Tiago's brain dump

I got married recently to a wonderful woman from Ibaraki called Satomi. Mozart buffs that we both are, there was no place we would rather marry than  Salzburg , his birthplace, and, since we would already be in Europe, we decided to travel around the continent for our honeymoon. Leaving Salzburg, our first stop was Vienna, a marvelous city in which, amidst all the beautiful, historical buildings, lavishing palaces and breathtaking cathedrals, a  small cinema  caught my attention, for prominently displayed by its entrance was a poster advertising a noir-looking movie called  The Third Man , featuring none other than  Orson "Citizen Kane" Welles  himself! Intrigued, I jokingly asked the ticket clerk (in my poor man's German) why such an old movie would be top-billed alongside this year's releases, to which he replied that that movie had been playing there even before he was born (!). "A great look into post-WWII Vienna", he said enthusiastically....

Filmmaking is a collective enterprise, and it has been so almost since its inception. As every new storytelling tool demands additional crew members to oversee it, and since the cinematic grammar never stops evolving, movie production has unfolded into an endeavor that nowadays comprises  thousands  of people. Even though, as a consequence, the responsibilities delegated to each role in such massive crews can become considerably fuzzy, it is still  widely accepted  that a movie as a whole is (and has always been) the result of the creative vision of its director above everyone else: swap the producer, replace the editor or have the script altered during filming, and the ensuing movie will arguably still be the same overall; change its director, however, and you risk having an artistically fragmented mess of an outcome. That is, unless the true auteur behind that film is not its director, but in fact its  producer , something that was quite com...