Dokimasia

🎬 Cinema: Who Directed It?

From Hitchcock to Villeneuve — name the director.

Decade: 1950s & earlier (18) · 1960s (18) · 1970s (20) · 1980s (18) · 1990s (20) · 2000s (20) · 2010s & later (17).

Every frame has a hand behind it, and the society expects the name. One hundred and thirty-one films, each posed with its year, each asking who directed it — a syllabus that runs by decade from the studio age to streaming, with no decade allowed to dominate. The early rooms hold the monuments: Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Some Like It Hot — pictures whose directors have become adjectives. The sixties and seventies supply the bank's richest seam, where the New Hollywood arrived with Coppola, Lumet and Nichols and the answer to 'who directed it' became the reason the film existed. The eighties through the two-thousands test whether you watched the credits or just the trailer, and the final room — the twenty-tens and later — asks the same of films you saw in an actual cinema, which is somehow harder. Decoys are drawn from the same decade, so every question is a parlour game among contemporaries: Kubrick against Lean, Scorsese against De Palma, Villeneuve against the field. A third of the bank rates easy, which is to say famous; the hard band is for the people who know who directed the thing everyone else merely quotes. Misses join the drill pool. Auteur theory is not examined; attendance is.