80s directores
directores del cine de protesta de los años 80s
List activity
29 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
14 people
- Director
- Actor
- Producer
Zhuangzhuang Tian was born in April 1952 in Beijing, China. He is a director and actor, known for Cha ma gu dao xi lie (2004), Springtime in a Small Town (2002) and The Blue Kite (1993).- Producer
- Director
- Writer
Kaige Chen was born on 12 August 1952 in Beijing, China. He is a producer and director, known for Farewell My Concubine (1993), Yellow Earth (1984) and The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021). He has been married to Hong Chen since 1996. They have two children.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
A bright child, John Sayles began reading novels before age 9. A Williams College grad in 1972, he shunned a corporate career to work various blue-collar jobs, moving to east Boston to take a factory job. He wrote stories and submitted them to various magazines, and the Atlantic Monthly gave him the idea of publishing them in a novel--thus "Pride of the Bimbos" (1975) was born.
In the late 1970s he worked for renowned low-budget producer Roger Corman as a screenwriter. He saved much of the money he earned from that job, got some friends together and made Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) in 25 days. Altough it was a hit, he had trouble obtaining financing for the films he wanted to make because he would not give up his right of final cut. Baby It's You (1983) was Sayles' only film made under studio control.
In 1983 the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship granted him a tax-free income of $32,000 a year for 5 years. That stipend and money he earned for writing such films as The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) and Breaking In (1989) enabled him to make the kinds of films he wanted to make. Lone Star (1996) placed Sayles in the ranks of top American filmmakers. In it and his other films, a broadly appealing social consciousness emerges, showing Sayles to be concerned with what's going on with regional cultures, national values and what living in the US is like today.
Sayles and Maggie Renzi, whom he met during college, have lived together since the 1970s, splitting their time between a Hoboken, NJ, house and a farm in upstate New York. They have no plans to marry.- Producer
- Actress
- Production Manager
John Sayles and Maggie Renzi have been creative partners, in their life and in their art, since the early '70s. They met as students at Williams College in Massachusetts. John was a member of the class of 1972 and Maggie was member of the class of 1973. In the years immediately after graduation, Maggie worked as a bookstore clerk, a pediatric receptionist, a substitute teacher, a casting agent and a talent agent, while John took jobs like nursing home orderly and meat packer. In the late '70s they moved to California for a few years. John worked for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, and Maggie worked as a salad chef.
In 1979 they released their first film: Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980). John wrote the screenplay, and directed and edited the film. He also played the supporting role of Howie', a townie who has three kids before his 30th birthday. Maggie starred as 'Kate', the high school English teacher who invites all her college buddies up to her New Hampshire home for their annual reunion. She also served as Unit Manager and Assistant Editor. The Return of the Secaucus Seven became an art house and campus hit, winning the Los Angeles Film Critics' Award for Best Screenplay, and launching Sayles and Renzi on their way as independent filmmakers.
Beginning with their second film, Lianna (1983), Maggie assumed the role of Producer. While she continued to act, her producing responsibilities grew on each subsequent film, and she finally decided to focus just on producing after Passion Fish (1992) was released in 1992. She worked as part of a team of producers on the early films, but on the two most recent films Limbo (1999) and Sunshine State (2002), she is credited as sole producer.
In 2000, Maggie was one of the producers of Girlfight (2000), the award-winning first feature made by Karyn Kusama (who began her film career on Sayles/Renzi production teams). However, Maggie says she is not planning to produce other non-Sayles films.- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Leos Carax made several short films and also wrote film criticism, then at the age of 24 years made a very strong first feature Boy Meets Girl (1984). The film played at the 1984 Cannes film festival and was a critical triumph. It paved the way for Carax's second feature Bad Blood (1986) (Bad Blood). That film was a giant step forward in the same direction that he was going in with his first film. Both films were visually stunning and focused on young love and also alienation. With his reputation and talent at its peak, he set out to make what seemed it seemed like would be another triumph. The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) (The Lovers on the Bridge) was the result of three long years of very difficult production; Carax spent a fortune building some of the sets and filming some mind-blowing sequences. Unfortunately, neither critics nor audiences favored what was a truly grand vision of the themes he dealt with in his first two films. Carax went into an a 8 year long exile, but finally returned with Pola X (1999). It was a departure from his other films and another critical flop.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Víctor Erice was born on 30 June 1940 in Karrantza, Vizcaya, País Vasco, Spain. He is a director and writer, known for Close Your Eyes (2023), El Sur (1983) and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Bill Douglas was born on 17 April 1934 in Newcraighall, Scotland, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for My Childhood (1972), Comrades (1986) and My Way Home (1978). He died on 18 June 1991 in Barnstaple, Devon, England, UK.- Director
- Producer
- Writer
Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983) which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set at a historically black school, focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With his School Daze (1988) profits, Lee went on to make his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie based specifically his own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed the racial tensions that emerge in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood on one very hot day. The movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay, for Danny Aiello for supporting actor, and sparked a debate on racial relations. Lee went on to produce and direct the jazz biopic Mo' Better Blues (1990), the first of many Spike Lee films to feature Denzel Washington, including the biography of Malcolm X (1992), in which Washington portrayed the civil rights leader. The movie was a success, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Washington. The pair would work together again on He Got Game (1998), an excursion into the collegiate world showing the darker side of college athletic recruiting, as well as the 2006 film Inside Man (2006). Spike Lee's role as a documentarian has expanded over the years, highlighted by his participation in Lumière and Company (1995), the Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls (1997), to his Peabody Award-winning biographical adaptation of Black Panther leader in A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), through his 2005 Emmy Award-winning examination of post-Katrina New Orleans in When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) and its follow-up five years later If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010). Through his production company 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks, Lee continues to create and direct both independent films and projects for major studios, as well as working on story development, creating an internship program for aspiring filmmakers, releasing music, and community outreach and support. He is married to Tonya Lewis Lee, and they have two sons, Satchel and Jackson.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Bill Forsyth was born on 29 July 1946 in Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland, UK. He is a director and writer, known for Local Hero (1983), Gregory's Girl (1980) and Housekeeping (1987).- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Terence Davies was born on 10 November 1945 in Liverpool, England, UK. He was a writer and director, known for Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The House of Mirth (2000) and Benediction (2021). He died on 7 October 2023 in Mistley, Essex, England, UK.- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Peter Greenaway trained as a painter and began working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information in 1965. Shortly afterwards he started to make his own films. He has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, but also paintings, novels and other books. He has held several one-man shows and curated exhibitions at museums world-wide.- Director
- Cinematographer
- Editor
After school, Jarman studied history and art history at King's College. In 1963 he began studying art in Pop Art London. In the general mood of optimism from the mid-1960s onward, he began to openly confront his homosexuality. Jarman took over the set design for Ken Russell on the films "The Devils" (1971) and "Savage Messiah" (1972). Then he began making experimental films himself - initially in Super 8 format. Jarman presented his first feature film in 1976 with "Sebastiane", an openly homosexual film adaptation of the life of the early Christian martyr Sebastian - in Latin! This was followed by "Jubilee" (1978), a sarcastic allusion to the crown jubilee of Elizabeth II the year before.
Jarman then turned to Shakespeare, which he filmed in the punk revue "The Tempest" (1979) and in the erotic-themed work "The Angelic Conversation" (1985). With "Caravaggio" (1986), Jarman approached the passions depicted in the Renaissance painter's paintings and which the director re-staged. At the end of 1986, Jarman learned of his HIV infection. The films "The Last of England" (1987) and "War Requiem" (1989) were made under the sign of the AIDS threat and the Falklands War, which deal with the themes of death and destruction. His films about the ambivalent historical figures of "Edward II" also deal with homosexual dramas. (1991) and "Wittgenstein" (1992). When Jarman slowly went blind, he made "Blue" in 1993, a film that only shows a blue screen and otherwise lives from its texts and sounds from the "off".- Actor
- Director
- Writer
David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father, Milton Cronenberg, was a journalist and editor, and his mother, Esther (Sumberg), was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early age (he wrote and published eerie short stories, thus following his father's path) and for music (playing classical guitar until he was 12), Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature after switching from the science department. He reached the cult status of horror-meister with the gore-filled, modern-vampire variations of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), following an experimental apprenticeship in independent film-making and in Canadian television programs.
Cronenberg gained popularity with the head-exploding, telepathy-based Scanners (1981) after the release of the much underrated, controversial, and autobiographical The Brood (1979). Cronenberg become a sort of a mass media guru with Videodrome (1983), a shocking investigation of the hazards of reality-morphing television and a prophetic critique of contemporary aesthetics. The issues of tech-induced mutation of the human body and topics of the prominent dichotomy between body and mind were back again in The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), both bright examples of a personal film-making identity, even if both films are based on mass-entertainment materials: the first being a rendition of a Stephen King best-seller, the latter a remake of a famous American horror movie.
With Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), the Canadian director, no more a mere genre movie-maker but a fully realized auteur, got the acclaim of international critics. Such profound statements on modern humanity and ever-changing society are prominent in the provocative Crash (1996) and in the virtual reality essay of eXistenZ (1999), both of which well fared at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. In the last two film projects Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg avoids expressing his teratologic and oneiric expressionism in favor of a more psychological exploration of human contradictions and idiosyncrasies.- Producer
- Director
- Animation Department
Norman McLaren is one of the most awarded filmmakers in the history of Canadian cinema, and a pioneer in both animation and filmmaking. Born in Scotland, he entered the Glasgow School of Fine Arts in 1932 to study set design. His early experiments in animation included actually scratching and painting the film stock itself, as he did not have ready access to a camera. In the early 30s he worked as a cameraman in Scotland and England, and in 1936 went to Spain to film the Civil War. He emigrated to the US in 1939, aware that war was imminent, and in 1941, at the invitation of John Grierson, he moved to Canada to work for the National Film Board.
McLaren made several propaganda films for the NFB, but continued develop his experimental work in his spare time. He later founded the animation department at the NFB, where he was at his most prolific. His most famous work, Neighbours (1952), utilized a style of animation known as pixilation, where the camera films moving people and objects a few frames at a time, giving the action a frantic, unearthly look. The short film won McLaren an Oscar. He continued to use a variety of styles and techniques on his animated shorts, including the optical editor to film _Pas de Deux (1968)_, filming through a prism for _Line: Horizontal (1962)_ and also using live action featuring himself in Opening Speech (1960).
In addition to film, McLaren worked with UNESCO in the 50s and 60s on programs to teach film and animation techniques in China and India. His five part "Animated Motion" shorts, produced in the late 70s, are an excellent example of instruction on the basics of film animation.
McLaren died in 1987, leaving behind a lasting legacy to the film and animation world. The Canadian Film Board recognized this in 1989 by naming the CFB head office building the Norman McLaren Building.