Who It Is

Polanski‘s film-sense and mastery -- the force of his style, his ability to wring laughter out of the most degrading heartbreak -- will carry the same wealth of healthy shocks in 100 years, and embody a macabre beauty to be wooed by, and wondered at. But a subtler, morally more vital element will also apply: the ghostly truth, which haunts his every film, that Polanski was orphaned by the Nazis and wandered Poland alone from ages 8 to 12. Consider the intensity of isolation that bridges Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and Death and the Maiden. In each, the omniscient viewpoint feels “childlike” in the least innocent sense: We listen and watch, ever wary. The truth of what‘s been hidden, or is being planned in secret, is always a matter of life and death; one’s survival (even within the playful confines of a fantasy) depends on not missing so much as a detail. Such will be true for more and more people in the century to come, be they orphans of Rwanda, Kosovo or wherever. It‘s easy to imagine that if they find their way to Polanski’s work, it will sing to them. --F.X. Feeney

CLAIRE DENIS

No one films male bodies as beautifully as Claire Denis, or with such consummate tenderness. The French director has been setting her gaze on the male body since 1988‘s Chocolat, a film about desire and colonialism in West Africa with the beautiful Isaach de Bankole at its heart. Since then, Denis has gone on to create more films centered around male characters, black and white both, the complex likes of whom are rarely seen on screen -- No Fear, No Die, I Can’t Sleep, Nenette et Boni. What‘s striking about these intently different, elliptical stories about men in the world, men in love and in trouble, is that no matter their emotional pitch or narrative force, in each the constant remains the director herself, a woman able to understand men from inside their own skin. That in itself is remarkable. What makes it revolutionary is that Denis is also one of the greatest filmmakers in the world -- even if the world doesn’t yet know it. --M.D.

KORE-EDA HIROKAZU

With only two very fine features under his belt (1995‘s Maborosi and 1999’s After Life), Kore-eda has already forged a powerful style, one of languid soulfulness. Both his films are meditations on grief and loss, and how we respond to them. Not only does he have a generosity of spirit that comes across onscreen, he trusts his audience to have an attention span longer than a gnat‘s. Maborosi opens inside a dream of abandonment, then keeps the audience wrapped in a hypnotic world that was filmed in warm, dark hues of brown, blue, gray and black. Dialogue is spare, and the camera lingers quietly in dark tunnels and lush, open spaces. It’s about the shattering effect of death on those left behind. After Life -- starkly elegant in style -- interprets heaven as the chance to live out eternity inside the happiest memory of one‘s life. The movies are evocative meldings of philosophy, poetry and cinema, resulting in a vision that is singular and potent. At a time when everyone is revving up about the digital and techno future of film, his work serves as a reminder of the power of stillness and introspection. --Ernest Hardy

HAROLD RAMIS

Perched happily though he is on the lower brow of American culture, Harold Ramis has pegged more astutely than most the existential nightmare of having every day repeat exactly the one that went before it. There’s nothing more terrifying than the absence of history, which is one reason why we cover up the drone of everyday sameness with pomp and circumstance over the passing of decades, centuries and millennia. I hope that on December 31, 1999, a print of Groundhog Day (oh, and Ghostbusters, why not?) will be floated onto the Pacific in a sealed bottle for the delight of spaceballs eons hence. Either way, Ramis‘ affably goofy anthropology of strange American habits may prove more lasting than the punditry of many a heavier weight in our national cinema. --Ella Taylor

JEAN RENOIR

One small measure of whether enlightened humanism lives on into the next thousand years will be the durability of the films of Jean Renoir. This year’s re-release of the master‘s wise and wonderful war drama, Grand Illusion, is a hopeful sign that distributors trust the public to appreciate classical aesthetics, not to mention literate dialogue. Even now, I fear that outside of film schools (and perhaps inside them, where neither classicism nor literacy are exactly in vogue), the name Renoir conjures vague images of the filmmaker’s painter father. It was a tribute to the mid--20th century that Renoir‘s biggest commercial catastrophe and his most beautiful film, The Rules of the Game, was resuscitated and given its due as a masterpiece of civilizing philosophy. As the millennium turns, are we still capable of recognizing that today’s bottom-line flop may be tomorrow‘s work of art? Is there a filmmaker working today who articulates with the same conciliatory grace as did Renoir that, in the combative Sturm und Drang of daily life, everybody has his reasons? --E.T.