The Accidents and Instincts That Brought Six Golden Lion Winners Fame

What do Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Satyajit Ray, Robert Altman, Éric Rohmer, Wim Wenders and Andrei Tarkovsky have in common? Quite a lot, actually. They’re all men, for one thing, and not insignificantly. They are all among the greatest filmmakers ever to have put film through a camera. And they all, along with dozens of others not listed, have won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Only eight women have ever won the award, four of those since 2010. For decades the cult of genius in filmmaking, as well as the professional resources and institutional support to actually make work, has been afforded predominantly to men. The lack of female winners reflects poorly on Venice, but is symbolic of the patriarchal film world generally. Still, looking through the list of Golden Lion recipients, of which the above names are just a small sample, the company is admittedly far more diverse and interesting than, say, the list of Best Directors according to the Academy. Ditto for their biographies and memoirs, which delve into their practices, their ideas and, occasionally, their gossip. What follows is a list of books that trace how past Golden Lion winners, from Kurosawa to Varda, thought about their own work. It is by no means exhaustive—indeed, it’s rather short. But read together, these titles suggest that a director’s account of their own process is rarely as tidy as the films that made him or her a legend.