180 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding MediaIndependent Artists and Collaboratives
Th e collaborative nature of motion picture art has rarely been more successfully
expressed than in the movies of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric
Pressburger. During a nearly two-decade run, their British production team,
Th e Archers—including cinematographers Jack Cardiff and Christopher
Challis, art director Alfred Junge, and composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale,
among others—created some of the most vibrantly original, provocative,
and independently spirited movies in fi lm history, such as I Know Where
I’m Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, and Th e Red Shoes, made from 1945
to 1948.
With the recent growth of independent production, many fi lmmakers
have developed their projects through partnerships with investors and
distributors. One of the most prolifi c has been John Sayles, who began his
work in fi lm as a screenwriter and soon started to direct his own movies,
including Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988). Sayles and many of
the fi lmmakers of the late twentieth century and early twenty-fi rst century
originate their own projects with the support of a production team, as Woody
Allen had begun doing in the 1970s and as Spike Lee had begun doing in
the 1980s. Oft en these fi lmmakers work consistently with a core group, such
as with Jim Jarmusch, an American director who writes his own scripts
and retains a great deal of control of his material (in fact, not only does he
maintain fi nal cut on his movies, he secures the rights to the negative) while
working with such colleagues as cinematographer Robby Müller and editor
Jay Rabinowitz.Figure 5-12 Delmer Daves,
seated on crane, directs
Gary Cooper in The Hanging
Tre e (1959). (Warner Bros./
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