Aging Auteurs

The recent discovery of a nearly pristine print of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight has me thinking a lot lately about later works of great filmmakers and how we perceive them. Is film truly a young man’s game? Or is there room out there for an old master to still make an impression on the world?

Though Welles went on to direct the wonderful essay film F for Fake and the still unreleased The Other Side of the Wind, his Falstaff picture is considered by many to be his final masterpiece. Yet at the time of its release, opinions were decidedly more mixed in nature.

After Midnight and Charlie Chaplin’s final film A Countess from Hong Kong were both brutally panned by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, Andrew Sarris seized the moment as a chance to defend the honor of older directors whom he felt were being unjustly maligned for staying true to who they are. As Sarris succinctly put it, “The great sin of Welles and Chaplin is their failure to abandon their own personal visions of the world to current fashions.” And just imagine if these great filmmakers had in fact tried to chase the trends! They would have been just as ridiculed for falseness. Remember how bad it was when George Romero went digital and tried to hop on the found footage train with Diary of the Dead?

Apparently the best a filmmaker can hope for is an audience that ages with you. When the audience is young and brash, you are there to egg them on. As they begin to settle into the rituals of family life, you are there to point out the little foibles and nuances that only they can appreciate. And as they begin to reflect upon their own mortality, you are there to either comfort them or to at least let them know that they are not alone in having such thoughts. Of course your audience won’t be as big at the end as it was at the beginning, but so what? They've been loyal and stood by you through thick and thin. Unless of course you've outlived everyone in your original audience like the still active 106 year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. In that case, everyone should want to watch your movies BECAUSE YOU ARE 106 AND STILL MAKING MOVIES!

And what about the older directors like Kinji Fukasaku and Martin Scorsese who unleash big, swinging-dick movies like Battle Royale and The Wolf of Wall Street at the ages of 70 and 71? Who am I to write someone off just because they're old enough to collect Social Security? I'm still the guy who has all but given up on filmmakers like Brian De Palma, and who holds theories about how certain filmmaking styles only work with certain no-longer-in-production film stocks. Mea culpa! I'm very far from perfect. But I do try to expose myself to as much as possible and give it as fair of a shake as I can.

Let’s close this piece by taking solace in the fact that even Quentin Tarantino who plans to retire at 60 and has made insanely brash statements like, “I don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies who doesn't know when to leave the party. And I don’t want to fuck up my filmography with a bunch of old-man stuff.” listed Midnight in Paris (directed by the then 76 year old Woody Allen) as his favorite film of 2011. There's hope!