If I was mentioning authors I'd probably give a couple of examples -- an idea of which works are 'classic', which are particularly good, which are a bad place to start if you haven't read anything else by that author, etc... Also I'd try to say what makes those particular authors so central, so influential -- did they inspire a lot of imitators? Or do things so differently that they changed the whole face of the genre/medium? Did they capture the zeitgeist? (Moo!) Or what?
Which is, of course, just a roundabout way of saying that I would not be able to name a single film by any of those directors except Hitchcock (I've seen 'The Birds' and 'Marnie') and possibly Bergman (didn't he do 'The Seventh Seal'? I haven't seen it, though). I've heard of most of them, but most of the time I have literally no idea who directed anything.
(And yes, I'm ashamed of this; I feel as though I'm doing the moral equivalent of not being able to name a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens, or of only being able to refer to pieces of music as 'the one on the jeans advert' or 'the one that goes da-da-da-dummm'.)
I suppose one answer is that I should Just Fucking Google It, but I'm also interested in hearing ideas/opinions from people I actually know, partly because that way I'll learn something about them as well, and partly because I have more of a jumping-off-point for understanding the film if I know why somebody-whose-context-I-already-know-a-little-about rates it.
Of course, I realise that this is basically asking people to write essays on film which they don't have time for... so will understand if they don't want to.
no subject
Which is, of course, just a roundabout way of saying that I would not be able to name a single film by any of those directors except Hitchcock (I've seen 'The Birds' and 'Marnie') and possibly Bergman (didn't he do 'The Seventh Seal'? I haven't seen it, though). I've heard of most of them, but most of the time I have literally no idea who directed anything.
(And yes, I'm ashamed of this; I feel as though I'm doing the moral equivalent of not being able to name a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens, or of only being able to refer to pieces of music as 'the one on the jeans advert' or 'the one that goes da-da-da-dummm'.)
I suppose one answer is that I should Just Fucking Google It, but I'm also interested in hearing ideas/opinions from people I actually know, partly because that way I'll learn something about them as well, and partly because I have more of a jumping-off-point for understanding the film if I know why somebody-whose-context-I-already-know-a-little-about rates it.
Of course, I realise that this is basically asking people to write essays on film which they don't have time for... so will understand if they don't want to.