Conditioned by logistics, Great Directors accepts that title adjective very broadly. The ten auteurs considered do at least homage their mentors, muses or models -- Pasolini, Ford, Sirk, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Fassbinder, Hawks, Scorsese, De Sica, Mel Brooks. Some of those interviewed, like Bernardo Bertolucci and David Lynch, are famous while others are critically discussed or controversial rather than household names. This documentary, full of interviews and clips,  is not for the casual moviegoer but for the hard-core, often art-house crowd and the historian.

First shown last year at Venice, this result of over four years’ shooting and editing (from two-hundred-fifty hours of dialogue) appears poorly stitched together by director-producer Angela Ismailos herself, a “personal journey” during which two cameras catch her comfortable alongside her subjects, in flats or courtyards or strolling gardens or streets.

Parallel reinforcement of Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris realization of cinema as pleasure in addition to political conviction, is Ismailos’ concept of non-fiction as education and entertainment for her and her audience. Thus, the films are to be understood as part and parcel of the individual aesthetic and/or social apprehension of the man or woman behind the camera, i.e., clips and directorial philosophy.

Sooner or later they all mention financing, or the lack thereof. None talks about the meat and potatoes of technique. And all are Westerners: no Asian, Latin American or African viewpoints counterbalance Euramerica-centric concerns.

Some sociopolitical agenda is professed by the seven male filmmakers -- “Every movie is political,” says John Sayles -- as against the more isolated, often aesthetic, sometimes erotic direction of the three women: the S/M and Nazi-protagonist scandal of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, the Guardian’s nominating Catherine Breillat “the bad girl of French film” and her own assessment of “not about eroticism but shame.”

The most conceivable justification for inclusion of footage of Paris’ spring 1968 disturbances is Truffaut and Godard’s lending vocal support. The latter’s subsequent abandonment of political essay “revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences” and semi-return to American gangsters and noir, also marks several of the directors in this film, aged and mellowed.

The elder males were a loose bag of leftist, socialist, Marxist or communist, while, the oldest of all ten participants, Agnès Varda, a still photographer “happy to create” in films, is leftist but yet apart from that. She reflects on house and garden, cat and late husband Jacques Demy, four grandsons so “not one girl I can make a hairdo for,” on life and death and her apotheosis as “Grandmother of the New Wave” because her first, La Pointe courte, was edited by Resnais and was a precursor.

Her affectionate ambivalence about the U.S. is shared by Ken Loach and Stephen Frears, who began with more permissive, pre-Thatcher BBC-TV considerations of workers, the marginalized, and corruption in high places. The two are self-effacing, though there is seriousness behind socialist Loach’s emphasis that the manicured grounds of the interview is a studio set, “not my private garden!” Frears references his stint in Southern California to point up the differences between its films and those of England, the latter of which flaunt less commercial star wattage and cash and are more tied to class concerns.

Self-financed by his freelance screenwriting, Sayles appears the most political of the directors considered on this side of the Atlantic. Nasal-voiced chain-smoking Lynch, in contrast, consciously will not interpret his picture of the underbelly of life here, letting the works speak for themselves, “you go see it.” Todd Haynes reflects on “the new queer cinema” filmmakers, on Fassbinder and pioneer Jean Genet and chameleon personalities like Bob Dylan, while young Richard Linklater’s theme is rebellious youth, from his own relatively unprivileged (for a white) childhood with few options in a Texas Podunk.

In English and subtitled French and Italian, these interviews are for those of politique des auteurs persuasion. Awestruck cutaway Ismailos knows that her project “changed constantly and could have gone in so many different directions.” Ten directions, that is, whereas a deeper one, two or three directors/themes would have been tighter and notched this record up to invaluable.

(Released by Paladin; not rated by MPAA.)