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Alexander Mackendrick — news, coverage & facts — IJR

CalArts

In 1969 he returned to the United States after being appointed the founding Dean of the film school of the California Institute of the Arts (now the CalArts School of Film/Video), giving up the position in 1978 to become a professor at the school.

With regard to his teaching style, former student Douglas Rushkoff, noted: "One of my greatest teachers, the filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell of Success, The Man in the White Suit) insisted that to make films, we had to know everything about them. He studied the anatomy and functioning of the eye, so that he could know how the light reflected on a movie screen interacted with the optic nerve and the brain. He learned the chemistry of emulsion, so that he'd understand the way images burned themselves onto film stock. If one of us turned in 10 pages of a script we were working on, Mackendrick would present us the next day with 20 pages of notes, showing more appreciation for our work and process than we did ourselves. Mackendrick also insisted that we relish the physical sensations of making movies. If we didn't appreciate the pencils with which we drew our storyboards, or the texture of the paper, then how could we invest our drawings with the level of passion worthy of the kinds of budgets we hoped to spend on them? I remember him telling one student that her drawings were written too tentatively, as if the colored pencils she used to create them had been borrowed and she was afraid of using them up. He was right: she had borrowed the pencils from her roommate. He told her to work an extra job, if she had to, in order to finance her own pencils, which she could abuse to her heart's content.What Mackendrick meant to communicate, in so many words, was that if you don't love enough the particulars of the experience of what you do to devour the tangible details, or if you don't care enough about your work to find out everything there is to know, then you'll never be able to get into it, and you'll never come up with anything original. Maintaining anything less than total commitment is to be a dilettante."

Some of Mackendrick's most notable students include David Kirkpatrick, Terence Davies, F. X. Feeney, James Mangold, Stephen Mills, Thom Mount, Julien Nitzberg, Sean Daniel, Bruce Berman, Gregory Orr, Douglas Rushkoff, Lee Sheldon, Bob Rogers, and Laurence Wright amongst others.

A collection of Mackendrick's handouts and lectures at CalArts were collected and published in the book On Film-Making : An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese.

Legacy and appraisal

Critical consensus of Mackendrick's body of work, both as a filmmaker and later as a teacher, has grown significantly over time. In his obituary, critic Anthony Lane compared him positively to both Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Paul Cronin described him as "one of Britain's greatest film directors.... and one of the finest instructors of narrative cinema who ever lived."

Geoffrey O'Brien described Mackendrick as a "singularly elusive sort of auteur," whose films' "controlled surfaces and exquisitely lucid storylines a potential for chaos and violence swirls almost palpably. His reasonable and civilized art is profoundly in tune with instinctive forces that can manifest themselves as ecstatic celebration but also as tribal warfare or relentless perseverance in a private mission."

The British Film Institute's Screenonline profile of Mackendrick called him:

"a perfectionist in an industry devoted to profit.... But if the overall sense of Mackendrick's career is of great potential unfulfilled, his oeuvre, though small, is distinctive and always rewarding, the work of a visually acute filmmaker who thought in images and movement whilst always remaining in command of cinematic storytelling; a director whose films offer a complex and ambiguous mix of pessimism, callousness, mordant humour and startling empathy with the innocent and brutal world of the child."

The Harvard Film Archive wrote of Mackendrick during a 2009 retrospective:

"The full appreciation of Mackendrick's oeuvre as a whole—which only began in earnest during the 1970s—has accelerated since his death, a re-evaluation that has found his lesser-known and later films equally rewarding as his acknowledged masterpieces. This belated appreciation no doubt owes a debt to Mackendrick's classicism, his dedication to well-crafted, character-driven narratives that avoid baroque visual excess in favor of a subtler authorial stamp, the complex emotional and intergenerational dynamics that unite Mackendrick's films, be they funny, disturbing, moving or a heady combination of all three."

Film director Paul Thomas Anderson expressed admiration for Mackendrick's films, citing Sweet Smell of Success one of his favorites, showcasing its influence on Anderson's cinematic style. In a 1999 interview, Anderson advised aspiring filmmakers to watch all of Mackendrick's movies.

Mackendrick is the namesake of the Alexander Mackendrick Award for Best Director at the St. Andrews Film Festival.