What do Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Satyajit Ray, Robert Altman, Éric Rohmer, Wim Wenders and Andrei Tarkovsky have in common? Quite a lot, actually. They're all men, for one thing, and not insignificantly. They are all among the greatest filmmakers ever to have put film through a camera. And they all, along with dozens of others not listed, have won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Only eight women have ever won the award, four of those since 2010. For decades the cult of genius in filmmaking, as well as the professional resources and institutional support to actually make work, has been afforded predominantly to men. The lack of female winners reflects poorly on Venice, but is symbolic of the patriarchal film world generally. Still, looking through the list of Golden Lion recipients, of which the above names are just a small sample, the company is admittedly far more diverse and interesting than, say, the list of Best Directors according to the Academy. Ditto for their biographies and memoirs, which delve into their practices, their ideas and, occasionally, their gossip. What follows is a list of books that trace how past Golden Lion winners, from Kurosawa to Varda, thought about their own work. It is by no means exhaustive—indeed, it's rather short. But read together, these titles suggest that a director's account of their own process is rarely as tidy as the films that made him or her a legend.

'Something Like an Autobiography' by Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa won the Golden Lion for Rashomon, a film about a murder in the 11th Century told from multiple perspectives that suggests there is no single way to tell a story. How then does Kurosawa tell his story? Very sensually, in his early recollections of the Omori district of Tokyo, but at other times soberly, as when describing his first experiences of going to the cinema as a boy, which he admits had "no relation to my later becoming a film director." There are interesting reflections on the war, during which time Kurosawa "offered no resistance to Japan's militarism." He confesses that he got by by fitting in as best he could. "Because of my own conduct," he writes, "I can't very well put on self-righteous airs and criticize what happened during the war. The freedom and democracy of the post-war era were not things I had fought for and won, they were granted to me by powers beyond my own." Kurosawa doesn't address cinema much. After spending most of the book writing about childhood and early experiences, filmmaking only really appears towards the end, and not in the same detail that other directors write about their craft. "I don't really like talking about my films," he writes. "Everything I want to say is in the film itself." Still, there are plenty of interesting insights into the Japanese film industry and the films that influenced Kurosawa. The book ends with the making of Rashomon. When three assistant directors came to Kurosawa the day before shooting began and told him they didn't understand what the film was to be about, he told them, "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing." It leaves you wondering how true the preceding pages have been.

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'My Years with Apu' by Satyajit Ray

On the first day of shooting Pather Panchali, the first in the exquisite Apu trilogy, director Satyajit Ray had never directed a scene before and cinematographer Subrata Mitra had never shot a scene before. The children who star in the film hadn't even been screen tested. It makes the achievement of the Apu trilogy all the more inspiring. The story of Apu as he grows from a little boy in rural Bengal into a young man facing the world is among the greatest film trilogies ever made (unlike The Godfather, there's no weak third act here). Ray details the making of the films in My Years with Apu. He charts being influenced by Jean Renoir (he worked as an assistant on Renoir's The River, which was shot in India) and how the haphazard filming of Pather Panchali produced one of the greatest humanist films ever put to celluloid. There's a brief but charming passage in the book in which Ray describes being in Venice to screen Aparajito, the second in the trilogy and the film that would win the Golden Lion that year. He was drinking espresso in a café when an elderly journalist approached him, leaned down and whispered in his ear, "I can hear the lion's roar." The Lion statue was apparently so heavy that Ray had to pay excess baggage fees on his flight to Calcutta.

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'A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda' by Carrie Rickey

In 1994, Cahiers du Cinéma published an unconventional memoir by Agnès Varda. Varda par Agnès is a collection of essays, photographs and recollections; it's partly an autobiography, partly a record of her working methods. The book was never translated into English and is now out of print. But readers wanting a better understanding of the "grandmother of the French New Wave" can consult Carrie Rickey's 2024 biography. As Rickey notes, Varda is a fascinating subject, a woman of many talents and identities. She writes of the "Zelig-like improbability of a woman who was chums with Susan Sontag, a political ally of Simone De Beauvoir, the discoverer of Gérard Depardieu, the director of an early Harrison Ford screen test, and a friend of Jim Morrison who kept his death under wraps for several days." Varda, who died in 2019, was the first woman to win the Golden Lion. The film was Vagabond (1985), her incredible film about a young woman called Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) who is found dead in a ditch and whose story is told in flashbacks as we discover what led to this tragic end at the beginning. But Varda's life and career were long. She was, in Rickey's words, "a single mother, then wife and mother, political activist, widow, grandmother and late-life fairy godmother of independent film."

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'Sculpting in Time' by Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky is cinema's poet. From his debut Ivan's Childhood (which won the Golden Lion in 1962) to his parabolic swan song The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky used long takes, a sweeping camera and a philosophical inquisitiveness to imbue his cinema with intelligence and sensuality unmatched by even his best contemporaries. He wrote Sculpting in Time in response to the hundreds of letters he received from viewers, some admiring, others mystified at his films' supposed opaqueness and impenetrability. The book is more theory than biography—a chance for Tarkovsky to explain his methods and principles of filmmaking—but the result is far more intimate than the piles of Hollywood memoirs written by ghost-writers (or written with prose bad enough to make you wish they'd hired one). Tarkovsky's book is informative, sensuous and an essential addition to any cinephile's bookshelf.

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'My Last Sigh' by Luis Buñuel

A book by the director of Un Chien Andalou—the most famous surrealist film ever made, co-written by Salvador Dalí—was never going to be a conventional memoir. As he writes in his self-described "semi-autobiography," Buñuel often wanders "from the subject like the wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained, despite my vigilance. But it doesn't matter. I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties. Since I am not a historian, I don't have my notes or encyclopedia, yet the portrait I've drawn is wholly mine, with my affirmations, my hesitations, my repetitions and lapses, my truths and my lies. Such is my memory." Would we want anything else from the avant-garde director of The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie? Published six months before his death, the book is like a surrealist collection of memories, subjective, meandering and not always clear. He won the Golden Lion for Belle de Jour, that famous film of erotic longing interspersed with imagination and reality. There was always more than one version of reality for Buñuel.

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'Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker' by Jan Wahl

When Jan Wahl was a Fulbright student at the University of Copenhagen in 1954, he spent the summer with Carl Theodor Dreyer, the famed director of The Passion of Joan of Arc and other silent masterpieces. Half a century later, Wahl published his "impressionistic yet detailed" account of that summer when Dreyer shot Ordet, his supernatural masterpiece that would win the Golden Lion the following year. Thankfully for us, Wahl kept a journal that summer and kept transcriptions of his conversations with the "saintly, soft-spoken" Dreyer. The book is a personal recollection of watching a master filmmaker at work, told from the perspective of a young admirer, and is especially worth seeking out as it concentrates solely on the making of a film that would win the top prize at Venice.

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