Magnificent Obsessions

[Andrew Forbes]

I tend to become fascinated with a certain filmmaker or actor from time to time, triggering a tidal wave of purchases, rentals and critical consumption. Most recently, it's been Polanski. Previous infatuations have been had with Barbara Stanwyck, John Ford, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks among many others. Sometimes, they lead to lifelong love (Guy Maddin, John Carpenter). Other times, obsessions burn brightly and then quickly diminish (Kieslowski, Lynch, Charles Bronson), though I always retain an interest in what first drew me to the individual. These periods are almost always somewhat bumpy, with uneven patches of quality, sometimes yielding only a few gems. Regardless, even the most disappointing, crap-laden burst of auteurist obsession seems to teach me more about what I value in a film than any one great movie that lacks an evident personal stamp.

Does anyone else have this experience? Who are the objects of your obsession, past and present? This is not about our Favorite Director/Actor, but those lesser, sometimes irrational love-affairs that crop up every so often.

[Andrew Forbes]

F*** it. What did you guys buy this week?

[HGervais]

I'm in the same boat as you. I find a director or a genre that lights a spark and then I feel it is my mission to absorb as much as can as quickly as I can.
First time out for me it was probably discovering The Marx Brothers for the first time. Bear in mind these were the pre-VCR days so my options were limited to TV programming or the rep house here in NOLA...which it should be noted where I discovered Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford etc. Imagine my good fortune to watch Sleeper, Love & Death, Annie Hall and Manhattan on a big screen over the course of two days. Or 2001 & A Clockwork Orange on the same night.
Video stores made obsessive movie going habits a lot easier and that is the way I started watching Kurosawa or Bergman.
My two biggest avenues of movie obsession the past few years have been digging into film noir and Korean cinema. I'm sitting here staring at two bookshelves worth of film noir discs and a full shelf of Korean movies right underneath it.
Directors who I have devoured in recent years are Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller and Robert Altman.

[mavrach]

If I find a director I like, I'll try to delve deeper into their filmography. In the past couple months, I saw movies from Peckinpah and Bergman for the first times, so right away I scooped up more of their movies. It might take me a while to actually watch them though. I find that if you find one great movie, they usually have several more lined up behind it waiting to be discovered.

For movies I've already seen, I tend to dip through a director's collection all together again. In the past month I went through a bunch of John Carpenter's movies. Also on a bit of a horror kick lately.

[BenSaylor]

Great topic. I find this happening to me a lot, actually. Here are some examples.

Clint Eastwood: I've actually gone through 2 periods of obsession here, the first during college or soon after, when I watched a cluster that included White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, A Perfect World and probably some others. It continued again a few months ago, when I watched every film he's directed that I hadn't seen except The Bridges of Madison County. Unfortunately, I also watched a lot of his stuff as an actor at the same time and burned myself out, so I'm taking a break.

Douglas Sirk: This kick happened this year, when I watched the film that gives this thread its name along with Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows. Although I'm not crazy about all of these movies, I did enjoy them (especially Written on the Wind) and will be revisiting Sirk down the road.

British New Wave/"Angry Young Man" cinema: I watched a bunch of these sometime in college, and Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long Distance remain all-time favorites.

[Gabriel Girard]

This happens to me once in a while too although there are a few directors whose work I never finish seeing. I usually try to see their films in chronological order.

Recently I'm more interested in filling the gaps slowly but surely. It's rare that I ''must'' go thoroughlt through a director's repertoire. Also there are a fe where I doN,t wanna see all there stuff - Hitchock has too many films.

Directors whose work I've seen in its entirety, or where I'm missing 1 or 2 films : Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, Lars Von Trier, Richard Linklater, Oliver Stone, Woody Allen

Still a few films to go : Sidney Lumet, Stephen Soderbergh, Federico Fellini, Brian De Palma, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin

A long way to go : Fritz Lang, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

[Steve T Power]

A few years back i went crazy with Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah stuff, and devoured pretty much everything i could lay mitts on. Neither was fleeting though, and both are in my top 10.

I went a little crazy with Sam Fuller after seeing the reconstruction of The Big Red One, but It has to be said, that's the only film of his I really unabashedly love. I snagged a bunch of his noir and war stuff and wound up selling it again. I kinda wish i'd held onto the cheapo war collection that had The Steel Helmet in it though. I think it may have been a bootleg.

Walter Hill is another I went crazy with, and I have yet to see a film of his that I didn't like. Extra special love for The Driver, Southern Comfort, and Streets of Fire.

I did have a spaghetti western phase about 11 years or so ago where I went through a metric ton of ultra-cheap VHS tapes, rentals from a local joint that specialized in anime/foreign flicks and anything i could devour on cable. Covered everything from The Man With No Name trilogy to lesser known stuff like Django (and many of the sequels), Sartana (and more sequels), and what remains a holy grail for me on DVD/Blu-ray, The Great Silence.

[Andrew Forbes]

Gabe, interesting that you've avoided going through most of Hitchcock's filmography, yet you've absorbed all of Allen's. The numbers are pretty comparable (Hitch, mid-50s going back to The Lodger; Woody, 45 and counting). That's not a criticism, I just find it interesting. Obviously, Allen's films are more affecting and interesting to you.

Harold, I'm starting to feel another pull toward Korean cinema, although the titles I've sampled have, in all honesty, been films I've admired more than I've loved. Park Chan-wook's vengeance flicks are phenomenally stylish, but I find them oddly distant and, paradoxically, too disturbing for comfort. That's a combination that I can appreciate, but I can't embrace. Despite coming from different directors, I've never gotten around to seeing titles like Memories of Murder and A Tale of Two Sisters, as it's hard to work up the enthusiasm for something I expect to find similarly dispiriting. The Host was great, but again I found myself held at arm's length from the characters. I've got The Good, the Bad, the Weird sitting on my shelf at home, so I'm looking forward to digging into that.

[Dan Mancini]

I've obsessed over any number of directors, including John Cassavetes, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Francois Truffaut, and Hitchcock. There's definitely something fascinating and educational about gulping down large doses of a particular director's work. The only directors with whom I maintain a pretty much constant obsession are Kurosawa and John Carpenter.

I've obsessed over entire film movements in the past, too: French New Wave, Italian neo-realism, New Hollywood, film noir, and postwar Japanese flicks, especially.

Pretty much every year from September to the end of October, I have a fleeting obsession with the horror genre, devouring a steady flow of familiar favorites while also staying on the hunt for new revelations.

Lately, I've been totally digging the DVD/Blu-ray dump of all of this Roger Corman-produced schlock. Much of it is truly horrendous, but some of it brings back fond childhood/teenage memories. And I just find the hit-or-miss quality of Corman's bottom-line-focused approach to moviemaking fascinating. A movie like Piranha is a blast because you have a talented young director busting his ass to be as creative as he can with a tiny budget and impossibly tight schedule. There's something charming about that.

[cdouglas]

Yeah, I have a tendency to get obsessed with particular directors and then try to devour as much of their filmography as possible. Some of the more noteworthy examples of years past include Werner Herzog, Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, Woody Allen, etc. It's usually after I've seen a few films from a particular director and have decided that I find enough of interest in those films to really want to explore everything they've done. On the purely popcorn movie side of things, I recently went through Tony Scott's entire filmography. Watching Mona Lisa a few days ago has inspired me to dig into some of my unseen titles in Neil Jordan's filmography, too. I also enjoy doing themed days/weeks/months as the inspiration hits (George A. Romero zombie day, Disney animation week, foreign film month and so on).

[Gabriel Girard]

Gabe, interesting that you've avoided going through most of Hitchcock's filmography, yet you've absorbed all of Allen's. The numbers are pretty comparable (Hitch, mid-50s going back to The Lodger; Woody, 45 and counting). That's not a criticism, I just find it interesting. Obviously, Allen's films are more affecting and interesting to you.

That's pretty funny - I hadn't calculated the exact number of Hitch's films. Actually I should have said that there are many of his films I'm not really familiar with - mostly the stuff he did before Spellbound. But you're right about Allen affecting me more. Hitch is a master filmmaker and I'm always impressed each time I see one of his movies but he wouldn't really make a list of my favorite directors. I appreciate the movies and know why they're great but only Vertigo has really stayed with me so far. BTW according to imdb Hitch has 65 credits starting with The Lodger and Woody 46... so that's about 20 movies more

Oh and I forgot to mention Gilliam, Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon in my ''complete or almost '' list and Herzog in the second one.

[Andrew Forbes]

BTW according to imdb Hitch has 65 credits starting with The Lodger and Woody 46... so that's about 20 movies more

I excluded Hitchcock's wartime shorts and television episodes when I added up the numbers.

[Dunnyman]

Most of my fave genres/directors/actors get steady workouts, but I do tend to wander into almost obsessive territory now and again. Recent years have seen me dip into and devour Preston Sturges, Mario Bava, and in the case of Kurosawa, he jumped from obsession to standard fave, where a month doesn't go by without me watching at least one of his films. I usually get into someone when a particular scene or bit really impresses the hell out of me, for instance I'd more or less ignored Mark Wahlberg, but his work in I Heart Huckabees showed me a whole different actor, and then by taking a closer look at his career I realized just how good he was.