Click above to REALLY enlarge...
UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...
Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.
In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)
The thing is, Srikanth has no key to tell us who's who. So, with his permission, I thought we could collaborate on one. If you feel like it -- after you've completed Professor Russell Johnson's "My Ancestors Came Over on the Minnow..." quiz, which I haven't yet (mull over question #28, why don't you?) -- see how many of these you can identify. (Keep in mind, some of these pictures may have been taken several decades ago, and some are flopped and/or anamorphically distorted.) Below are some of the ones I identified at first glance (in other words: the really easy ones!), listed by rows (top to bottom, I through IX) and columns (left to right, 1 through 20). Some of these faces are so familiar they're driving me crazy, but I can't put names to them. Help! Post your own IDs (and let me know if I got any wrong -- I've put question marks by a few I'm unsure of) and eventually, we should be able to figure this thing out together!
Most recent update: 2:25 p.m. PST 01/28/10 -- COMPLETED!:
Row I
1. Victor Erice
2. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
3. Agnes Varda
4. Robert Bresson
5. Robert Aldrich
6. Robert Altman
7. Youssef Chahine
8. Michelangelo Antonioni
9. Gillian Armstrong
10. Dorothy Arzner
11. Stan Brakhage
12. Mauro Bolognini
13. Peter Bogdanovich
14. Blake Edwards
15. Carl Theodor Dreyer
16. Doris Wishman
17. Ingmar Bergman
18. Craig Baldwin
19. Mario Bava
20. Catherine Breillat
Row II
1. Luis Buñuel
2. Charles Burnett
3. John Frankenheimer
4. Maya Deren
5. Ken Loach
6. Jacques Demy
7. Su Friedrich
8. Robert Flaherty
9. Arthur Lipsett
10. Joseph Losey
11. Kenji Mizoguchi
12. Francis Ford Coppola
13. Mikio Naruse
14. Antonio Margheriti
15. Georges Méliès
16. Guy Maddin
17. Joseph H. Lewis
18. Sergio Leone
19. Howard Hawks
20. David Lean
Row III
1. Tim Burton
2. Federico Fellini
3. David Cronenberg
4. Werner Herzog
5. Krzysztof Kieslowski
6. Clara Law
7. Abbas Kiarostami
8. Stanley Kubrick
9. Fritz Lang
10. Shohei Imamura
11. Satyajit Ray
12. Woody Allen
13. John Waters
14. Margarethe von Trotta
15. Idrissa Ouedraogo 16. Jacques Rivette
17. Nicolas Roeg
18. Raoul Walsh
19. François Truffaut
20. Otto Preminger
Row IV
1. Jane Campion
2. Sam Fuller
3. Joe Dante
4. Jia Zhangke
5. Alanis Obomsawin
6. Preston Sturges
7. Pier Paolo Pasolini
8. Don Siegel
9. Zhang Yimou
10. Preston Sturges
11. Robert Siodmak
12. Leslie Thornton
13. Yasujiro Ozu
14. Nicholas Ray
15. Claude Sautet
16. Tsui Hark
17. Eric Rohmer
18. Edward Yang
19. Sam Peckinpah
20. Don Siegel (again)
Row V
1. Leos Carax
2. Lucio Fulci
3. George Cukor
4. Chuck Jones
5. Idrissa Ouedraogo (again)
6. Carol Reed
7. François Ozon
8. William Wyler
9. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
10. Fred Zinnemann
11. Michael Winterbottom
12. Jean Cocteau
13. Kon Ichikawa
14. Tomu Uchida
15. Jonathan Demme
17. Roberto Rossellini
18. Alfred Hitchcock
19. James Whale
Row VI
1. Claude Chabrol
2. Lucio Fulci
3. Melvin Van Peebles
4. Akira Kurosawa
5. Jacques Tati
6. Jerzy Skolimowski
7. Glauber Rocha
8. Bernardo Bertolucci
9. Richard Linklater
10. Jerzy Skolimowski (again)
11. Hiroshi Teshigahara
12. Paul Verhoeven
13. Luis Garcia Berlanga
14. Werner Schroeter
15. Steven Spielberg
16. Tsai Ming Liang
17. Roberto Rossellini 18. Jean-Luc Godard
19. Michael Almereyda
20. Francesco Rosi
Row VII
1. Chang Cheh
2. Vincente Minnelli
3. Jean-Pierre Melville
4. King Hu
5. Mamoru Oshii
6. Martin Scorsese
7. Richard Franklin
8. Mitchell Leisen
9. John Schlesinger
10. Theo Angelopoulos
11. Melvin Van Peebles
12. Anthony Mann
13. Roger Corman
14. Peggy Ahwesh
15. Terry Gilliam
16. Arthur Penn
17. Bertrand Tavernier
18. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
19. Clint Eastwood
20. Emeric Pressburger
Row VIII
1. Henri-Georges Clouzot
2. Michael Haneke
3. Terry Gilliam (again)
4. Lars von Trier
5. Andrei Tarkovsky
6. Bertrand Tavernier
7. Sergei Eisenstein
8. Brian DePalma
9. David Fincher
10. Edgar G. Ulmer
11. John Carpenter
12. Phillip Noyce
13. Yoshimitsu Morita
14. Wang Xiaoshuai
15. Sadie Benning
16. Kira Muratova
17. Wong Kar-Wai
18. Margarethe von Trotta
19. Jean Vigo
20. Andy Warhol
Row IX
1. Joel & Ethan Coen
2. Terrence Malick
3. Michael Mann
4. Takeshi Kitano
5. Nagisa Oshima
6. John Sayles
7. Willi Forst
8. Mike Nichols
9. Yvonne Rainer
10. Orson Welles
11. Bill Forsyth
12. Wim Wenders
13. Jerry Lewis
14. Steven Soderbergh
15. Gaspar Noé
16. Jim Jarmusch
17. Maria Novaro
18. Leo McCarey
19. Michael Powell
20. Billy Wilder
Is it just me, or are some of the usual -- and most familiar -- suspects missing: Roman Polanski? Budd Boetticher? Frank Capra? Buster Keaton? John Huston? Chantal Akerman?...
