The 30 Greatest Directors of All Time

The following attempt to list the 30 greatest directors of all time is a statement of personal taste more than an objective assessment of film history.  There are some glaring omissions, starting with the fact that no women make it into my pantheon (for the record, Leni Riefenstahl comes closest: it’s a shame World War II so spoilt her career).  There are also no representatives from Africa or the Middle East or Australasia, no French New Wave directors (Godard is overrated) or New Germans, or Chinese from any generation, and the Russian formalists and Italian neo-realists feature but once.

Clearly, my bias is toward the past, with a healthy representation of silent artists - including, naturally, the comedians - and the best of Hollywood’s golden age.  Marty Scorsese aside, it is a list of (mostly white) dead men.  He alone flies the ‘movie brat’ flag, though perhaps if I were able to overlook three decades of disappointment from Francis Ford Coppola (in the way that, say, Michael Powell’s ‘quota quickies’ era or the weaker American films of Fritz Lang are ignored) the godfather of the 1970s could have got a look in.

The columns which list career length and amounts of films made are based on IMDB information which is often at odds with that seen in published filmographies.  IMDB tends to include amateur productions, shorts and television programmes as well as instances where work went formally uncredited.  The last column on the right details how many films by each director is respectively stocked by Auteur House.

Rank   Director               Made      Years     Career   Stocked by AH

1. Orson Welles                   35         52    1934-1985       10
2. Sergei Eisenstein           29         25    1923-1948         6
3. Ingmar Bergman           63         57    1946-2003       17
4. Alfred Hitchcock           56         51    1925-1976        48
5. Jean Renoir                     38        46    1924-1970          9
6. Akira Kurosawa              31        50    1943-1993       24
7. Carl Theodor Dreyer     22         45    1919-1964       13
8. Yasujiro Ozu                    54         35    1927-1962        6
9. DW Griffith                    532         23    1908-1931        6
10. Stanley Kubrick             16         48    1951-1999       11

11. John Ford                              132         53    1917-1970       21
12. Michelangelo Antonioni    37         57    1947-2004        7
13. Satyajit Ray                           38         36    1955-1991          1
14. Howard Hawks                    42         44    1926-1970       18
14. Charles Chaplin                   64         53    1914-1967        55
14. Buster Keaton                       27          7    1920-1927        17
17. Federico Fellini                     24         40    1950-1990     16
18. Luis Bunuel                            34         48    1929-1977        8
19. Robert Bresson                      14         49    1934-1983        7
20. Billy Wilder                            27         47    1934-1981       22

21. Preston Sturges                     12         15    1940-1955        9
22. David Lean                              17         42    1942-1984       14
23. Michael Powell                       55         47    1931-1978       10
24. Fritz Lang                                44         41    1919-1960        9
25. Jean Vigo                                    4          4    1930-1934        1
26. Luchino Visconti                   20         33    1943-1976       11
27. Andrei Tarkovsky                  11         28    1958-1986        5
28. Martin Scorsese                    42         50    1958-2008    26
29. Erich Von Stroheim              10         14    1919-1933        0
30. FW Murnau                             21         12    1919-1931        3