to "finalize" this list in some way, I'd probably include him, but close to the bottom.

The other one that I can recall is Peter Jackson... I'm just not as fond of LOTR as I used to be, need to update my scores at some point. And I imagine his early films would drag the average down, if I were to bring myself to watch them (I saw enough of Meet the Feebles to know I can't stand it).

As a further aside, I was a little disappointed with FitFortDanga's list: a very interesting list without doubt, from which I can certainly learn much. But it seemed a little over-engineered to me, to the point that it seemed pretty much just the list of this user's favourite directors. I would have been interested to see the outcome if the simpler procedure I outlined had been followed to the T. But hey, that's me.

There was some cherry-picking to be sure, but for most part the adjustments I made stuck to the mathematical spirit of your original model.