The films of John Boorman (b.1933) masterfully balance classical storytelling with arresting image-making, a profound nostalgia for a lost pre-modern world and a flair for innovative narratives and richly eccentric mise-en-scene. Running throughout Boorman’s films is a sustained critique of modernity and an exploration of the ways that 20th and 21st century rationality has trapped and limited mankind. In contrast to and in defiance of the stultifying forces of modernity are the restless searching heroes of Boorman’s films, loners whose yearning for a realm of freedom outside the ordered world finds its best expression in the arduous journeys that recur throughout the films from Catch Us If You Can to The Emerald Forest.

A resident of Ireland for most of his life, Boorman’s cautious resistance to modernity is informed by the distinctly Irish perspective that grounds his work. In his wonderful memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy, Boorman explains, “Although hag-ridden by priests and oppressed by the Church, I felt Catholicism was only skin deep [in Ireland], that underneath it was a pagan place. For all its sorrows and suffering, Ireland had at least escaped the brutalizing effect of the Industrial Revolution which, in England, had sucked people from the land to the misery of city slums.”

Boorman’s career began first in radio and then in television, where he eventually became a well-respected documentary director for the BBC. This nonfiction training is an important key to Boorman’s cinema, which reveals a strong attachment to the notions of Jungian myth—increasingly defining a mode of ecological consciousness—yet also retains a firm grip in the material world that avoids any “New Age” wooliness. Boorman’s attachment to narrative cinema— and his deep knowledge of film history— is revealed in his choice of D.W. Griffith as his filmmaking hero, a seemingly eccentric preference that underscores Boorman’s interest in the mode of formally innovative narrative filmmaking which is, after all, Griffith’s main contribution to film history.

Boorman is a true auteur in every sense of the term and is deeply involved in every aspect of his films’ productions, from story development, scriptwriting and art direction to the final editing and sound mix. A product of the intensely fertile period when the the studio era overlapped with the emergence of the European New Waves, Boorman’s films simultaneously channel both traditions to offer that rarest of cinematic experiences: the film that entertains even as it makes us think.