Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Luc Dardenne has described their process of working with actors thusly: “What we do with the actors is also very physical. The day filming begins we do not feel obliged to do things exactly the way they were rehearsed; we pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before. The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman–just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking, first one then the other, trying several different versions. They say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be; we just say that we will see once the camera is rolling. At this point there is no cameraman, no sound engineer, no lighting. Then we set up all the camera movements exactly and the rhythm of the shot, which is usually a long take. Doing it this way allows us the ability to modify the actors’ movements or any small details.” The Dardennes often employ handheld cameras and use available light; their films have no musical score or soundtrack.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Often seen primarily as a Taiwanese formalist and innovator by Western critics, the social and political context of Hou’s films, and above all his sense of place are equally important in their development. Hou generally makes rigorously minimalist dramas dealing with the upheavals of the Taiwanese (and occasionally larger Chinese) history of the past century by viewing its impacts on individuals or small groups of characters. His storytelling is oblique and his style marked by extreme long takes with minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame. He uses extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his scenes and the low-key, naturalistic acting of his performers. Without abandoning this famous austerity, his imagery has developed a sensual beauty during the 1990s, partly under the influence of his collaboration with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

Kieslowski said the following in an interview, “It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn’t matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it’s still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word `love’ has the same meaning for everybody. Or `fear’, or `suffering’. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That’s why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.”

Lukas Moodysson

Moodysson is an outspoken left wing socialist, feminist, and vegetarian and at the same time a profoundly spiritual Christian. All of these traits that have become more and more pronounced in his works. With the brutal Lilya 4-ever in 2002, named to many American critics’ ten best lists for the following year, the mainly Russian language film follows a young girl living in an unspecified country in the former Soviet Union (filmed in Estonia) as she is abandoned by her mother, drops out of school, is forced into prostitution and then is kidnapped into sex slavery. Moodysson has said he could not have made the film without his strong Christian beliefs, and the frequent religious fantasies that Lilja has are the only tender spots in the bleak world Moodysson presents.

Lynne Ramsay

Relentlessly experimental, Ramsay brings a photographer’s eye to the cinematic image: through silence and space within the frame her films unfold in expanded time, showing rather than telling. Everything is on the surface; there are no hidden depths. Against this visual canvas, sound assumes a special importance, carrying weight and resonance in its own right. “Sound is the other picture,” Ramsay has said, and this is certainly true of Morvern Callar’s sophisticated use of the music on Morvern’s compilation tape (a posthumous gift from her boyfriend), which works at every level from (apparent) underscoring to expression of Morvern’s near autistic relationship with her surroundings. Lynne Ramsay acknowledges the influence of the work of US avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, with its trance-like meditation on detail; and of Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer (”If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear”). Other filmmakers whose work has been likened to Ramsay’s include Bill Douglas and Terence Davies - both influences which probably have less to do with cinematic style than with a shared openness to the silent, brutal and magical world of the child and the innocent.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s films are characterized by metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. He developed a theory of cinema called “sculpting in time”. By this he meant that the unique characteristic of cinema as a medium was to take our experience of time and alter it. Unedited movie footage transcribes time in real time. The speedy jump-cutting style that is prevalent in music videos and many Hollywood movies today, by contrast, overrides any sense of time by imposing the editor’s viewpoint. By using long takes and few cuts in his films, he aimed to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. Up to and including his film Mirror, Tarkovsky focused his cinematic works on exploring this theory. After Mirror, he announced that he would focus his work on exploring the dramatic unities proposed by Aristotle: a concentrated action, happening in one place, within the span of a single day. Stalker is, by his own account, the only film that truly reflects this ambition; it is also considered by many to be a near-perfect reflection of the sculpting in time theory.

Also of note, Sabi Pictures takes it’s name from this excerpt in his book, Sculpting in Time… “It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means ‘rust’. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.”

Bela Tarr

Satantango, a 415-minute masterpiece, appeared to international acclaim in 1994. After the epic he released a 35-minute film Journey on the Plain in 1995 and fell into silence until his most recent work to date, the 2000 film Werckmeister Harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies), occasionally shot in very intense circumstances. The film itself was very warmly welcomed by critics and the Festival circuit in general. Many if not most of the shots in these later films are up to eleven minutes long. It may take months to do a single shot. The camera swoops, glides, and soars. It circles the characters, it moves from scene to scene. It may, as in “Satantango,” travel with a herd of cows around a village, or follow the nocturnal peregrinations of an obese agoraphobic drunk who is forced to leave his house because he’s run out of booze. At the moment he is filming his first film in 5 years, The Man From London and it was scheduled to be released at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival in May, but production was shut down because of the suicide of producer Humbert Balsan on February 10, 2005 and disputes arose with the other producers over a possible change in the film’s financing.