Michael Atkinson has posted an extensive list of directors who are
severely unknown/underrated/undistributed in the U.S..:
www.zeroforconduct.com. (A few are American themselves.) See how many you've heard of. There were 6 that stumped me. Can anyone enlighten me on the works of Claude
Faraldo, Manuela Viegas, Gianluigi Toccafondo, Peter Solan, Mati Kutt
and Pjer Zelica? I haven't necessarily seen a film by all the others,
but at least I know who they are.

Well, considering the first name you mentioned (Claude Faraldo) is a) dead and B) hadn't directed anything but TV for 28 years (although, to be fair, he did co-write THE WIDOW OF ST. PIERRE), I think his criterion is so loose as to be meaningless. Manuela Viegas is a Portugese editor who directed one film nine years ago. Gianluigi Toccafondo has directed a few animated shorts. Et cetera.* (IMDB is a wonderful thing.)

Literally anybody who's made a film of any length, alive (or not, I suppose from Faraldo's case [or Huillet's], despite his posted criteria), and not Spielberg or at least Jarmusch (I assume) seems to qualify, and give me two hours scouring film festivals of the last twenty years and I could make an even more obscurant list. ("What do you mean, you've never seen the works of Miguel Sabido? SANTO LUZBEL** is a classic Mexican film!" Etc.) If Atkinson is a passionate fan of all these filmmakers, great! Write something substantial and celebrate their work!*** But to produce a long list of names, many of which people like you and I have never heard of despite copious access to international forums and media, as a cudgel against "American distributors and media", rubs my hair the wrong way ... particularly when the failure of American feature film distributors to support a director who hasn't made a feature in 28 years or, well, ever (in the case of Toccafondo) seems to rest, well, not entirely on the distributors' shoulders. (The issue of how distributors treat short films seems to me almost an entirely separate issue from their support of marginalized feature-film directors.)

Do literature fans sit around and make lists of everybody who's ever written a book like this? Sometimes there seems to be something peculiarly cinema-driven about the "gotta have 'em all" mentality lists like this promote ... one that I suppose am guilty of from time to time. Obviously, I'm no fan of the alternate mentality (I never heard of it = not any good), but it strikes me as equally reflexive and annoying at points as some of the "heard of it = not very good", which I've soured against ever since Cannes a couple years ago where a certain crowd were using Pedro Costa as a baseball bat to beat up anyone who might dare like the "middlebrow" (gasp!) cinema of Pedro Almodovar.

None of which is to suggest that the films made by the directors he mentioned that I haven't heard of aren't good, or even great, or perhaps even masterpieces ... but it'll take a lot more than their inclusion on this list to convince me, despite the mention of many filmmakers who are in my personal pantheon (Peter Watkins, who I swore retired, and Hong Sang-Soo are two names Atkinson mentions that are as important as any filmmakers ever to me, and Craig Baldwin and Roy Andersson aren't far behind) and despite his failure to mention other marginalized names (Peter Hutton, Peter Tscherrkasky) that are just as important to me.

oh, and to answer yr. question - there's a lot more that I haven't heard of than you, though there's quite a few names that sound vaguely familiar that I can't place. Out of curiosity, of the more obscure ones mentioned, how many would you go to bat for as current, vital, and overlooked?

*I decided to check the rest, just for grins. Peter Solan is a 79-year old Czech who hasn't made a film since '85, though he did have a substantial output. Mati Kutt is an Estonian animator of shorts. Sarajevo-born Pjer Zalica is the closest thing to a vital force of feature-length films currently being released, having made FUSE and DAYS AND HOURS in the last few years, both names that sound vaguely familiar to me.

**SANTO LUZBEL is a film I saw at Houston's World Fest in 1997 that I enjoyed quite a bit at the time, about indigenous people in Mexico making a pageant in honor of Lucifer and the local Christians being unhappy. I suspect it's not THAT great - I was just discovering foreign cinema then, and when I go back now my opinions on films I viewed then are often wildly divergent - but considering nobody I know has ever seen it, I could probably get a lot of mileage billing it as a lost classic should I choose to.

***On a quick Google, I found one paragraph written by Atkinson on Toccafondo in 2001 and nothing on Faraldo, not that that guarantees he hasn't treated the subjects elsewhere.

Leaving aside some of the more obvious big names in Atkinson's list (Resnais, Rivette, Watkins), I think Elia Suleiman, Souleymane Cissé, Jean Rouch, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Alexei German Sr., Lewis Klahr and Jang Sun-woo are major figures who deserve to be better-known in the U.S. I didn't know Rouch was still alive. Many of these directors have large gaps in their filmography or haven't been able to make many films. I don't think Cissé has worked in a dozen years, and Tian was banned by the Chinese government from filmmaking for nine years. RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL, a big-budget Taoist answer to THE MATRIX, seems to have killed off Jang's career.

SANTO LUZBEL reminds me of a documentary called THE DEVIL'S MINER, about Bolivian miners who make sacrifices to Satan (mostly leaving out alcohol and coca leaves but also killing animals) for their protection.

Your comparison of this collector's mentality (even more present in music) to literature is interesting because I think you're right that it's not an operating principle there. There are a fair amount of lists of rediscoveries but nothing quite like this, possibly because we're tending to look at this in terms of centuries rather than decades and know that inevitably some of this will fall out of print, vanish from libraries or even actually be lost for good.

But this type of rant against the venality of American distributors tends to get a little tedious. One reason I wasn't more sad about Jonathan Rosenbaum's retirement announcement is that he's almost become a borderline crank on this subject. They're not wrong - there's an astonishing amount of major work simply unavailable in the US that goes beyond the expected - but really at some point the big lists and frothing commentary just obscure the point.

And of course that "visibility in the English-speaking world’s media eye" is inevitably a point-of-view question because I think Jean Rollin and Alex de la Iglesias could be considered almost canonical figures over on the Euro-cult board while Snow, Rainer and Straub/Huillet would be for the Frameworks experimental film mailing list.

I have enough theater experience to know that if a film by a well-known director goes unreleased in the U.S., it's probably because the sales agent wanted too much money and had an unrealistic expectation of the American market, not because distributors are philistines with no taste. This is the case with Alexander Sokurov's THE SUN, for example. Rosenbaum has never really addressed the financial realities of arthouse distribution - looking at the grosses of companies like Palm and Strand in the new FILM COMMENT, I wonder how they can stay in business - or offered solutions like suggesting that new distributors operate as non-profits. On the other hand, I continue to disappoint by the Weinsteins' tendency to send films straight to video. Surely, NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE could've earned more theatrically than the $37,000 brought in by THE GRACE IS GONE.

Yeah, but NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE doesn't have that art film snob cachet that let's them feel good about themselves.

Grant Gee's excellent Joy Division documentary surely has some snob appeal, yet it's coming out straight-to-video from the Weinsteins as well.

But surely "earning more than $37,000" doesn't mean that you're making money; given the prohbitively high costs of marketing films, plus overhead, getting $37,000 gross on theatrical if you're the Weinstein Company doesn't cover the costs of a theatrical release (to say nothing of acquisition costs). This math seems to also often be overlooked in back-seat calculations of what does and doesn't get a theatrical release.

Sure, it's expensive to do a theatrical release, but Weinstein Co. straight-to-DVD items like INSIDE and NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE seem perfectly commercial to me - especially the former - and might actually connect with a wide audience. As for JOY DIVISION, they're releasing Julian Schnabel's LOU REED'S BERLIN at Film Forum this summer. What's the difference?

Sorry, but "foreign language" and "perfectly commercial" don't belong in the same sentence in the United States, sadly. I've never seen either INSIDE or NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE so can't comment on specifics, but horror has been waning as a "sure thing" and Tsukamoto has never set the box office on fire before. A creative distributor might get them to catch fire despite of these barriers ... or might lose their shirt trying.

As for the difference between Lou Reed and Joy Division - millions of record sales, an Academy-Award nominated director, and no recent underperforming bio-pic that might make it feel redundant?

Amy Heckerling, in a recent interview with the AV Club, quotes the cost of a specialty theatrical release at $20 million. (The cost for a wide theatrical release is much, much higher.) Obviously limited releases are going to be much lower ... but if you're going for more than a single 1/8th page ad in the NYT on Friday and a few posters, they're going to be enough to make a distributor take pause before jumping in the water.

Not to mention that the Film Forum is in Lou's town.

Oh, and when the hell is Robert Downey, Jr gonna play Lou Reed in his very own underperforming biopic? Somebody's missing a bet here.

I don't know what Heckerling means by "specialty release," but I suspect she's referring to something like Fox Searchlight's releases of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE or JUNO. If it cost $20 million to release every "specialty" film, no distributor without studio ties would still be in business. (I'd be amazed if even the Weinstein Company spent that much on DIARY OF THE DEAD.) I'm sure, for example, that IFC Films is making money off 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS and 2 DAYS, which just crossed the million-dollar mark in US box office.

As I said, obviously the numbers for limited releases are much smaller than $20 mill ... but I have to wonder, with 4 MONTHS scraping out $1 mill over 50 prints and 9 weeks, how much of that $1 mil is actually profit - a quick scan online reveals $3000/print, so that's $150K for prints*, plus shipping, plus publicity, plus overhead, plus acquisition costs, minus the theatre's cut of 20-30%. So there is a bit of money left after that ... but if that's your upside, that's pretty scary.

And that's making $1 million AFTER having become a cause celebre for its Oscar snub, winning the Palme D'Or, getting glowing reviews, having the best trailer of the year (IMO), etc. - advantages the like of INSIDE and NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE could never hope for.

Don't get me wrong - I would love every movie to have a proper theatrical release on film, and am grateful to those distributors who take chances. I'm just agog trying to figure out the economics of it, and if somebody offered me the chance to start a distribution company for film prints, I would probably run the other way screaming.

*This is pulled from http://www.unhollywood.com/appendix.htm - anyone with more detailed knowledge, I'd be curious. And that's for 90 minutes, and 4 MONTHS has a longer running time.