20. Michelangelo Antonioni
For a few years in the 60's, Antonioni might have been the most important art-house director in the world, outstripping even Bergman, Fellini, and the New Wave auteurs. Although his status has faded a bit, Antonioni still holds a seminal place in film history for a few enormously influential films he made in the 1960's. Early in his film career, Antonioni broke away from the neo-realism that had come to define Italian filmmaking in favor of a more experimental style that focused on disjointed narratives and use of long takes. His first hit was the 1960 classic L'avventura which received mixed reviews on its release but which has become an art-house classic and one of the defining films of the 60's. He followed this with the better received The Night and Eclipse. In 1966 he released Blowup which might be his most famous movie and one in which he began to delve into the burgeoning counterculture. Although his work decreased in renown after the 60's, he did in enough in that decade and in subsequent years to build up an impressive resume that stands with all but a few directors. His work, alongside Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Resnais, was one of the first of a new kind of European cinema that took a close look at modern existence and ennui through the use of unconventional film methods and narratives completely different from Hollywood films. Although no one doubts his influence on filmmaking, Antonioni has remained a somewhat divisive member of the filmmaking community, Kurosawa considered him one of the most interesting directors ever and Kubrick and Tarkovsky listed him among their favorites. At the same time, Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman both considered his work to be very inconsistent and often boring. Regardless, Antonioni challenged and expanded what was seen as narrative cinema and at his best, he made some of the most iconic films of the 1960's.