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10 Directors On-screen
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1. Sydney Pollack once said, “I hate acting in my own movies, and I do it when I can’t find or afford the right person.” Here are ten Criterion directors who decided they were the man—or in one case, the woman—for the job, starting with (above) the grandfather of Swedish cinema, Victor Sjöström, whose performance as the abusive alcoholic husband David Holm is the heart and (perhaps doomed) soul of The Phantom Carriage.
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2. In Häxan, Danish director Benjamin Christensen plays none other than the grand dark master himself, a tongue-wagging Satan, in one of the most amusingly obscene walk-ons in cinema history. He even has other members of the cast line up to kiss his ass one by one.
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3. The boulevardier turned big-screen director Sacha Guitry almost always cast himself in his movies, often adapted from his own plays. He’s particularly enjoyable in Désiré, sassily embodying an impertinent butler known for bedding the ladies of the house.
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4. Jean Renoir didn’t often cast himself, so his extended appearance in The Rules of the Game as Octave, bumbling observer of the evils of the idle rich, is truly special.
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5. Laurence Olivier won a well-deserved Oscar for directing himself in the best picture winner Hamlet. But his performance in Richard III may be even more ravishing, an uncompromisingly slithery interpretation of classic villainy.
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6. The more you dig into William Greaves’s wildly entertaining 1968 experiment Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the more you realize that, though the director ostensibly appears as himself, he’s actually carrying out a dissection of performance and the power dynamics inherent in filmmaking, and trying on different hats to elicit responses from his cast and crew.
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7. Chantal Akerman laid herself bare for the role of the shiftless wanderer Julie in her challenging and accomplished 1975 film Je tu il elle, resulting in some of the director’s bravest and most arresting sequences.
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8. Maurice Pialat storms onto the screen in his À nos amours as the intimidating, magnetic, and finally estranged father of Sandrine Bonnaire’s troubled teen. The film is full of desperately intimate, almost unbearably authentic moments between Pialat and Bonnaire.
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9. At first, Spike Lee seems to have cast himself as a wry observer in Do the Right Thing. Yet as the film’s sweltering day of racial unrest speeds to its riotous end, his Mookie becomes an integral participant. He’s the one who throws the first trash can, after all—quite a powerful directorial statement.
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10. You might miss Richard Linklater completely in Slacker. But that’s the dude right there, opening the film with a deceptively relaxed and surreal rant to a cabdriver—describing a dream he just had on a bus—which makes the perfect prologue to his oddly ethereal and nonlinear film.
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1. Sydney Pollack once said, “I hate acting in my own movies, and I do it when I can’t find or afford the right person.” Here are ten Criterion directors who decided they were the man—or in one case, the woman—for the job, starting with (above) the grandfather of Swedish cinema, Victor Sjöström, whose performance as the abusive alcoholic husband David Holm is the heart and (perhaps doomed) soul of The Phantom Carriage.
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