Facebook friend Ray Sawhill once posed a “Question For the Day”:

“The work of which filmmaker(s) says ‘This is pointing the way to the future of cinema!’ to you?”

I say:

Movies will be saved, and find a future, through a renaissance that
will work pretty much the way the Italian Renaissance worked, looking
backwards and “creatively misreading” what’s seen there. No one
currently looking ahead for “the next new thing” (after Gothic
sculpture, as it were) will see it coming or be part of it.

So to answer the question in brief — John Ford.