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The Accidents and Instincts That Brought Six Golden Lion Winners Fame

These filmmaker biographies and memoirs span decades and continents, but return repeatedly to the same question: how does personal history shape what ends up on the screen?

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.

'Something Like an Autobiography' by Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa won the Golden Lion for Rashomon, a film about a murder in the 11th Century told from multiple perspectives that suggests there is no single way to tell a story. How then does Kurosawa tell his story? Very sensually, in his early recollections of the Omori district of Tokyo, but at other times soberly, as when describing his first experiences of going to the cinema as a boy, which he admits had "no relation to my later becoming a film director." There are interesting reflections on the war, during which time Kurosawa........

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