Samuel Fuller

In the early twentieth century, the art world was captivated by the imaginative, original paintings of Henri Rousseau, who, without formal art training, produced works that astonished not only the public but great artists such as Pablo Picasso. Samuel Fuller (1912–1997) is known as the 'Rousseau of the cinema,' a mostly 'B' genre Hollywood moviemaker deeply admired by 'A' filmmakers as diverse as Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cassavetes, all of them dazzled by Fuller’s wildly idiosyncratic primitivist style. A high school dropout who became a New York City tabloid crime reporter in his teens, Fuller went to Hollywood and made movies post-World War II that were totally in line with his exploitative newspaper work—bold, blunt, pulpy, excitable. The images were as shocking, impolite, and in-your-face as a Weegee photograph of a gangster bleeding on a sidewalk. Fuller, who made twenty-three features between 1949 and 1989, is the very