ONE HUNDRED GREATEST FILMS LIST.   Dennis Grunes  12/05

Below is a list of what, on a given day, I consider to be the 100 greatest films of all time.  Each film is given an entry of about 300 words.  The first twenty-five films are given in rough order of preference.  The remaining titles are given in chronological order, except that, where there is more than one entry for a given year, the entries for that year are given in order of preference. 

1. EARLY SUMMER (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1951).  Postwar Tokyo; Noriko’s family prevails upon her to marry, but she chooses a man of whom they disapprove. He is twelve years her senior, has a child, and is relocating to Akita. Noriko’s family worry that she will not end up happy.

     In the aftermath of war, with Japan’s authoritarian ruler deposed and democracy dawning, the structured, stable Japanese family, as a social force, has devolved. A small child tells his grandfather (twice) that he hates him; her older brother (Chishu Ryu, superb) tells Noriko she is impudent to men—to which Noriko counters, “Men used to be too important.” “Our family has scattered,” the father will say once Noriko has left. “We shouldn’t want too much,” he tells his wife (twice). Is this the path to happiness—being content with what life gives rather than asking for more? Perhaps an attitude of acceptance provides the only consolation and relief for life’s disappointments, and life’s transience.

     Bakashû, delicately composed, is sensitive to light and to nuances of feeling; yet the accumulated result is overwhelming. No film more powerfully conveys the passage of time—here, a paradoxical, slow, inexorable rush. Sisters walk the beach, talking, the camera following, or the father and mother sit outdoors side by side, discussing family, the low, angled camera favoring their backs. Much of their anxious conversation is pressured by time—human time measured against eternity.

     As ever with Ozu, human beings are paramount. In a beautiful long shot, a loose balloon scales up the sky. “Some child must be crying,” the father notes.

     Ozu’s characters experience happiness, when they do, not because of good fortune but from the way they engage life: with humility, and with their philosophical stance. This life is gently moving, always, imperceptibly, towards the last end.

2. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Serge M. Eisenstein, U.S.S.R., 1925).  One would never guess that Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein heralded from the stage. Thrilling and kinetic, his Battleship Potemkin is purely cinematic.

     The film re-creates the Kronstadt naval mutiny that triggered the doomed 1905 Russian Revolution—an event preceding the Bolshevik Revolution. In graphic detail, the film shows the conditions onboard that led to the mutiny.

     Perhaps cinema’s most celebrated passage is the Odessa Steps Massacre. In reality, this event never occurred, but, because of the power of Eisenstein’s images, it is widely believed to have occurred. Potemkin, then, reinvents history, translating documentary and fiction each into the other—what has remained cinema’s signature strategy for fathoming time and investigating social and political realities. It is important to note that Eisenstein’s fiction remains true to political circumstance in Russia. His fabricated event captures the cruelty and oppressiveness of tsarist rule, creating for these a stark, fiercely lit metaphor. (Eduard Tissé is Eisenstein’s essential black-and-white cinematographer.) In a rush of images, the masses, in enraged sympathy with the mutineers, are cut down by the police in the streets. Shot rapidly follows shot; but this ferocity gives way to another kind of passage later on—mysterious, meditative, lovely, one that is wrapped in silken darkness: dusk-cloaked sails on moonlit water—images that evoke the eternal note of sadness attending humanity’s struggle to assert fundamental rights in the face of oppression. Somewhere, always, the battle continues.  

     Eisenstein’s militant masterpiece is a national epic for his young nation, set a dozen years before its existence. It is a film full of anticipation—a look back for the courage to move ahead, united. The Soviet Union no longer exists. Today, Battleship Potemkin is cinema’s most poignant elegy, and its most powerful expression of a now largely dormant idea: the people.

3. ORDET (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1954).  From Kaj Munk’s play, Ordet is cinema’s finest expression of Christian faith.

     In 1925, Morten Bergen lives on a remote farm with three sons: Mikkel, an atheist, whose wife, Inger, anticipates his return to the fold; Johannes, whose conviction that he is the risen Christ prompts him to chide “believers” for not believing fully enough; and young Anders, who has fallen in love with Anne, with whose father Morten has long been locking horns over their differing views of Christianity. Inger dies shortly after giving birth to a son whose wrong position requires the doctor to terminate the infant in an effort to save her life. Mikkel is left in inconsolable grief. Invoking Jesus Christ, Johannes resurrects Inger, bringing Mikkel to his wife’s faith and reconciling both families.

     Dreyer’s sublime comedy accumulates the awesome power of his great tragedies. Its signature image is the family laundry, whites outdoors on a line, furiously flapping in the wind—perfectly mundane, and yet full of mysterious beauty that betokens spiritual possibilities. At Inger’s funeral service, the sheer white curtains through which sunlight filters and the tick of a wall clock are transmutations of the laundry’s sights and sound.

     With a crystalline sense of the eternal, the mystery in our midst that gives rise to religious feeling, The Word encompasses, outdoors, an unsurpassed beauty of landscape and an almost palpable depth of air and, indoors, a miracle whose emotional power and depth of spiritual suggestion remain unmatched in cinema. Twentieth-century humanity’s remove from natural sources of faith Ordet’s moment of rebirth shatters in a tidal wave of passion. Dreyer burns “religion” down to its ancient core of wonder, taking even nonbelievers to a summit of shared visionary experience where the pure air seems the very breath of God.

4. L’ECLISSE (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, 1962).  Eclipse completes Michelangelo Antonioni’s towering black-and-white trilogy of modern alienation and uncertain European identity. (L’avventura, La notte: see below.) It begins with the end of a romantic relationship and ends with another; Vittoria (Monica Vitti, magnificent) is the constant in both. The film begins and ends in sheer silence and with an overwhelming sense of vacancy.

     L’eclisse’s frames are composed in intricate, dynamic depth—a depth that evokes modern times, where, rather than keeping hidden below, a now thoroughly known-about, hence objectified, unconscious so intrudes on the surface of human behavior and thought that, rattled and unsure of themselves amidst self-criticism and second guessing, people seem lost in their own lives—the problem of identity that Vittoria’s frenzied dance, in African brownface, apotheosizes. Compounding this is the wobbled European identity as a result of western Europe’s loosened and lost moorings in colonialism—and this, too, Vittoria’s dance brings to the fore. Moreover, Antonioni relates all this to another concern of the 1960s: materialism. Materialism depersonalizes everything, even intimacy; thus Antonioni shows columns at the Roman Stock Exchange dividing future lovers Piero and Vittoria—a sign of the societal ill that will infect their relationship. The columns are orderly. What passes now for order is divisive rather than integrative—an idea stunningly expressed in the film’s conclusive series of bleak, abandoned nightscapes: a world of order with nothing left to order: form outlasting content. The total absence of humanity suggests humanity’s now empty core.

     Piero and Vittoria have not kept their date. L’eclisse sharpens despair to the point of apocalypse, signalling in the failure of two individuals to remain a couple the end of the world. By indirection, then, Antonioni touts the primacy of love. L’eclisse is the most powerful film ever made about two lovers.

5. THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Dziga Vertov, U.S.S.R., 1928).  Cinema began as a documentary enterprise, with the camera a purely objective recording device; but documentaries have also been subjective and personal.

     Chelovek s kino-apparatom, by Dziga Vertov, born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman, employs a framing device: preparation for the screening, followed by the ceremonious screening, of the film itself. On the agile move, it follows the cameraman, the director’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, from dawn to darkness, here, there and everywhere, including bustling city streets in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, as he tries taking in “life as it is being lived” from numerous perspectives while photographing the film we’re watching. Two audiences complete this

self-reflexivity: those attending the screening in the film; Vertov’s audience—now, us. Both “half-create” what they see, as in life.

     What’s on screen is life then? Not so fast! What appears is full of camera tricks. In Vertov’s earlier Kino-Eye (1924) the Chinese street magician’s magic seems the result of his own sleight of hand. Now, however, the magic of life and the magic of cinema so continuously translate into one another that we cannot be certain whose “tricks” we witness: the magician’s or Vertov’s. The “factuality” that Vertov is after, then, isn’t the sort that omits or discards the myriad ambiguities of human experience; his eclectic film displays various tones and moods, with beauteous lyrical inserts recalling poet William Wordsworth’s visionary “spots of time,” amidst highly descriptive passages, such as of people at work. The result places the adventure in the graciousness of eternity—although the film never quite loses hold of the here and now, even when, in a burst of ingenious animation, Kaufman’s camera, onstage, comes to robotic life to confront its audience: a sci-fi image predicting a delightful Soviet future that wasn’t to be.

6. REGEN (Joris Ivens, Mannus Frånken, Netherlands, 1929).  It’s only minutes long, but Rain—now, thanks to Kino, restored to completeness—is one of a kind. The year before, Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens launched his prolific,

globe-trotting 60-year career with The Bridge; but, fine as it is, that film doesn’t predict the astonishing lyricism of Rain. Besides co-directing the film with Mannus Frånken, Ivens co-cinematographed it, with Chang Fai, and edited it.

     Vertov and Kaufman shot material for The Man with a Movie Camera over four years; another black-and-white silent, Ivens’s masterpiece also took time to compose. Several rainshowers in Amsterdam over many months were meshed into a single event encompassing darkened sky, splattered pavement below and, in between, radiant humanity busily in motion. The result is a luminous meditation on human transience amidst Nature’s volatility—if you will, permanent impermanence.

     Time’s rush, the passage of life—everything in the film contributes to the development of this theme, including overhead shots of barges pushing through the frames, and scores of people in the street hurrying away from the camera to get out of the rain.

     Among its accomplishments, Rain remains exemplary for its fluent use of handheld camera, which, on this occasion, seamlessly disappears into the viewer’s captivated eye—a poor indicator of the technique’s eventual agitato trademark.

     Rain is the little film that could. It still can. It still does.

7. THE TRIAL (Orson Welles, France, Italy, West Germany, 1962).  Orson Welles, who wrote and directed The Trial, from Franz Kafka, considered it his best piece of work. I concur.

     Certainly it is Welles’s most haunted film. It satirizes bureaucracy by promoting it to an almost cosmic level of authoritarianism, as Kafka had done in order to portray humanity’s sense of cluelessness in the vast, impersonal modern world; but Welles also lends great sorrow to the satire by infusing it with a specter of the Holocaust. (Kafka’s novella preceded the Holocaust by about twenty years; the film came about twenty years after.) This brings to fruition the full horror of totalitarianism that Kafka had only begun to imagine. To be sure, the film dazzles with its kaleidoscopic maze of ambiguous black-and-white images and visual cul-de-sac, its use of chiaroscuro, its urgent sense of parable; but it is the film’s phantomlike repository of historical memory, an omnipresent insinuation, that accounts for its inexhaustible power of emotion.

     Not everyone who loves Welles loves this film. Critic Andrew Sarris, who places Welles in his pantheon of great American filmmakers, finds The Trial “hateful,” “repellent,” “perverted”—or did so at the time of The American Cinema (1968), where he writes: “Welles asserts in his prologue that his story has the logic of a dream, but Welles on Kafka, like Mondrian’s white on white, is less logical than superfluous, less a dream of something than a dream of a dream of something.” Bound up in memory, Welles’s film is the dream of a dream. It is Welles’s nightmare of an historical waking nightmare that we all share.

     The Trial is Welles’s great lament for humanity’s inhumanity. It is a film mourning a world of justice and reason that it nevertheless knows existed in mind but never in time.

8. D’EST (Chantal Äkerman, Belgium, France, Portugal, 1993).  Like Dziga Vertov’s lyrical Three Songs of Lenin (1934), From the East is a photographic essay—a documentary survey—of humanity. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Äkerman traveled from Germany to Poland to Moscow. She had always wanted to make a film about “the diaspora of the Eastern European Jews,” and, in a transfigured form, D’Est became this for her. In each face she encounters throughout her journey she feels the history with which she, Jewish, is investing it, and this history includes the death camps and Stalin—like Hitler, an anti-Semite. “Road pictures” are drifty things reflecting the impermanence and uprootedness of human lives, and the “impermanence” and “uprootedness” of Äkerman’s tracking camera destabilizes figures in often stationary positions, transforming them into a metaphor for lost and scattered Jewry. Äkerman also films numerous people walking, which contributes to the same thematic result.

     Äkerman’s dark of night resonates with a sense of Jewry’s eternal tragedy: one’s home, or even someone’s life, always being taken away—the nothingness to which the rest of the world is ever poised to consign Jews by scattering them or their ashes to the winds. The Soviet Union has ended, but its former citizens, apparently unfazed, go on with their mundane lives. They, too, are scattered to winds, and thus this continuation of ordinary existence cocoons them from the sea-change that has taken place, as Äkerman’s camera penetrates and deconstructs the event of their survival, wringing from it her metaphor for Jewish endurance.

     We feel the loss of each face, each form, that the camera passes by, and, because there are so many of these souls, we are never passive in watching this nearly wordless film, for we are always catching up with it.

9. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Carl Theodor Dreyer, France, 1928).  Who was the chief architect of her martyrdom? The English invaders, who imprisoned her? The French clergy, who tried and condemned her? God? The girl herself? The people, who identified with her and gave her martyrdom political purpose?

     Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dreyer thus entered fifteenth-century France and collapsed the difference between present and distant past, not to construct an objective history, but to show opposing subjectivities as Jeanne d’Arc’s trial: her insistent faith; the heretic that her judges, at the behest of the English, felt compelled to subdue.

     Using composition, camera placement and camera movement to isolate Jeanne within the frame, and a dissonant editing style wherein consecutive shots sometimes appear deliberately mismatched, Dreyer lays bare the politics of official persecution. Moreover, he plumbs a solitary soul’s duress under this persecution and shows the transformation of the witnessing masses from an amorphous mob into a responsible voice—and fist—of moral protest. Transcending images of the exploitative circus that Jeanne’s execution attracts, Dreyer’s film achieves startling clarity.

     Her unadorned face in varied closeup, at the center of the film is Maria Falconetti giving a tremendous performance—in fact, among the most celebrated ones in all of cinema. What became of her? One legend claims she so identified with her one film role that she ended up in an insane asylum, convinced she was Jeanne. Some say the actress returned to the stage. Falconetti’s “madness” may be an antifeminist lie taking aim at so powerful a female image.

     Falconetti enrobes us in the silence of Jeanne’s destiny, much as Dreyer enrobes us in the silence of silent film, with which added scores or orchestral accompaniments uncomprehendingly tinker. Falconetti’s Jeanne makes Dreyer’s Passion a mystery there is no coming out of.

10. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (John Ford, U.S., 1962).  James Stewart and John Wayne are magnificent in John Ford’s last great film, which addresses the foundation of lies and myths sustaining ideas of national destiny, frontier and progress in the U.S. “The man who shot Liberty Valance” doesn’t refer to the man who actually shot and killed the embodiment of Old West lawlessness but to the gun-shy lawyer who, given the credit, builds upon this celebrity a lofty political career that is about to allow him, as U.S. senator, to bring irrigation to Shinbone, thereby turning vast, open desert into a fenced garden, and consigning anarchy to the discipline of rules and boundaries, all of which entails, along with some reluctant modification of individual liberty, the loss of an elusive quality of romance.

     Here is Ford’s most intricately composed yet grayest, knottiest, thorniest Western—his most highly analytical film. (German filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub has called Ford “the most Brechtian of all filmmakers, because he shows things that make people think . . . [and that make] the audience collaborate on the film.”) Like Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), also in black and white, the film seems to emanate from some dark collective mind, the historical imagination where myth and truth, shifting in and out of one another, are phantoms of the night. Senator Ransom Stoddard’s marriage is also founded on the error that he dispatched Liberty Valance; Hallie, his wife, originally loved Tom Doniphon, who really did kill Valance, and who, losing Hallie to Stoddard and gleaning his nation’s future, chose to pass into oblivion. Divided, like America, Hallie loved the dashing substance of one man in the righteous form of the other.

     What an enduring, frightfully weighted haul is here—America’s baggage of memory, regret, contradiction, political disillusionment.

11. EARTH (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R., 1930).  Cinema’s “poet of the Ukraine,” Aleksandr Dovzhenko, made his lyrical silent Zemlya in response to Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929). Selfish peasants—kulaks—resist collectivization. Trying to hold onto exclusive ownership of land, they oppose Nature by violating the bond of sympathy that weds individuals to the common good and to the earth. Nature is shown as bountiful, ripe, nourishing, the source of moral truth, and an ennobling, humanizing force that the farm cooperative as a practical idea embodies. Nature also is the eternal witness in whose philosophical breadth and breath human mortality—the tragedy of life—unfolds. Whereas Eisenstein’s film points proudly, confidently ahead, Earth finds a solemn continuity, imaged forth by a vast ocean of waving wheat, threading past and present.

     Stalin’s 1929 collectivization policy, which would soak Soviet soil in human blood, had just begun. It is madness to lay this on Dovzhenko’s film. Serene, meditative, Earth celebrates Nature and workers; one astounding passage shows (from every conceivable angle) harvesters at work in the fields. A generalization arises as to the holistic nature of these people’s lives.

     Walking home in the wee hours, the boy who chairs the collective committee, full of joy for love of the girl he plans on marrying, breaks into dance on a moonlit road. The camera fixed, Vasili dances and dances, from long shot to closeup to just out of camera range. Suddenly, in the next shot, he drops. Did Vasili stumble? A horse reacts—to what? Vasili has been shot dead by the son of a kulak.

     The day of Vasili’s burial, the murderer’s insane dance among the graves replaces Vasili’s joyous dance, connecting these dances—and the boys, who, it is implied, should have been comrades.

     Nature responds with lament: a downpour splashing fruit.

12. TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1953).  The Japanese family’s postwar disintegration: this is the theme of a noble, massively humane work by Yasujiro Ozu, all of whose films bear the universal appeal of family (or surrogate family) concerns. The war’s demoralizing outcome and the chauvinistic U.S. occupation that followed are not mentioned in Tokyo monogatari, nor do they need to be. We grasp, as Japanese audiences certainly did, that what we are witnessing is, at least partly, fallout from what Japan endured over the previous decade.

     An elderly couple visit their married son in Tokyo. Both the son, a pediatrician, and his wife work, leaving little time to attend to these guests; and their son is a disrespectful, unruly child. Only the widow of the elder couple’s other son, who died in the war, is warm and attentive. Meaning well, the younger couple send the elder couple off to a spa, but being denied the company of those they came to visit only intensifies the older couple’s loneliness and disappointment. At home, the doctor’s mother falls ill and dies.

     As it happens, the younger couple also are disappointed, but their sense of the traditional Japan that they have lost is less tangible. Ozu’s film, then, is a study in cultural disappointment, about a national mood as it affects the thoughts and feelings of individuals. Acting is key in such a film, and the performances are wonderful, especially those of Chishu Ryu as the father and Setsuko Hara as his compassionate daughter-in-law.

     No film better portrays upheaved lives in a “society in transition.” Moreover, Ozu’s shots, such as those showing the backs of the elderly couple sitting outdoors, which convey their shared loneliness and suggest the world—the past—that is now behind them, are material and poetic, elegiac, mundane and transcendent.

13. THE ROUNDUP (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary, 1965).  Every authentic film exists on a continuum of expression governed by opposite poles of objectivity and subjectivity, documentary and fiction. In Szegenylegenyek, the

mise-en-scène is objective; the camera, subjective. One presents material; the other interprets it.

     Like Eisenstein and Claude Chabrol, Miklós Jancsó is a master formalist. Viewers breathe according to his shots.

     The Roundup is about state terrorism. In the nineteenth century, their revolt against Austrian rule having failed, Hungarian rebels are rounded up, interrogated, tortured and killed, all of which is recorded by an intricately choreographed camera whose fluent, relentless trackings and backtrackings thread an impartial noose around oppressed and oppressors alike—those, unaware, who share small breathing space in history’s tightening grip.

     Jancsó, then, is also an ironist. However, its being set in the past sufficiently concealed The Roundup’s contemporary relevance that the Soviet Union helped finance its companion-piece, The Red and the White (1967), set during the 1918 Russian Civil War, and subsequently banned the result. Here, Jancsó envisions war as a continuous wheel of fortune, where, first, one side holds sway and then, their positions reversed a moment later, the other side does, and so on, back and forth—with all this formally rendered by lenses and mobile cameras that are attuned to each shift of power, each reversal. The Red and the White analyzes the mechanism of war.

     Silence and Cry (1968) is the final entry in Jancsó’s black-and-white trilogy. Hungary 1919; the First World War has ended, as has the communist rule that briefly followed. Now the nationalist Royal Gendarme is hunting down soldiers of the Red Army, one of whom hides in a farm house. This young revolutionary continually has to weigh competing values, historical versus humane alternatives, his own survival against the survival of others.

14. IN PRAISE OF LOVE (Jean-Luc Godard, France, Switzerland, 2001).  The former enfant terrible of the nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard has made more brilliant films than anyone else. At seventy, he achieved his masterpiece: Éloge de l'amour.

     The film is divided into two parts. The first centers on a filmmaker’s project about a love affair. It is filmed in luxuriant black and white (cinema past). Shifting to two years earlier, the second part is videographed in saturated color (cinema future). The order is accurate; past follows present here because it is the filmmaker’s memory, triggered in this instance by the suicide of a young woman whose grandparents also are suicides.

     The French intriguingly investigate memory as part of people’s intelligent lives. Italians, by contrast, mine the nostalgic—the emotional—properties of memory.

     Reflections from the first part: History has been replaced by technology; politics, by gospel. “There can be no resistance without memory of universalism.” In the second part, the grandmother, a Resistance fighter during the Second World War, recalls that money then was a means, not an end. Her and her husband’s story is now being bought by Hollywood. Because they have no memories of their own, Godard reminds us, Americans buy the memories of others.

     Haunted shot after haunted shot encapsulates the idea of memory. Scenes of nighttime Paris, besides evoking memories of futuristic ones in Godard’s earlier Alphaville (1965), seem to enter the dominion of memory. Here is a film saturated in memory—memory as a force that participates in inventing current reality. Here is a film in which the tone of a woman’s voice “brought ideas to life.”

     Memory is omnipresent. “You can think of something only if you think about something else,” something familiar.

     We’re creatures of habit—creatures of habitual memory.

15. ¡QUÉ VIVA MÉXICO! (Sergei M. Eisenstein, Mexico, U.S.S.R., 1931-32, 1979).  When author Upton Sinclair withdrew his financing, Eisenstein’s anthropological Mexican film mixing documentary and fictional elements was left incomplete. In 1979, Grigori Alexandrov commandeered a version based on Eisenstein’s notes. It omits, however, the haunting material of the carnival’s dissolution at night included in the looser, more lyrical Eisenstein’s Mexican Fantasy.

     In this study of mixed cultures, native and imposed, pre-Columbian and Spanish, Eisenstein focuses on the devolving role of women in Mexico. The film is thus a companion-piece to his The Old and the New (1929), which identifies the Soviet future with gender equality.

     ¡Que viva México! opens in the sacred city of the Mayas, Chichén Itzá, in Yucatán. Stark, powerful images: Amidst immense pyramids, human faces are compared with faces sculpted in stone, showing the living embodiment of Mexico’s ancient past in her present inhabitants, and suggesting religion’s anthropomorphic basis. A beautiful young woman appears. Is she Mexico’s future?

     Episodes portray a male-driven culture that honors females only as a formality. In “The Sandunga,” set in Tehuantepec, for example, an Indian girl dreams of marriage. Gold coin by gold coin, she pursues the completion of the necklace that will be her wedding dowry. But what power accrues to Concepcion by her having to buy her way to marital bliss? Stop-gap photography tracks the necklace as, through sale after sale of one thing after another, coins are added to it. The visual trickery identifies money not with power but with the illusion of power. Although the day belongs to the bride, the wedding is officiated by the patriarchic church imposed on Mexico by conquerors, and the subsequent marriage finds Concepcion subservient to an indolent spouse.

     On the Day of the Dead, a beaming boy bears the face of Mexico’s future.

16. VAMPYR (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany, France, 1931).  A student of vampires, young David Gray is a “dreamer, for whom the boundary between the real and the unreal has become dim”—an explorer given to “aimless journeyings.”

     Like Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), Dreyer’s Vampyr fully enters a magical world, a realm of sinister enchantment. Its images and sounds attempt to bridge the worlds of silence and sound. The film’s sparse additions of sounds and spoken dialogue interrupt and unsettle its silent or eerily quiet dreamlike state, helping the film to realize its momentous theme: humanity’s anxieties stemming from mortal awareness. Vampyr’s dreaminess goes beyond the suggestion of an anxious dream; it also suggests a desired, a willed, dream, whose aim is to relegate elements of anxiety-ridden reality to the realm of dream in order to conjure the possibility of waking up and having these elements dissipate and dissolve. The film implies, then, a permanently objective world fear of whose loss requires the landscape of a dream as a kind of safety hatch or escape route.

     After two title cards, the film per se materializes in a kind of dematerializing way. Gray appears walking up a hill, with the sea in close proximity. The shot is framed so that the dream possibility arises that he has walked out of the water; indeed, because we have just read that he is a dreamer, we associate the water with Gray’s unconscious. Gray is on land, which implicitly means he is firmly in reality, but the water, coupled with the butterfly net he totes, casts him symbolically adrift.

     What images there are in this film!—for instance, those shots, in shadowy silhouette, where a man is digging a grave, and we see, in reverse motion, the earth sail through space to the spoon of the shovel.

17. CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, U.S., 1941).  Rosebud.

     The attempted deconstruction of a man’s life by an investigative reporter, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is a fascinating film. Nearly intolerably moving, it’s a titanic, dark, dense canvas of American sociology, history and politics that sums up as waste the crammed life of a newspaper magnate, who, disconnected from family and his own past, “buys things.” With its infinite reflexivity, the hall of mirrors in the elderly Kane’s mansion suggests his attempt to extend time and space, that is to say, defy mortality. But life exhausts even such illusionary extensions; like the rest of us, Kane reaches a last deadline. It is here—at Kane’s end—that the movie begins.

     Except for us, no one is present to hear Kane’s deathbed utterance: “Rosebud.” This signals the absurdity of any attempt to “solve the mystery” of a human life. What is “Rosebud”? At the last, one of the countless possessions of Kane’s that is tossed into an insatiable furnace is the childhood sled bearing that name and image. Rather than this, though, “Rosebud” suggests the accumulated thought, feeling and memory that Kane attached to this discarded object. Ultimately, perhaps, it signifies loss, which Kane’s solitudinous egotism has monstrously enlarged into his own province, his Xanadu.

     Rather than the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, “Rosebud” remains an elusive clue in a mystery too vast to admit solution. Thus the film is self-critical, its zigzagging time structure at every point undercutting the straight line of inquiry that the reporter’s investigation tries to impose.

     Citizen Kane haunts and astounds, as in the case of the closing visual pun of a man’s whole life going up in smoke, preceded by a sweeping crane shot of Kane’s accumulated stuff—an apotheosis of American material obsessiveness filling loneliness.

18. L’AVVENTURA (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, 1960).  Antonioni launched cinema’s greatest trilogy with The Adventure. Two souls, her lover, Sandro, and her friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s partner and muse at the time, phenomenal), search for Anna, who is missing from their party on an uninhabited island; in the course of this adventure, the two become a couple and lose the thread of their search. What had brought them together no longer matters—except to us, who miss Anna, who, at first, seemed to be the film’s protagonist.

     The fragile nature of relationships; the ties that loosen and unbind: Antonioni shows the abstract way that modern humans live their lives, giving themselves up to experience. These characters demonstrate self-estrangement and an inability to make emotional contact with others. Visually, L’avventura translates the concepts figure and ground into the relationship between humanity and landscape. Daunting Sicilian locations fail to do what we expect locations to do in a film: locate the characters and their story. Instead, they project the vast spaces, the disconnects, between, among and within characters who lack moral and sensitive rootedness. Here is a film about will-o’-the-wisps.

     Antonioni had mined the poetry of bleak landscape before, such as in The Cry (1957), but never to such intoxicating effect. Used to their own abandonment, the landscapes appear to reveal (or mimic?) the idle, empty, well-to-do characters. This is a film of long shots and wide shots, in which characters are often on the verge of becoming lost to the eye. It is about how, like Anna, we all can be lost in this modern world of ours—lost to ourselves and others. Its overarching theme is the signature one of the sixties: alienation. But Antonioni investigates its character rather than exploiting a fashionable mood.

     L’avventura is not Zabriskie Point (1970).

19. THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG (Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, U.S.S.R., 1927).  Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Konyets Sankt-Peterburga begins with a trenchant portrait of rural poverty in 1914 Tsarist Russia. After the birth of a sister, “another mouth to feed,” a boy leaves the farm and goes to the city to get a job. An uncle living there is a labor activist; his stingy wife (Vera Baranovskaya, superb) throws the boy out. When workers strike, the boy, hungry, becomes a scab. When he better appreciates matters, he assaults a boss, is thrown into prison and is sent to fight in the First World War. When he returns, he participates in the revolution that consecutively disposes of the tsar and Kerensky’s provisional government, by which time his aunt’s compassion and generosity have grown. St. Petersburg is now Leningrad.

     Except for an overdone bout of crosscutting between suffering at the front and, back home, capitalists gleeful over war profits, V. I. Pudovkin and four assistant directors have wrought a perfect film. Along with Pudovkin’s Mother (see below), it remains cinema’s best study of radicalization. Its stark images stun—for instance, towards the camera in closeup, the scythe-like rotation of a windmill’s fan on the farm: persistent, sharp motions that unsettle the frames, within the implied symbolism of life’s tragic round. The image both conveys the harsh entrapment of poverty and signals the future growth of the peasant’s political consciousness. Greed-driven, power-fixated St. Petersburg contextualizes images that prepare the boy for political maturation: dense factory pollution, amidst which overworked, underpaid workers toil, in contrast to the artificial lot of clean suits and straw hats—stock exchange participants, whose rat-like scurrying, shot from overhead, would be comical were it not for the connection to the plight of workers that the juxtaposition draws.

20. PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson, France, 1959).  Burdened by his history, a young pickpocket approaches us in voiceover in Robert Bresson’s electrifying Pickpocket. Michel is poor, and that’s the principal reason for his stealing, until, that is, the thievery itself provides an addictive and compulsive element. Bresson does not reduce Michel’s humanity by categorizing him as a criminal. Instead, the hinted connection between Michel and the lieutenant who escapes the Gestapo in Bresson’s A Man Escaped (see below), both of whom are in a constant state of anxiety, imparts to the pickpocket some of the Resistance fighter’s heroic humanity. Bresson’s largeness of directorial spirit gives his film a religious aura—that and, on the soundtrack, the outbursts of quasi-religious music that either strengthen or tweak the film’s religious identity. You choose.

     But Bresson does dehumanize Michel, and others, in another way. At the racetrack, in the police station or the Metro, closeups focus on money and its movement from one hand to another, or from one place (such as a pocket or pocketbook) to another (such as a hand)—money taking precedence over humanity and directing the course of people’s lives. Rock-bottoming out, though, Michel may be ultimately guided to his redemption by the invisible hand of God.

     Each shot is concise, passionate, radiant, and the dialogue is so minimal, elliptical, even cryptic, that we must invest ourselves imaginatively to bring a clear, continuous sense to the film. In the absence of much talk, we hear things wonderfully: footsteps; doors opening and closing; automobiles—all the sounds, in fact, that Bresson has included and emphasized, translating each, along with each black-and-white image, into its essence. As ever, Bresson refreshes our sense of material life, which too often otherwise falls into jadedness and complacency by becoming detached from our sense of spirit.

21. THE GOLD RUSH (Charles Chaplin, U.S., 1925).  Charles Chaplin’s Gold Rush, about the 1898 Klondike gold rush, is humorous and serene—a wondrous light comedy in which Chaplin’s persistent Everyman, cinema’s signature icon, wins even at love.

     But this is not to say that the film is free of anxiety. Amidst bewitching images of Charlie in the Alaskan wilderness, the American Dream gasps at a problematic final frontier. First cousin to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (see below), Chaplin’s comedy eludes tragedy, it seems, by a single whisker. Snow burns intensely and, before he emerges from his ordeal triumphant, Charlie nearly starves, his imaginative and material resourcefulness, although great (consider the meal he concocts from boiled shoe and spaghetti-like shoelaces), a lame weapon against fierce Nature. A sublimely funny moment: Delusional from hunger, Big Jim, a fellow prospector and Charlie’s cabin-mate, imagines Charlie as a giant chicken and promptly chases him for a much-needed meal.

     Nor is Nature all that threatens Charlie, for he is searching out beyond its 1925 borders an already dwindling America, as the grandeur of America’s terrain of hope yields to exploitation, population growth, and the cramping commotion of progress. Like many a comedy, then, this one teeters on the edge of disaster—like, unforgettably, Charlie’s uprooted cabin slip-sliding away.

     Everything—home, prospects, life, America—is perishable.

     But Charlie at the last gets the girl.

22. THE CONSTANT FACTOR (Krzysztof Zanussi, Poland, 1980).  For whatever reason(s), Krzysztof Zanussi has participated in obscuring his artistic signature by doggedly trying to make films that are different from one another. Constans is perhaps his most personal film.

     Witold is beset with difficulties. He is his dying mother’s caregiver; at work his idealism collides with the inwardness, rigidness and corruption of an entrenched bureaucracy that mounts a plot against him; and he longs to scale the Himalayas, as his father died doing. Witold’s life appears bleak at the crossroads of his own character and things beyond his control. Finally, he withdraws from the world and becomes a window washer—a grotesque parody of mountain-climbing. The son will never become his father. The integrity to which he aspires must forever elude him.

     Witold places his faith in mathematics, believing it can explain his apparent bad luck, and the film’s precise, almost mathematical style is suited to this faith and his perception of the world. Something human, though, is ever poised to drop into or out of such a view of reality. As a result, Witold unwittingly contributes to a tragic outcome. Constans is breathtaking in its irony.

     Zanussi, a former student of physics and philosophy, has fashioned a rigorously intellectual work about self-determination and other-determination. Constans elegantly locates a man’s emotional life in a complex social and political environment. It demonstrates the struggle for survival by an individual whose resilience and intelligence would seem to offer more hope and better prospects. Of all great films, this may be the bleakest, not least of all for its portrait of daily existence in a joyless, programmatic Communist state. Throughout, its cold colors appear on the edge of colorlessness.

     Zanussi has made an uncompromising film about an uncompromising man. The implied self-criticism is devastating.

23. VIRIDIANA (Luis Buñuel, Spain, Mexico, 1961).  Only Godard has made more brilliant films than Spain’s political self-exile Luis Buñuel, whose career spanned a half-century. Antifascist, surrealist, Catholic-turned-antireligionist, Buñuel is a withering artist perpetually applying a satirical razor blade to the eyeballs of the bourgeoisie, Catholic clergy, and assorted other groups deemed backward. The critical miscomprehension that attended his beautiful Nazarin (1958) found him giving many of its themes a more blatant treatment in Viridiana. For once, the less subtle rendering proved the greater work. Viridiana had to be smuggled out of Franco’s Spain, to which Buñuel had returned just to make it, and completed in Mexico.

     Dark, course, rough wool, black-and-white Viridiana is stylistically different from the teasing silk of Buñuel’s later French work in color (Belle de Jour, 1967; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972). In it, altruism and idealism collide with mean, grubby reality and various forms of corruption. The film follows Viridiana, a girl about to take final vows at convent, the course of whose life is wrenched when the aristocratic uncle she is visiting lies to her before committing suicide, claiming that he violated her the night before while she was in a drugged state. Viridiana assumes charge of Don Jaime’s estate, which she shares with his illegitimate son. Believing she can redeem them through prayer, Viridiana invites in beggars, resulting in the high point of the film’s astonishing brio: a looting-rape celebration that visually parodies Leonardo’s The Last Supper and is set to Handel’s Messiah. Hal-le-lu-jah!

     The closeup of a child’s feet as she skips rope provides a sense of balance ripe for tragicomic reversal. Fernando Rey is marvelous as Don Jaime, whose chuckle right before he hangs himself with the jump-rope remains one of cinema’s most enigmatic and haunting gestures.

24. THE BURMESE HARP (Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1956).  About the effect of war’s horror on a sensitive combatant in the Second World War, Kon Ichikawa’s Biruma no Tategoto is the most humane of war films. Its eloquent simplicity befits its literary source: Michio Takeyama’s postwar novel aimed at introducing to children Buddhism’s tenets.

     The film opens on a barren, desolate landscape. Dirge-like music; image and sound thus combine to suggest a vast graveyard. Titles appear—a kind of epitaph: “In Burma, soil is blood-red. So are rocks.” A reflective voiceover replaces the titles: “It’s such a long time since the war ended. The war has left many sad stories . . . . By July 1945 the war was going badly.” Memory of war becomes, then, the “life” of this film—life commemorating the lost and the dead.

     The film’s first movement introduces Inouye Company, the platoon including Private Mizushima, whose constant companion is his lute patterned after a Burmese harp. Captain Inouye, who studied music, has taught his men to sing. The beauty of their choral endeavors suggests the haven of humanity they perpetuate in the midst of their violent existence; their nostalgic, sentimental songs transport their souls to home. Similarly, the plaintive sounds of Mizushima’s simulated Burmese harp are the repository of the men’s embrace of life in the midst of so much death. Its soulful expression counters the imperialist motive of war, the power of governments that discounts the humanity of the ordinary people who become the soldiers and other victims of war.

     Mizushima goes AWOL and becomes a monk. The film charts his highly individual and transformative journey; but in some mystical sense, Mizushima is the extension of his comrades, including Inouye, whose love of music inspired him in the first place.

     Ichikawa’s delicate, elegiac masterpiece inspires us all.

25. ARSENAL (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, U.S.S.R., 1929).  On the heels of his Zvenigora (1928) arrived one of the great films about war: Dovzhenko’s Arsenal. It is set during the 1918 Russian Civil War, between the Reds and the Whites, communists and nationalists.

     Some of the Ukrainian artist’s images are indelible: amid combat, a soldier, eyes bulging amidst artillery fumes, his face a contorted mask; the mutineers’ derailed train, from which drops an accordian, which collapses into motionlessness; an officer mechanically performing executions in rapid succession—arm up, fire, arm down, arm up, fire, arm down. In war’s crucible, naturalism yields to expressionism. Dovzhenko convinces that his impossible vision of war suits war’s reality.

     Yet this isn’t the sum of Arsenal’s achievement, for Dovzhenko probes the politics and various casualties of war, from the competing civilian sides to the Social Democrats, to the soldiers in the field, to the starving peasants back home. (A farm horse drops to the ground in slow motion: starvation? or has it been shot, to appease human hunger?) War is shown, then, as an intricate mechanism in which everyone is impressed. There is, for instance, the agitated response of the bourgeoisie to a workers’ strike in the munitions factory; and the coming to a halt of the arsenal, besides providing a brilliant image of revolt, weighs in with the dire consequences of nonproduction for the soldiers waging war and the war effort being waged by a fractured nation. The arsenal’s stoppage would inform the heart-stopping stopping of the mill at the close of Dreyer’s Vampyr (see above), much as the collapsed accordian would reappear in René Clément’s Battle of the Rails (1945). Arsenal is an influential film, then, as well as a mind-boggling masterpiece—a part of our collective consciousness even if we have never seen it.

The remaining 75 films on this list of the 100 greatest films of all time do not appear, as do the first 25 listed above, in order of preference.  They are given chronologically, year by year.  However, when more than one entry exists for the same year, the entries are given in order of preference for that particular year.  For tracking purposes, the remaining entries will be consecutively numbered beginning with number 26.  But these entries complete the list of the 100 greatest films rather than continue the list of the 25 greatest films.

1922

26. NANOOK OF THE NORTH (Robert J. Flaherty, U.S.).  Robert J. Flaherty is the “father of the documentary,” not because he invented filmed documents (cinema’s earliest incarnation, in fact), but because he invented documentary films—thematically unified works including instances of documented reality.

     Flaherty staged things, having actual people in their usual surroundings—natives in primitive environments—“perform” what they routinely do or what ancestors did. His persistent theme is humanity in Nature—humanity endangered by Nature and by the intrusion of mechanical apparatus into their fragile world, including, ironically, the motion-picture camera that Flaherty brought in in order to document these disappearing cultures.

     Shot in the Canadian Arctic, Nanook follows a family of Itivimuits (Eskimoes). The opening in unsurpassable cinema. From a boat, two tracking shots extend over stretches of water dotted by ice floes while a sterile sun illuminates a frigid no-man’s-land. Nanook, a fur trader, appears to be standing guard at a lower corner of expository title cards, following which closeups introduce him and Nyla, his wife, prior to a thematic integration of all that we have thus far seen: Nanook in his canoe on the water, poised to provide for himself and his family—an Itivimuit in the wild.

     Cultural anthropologists may gripe at Flaherty’s “enactments,” but in this “reconstructed reality” how wondrously Flaherty, as artist, shows humanity’s resourceful adaptation to an almost inconceivably harsh environment. Indeed, Nature proves Flaherty’s assistant in the savage snowstorm that threatens to engulf the Itivimuit family. Only luck saves them, in the form of an abandoned igloo—a set!—they supposedly chance upon on their way home. Upon their dogs outside the igloo, though, the snow falls and falls—this conclusive shot an associative reminder of the precariousness of the family’s own existence.

1926

27. THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, U.S.).  The American Civil War remains an emotional powder-keg, at least in the white South, which continues spiritually, and sometimes politically, to resist the idea of Confederate defeat. This may be why the one indisputable masterpiece about that war, Keaton and Bruckman’s The General, is a comedy.

     Buster Keaton has transformed an actual incident involving a Confederate engine driver, whose heroism helped score a victory against the Union army, into his signature theme of a boy trying hard to prove himself, in this case to the girl he loves, who rejects him as a suitor when she mistakes him for a coward. Johnnie Gray’s attempts to enlist in the army are rejected because he can better serve the cause in his job as train engineer. But doesn’t Johnnie pose a threat to the family inwardness that the girl’s father and brother hope to remove by disparaging him, to keep him from making further romantic inroads while they are away at war, and doesn’t this paranoia cast a sardonic light on the South’s regional secession motivated by their desire to retain at all costs their “way of life”?

     The girl tells Johnnie she won’t accept him into her heart again until she sees him in uniform—translation: until he is more like Father and Brother. This grotesque failure of hers to fathom the horrible nature of war spins ironically throughout the film; and when, finally, Johnnie is indeed in uniform, it is left to us to grasp Keaton’s closing irony, Johnnie’s likely fate in a war that has only just begun. It is unlikely that Johnnie will come marching home again—and if he does, he will be transformed by the experiences of killing and defeat: the loss of everything that his beloved represents.

28. MOTHER (Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, U.S.S.R.).  Once a staple on lists of the ten best films, Pudovkin’s Mother is now neglected. Its centerpiece is Vera Baranovskaya’s profoundly moving performance as Pelageya Vlasova.

     An exemplar of Stanislavski’s acting “method” that was devised for the Russian stage (where Stanislavski in fact directed her), Baranovskaya acted to the bone. Rather than playing scenes from whose sum an audience might induce her character, Baranovskaya acted fresh, holistically, that is, out of a wholeness of characterization that she conceived and imaginatively drew into herself prior to performance. Moreover, she detailed the sort of archetypal role representation that populated the Russian stage by drawing on her own emotional history and life experience. (The misapplication of Stanislavski’s method to naturalistic roles, coached by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and others, helps explain its artistic shortcomings in the U.S.) Thus in Mother was Baranovskaya able to play to the full both the Mother archetype and a highly specific individual.

     Pelageya Vlasova is a tremendous instance of the Russian soul—a peasant who, trusting tsarist assurances, turns her son in for political pamphleteering but, when double-crossed by authorities by her son’s kangaroo trial and imprisonment (“Is this justice?” she asks), becomes a revolutionary herself. Somber and militant, the film is loosely taken from Maxim Gorky.

     Mother’s major motif consists of inserts showing the springtime breakup of river ice: a stunning metaphor for revolution’s liberating sunlight following a long winter of tsarist oppression and constabulary cruelty. Pudovkin acknowledged his source; but, whereas the heroine’s escape on ice floes in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) is just a sensational bit of plot meant to agitate and titillate, Pudovkin’s motif is expressive and poetic—the visual rendering of one of Mother’s principal themes.

     Such is the difference between art and entertainment.

1927

29. OCTOBER (Sergei M. Eisenstein, U.S.S.R.).  Commemorating the 1917 revolution, Oktyabr’ is a “people’s film.” For the famous passage depicting the storming of Tsar Nikolai’s Winter Palace, Eisenstein employed veterans of the actual event and borrowed details from the pantomimes of the seige that were annually staged by the people of Leningrad. These and other factors tend to collapse the difference between on-the-spot documentary and reenactment. The result is akin to faux-documentary.

     Eisenstein pushed cinema beyond linear narrative, creating trains of images that figure forth ideas rather than “tell a story.” One example: the officially ordered raising of the bridges, which unloads upon the water below—to which are added, for drowning, copies of the revolutionary newspaper Pravda (“Truth”)—a horse’s heft and a girl’s fresh, still sensuous corpse. In cinematic language, here is the tsarist establishment’s attempt to break the spine of human ties to life, beauty, Nature and truth—truth, the passage implies, that is undrownable, so wedded to it are the hearts of the masses. The outrage that the tsarist act inspired, the passage suggests, called forth revolution.

     When viewing it, one must constantly interpret October; it doesn’t encourage, much less exploit, viewer passivity. Eisenstein had tremendous faith in the power of images—and in Soviet communism as liberator of the human spirit. But just his being Jewish drew Stalin’s suspiciousness, and October became the first of his films to provoke official disfavor for its formalist tendencies—translation: too great an interest in art as something other than a tool of the state. Thereafter, Eisenstein’s projects were monitored daily to hold these “tendencies” in check. At the last moment, moreover, October had to be hastily re-edited to delete from its cast of characters Leon Trotsky and others who openly opposed Stalin as betrayer of the Revolution.

30. BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walter Ruttmann, Germany).  Inspired by Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1926) and other Soviet documentaries by Vertov, as well as abstract German experimental films, Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt is a rhythmic documentary. The idea for Walter Ruttmann’s film came from Carl Mayer, who had scripted F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). Shots were selected and edited to compose a day in the life of Berlin, from dawn to deep in the night.

     The sweeping opening movement is the camera’s approach to Berlin: over rolling water, across train tracks, including over a bridge. A montage of overhead shots portrays a dense metropolis; commercial advertisements on the sides of buildings perhaps introduce a disquieting note. Sewer; tall buildings. A solitary cat walks the street. A few people become visible, then more and more as the workday begins, with men in suits off to one kind of job, and laborers off to factories. Commuters enter Berlin (trains again); children are off to school. Here is a city that works.

     Only, marching soldiers remind one of Great War defeat and Germany’s subsequent economic hardship. Are there other clues of stress? Magnets for a crowd, two “respectable” men push one another on a street corner. On another corner, a rabble-rouser of some political stripe attracts his own crowd. In a blatantly staged sequence, a woman commits suicide from a bridge. Before she takes the plunge, we see her eyes bulging in horror and madness—the film’s one closeup. A patron’s-eye view of a roller coaster ride insinuates more stress, as does the quickened pace of the film’s editing.

     Most viewers, though, see Ruttmann’s film as harmonious. My reading of Berlin’s discontent may be wrong. It must be wrong.

     Right?

1928

31. STORM OVER ASIA (Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, U.S.S.R.).  Potomok

Chingis-Khan is a little difficult to rank. While it contains the best material that Pudovkin ever shot, its level of achievement is far less consistent than that of either Mother or The End of St. Petersburg (both, see above) or of Pudovkin’s outstanding sound film, Deserter (1933). Moreover, some viewers are likely to view as gratuitous the fact that the cheating fur trader in the film is an American!

     An opening shot, however, is the single most awesomely beautiful evocation of sheer topographical remoteness in all of cinema. The shot, angled, captures what appears to be the top of the world as mysterious light shimmers across the curving horizon. Also, the film’s portrait of the faces and nomadic lifestyle of Mongolians is indelible.

     It is 1920, in Soviet Asia. Storm Over Asia charts the pilgrim’s progress of a Mongolian boy, a fur trapper, who, descended from Ghengis Khan, is installed as a figurehead ruler but who matures to become an anticolonialist national leader. Lovely and leisurely until a rushed ending, the film occasions a stylistic lightness that accumulates into a metaphor for spirit, providing the hero with continuity even as he undergoes radical growth. The film is momentous for another reason. Early on, its highly specific detail and sense of spontaneous observation, while delaying the film’s ability to take shape dramatically, succeeds in blurring the distinction between fiction and documentary. This blur, or blend, of elements stakes out one of the main trails—documentary nudged in the direction of fiction (see Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, immediately above); fiction nudged in the direction of documentary—that authentic cinema has followed.

1930

32. L’AGE D’OR (Luis Buñuel, France).  A candidate for the title “the world’s most incendiary film,” Luis Buñuel’s The Golden Age was withdrawn from circulation after its Parisian launch led to riots provoked by two fascist groups, the League of Patriots and the Anti-Semitic League. (The United States denied the film a commercial release for fifty years!) One would think that the passage of time would have relegated L’Age d’Or’s inflammatory nature to the regions of quaintness. Not so. The film’s excitement remains intact.

     This eclectic work opens with a brief documentary about scorpions that suggests the poison-tailed nature of another species of animals: us.

Cave-dwelling bandits show that humans also do whatever they can in an effort to survive. This is the associative way the entire film works. Both the scorpions and the men, impoverished, have only themselves as resources—in addition to whatever they manage to take. Boats arrive; people mount the rocky terrain. They pay their respects to a grizzly expanse of skeletons in religious garb—the surreal translation of a bandit’s vision of mumbling clerics! The official ceremony is interrupted before it begins. A couple rolling in mud are pulled apart. Their coitus interruptus becomes the film’s persistent motif. A shot of the woman, in agony while alone in her apartment, leads to the sound of her flushing toilet superimposed on a fantasy of “flushing” land that looks like a swamp, a slide, of shit. In the street, the man heartily kicks an object of bourgeois affection: a small dog. Buñuel, bless him, is really sticking it to propriety and domestic order.

     The film’s exhilarating social satire and liberated air, not to mention its insatiable Jesus by way of the Marquis de Sade, astound.

     Salvador Dalí contributed to the script.

1931

33. KAMERADSCHAFT (G. W. Pabst, Germany).  The title Comradery reflects the politics of its maker, Georg Wilhelm Pabst. The film is based on an actual 1906 mining disaster, wherein Germans helped in the attempted rescue of trapped Frenchmen, but is set some fifteen years later to draw contrast with what then would be the recently ended world war in which Germany and France were on opposite sides. In the silent era, “the universal language of film” had been a ubiquitous notion; now, with its fraternal border-breaking, Pabst’s preeminent sound film encapsulated the hope that cinema might yet usher in a new era of international cooperation. Ironically, the film is set in the Saar Territory, which France administered under the League of Nations following the war, pending a plebiscite in 1935 that, as it happens, returned it to Germany’s control.

     The claustrophobic condition in the coal mines is grim. When it appears that the French miners are doomed, a powerful sense arises of their being buried alive. It is a projection of the oppressive nature of common labor, for which the entrapment serves as metaphor. Sober and naturalistic, Kameradschaft eschews the giddiness and moody flights of Pabst’s haunting silent Pandora’s Box (1928).

     Georges Sadoul, in his Dictionary of Films, described the film’s original ending, which by now may have finally crossed the Atlantic but which I have never seen: “After the rescue, the iron barrier between the French and German workers is

re-established by the officials.”

     France applauded Kameradschaft; Germany dismissed it. One final mockery: Nationalism proved too strong even for Pabst, a leftist, who chose to remain in Germany after the advent of Chancellor Hitler, in time assuming an elevated—he later insisted, minor—role in the Third Reich film industry. He never recovered either his artistry or his reputation.

34. CITY LIGHTS (Charles Chaplin, U.S.).  Still silent despite the advent of sound, Chaplin now gave his most moving perfromance. Of course, he had the benefit of brilliant writing and directing: his own. City Lights is the seminal American movie of the Great Depression.

     Chaplin’s vagrant draws kindness from the girl he loves, a flower peddler whose blindness perhaps spares them both her judging his circumstance. Their lives are precarious. Charlie, homeless, routinely skirts starvation, and the girl, who supports her mother, with whom she shares a tiny apartment, is threatened with eviction. Charlie has crossed paths with a rich playboy whose life, luckily, he saved on the occasion of one of the playboy’s frivolous suicide attempts—foolishness that stands in sharp contrast to the real hardship of others. Not so luckily, though, the playboy is generous only when drunk, which is also when he attempts suicide, but mean and stingy the morning after: a telescoping of society’s ambivalent feelings about the poor. Charlie’s goal to help the blind girl takes him from sweeping streets into the boxing ring, where he is hilariously ill suited, to committing a robbery in order to pay for a surgical operation that might restore the girl’s sight. Released from prison, he chances across his beloved again. Now she is the proprietor of a flower shop, and she can see him for the first time. This is her benefactor—Charlie the Tramp. How he appears; her new status now dividing them: Will she be grateful only? Can she love Charlie? By dint of the film’s closing fadeout, we will never know.

     Thus Chaplin finds a perfect metaphor for the uncertainties of the time. Ambiguous, poignant, haunting, this celebrated ending releases such powerful, complex feeling as to give fresh meaning to the idea of the bittersweet.

35. DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER (G. W. Pabst, Germany).  Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera portrays an impoverished Soho one hundred years after John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728)—satirizing elitist high opera, the people’s ballad opera that Bertolt Brecht’s play updates. Its London reflects post-First World War Berlin, another hundred years later, exposing the social disease and discontent that had fomented the allure of National Socialism in the Weimar Republic. Pabst’s film, like the play, is a musical about something.

     It takes us into the criminal underworld. Mack the Knife, king of thieves, dandy and bully, preys on the weak in the dockside slums. He dumps prostitute Pirate Jenny (wonderful Lotte Lenya, wife of the play’s composer, Kurt Weill) and marries Polly Peachum. When Mackie next visits the brothel, Jenny betrays him to the police. Will he hang?

     Slow tracking and panning shots, and deep shadows, characterize the film’s atmospheric visual style, along with sharp images of teeming humanity, such as when a street singer sings the most famous tune in the Weill-Brecht score, “Mack the Knife,” and couples move toward the camera as it pans leftward across the backs of the large gathered audience—a separate shot places Mack himself at the scene!—and, also, during a beggars’ demonstration at Queen Victoria’s coronation. (In her pompous carriage, Victoria uses her bouquet to block her sight!) Veterans, whose “rags do not cover [their] wounds,” are also demonstrating—against military wantonness and false promises. The film closes famously: at night, the camera at the backs of an army of the poor and disenchanted filling the frames with foreboding—the dangerous raw edge of expectancy.

     Brecht, unhappy with Pabst’s film, unsuccessfully sued.

     The Nazis destroyed the film’s original negative and prints.

     Die Dreigroschenoper remains the most brilliant film musical of all time.

1933

36. BORINAGE (Joris Ivens, Henri Störck, Belgium).  The year before Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934), another documentary came to rest on the image of Lenin. Co-directed by Joris Ivens, the Dutch maker of Regen (see above), and Henri Störck, the Belgian maker of Histoire du soldat inconnu (1932), Borinage is silent and about a half-hour long.

     Borinage reconstructs a 1932 coal miners’ strike, showing (through the agency of a fifteen-year-old miner) the dire conditions that workers faced. The reconstructions are woven in and out of a consideration of the strike’s

then-current social and political consequences. Thus the film is indebted to Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) and Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (see above). It is a sober, bracing piece of work.

     “We stopped thinking about cinema and how to frame shots,” Störck would say, “and instead became dominated by an irrepressible need to produce images as stark, bare and sincere as possible to fit the cruel facts reality had thrown at us.” However, Ivens did not discard his earlier poetic streak, despite what commentaries routinely insist. Borinage is touched with fierce poetry, its lyrical dimension deriving from the same regard for ordinary humanity that graces Regen.

     Borinage touched off a political firestorm, not least of all because it crashed the barrier between reality and its representation. A demonstration that was staged for the film ignited the hearts of its regional participants, turning the show into the real thing and drawing a violent response from the police. Initially the film was widely banned, although it found a supportive home in the Soviet Union, where sound and new scenes were added. I have seen only the original version.

     Ivens proceeded with one of the longest, most prolific careers in cinema. Four years later, Störck again documented the plight of workers in his magnificent Houses of Misery (1937).

1935

37. THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE (Jean Renoir, France).  When Jacques Prévert wrote for Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, 1939; Children of Paradise, 1945), the result would be fatalistic; but his one collaboration with Jean Renoir, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, is bursting with life and humanity. The son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste, Renoir enjoyed his greatest period in the 1930s, when he was an active communist. Renoir’s Crime fits his politics—and soul.

     Lange is an exploited young worker in a publishing firm. His alter ego is Arizona Jim, the adventurous, liberated character about whom he writes in his spare time. When his boss disappears, the boy and his co-workers transform the business into a cooperative. But guess who unexpectedly returns, disguised as a priest? What’s to be done?

     The workers’ cooperative expresses the communard in Renoir. France’s regrettable history on this score, her willed amnesia regarding her ill-fated 1871 political experiment in Paris, makes the cooperative in the film a thing to be cherished—an imaginary opportunity for France to redeem a part of the past. As far as movies go, the moral choice of the decade falls to those in the border town who must decide whether to turn in to the police Lange’s loyal girlfriend and the fleeing “criminal,” who dispatched (as Jules Berry plays him) a smarmily charming embodiment of evil, or let the couple go on their way across the border. It is remarkable how the situation predicts moral choices that persons in the same nation would face during the next decade. But even if one discounts this touch of prophecy, movies don’t get more profoundly (as distinct from artificially) exciting than this.

     With its fresh invention and moral vigor, The Crime of Monsieur Lange anticipates the nouvelle vague by two decades.

38. AN INN IN TOKYO (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan).  Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo no yado is a silent film about a homeless family—Kihachi, an unemployed father, and his two small sons—at a time of national economic crisis. (His becomes an extended family when it unites with another homeless pair, a mother and her daughter.) Kihachi ends up a thief.

     The film opens on the road, in the industrial outskirts of Tokyo, the Koto district, as Kihachi, accompanied by his children, tries to find factory work. His wife has abandoned them, probably because of the family’s poverty, and her dogging absence implies a kind of cosmic abandonment. With his meager resources, Kihachi must often choose between food and temporary shelter for himself and his children. Also, as Kihachi begs and begs for work, his morale is increasingly laid low. Moreover, tensions crop up between him and his sons, whose sense of entitlement to his taking care of them is frustrated by circumstances they minutely perceive but do not totally grasp. Ozu, then, shows us depression poverty and the resultant family dynamics.

     As these circumstances press Kihachi toward crime, the film seems closer to Bresson’s Pickpocket (see above) than to the postwar neorealism of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), with which it is often compared. Still, it is most expressive in portraying Tokyo’s industrial hinterlands, a sunbaked wasteland with smoke-belching factories in the background. Gigantic spools lying on the ground, shorn of cables, encapsulate an expanse of land bereft of productivity. Their heightened, surreal tangibility, like the sights of factories that taunt Kihachi with the illusion of work possibilities, contrasts with a “family picnic” at which Kihachi and sons, pantomiming, pretend to treat their palates and fills their stomachs with imaginary food.

1937

39. LA GRANDE ILLUSION (Jean Renoir, France).  Before the world changed its mind about The Rules of the Game (see below), La grande illusion was considered Renoir’s masterpiece. It is certainly the greatest “escape movie” ever made—but, here, the escapees aren’t criminals but three First World War soldiers in a German prison camp: an aristocrat (Pierre Fresnay, Hitchcock’s “man who knew too much,” brilliant); a mechanic (Jean Gabin, wonderful); a Jewish banker (Marcel Dalio, himself Jewish, also brilliant). By its attempt to cast each class against itself, war is “the grand illusion”; but class also is “the grand illusion,” because it wilts before the new alliances—ones not based on class—that war by necessity forges. To Renoir, then a communist, perhaps the most striking illusion is the belief that the world would not change. The world must.

     In praising this widely cherished film, some slight its content—its visual expressiveness—in favor of its humanistic attitude. Consider: Comparing captors and captives in the prison camp, parallel tracking shots weigh nationalistic differences that class affinity among old-order aristocrats fails to cut across, clarifying the tension inherent in the whole idea and execution of a tracking shot: the obliteration of the boundaries of successive frames before a conclusive curtailment is finally, as it must be, reached—a tension between restriction, rigor (in Renoir’s film, the past) and liberty, freedom of movement, aspiration (here, the future). Renoir thus explored and expanded his chosen medium, much as his father had done with his.

     Perhaps only one other film, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (see below), expresses the idea of freedom as well as this one. Those who pay lip service to the idea, but who hold no core allegiance to it, will not be as moved as are others by La grande illusion.

1938

40. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (Sergei M. Eisenstein, U.S.S.R.).  Eisenstein’s films of the 1920s were like nobody else’s. These highly analytical works combined his invention of intellectual montage (the juxtaposition of two images whose collision generates an idea neither contributory image wholly contains), dynamic, rhythmic image flow, the use of “types” to achieve bold, unvarnished “acting” that here and there pointedly slips into cartoonish caricature in order to skewer whatever the character represents (for instance, capitalism or religion), and a present-tense, immediate sense of history. But Stalin objected to the “formalism” of such techniques, and in the ’30s Eisenstein found himself in the Soviet doghouse. Alexander Nevsky was supposed to get him back into the state’s good graces.

     Climaxed by Russian good’s triumph over outside evil in the spectacular Battle on the Ice, possibly the most brilliant battle sequence ever filmed, the thirteenth-century struggle against Teutonic invaders served, after all, as a timely patriotic warning against current German ambition towards the U.S.S.R. Moreover, it is a stunningly beautiful piece of work, in black and white (the cinematographer is Eduard Tissé), thrillingly scored by Sergei Prokofiev, and starring, as the hero, the reigning titan of Soviet film acting, Nikolai Cherkasov. Alexander Nevsky is a fierce vision of cruelty and the noble response it incurs, with a ringing finale that also admits haunting, mournful accents: a celebration of victory in war on which duly weighs war’s terrible human cost.

     However, it is a different kind of film for Eisenstein, one more epic than analytical, and one less original, too, than his ’20s work. The influence of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) hung heavily over it.

     Still, it succeeded in bringing Eisenstein renewed official favor—until, that is, Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler led to its being seized and shelved to prevent national embarrassment.

1939

41. THE RULES OF THE GAME (Jean Renoir, France).  Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu is the progenitor of 1960s mansion- or hotel-party films such as La notte, Last Year at Marienbad and The Exterminating Angel (for all, see below). The Marquis Robert de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio, terrific) organizes the weekend get-together at his country chateau. Among the guests are his best friend, his wife and her lover, who is a national celebrity, and his mistress. Intrigues unfold, including among the help. At the last, a bullet meant for one person finds a fatal home in another, occasioning a bracing, dignified speech by the host.

     Classes intertwine and collide. The film bursts with both sharp and humane social observations, often achieving a rollicking sense of the emotions that drive us all, such as jealousy, no matter our station in life. Its most brilliant passage portrays a hunt on the Marquis’s estate. The help prepare for the hunt, in which the aristocrats will participate, by whacking trees in the woods to set on the open run every lodging and burrowing creature. But, by dint of metaphor, might not the help also be the quarry? The methodical hunt is ghastly, with animal after animal shot from the sky or on the ground. Prey flutter and twitch in their death throes. It is a miniature of the war on whose brink France at that moment stood, and the leisured warriors—the hunting party—project onto the animals they subdue their own anxiety. It is a denial—a displacement—of their dread of annihilation, as individuals, as a class. Sexual intrigue unfolds even in the midst of the hunt, and the animal that a guest espies may actually be a human one.

     Life goes on until it stops—or is stopped by a bullet.

1940

42. THE LONG VOYAGE HOME (John Ford, U.S.).  Drawn from four sea plays by Eugene O’Neill, here is John Ford’s most poetic and affecting film—this, despite a slip or two into island native-exotica that, ridiculous, the original texts do nothing to discourage. Noble and humane, and rich with a sense of “the pity of war” (Wilfred Owen’s phrase, not O’Neill’s), The Long Voyage Home transcends (as Ford films often have to do) all manner of blemishes, including bad acting by John Wayne and Ward Bond, two normally reliable Ford regulars. (Wayne fumbles with a Swedish accent and doesn’t seem quite dumb enough—a frightening prospect.) On the other hand, there is marvelous acting by Thomas Mitchell, Wilfred Lawson, Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields, Fitzgerald’s brother.

     The film is set during the First World War but addresses the time in which it was made, reflecting Ford’s unease over the world’s then-current unsettled state, which for Ford and others the bombing of Pearl Harbor, less than two years away, would bring to a point of decision. The mood pervading The Long Voyage Home is of dispossession and homelessness, of irresolution, disquieting uncertainty. Sailors onboard the merchant ship Glencairn, like those in Ford’s Mister Roberts (1955), inhabit a suspended state; a time-erasing fog envelops the Glencairn. This cargo vessel becomes a target of war; is nothing safe? Survivors and lost hands equally seem ghosts of the past: souls lost either to war or to time—souls “lost” in the very moment of their lives.

     Incalculably aided by a virtuoso script by Dudley Nichols (which removes almost all of O’Neill’s use of dialect), Gregg Toland’s shimmeringly beautiful black-and-white cinematography and Richard Hageman’s haunting music, Ford thus distills an elegiac lament for us all. Especially in the last movement, his filmmaking achieves powerful, sweeping results.

1942

43. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (Orson Welles, U.S.).  Along with Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), studio-mutilated The Magnificent Ambersons, from Booth Tarkington, is one of the two great “lost works” of American cinema. It is still phenomenal, though: a dark, sober, penetrating meditation on a country in perpetual growth and transition. Nostalgia nearly coincides with experience, rather than waiting on the passage of time, amidst kaleidoscopic changes in fashion and—embodied in the “horseless carriage”—technology. An old-money family, the Ambersons, is tripped by these changes and, eventually, left behind.

     Perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful sequence Welles ever shot is the Amberson ball. The camera follows guests in through the front door, winds of recollection rushing by; when guests dance in the echoing hall, an intricately choreographed long take discloses the last gasp, prior to bankruptcy, of the family’s integrated high life. Later on, these exceptionally fluid shots reach an ironic impasse on the town’s new, flat-sounding city street, where Welles’s superimpositions of upheaval, denoting progress, find the insular family dream, along with the bones of its youngest, sturdiest member (Tim Holt, excellent), broken (by an automobile) into bits—metaphorically, the price exacted from those unable to adapt to growth’s rapid changes. Welles’s voiceover is grimly prophetic as a dollying camera—a pedestrian—tours a town that now consists of profuse power lines, new tall buildings and low, abandoned ones: “George Amberson Minifer walked homeward slowly through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city. The town was growing and changing. It was heaving up in the middle, incredibly. It was spreading, incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself, and darkened its sky.”

     The Magnificent Ambersons identifies America with stunted emotion. Consider George’s frustrated Aunt Fanny, soul-sister to Trina in Greed, and brilliantly acted by Agnes Moorehead.

1943

44. DAY OF WRATH (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark).  Although based on a play by Wiers Jensen, Dreyer’s Vredens Dag is apt to remind Americans of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Anne (Lisbeth Movin, wondrous), a parson’s much younger wife, falls in love with her stepson. After hearing her heart’s confession, her husband dies, and her beloved guiltily joins those denouncing her as a witch—a designation that she, broken, accepts.

     Dreyer discloses a seventeenth-century world of dark, spare interiors, where, like the stiffly dressed souls inhabiting them, light appears molded, constrained. Outdoors, the young clandestine couple steal respites of fresh, sunlit air amidst beauteous Nature. The “Dies Irae,” which opens it, also closes the film; on the latter occasion, the “day of judgment” is Anne’s. To her public confession, before she is burned to death, we bring our memory of The Passion of Joan of Arc (see above). Whereas he showed us Jeanne’s execution, however, Dreyer leaves Anne poised in the direction of hers; because she lacks Jeanne d’Arc’s sure consolation of a heaven-to-come, Anne is trapped and uncertain on eternity’s brink—like Occupied Denmark, which she embodies. Anne’s unquarrelsome move toward her terrible end makes comprehensible, as nothing else in cinema, the countless wartime acts of civilian courage and sacrifice committed by Europeans who, like Anne, felt certain that they also were on their way to the stake. Under their eyes, Dreyer took aim at his nation’s captors; but refusing this as his own day of judgment, he managed to escape to neutral Sweden. Anne’s fatalistic impulse to die, by its spiritual integrity, thus informed Dreyer’s impulse to live.

     Somber, spiritually radiant, almost unendurably moving, Day of Wrath is a work whose gravity and deliberate pace suggest human responsibility as it is perfectly weighed in the mind of God.

1944

45. HENRY V (Laurence Olivier, Great Britain).  Drawing visually on The Book of Hours, Paolo Ucello’s paintings, and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (see above), Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, from Shakespeare, was his contribution to Britain’s war effort against Nazi Germany: a pageant and a battle film full of patriotic fervor and stirring rhetoric. Ingeniously, it shifts from the Globe Theater in Elizabethan London to the fifteenth century and, at the end, back again, all the while reflecting on the present (1944).

     In a stupendous performance, Olivier is the young king whose heroism we see in the calm he exhibits the night before the big battle with France, and in his rousing St. Crispian’s Day speech to his battered troops, exhorting them to fight.

     The 1415 Battle of Agincourt is the film’s great set-piece: the cascade of English arrows given amazing flight to reduce the French army to a more manageable number. The day turns out to be Harry’s; and, after the reading of the names of the dead, come the play’s most poignant lines, rendered by Olivier with devastating irony:

                    Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum,

                    The dead with charity enclosed in clay.

                    And then to Calais, and to England then,

                    Where ne’er from France arrived more happier men.

     At Agincourt, the camera passes through a palace window to survey, in one long tracking shot, conquered France: a bleak, inconsolable landscape punctuated by two lone persons, a girl and a boy. The shot is so achingly desolate that it chastises Harry for the flippancy of his remark to Princess Katherine, the French king’s daughter whom he is wooing for a politically advantageous wife, that he loves France so much he will not part with a village of it!

     Olivier brought us all “a little touch of Harry in the night.”

1945

46. SAN PIETRO (John Huston, U.S.).  Narrated by the director, John Huston’s San Pietro documents the costly battle to capture and liberate a strategic Italian village forty miles southeast of Rome in 1943. The version we have, about a

half-hour long, is one-third of the length of Huston’s cut; the U.S. government slashed it for being antiwar. Huston’s famous response to the American High Command: “If I ever make anything other than an antiwar film, I hope you take me out and shoot me.” (Some of the censored material is included in the DVD of Huston’s 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)

     The film’s opening surveys the valley at whose threshold San Pietro is located. It is a place of devastation and desolation because war has prevented the planting and tending of grapes and olives, which normally make the region lush. Huston explains that the elevated area beyond the valley had to be taken hill by hill. We glimpse American soldiers as Huston explains in detail the plan for taking San Pietro. The most ferocious, trenchant battle footage ever, some of it hauntingly shot through fluttering leaves of trees, is punctuated by montages of human death. A stunning passage: Soldiers wrapped in snow-white shrouds. A montage of enemy deaths also grips. More battle footage; more deaths. In all of the passages essaying American deaths, the corpses include soldiers we earlier saw alive, socializing with comrades. Huston informs us that many of the survivors of the Battle of San Pietro whom we are watching have since, in fact, joined their fallen comrades.

     The film closes with wonderful shots of the liberated villagers. This conclusion is sober, heartrending—not exultant. Huston at least holds out hope that the children will rebound. I’m not so sure. See (right below), Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero.

1947

47. GERMANY, YEAR ZERO (Roberto Rossellini, East Germany, Italy, France).  Filmed in German in Berlin with a nonprofessional cast, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero is the single greatest work of neorealismo. It is the clinically observed case study of Edmund (Edmund Meschke, shattering), a 12-year-old child coping with the Second World War’s aftermath. It pursues a generalization of the war’s civilian toll, then, through his example.

     Rossellini’s aim is to foster the kind of social consciousness that searches out remedies for appalling social conditions. Opening commentary presents facts: Berlin is “almost totally destroyed”; there, “3.5 million people live desperate lives”; “German children need to relearn to love life.” This orientation steadies us for events we are unlikely to anticipate: The boy kills his father with poison before dropping to his own death from a gutted neighborhood building. Locating Edmund in this milieu early on, a panning shot of the city finds him digging graves because he is, we learn, his family’s sole support, apart from government rations. But he is deemed too young for the job and dismissed. Edmund is between a rock and a hard place.

     The grave digging introduces two themes. One is war’s disruption and theft of childhood. The other is war’s relegation of human life to the discardable and disposable. The course of Edmund’s experience, culminating in his suicide, will bring this theme to fruition, but, in the meantime, its principal agency is Edmund’s elderly, ailing father. “I’d be better off dead,” he tells Edmund, his youngest. “I have to watch all of you suffer without being able to help.” Such remarks also burden Edmund beyond what he can comprehend or bear. A child is lost before our eyes.

     The most dynamic “character” in the film is Rossellini’s camera: darting, sweeping, probing, burrowing—and catching illimitable tragedy.

1950

48. FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO (Roberto Rossellini, Italy).  His films had been immediate, urgent, focused on the present; but, departing from the neorealismo of Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), Germany, Year Zero (see above) and Stromboli (1949), Rossellini achieved his masterpiece by looking to two places other than the present: the past; eternity.

     Based on I fioretti, from the fourteenth century, Francesco, giullare di Dio (literally, Francis, God’s Fool) essays the founder of the Franciscan Order in the thirteenth, Giovanni Francesco Bernardone—St. Francis of Assisi—and his followers, God’s “little flowers.” They exemplify Christian charity and devotion at the folk level; their legends, whether humorous or sober, place Francisco and his monks among the simple people they generally serve. This is in contradistinction to the insularity, haughtiness and corruption of the institutional Church, which foments poverty and strife in the country. Instead, Francesco and his nonmilitant band of brothers follow the path of Jesus.

     Befitting an adaptation of a collection of stories, the film is given an episodic form. The result, a mosaic, unhinges linear narrative as decisively as had the episodes composing the national portrait in Paisà. Rossellini nonetheless achieves a unified vision—one of innocence, humility, tenderness and spiritual harmony. In drawing on the past in this way, he is able to suggest human possibilities and offers hope for Italy’s postwar future. A reflection on the present (the usual reason for an artist to venture into the past), Francesco serves as antidote to Italy’s then current disarray and political turmoil.

     The final shot is among the most haunting in cinema: a skyward pan that seeks to restore uncertain humanity to a secure place in a continuity of time lost and timelessness—a thrilling imaginative gesture in a deeply humanistic work.

     Federico Fellini contributed to the script.

1952

49. IKIRU (Akira Kurosawa, Japan).  Kanji Watanabe, an aging civil servant, learns he has terminal cancer. Can he correct the insignificance of his life? Used to giving citizen complainants the runaround, city bureaucrats have dismissed the pleas of mothers who want sewage drained from a public park in a poor section of Tokyo. Watanabe takes up their cause and even gets a playground built on the site. At Watanabe’s wake, though, the deputy mayor, up for reelection, takes credit. Alas, the drunken pledge of his co-workers, to follow Watanabe’s example by doggedly pursuing the public interest, carries little weight against their complacency and the monotony of their workday routine. Children at play in the park, however, confer on Watanabe anonymous immortality.

     Akira Kurosawa’s greatest film suggests a melding of James Joyce and Frank Capra. To Live begins, though, poetically—with scant light shimmering in darkness: a full-screen x-ray of Watanabe’s cancer-eaten stomach evoking the irreducible mystery of life and death. This static composition also sets the film’s serene tone. Kurosawa’s most meditative film, not surprisingly, is also his most quiet. Its evenness renders Watanabe’s shafts of memory all the more painful; they pierce the quietude, admitting rushes of time and inconsolable loss.

     Ikiru’s most celebrated passage is magical. On his last night on Earth, Watanabe sits on a swing in the completed playground. Kurosawa frames the initial shot so that the swing’s suspension is invisible; Watanabe seems suspended in air. In a children’s area, he is lost in childhood reverie. Snow falls lightly on him as he sings, quietly, about life’s brevity and the need to enjoy life. Earlier, the same song had been for him one of frustration and wistfulness—a song mourning the past and lamenting the future. Now a song of contentment, it closes an ordinary life to fullness.

1953

50. UGETSU MONOGATARI (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan).  From Akinari Ueda’s collection of stories Tales of the Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain, Mizoguchi’s masterpiece is a tragic look into the human heart of war.

     In sixteenth-century Japan, war ravages the countryside. A potter, a farmer and their wives are among those fleeing an overrun village. Both men abandon their wives, one in pursuit of wealth, the other in pursuit of military glory. Genjuro, the potter, sells his wares at market and falls under the spell of an exotic princess, into whose castle he moves. Both princess and castle turn out to be illusions. Genjuro goes home. Miyagi, his forgiving, devoted wife, tends to him lovingly through the night. The next morning, however, Genjuro learns that Miyagi, last night, was an apparition. Left unprotected, Miyagi had been killed in the war. The camera tilts upward from Miyagi’s grave to reveal the whole peaceful village: yet another illusion. Beyond the village’s borders, war rages on.

     We surmise that Genjuro will remain haunted by Miyagi’s memory and by questions: Did his intimacies with the phantom princess contribute to Miyagi’s death? Whatever thing she is beneath her façade of seductive beauty—did the princess, out of jealousy, kill Miyagi? Or was the princess, in another form, Miyagi’s ghost come to tempt him to abandon spiritually one he had already abandoned materially? At the end we hear, or think we hear, Miyagi’s voice: Is this her spirit? The voice of Genjuro’s guilt? Regardless, never again will Genjuro hold his wife in his arms.

     Contributing to the visual poetry of this delicate, entrancing work is Kazuo Miyagawa’s black-and-white cinematography; quiet, lovely, restrained, it projects Miyagi’s sensibility and spirit. Thus Miyagi silently haunts frame after frame—a formal expression of the cost of war that is Ugetsu’s unifying theme.

51. VOYAGE IN ITALY (Roberto Rossellini, Italy).  Ingrid Bergman gave her most probing, penetrating performance in husband Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia. The film surveys a faltering marriage. Nevertheless, Rossellini described its subject matter as “a couple’s relationship under the influence of a third person: the exterior world.”

     Alex and Katherine Joyce, a British couple, first appear on a vacant, seemingly endless road to Naples. Only Katherine seems open to Italy. She tours alone a Neapolitan museum; ancient sculptures, which Rossellini’s closeups and upwardly tilted camera angles invest with startling life, stir her soul. She visits ionized craters near Vesuvius in Pompeii, where the spark of a cigarette ignites a gorgeous expanse of voluminous smoke; must one “lose” oneself, as in a cloud, to (re)discover a truer self? Katherine also visits ancient catacombs stacked with skulls and, at Pompeii, other remnants of the past: human remains from the volcano’s historic eruption. Molten plaster is poured into these so that the forms “come back to life.” A couple is locked for all time in their last embrace: the act of love; the point of death. All this constitutes Katherine’s soul-turning “voyage in Italy”—a journey contested, however, by her worry that Alex no longer loves her.

     At the volcano, the Joyces agree to divorce; but, when a festive street crowd later separates them, they push their way through in order to reunite, spurring their reconciliation.

     Rossellini makes us feel that everything depends on the course of this marriage, much as Antonioni, in L’eclisse (see above), would pin the world’s existence on the course of a fragile love affair. Antonioni ends his masterpiece by imagining the end of the world; Rossellini’s Voyage, though, ends in a burst of hopefulness—on however shaky ground. The Rossellinis divorced a few years later.

1955

52. NIGHT AND FOG (Alain Resnais, France).  The subject of the Holocaust has generated countless documentaries, including outstanding ones as the twentieth century drew to a close: Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War (1989), Héctor Faver’s Memory of Water (1993) and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator (1998). But, closer to the event, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard remains the finest.

     Resnais’s theme is the need to preserve historical memory—memory ever poised to slip away. At the sight of the Auschwitz death camp, careless green grass sways in the breeze, while black-and-white photos and newsreel snippets commit the reality of Auschwitz to flypaper. A long overhead shot of a blank field is held until the camera descends to reveal the surrounding barbed wire fence, with this ironical accompanying voiceover: “A placid landscape . . . An ordinary field over which crows fly”—author Jean Cayrol’s reference to Van Gogh’s symbol of matter’s passage into ephemera.

     The film’s signature mode is the tracking shot. The camera surveys the camp, noting the massive fence, this time from the inside, and remnants of some of the abandoned structures. The film cuts from one tracking shot to another, edited to compose, seemingly, one mind’s haunted journey, perhaps the return of a ghost. As the camera explores one of the barracks, we hear, “No description . . . can restore [the inmates’] true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear.” What we cannot grasp is already lost.

     Intermittently, Night and Fog revisits human horrors—historical memory’s overload: SS surgical experimentation on prisoners; the bulldozing of mounds of corpses into a mass grave. The commentary ends by weighing the matter of collective guilt (“War nods, but one has one eye open”), addressing denial and revisionism, and wondering aloud how much “the next executioners” will resemble ourselves.

     Indeed.

1956

53. A MAN ESCAPED (Robert Bresson, France).  Unsurprisingly, the most trenchant nondocumentary about the Nazi death camps is Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop (1948), for which the filmmaker drew upon her own internment at Auschwitz. Robert Bresson was a prisoner of the Germans in Occupied France for a year. His Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, ou Le Vent souffle où il veut, is similarly authentic—and taken from actual events.

     In Lyon in 1943, Resistance fighter Fontaine, based on André Devigny, is the prisoner of Germans, who have condemned him to die. Fontaine plots his escape. Long self-sufficient, he must cross a chasm of suspicion to an ambiguous

cell-mate, a teenaged boy who may be a plant. Will Fontaine take the risk and include this stranger in his plans?

     A Man Escaped is one of the great works of French Existentialism. It is also unmistakably Bressonian, emphasizing the sights and sounds punctuating the routines inside the Gestapo prison. Throughout, subtle lighting implies, too, a gracious presence in the frames. When a fellow prisoner tells him that God will save them, Fontaine responds, “Only if we give him a hand.” But how? All one can do is make personal choices and accept their consequences.

     Fontaine, at the last, does the humane thing. We know the outcome, from what happened to Devigny. Yet each fresh viewing revives the suspense that Bresson’s filmmaking, including Fontaine’s voiceover, develops by bringing us into the young lieutenant’s mind in the moment. And just as Fontaine is ultimately rewarded by escape, to execute which his companion proves absolutely essential (God at work?), we are rewarded with one of the moving shots in cinema: the camera at their backs, the two men, side by side, walking their way at night, barefoot, to freedom.

     The Spirit breathes where it will.

54. THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, U.S.).  The protagonist of The Searchers is Ethan Edwards (John Wayne, powerful), an embittered veteran of—from his vantage—the War Between the States. Edwards provides the occasion for John Ford’s brilliant investigation of American racism; the film explores the darkest American terrain, where bigotry seems a primitive and instinctual birthright but is, really, a kind of insanity corrupting the moral landscape and tying all into a tangle American ideals, sentimentalism, territorial arrogance, loneliness, isolation, regional paranoia.

     Ford sets the film’s action, then, along the great divide of American racial consciousness and collision. In postwar Texas, Edwards searches for his niece, whose parents were murdered in a Commanche raid motivated by revenge following the murder of Commanches by whites. Over time, “tainted” by her sexual relations with Scar, a Commanche, the kidnapped child (Natalie Wood—the film’s one piece of ineptitude) comes to draw her uncle’s hatred, changing the complexion of his mission. At the last, with her, terrified, in his arms, the memory of his having held her in his arms years back restores a profound sense of family connection. But Edwards knows he has no place in the racially mixed U.S. future that she and his adopted nephew, Martin, represent. Dispossessed, although finally emptied of racist demons, Edwards must wander endlessly between the winds.

     Ford astonishes with gorgeous seasonal imagery that ironically reflects on a cycle of madness in the American soul. Shot after shot appears to project a facet of Edwards’s mental state: images that disclose the danger and desolation with which America is fraught—for the loneliness that connects Edwards with many other Americans isolates each of them.

     Contributing to the film’s ineffable sadness, its sense of monumental lament, is the haunting ballad that dominates Max Steiner’s score, “The Searchers,” by Stan Jones.

1957

55. TOKYO TWILIGHT (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan).  Ozu’s deeply affecting Tokyo boshoku illustrates the disintegration of family in postwar Japan. It makes explicit what is implicit in Ozu’s exceptionally poignant Late Spring (1949), suggesting the bitter aftermath of the tenuously hopeful marriage with which the earlier film ends, and suggesting that the father’s Prosperoic sacrifice there—his letting go of his daughter, who had been anchoring his life, into a life of her own—has turned up empty for them both. Tokyo Twilight joins A Hen in the Wind (1948) in being one of Ozu’s bleakest works.

     Shukichi Sugiyama’s two daughters, college-age Akiko and older sister Takako, live with him. When Akiko was an infant, Shukichi’s wife, Kisako, abandoned him and their children. Now Takako is conflicted for having left her spouse, an alcoholic brute, and her mother’s reappearance in the neighborhood deepens her anguish. Father and daughters each lead a painfully lonely life.

     This is a film of cold, wintry evenings; its dusky and darker grays are correlative to souls at loose ends, living lives they cannot take hold of. With Dreyer’s Vampyr (see above), this is the grayest film ever made—Vampyr, light gray; Tokyo Twilight, dark.

     Ozu’s angled shots of a couple, backs to the camera, sitting side by side, generally intimate the couple’s closeness and connectedness. Here, though, the couple aren’t a comfortable pair of married folk. Akiko and her boyfriend, Kenji, sit on a pier, bound together by Akiko’s news that she is pregnant, as fog and the moans of foghorns envelop them. Ozu cuts to a frontal view of the pair and cuts back and forth between them as they quarrel, now seemingly far apart. The couple disintegrates before our eyes.

     Setsuko Hara, Ineko Arima, Chishu Ryu and Isuzu Yamada all give remarkable performances.

56. THRONE OF BLOOD (Akira Kurosawa, Japan).  Kurosawa’s Kumonosu jo—Spiderweb Castle—transcribes Shakespeare’s Macbeth to medieval Japan.

     By focusing on humanity’s confrontation with a shifting, unfathomable universe, for which the fog-drenched, convoluted maze of the forest becomes a symbol, Kurosawa can address Macbeth’s most perplexing paradox: that a bold leader could also be a subservient mate. Washizu’s battle prowess, and his assertions of military authority and political rule, enable him to hide, from himself and others, his fear and trembling; and, at home, he submits to his wife’s dominance only because she points up those deceptive appearances of reality that imply the cosmic ambiguity that terrifies him and proposes such courses of action as might hold his fear in abeyance. When he submits to Asaji’s cynicism and murderous promptings, Washizu is heeding the inner voice he has projected onto his wife. In accordance with the patriarchic culture that the film critiques, Asaji’s whole being has been sacrificed to the dutiful fulfillment of her marital role.

     Washizu rallies his troops, reassuring them in order to reassure himself that they remain invulnerable. But for his bravado, Washizu remains awash in fear. And no wonder. The forest, the opposing army’s camouflage, appears to approach the castle on its own, its dark, billowing branches creating a magnificent sense of impending doom. Washizu’s troops turn on him, savaging him with arrows. The dread consuming Washizu is objectified by his awesomely protracted death, his eyes at the last bulging in animal horror at—what? Perhaps the “nothing that is.”

     Grave, powerful, eerily beautiful, Kumonosu jo depicts a world where humanity acts violently in hopes of stilling fear and distracting its eyes from impenetrable mists. Haunted by interminable echoes of slaughter, it is an ancient world—and the modern one of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

1959

57. A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Jean-Luc Godard, France).  Godard’s A bout de souffle (literally, “Out of Breath”) helped define the nouvelle vague, the 1950s movement in French cinema that denoted freedom: freedom from the constraints of conventional, worked-through, tied-up narrative, freedom of personal expression, freedom of roving inquiry, and a freedom of camera motion scarcely seen since Dziga Vertov took to the streets of Moscow in the 1920s to record the pulsating synergy of Soviet life. Here is a film that bursts with spontaneity, in cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s gorgeous, unaffected black and white.

     The film follows Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo, tremendous), a young hoodlum, from Marseilles to Paris, where he romances Patricia (Jean Seberg, wonderful), an American abroad. A cop killer, Michel is eventually shot to death in the street.

     Our dynamic relation with movies: How does the interaction between us and film shape and detail us? Michel’s toughness is an act; but when the “act” is what one relies on, it determines behavior. A related issue: the extent to which movies have so conditioned our perception of reality that we sometimes address this perception as though it were reality.

     Breathless has become synonymous with the jump cut—the visual jerk that results when consecutive frames are deleted from a continuous onscreen action. Besides being a distancing device to snap us to analytical attention, the technique reflects the characters’ dissociation from reality and the emotional gap between them.

     Patricia says to Michel, “I want to know what’s behind that mask of yours.” But Patricia often also appears enigmatic; and, standing over his corpse at the end, she adopts Michel’s mask, with her duplication of his Bogart lip-rubbing gesture. Patricia, then, had also meant, “I want to know what’s behind my mask.” As do we. As does Godard—in terms of his own mask.

58. THE WORLD OF APU (Satyajit Ray, India).  Apur Sansar, the conclusion of Satyajit Ray’s monumental Apu trilogy, from the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhutti-bhusan Badapaddhay, is cousin to Italian neorealism. The small boy from the impoverished rural family in the first part, Pather Panchali (1955), who went to school in Calcutta in the second part, Aparajito (1957), has now graduated from university and struggles to find work. In the meantime, he writes an autobiographical novel. He marries, but Aparna, his wife, dies in childbirth, estranging Apu from their son, Kajole, whom he abandons, and himself. The odyssey culminating in their reunion is the film’s emotional crux.

     Apu’s reintegration comes after a great moment of loss and of moving on: from a hilltop, Apu, palms suppliant, unlooses—in a sense, sacrifices—the manuscript he has long labored on, which, given Aparna’s death, has become a record of endless grief. When he reunites with his son, he gives the boy a toy train. Passing trains—memory’s baggage—insinuate continuity throughout the trilogy; but it is a trail of loss, inaugurated by the childhood death of Durga, Apu’s older sister, and (following the deaths of both parents) compounded by the death of his bride—a continuity that, the closing shots imply, Apu’s reunion with Kajole—an image of his lost self—will reconcile him to and redeem. After Apu’s failed attempts to win the boy over, the sight of Kajole at home on his father’s shoulders overwhelms. But the trilogy is as circular as it is linear, with the first part as haunted by the future as the last part is haunted by the past. Still, the trilogy is open-ended. Where will the road of life lead that father and son end up on?

     As Apu, Soumitra Chatterjee gives an eloquent, powerful performance.

59. THE 400 BLOWS (François Truffaut, France).  François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows has drawn a degree of affection perhaps equalled only by The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, King Vidor, 1939) and La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954). Some rainy days the head says Bresson but we pop The 400 Blows into the DVD player instead. Some of us grew up with this film and don’t know where Antoine Doinel ends and ourselves begin.

     Antoine, Truffaut’s alter ego, is, of course, the world’s most famous schoolboy. Priceless scenes take place in the classroom, reveling in the lively pupils’ dear, quirky behavior. Truffaut once said that the only reason to make films with children is to express your love for them. Few films are so full of love as Les quatre cents coups.

     Here, Paris, the City of Lights, the City of Love, is also the City of Adolescence, rendered in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Henri Decaë. A liberated use of camera is one of the hallmarks of the nouvelle vague. Like Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933), Truffaut’s film is an anthem of freedom.

     Antoine’s troubled home life leads to his delinquency. His mother and stepfather have him put into a reformatory. Antoine’s escape is unforgettable: the stirring, aching tracking shot of his flight through the countryside, resolved in the single most celebrated shot in all of cinema: at shore, a startling frozen frame of the boy, who, with no place to run, blindly faces us—we (frozen, too) who cannot reach him to comfort him.

     Fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud’s monumental, heart-piercing performance as Antoine, is, with Chaplin’s in City Lights (see above), cinema’s most cherished one. And dear Jean-Pierre is still going strong, playing Georges Franju, no less, in Serge Le Péron and Saïd Smihi’s J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka (2005).

1960

60. PSYCHO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).  Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, marvelous) steals money from her Phoenix employer. On the way to lover Sam Loomis’s small town, in the rainy dark she inadvertently slips onto a back road, finding a barely functioning motel run by Norman Bates. After chatting with Bates, Marion decides to return the money; but the boy’s jealous mother kills her, and Bates unknowingly tanks the money in a swamp in covering up the crime. Bates’s mother died years ago, it turns out, and Bates—in denial; schizophrenic—periodically “becomes” Mother to reverse her death and assuage loneliness.

     Based on the case of Wisconsin farmer and serial killer Ed Gein, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho essays American loneliness, which certain forces compel: rugged individualism as a character goal worthy of especially male pursuit; the suspiciousness, hostility and competitiveness this pursuit fosters; urban impersonality; rural isolation.

     Marion steals because she sees no other way of translating her tawdry affair into the respectability of marriage. Bates also is in financial distress, the fortunes of his family enterprise having shifted with the Arizona sands underneath when the main highway, whose traffic the motel once accessed, was moved, banishing the motel to a marginal existence. Sales of hardware should translate into sufficient income for Loomis, but his luck is adrift in the same desert. In the U.S., the unpredictability of survival is peculiarly accompanied by an official insistence that hard work always yields a solvent result and that a contrary outcome is the individual’s fault.

     Psycho sharpens its doleful black-and-white vision with wit, as when, from a tightly wound rotation on the murdered woman’s face, the camera, abruptly, appears to float to the stolen money by her motel room bed—a parody of “spirit leaving body” pointing up materialism’s place above spirituality in America’s hierarchy of values.

61. DEVI (Satyajit Ray, India).  Formerly an assistant on Renoir’s beauteous The River (1951), Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray achieved his most concentrated result with The Goddess, which charts a soul’s disintegration. Subrata Mitra is Ray’s peerless black-and-white cinematographer.

     While Umaprasad, her husband, is away at school, Doyamoyee is destroyed when, believing she is the incarnation of Kali, the Great Mother, her father-in-law institutes a cult of worship around her. The girl, traditional, herself comes to believe she is no longer human, as processions of ailing individuals prevail upon her for blessings, and cures for themselves and loved ones. Tugged in opposite directions in a generational clash of males between father and son, Doyamoyee dissolves into madness.

     Devi unfolds in dark, sensuous, dreamlike images that suggest the corruption of family relations by various forms of jealousy, including the father’s against his becoming-higher-educated son, and by the past’s legacy of religious superstitiousness, with its sublimation of eroticism. The boy away at university is the righteous hero—in his own eyes, at least. But he is oblivious to the contribution he is making to his wife’s destruction by his insistence on India’s future at the expense of its past. Unwittingly, Umaprasad sacrifices Doyamoyee to his “enlightened” stand. There are, in fact, no heroes or villains here; the situation is tragic, as India’s past and future struggle without success to find common ground. Ray’s powerful fable explores, then, different kinds of human blindness and pride; even Doyamoyee is ambivalent about the crippling designation—that of a goddess, after all—that is cruelly imposed on her. Doyamoyee loses sight of herself. In a shot of stunning irony, we ourselves lose sight of her in deep darkness as she loses contact with the last thread of her own identity.

     Soumitra Chatterjee gives a tremendous performance as Umaprasad.

1961

62. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (Alain Resnais, France, Italy).  Resnais’s grand hotel in Last Year at Marienbad, in haunting black and white, is the Mansion of Europe housing France’s memory. The twentieth century’s traumatic events, beginning with the Great War, have emptied the mansion of inhabitants. Everyone now is a guest in what used to be a home. The place feels abandoned by history. No one quite knows anyone else because people do not quite know themselves anymore.

     Resnais and scenarist Alain Robbe-Grillet share an irritation with conventional narrative, that is to say, plot, a lack of interest in character psychology, and a more flexible sense of time than chronology permits. Motivated to forget the century’s horrors, can we be selective and retain the memory of love which once helped bring a sense of continuity to our lives? Few films seem as hermetically sealed as this one, but its insistence that it exists apart from our chaotic shared world only underscores its connection to that world. Hotel guests retreat into a fantastic realm where order can be (however unsuccessfully) imposed.

     Fluid, upwardly tilted tracking shots through hotel corridors eternize human preoccupation with time. An elegant pair “reunite” in what may be, actually, their first meeting. How can one remember love when memory exists in time and in time’s passing, but love exists, sublimely, outside time? At once this-worldly and otherworldly, Classical and Romantic, rigorous and at capricious liberty, Resnais’s masterpiece is a compulsive yet unfettered dream that fulfills while yet confounding desire. The film’s trackings are our eye’s journey, the film’s voiceovers the voice that the muteness of dream denies us. Like an epiphany, however mysterious, even unfathomable, Last Year at Marienbad is also

crystal-clear—and cold, beautifully cold: the memory of love longing to be filled by the feeling of love.

1962

63. THE FIANCÉS (Ermmano Olmi, Italy).  The Fiancés is about the strain on an engaged couple, Giovanni and Liliana (Anna Canzi, trenchant), once Giovanni relocates from Milan, where he works as a welder in a petrochemical factory, to his new job at the company’s new plant in Sicily. Writer-director Ermanno Olmi clarifies the extent to which work directs the course of working-class lives—including working-class love.

     Giovanni’s time in Sicily, intended by its job advancement to facilitate his marrying Liliana, proves very lonely. For the first time, the alienating nature of his work isn’t mitigated by any family or social life away from work.

     The Fiancés includes a shot of showers of sparks from Giovanni’s worksite set against the dark sky. The image is sorely ironic. Its black-and-white beauty is something that we see; the workers who are inadvertently creating it do not. Through no fault of their own, the beauty does not touch their lives. A related image consists of mounds of salt—eerily lovely to our eye, but also encapsulating the backbreaking labor that created them.

     Giovanni’s off-work wanderings through a bleak landscape show the influence of L’avventura (see above). Disconnected from Milan and all this is familiar to him, Giovanni has no place to go and therefore drifts. Is his life “going nowhere”?

     His relationship with Liliana takes a terrible beating. The separation, letters unanswered, wayward thoughts that seize her agitated imagination: all this helps make Liliana feel that she is losing Giovanni. Indeed, Giovanni succumbs to loneliness to the detriment of the bond between them. (Absence makes the heart grow fickle.) The context that Olmi provides takes these matters out of the realm of moralistic or (primarily) psychological consideration. What we see is the extent to which Giovanni’s work determines the rocky course of the relationship.

1963

64. IL GATTOPARDO (Luchino Visconti, Italy, France).  Following an engrossing, brooding Rocco and His Brothers (1960), about a rural peasant family’s demoralization and disintegration after their move to industrial Milan in order to better their prospects, Luchino Visconti made his most celebrated work: The Leopard, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, about an aristocratic Sicilian family’s demoralization and disintegration under Risorgimento, the unification of Italy begun with the revolution of 1848.

     Prince Fabrizio of Salina is an intelligent, enlightened man; and, although the nationalist movements point to the end of his influence and the death of his elegant way of life, his feelings about the changes are divided. Like Lampedusa, who based Don Fabrizio on his great-grandfather, Visconti was an aristocrat deeply committed to social and economic justice. (He was a Marxist.) Both author and filmmaker, then, identified with the larger-than-life character at the center of their epic accounts. The film’s expense required a considerable star to make it bankable; enter Burt Lancaster, who had never given the slightest indication of acting ability. Here, superlatively dubbed, he impresses, as does Alain Delon as Tancredi (so different from Delon’s Myshkin-like Rocco), Don Fabrizio’s dashing young nephew, who comes to embody realpolitik, beginning as an impassioned enlistee in Garibaldi’s people’s army, and then switching to the cause of Camillo di Cavour, the aristocrat who succeeded at unification where Garibaldi failed, but only by ruthlessly assaulting regional cultures.

     A grand ball and, for Don Fabrizio, its ambulatory aftermath: In the last movement, the tracking camera witnesses the proud patriarch’s self-aware eclipse in a lofty world that is losing political ground. Detailed, sweeping and, like the rest of the film, objectively toned (a surprise from Visconti), this phenomenal passage suggests history meditating on itself. Nearly an hour long, it brings Visconti’s masterpiece to a stunning close.

65. LES CARABINIERS (Jean-Luc Godard, France, Italy).  Across cultures, with twenty-four years dividing them, Rossellini and Godard, neorealismo and nouvelle vague, unite: cinema’s dream collaboration of the decade. Les carabiniers, a brilliant antiwar film, was adapted, from Beniamino Joppolo’s play, by Rossellini, Godard and Jean Gruault, with Godard directing. Perhaps Godard and Gruault translated and amended Rossellini’s adaptation. It would be interesting to know how this remarkable film evolved.

     Reversals of fortune in war sum up war’s futility. Two brothers are recruited to be soldiers. In the service of their king they do their duty; they rape, kill and plunder, only to be put to death themselves by revolutionaries opposing the king. Critic Roy Armes describes the film as a Brechtian fable.

     In black and white, hastily shot without concern for compositional refinement, repetitively punctuated by gunfire on the soundtrack and by abrupt cuts and title cards on the see-track, raggedy, minimalist and blessedly free of all “entertainment value,” Les carabiniers prompts us to analyze what we see and hear rather than seducing us with attractive surfaces. (The film begins with a voice summoning military music—music we then hear as the opening credits roll.) Moreover, the film is nonprofessionally cast; there isn’t a Bardot or Belmondo in sight. Newsreel inserts of war footage and a montage of nondescript photographs further contribute to the correctly highly distanced result. This style is compelling; it suits the film’s thematic assault on the dehumanizing properties of war. Doubtless, Rossellini, Godard et al. were motivated by the Western world’s then-current tour of duty in Vietnam, but the masterpiece they wrought, which approaches the force of Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (see above) in addressing war, the worst idea that we have borrowed from lower species, has universal and, appallingly, persistent application.

66. THE SILENCE (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden).   Some films we admire more than we love them. Bergman’s work I do not warm up to. But The Silence, which concludes his trilogy on humanity’s relationship with God, is stunning, haunting, bewitching. Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963), another one of my favorite Bergmans, begin the trilogy.

     The sum of Tystnaden’s enigmas is genuine mystery. To a city in some European country—an imagined place?—that either is preparing for war or is being occupied, three visitors—two women and a child—arrive by train. The older woman is dying. Are the women sisters? Lovers? Both? The younger woman is raising the child. Is she his mother, as he believes? Or, proceeding from some clandestine arrangement, is the equally fond and attentive “aunt” really his mother? Is this the cause, or partly the cause, of jealousy between the women?

     What remoteness and abstractness of place Bergman coolly achieves here. The hotel seems a world apart. (The rare shot outdoors startles with noise and bustle.) Like the quiet, quizzical old-world attendant and the buzzing room fan (a mortal tease, like the ticking clock with which the film begins), the walls’ whiteness and the hotel’s maze-like corridors evoke whatever “the silence” is—as also do the roaming of the boy on his perplexed own in these corridors, the foreign words scribbled on a piece of paper, and the women’s odd relationship, at once too close and out of touch. Bergman, an atheist, thus tracks down the precise point where the absence of God and the idea of God intersect.

     Sven Nykvist’s awesome cinematography consists of shook white satin and black silk. The human heart of Tystnaden, though, comes from Ingrid Thulin giving the performance of a lifetime as the dying Ester.

1964

67. GERTRUD (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark).  An Ibsen’s Doll’s House without agenda, Gertrud is Dreyer’s refined, rigorous valedictory—a last work of such nobility and clarity that it transports the viewer to astonishment and grace.

     Adding a haunting coda to Hjalmar Söderberg’s play, Gertrud shows the consequences of choice for a woman who, in the early twentieth century, leaves the security of a stifling marriage and ends up—calmly, with dignity—alone. Gertrud’s responsible life discloses her great spirit, releasing it from the distortion of a too highly placed wall mirror in her husband’s vast, cold, empty house; her exercise of free will, and her unquarrelsome acceptance of the disappointing results, help compose her integrity. Austere, poignant, mature, Gertrud is the patient revelation of the gravity and weight of a human life as it incrementally advances—moment by moment, choice by choice—in the direction of eternity. Bergman’s atheism seems crabby alongside Dreyer’s massive faith.

     Gertrud’s measured pace; the measured pace of the characters’ speech; the camera’s tactful distance in so many instances; the beauteous black and white; the solitude; the sheer calm: even in the exalted œuvre to which it belongs, Gertrud seems like nothing else. It captures life as life is measured against eternity. It is Dreyer as he prepares himself for God. For us, too, the film seems like some sort of momentous preparation—if only for our next viewing of this inexhaustible masterpiece. Gertrud is a movie to live by.

     Nina Pens Rode, as Gertrud, is sublime. Who can forget Gertrud’s final gaze, from her apartment door, as she bids farewell to a guest? Her sight seems to turn inward, approaching private reverie. What is it at the last that she sees? I think I know—perhaps the film that the rest of us have just seen. Gertrud.

68. IL DESERTO ROSSO (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France).  A coda to his titanic trilogy, Antonioni’s The Red Desert continues his consideration of alienation, the signature theme of the sixties. In Ravena, in northern Italy, the film follows another unsettled soul, Giuliana (gorgeous Monica Vitti, superb), a plant manager’s wife, this time peripatetic in an industrial landscape. For whatever she is searching, at one level a sense of self and integrity, Giuliana won’t find it in her extramarital affair with an engineer who, passing through, is already poised to abandon her. In her drab, cold, rainy milieu, the only bright colors are from paint on walls and plastic products. Thus Giuliana dreams of another, radiant space, one of sand, unpolluted ocean, clear sky—and of freedom and escape.

     Giuliana’s “sickness” is the modern condition. What the eye takes in reflects our ambivalence toward the modern world. Outdoors, lakes are polluted and polluted air assumes a terrible grandeur, while at home a helper-robot hints the high technology to come—which, while easing work, marginalizes people, as does all the manufactured stuff that turns a home into a house: a circumstance at which Giuliana’s agitated care of her sick child at one point levels a furious assault.

     The film’s celebrated use of color as a means of expression rather than decoration contributes to Antonioni’s vision of a world out of joint. (Carlo di Ponti is his cinematographer.) It is the world of products that Antonioni will blast into space in Zabriskie Point (1969)—things that take over our lives, sapping our strength, cutting our humanity off at the knees.

     Antonioni has always insisted he isn’t a political filmmaker, and I take him at his word. However, his Red Desert delivers a blow to capitalism the force of which few ideological films can match.

69. DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (Jan Nemec, Czechoslavakia).  But for sound effects a nearly silent film, Jan Nemec’s Démanty noci is the greatest work of the Czech New Wave, which, along with much else, fell to Soviet tanks in 1968.

     Based on co-scenarist Arnost Lustig’s story “Darkness Has No Shadows,” it is about Czech boys on the run, two “diamonds of the night”: Jewish teenagers, pursued by authorities and hostile locals, after they escape from a train transporting them from one death camp to another. (Lustig spent years in various camps, himself escaping on the way to Dachau.)

     All the “actors” are nonprofessionals, and the agitated use of handheld camera mimics documentary filmmaking. Despite this foundation in at least the appearance of objective reality, Démanty noci proceeds subjectively, its camera sensitively attuned to the boys’ flight and feverish attempts to remain alive. The repetitive circular mosaic that constitutes the film’s method, with its flashforwards and shafts of memory, and perhaps dreams, records the flight as a doomed,

fear-fraught standstill. Nemec and the magnificent dark, dusky black-and-white cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera move us inside the boys’ consciousness.

     As if in a fairy tale, the flight takes the boys to a forest that they must penetrate. They collapse on the ground before their brisk walk into utter darkness, during which, one boy behind the other, their arms, like insects’ antennae, bound out to navigate though the thicket of branches attacking them. Later, one boy enters the home of a villager, who, wary, gives him bread and, on his return entry, milk. The boy imagines killing the woman. His not doing so leads to his and his companion’s capture and murder.

     “Well, the boy should have killed the woman”: The film’s humanity may lie in its refusal to submit to this facile conclusion.

70. IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, France).  When Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew was first released here, it disappointed my sister-in-law. All the buzz about a Marxist filming of the Christian gospel had her expecting what today we would call a communist spin on the material. This she did not find; this, no one would be able to find. Indeed, the film doesn’t impose a communist complexion onto the Gospel. Rather, by allowing the text to speak for itself, in the context that the images provide, Pasolini’s film shows that, translated into twentieth-century political terms, Jesus was a communist. Humanistically and non-ideologically, the film presents the character that the Gospel indicates.

     Pasolini came from the right country to accomplish this. Christianity, humanism and neorealismo all converged to enable this son of Italy to make this particular film. Beautifully shot in gritty black and white—the cinematographer is Tonino delli Colli—over rough terrain, the Gospel does complete justice to the hardship endured by those whom history would anoint as the first Christians. Here is the finest, most profound film about Jesus, perhaps surpassing even the wonderful material about Jesus included in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (1919). It may also be, apart from Francesco, giullare di Dio (see above), cinema’s finest instance of applying neorealismo to the past—and without the addition of fabulous elements that partially shift Rossellini’s (greater) film to somewhat different expressive territory. In its attempt to unite Marxism with his deep religious feeling, moreover, it may also be Pasolini’s most personal work.

     The Gospel is nonprofessionally cast. I do not quite know what to make of the fact that Pasolini gave his own mother, Susanna Pasolini, the role of Mary, the mother of Jesus. For the record, though, her performance is brilliant.

1965

71. PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, France, Italy).  The most tender and most troubled of love stories, Godard’s musical-satirical-tragicomedy shimmers with the beauty of love’s and life’s volatility and transience.

     At a party, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo, wonderful) passes through a funny series of monochromatic tableaux, each one with a different group of guests whose “conversation” consists of lines from TV commercials. This commercial vampirism, wherein people’s personalities have been taken over by consumerism, motivates Ferdinand to run off with his children’s babysitter, Marianne (Anna Karina, perfect), abandoning wife, job, home—in sum, his bourgeois life. Ferdinand is also in love with Marianne. He sets out with her, then, to follow his heart.

     On the run, the lovers sleep in the wilds in complementary fetal positions, as though possessing a single body and soul; yet they remain separate and distinct. “We never understand one another,” Marianne tells Ferdinand; “You talk to me with words, and I look at you with feelings.” Their romance, she prophesies, will be short and sweet.

     They put on a show for a docked American sailor. Marianne, in Vietnamese makeup, protests fiercely; Ferdinand, wearing a naval officer’s hat, spouts Americanese (“Sure”; “Yeah”). Fire and a wooden stick, the latter a prop bomber, assist the pair’s makeshift portrayal of the Vietnam War. Explosions, gunfire fill the soundtrack. “That’s darn good,” the American sailor says about this evocation of American slaughter. The U.S. has moved on to other atrocities; but nothing else in cinema so brings back the horror of that moment in time when America sold whatever shred of soul it possessed in the name of fighting communism.

     The final shot of Pierrot le fou casts the by-now dead lovers’ disembodied voices against an illimitable nighttime sky.

     Throughout, Raoul Coutard contributes the most gorgeous color cinematography I have seen.

1966

72. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (Orson Welles, Spain, Switzerland).  Banished by Hollywood, Welles made movies where he could. Chimes at Midnight is primarily wrought from Henry IV, Parts I and II, although Henry V, Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor are also drawn upon. The film, then, patches together appearances of Shakespeare’s most beloved character, Sir Jack Falstaff, whom Welles himself beautifully plays. Welles described the film as a “lament for Merrie England”—in effect, a lament for all that is past. Apart from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (see above), it is the greatest film derived from Shakespeare. Welles was proud of it on another score: No horses were injured or killed during filming. Unlike countless other U.S. filmmakers shooting abroad, Welles did not take advantage of laxer laws regarding the (mis)treatment of animals.

     In particular, Welles considers Falstaff’s fatherly tutelage, in taverns and brothels, of Prince Hal (Keith Baxter, brilliant), young heir to the British throne. Alas, their close alliance as fellow carousers does not spare Falstaff royal dismissal once King Henry IV (sonorous John Gielgud) dies and the prince takes his place. By noting from the start the emotional distance between the boy and Falstaff, which the former imposes and the latter ignores, the film makes Hal’s subsequent rejection of his surrogate father less a betrayal of familial love than a signal for the collapse of illusions.

     With its melancholy, absurdism and rich comedy, the whole film amazes. One of its sequences, though, is often anthologized as clearest proof of Welles’s genius: the Battle of Shrewsbury. With Falstaff’s armored bulk darting about (“The better part of valor . . .”) lending the film one of its touches of the absurd, the passage becomes a massive, near abstract spectacle of muddy, flashing death—Welles’s stunning portrait of war’s enormity.

1967

73. WEEKEND (Jean-Luc Godard, France, Italy).  A savagely satirical take on “modern times,” Weekend—or Week End—is one of the signature films of the sixties. (A gloriously agile performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud helps certify this.) A typical bourgeois couple take a weekend drive to visit the woman’s mother, whom they murder for her money. The woman later joins the band of revolutionaries who have murdered her spouse, whom they eat for lunch. An alternative title might be: Ties That No Longer Bind—including patriotic ties to nation.

     Godard lays claim here to the most celebrated tracking shot of all time: a massive, seemingly endless, corpse-strewn traffic stall revealing the enormity of human folly as disparate, blindly self-contained fates are headlong-prone to one explosive end. Pitched complicitly and elegantly between determinism and documentary discovery, the sunlit shot proceeds gradually, shifting from a straight, rigid course to a course slightly, subtly more relaxed, and catching about the honking metal hulks belligerent confrontations and witty scenes of resourceful recreational activity. What a shot!

     Scarcely less remarkable is a later shot that likewise discloses Western civilization’s bankruptcy: a fixed, rotating—continuously panning—camera, flattened by its slow pace, and thus adding inexorability to the noose-like circle it draws around a pianist, encapsulating Western culture, who plays Mozart in a farmyard—a scene both lovely and incongruous. With great love for the music and an appreciation of the irrelevancy of Mozart to so many oppressed lives, Godard can lament the passing of such perfect beauty while yet keenly feeling the need to erase the social and political inequities that have enabled high culture to exist and that still seek to sustain it. Were Godard not tugged in these opposite directions at once, his apocalyptic Weekend would not be the heartrendingly beautiful thing that it is.

1968

74. THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES (Fernando Ezequiel Solanas, Octavio Getino, Santiago Álvarez, Argentina).  In their manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” Solanas and Getino argued the need for Latin American Third World countries to enjoin their political struggles for liberation with the power of images—for “giving the cameras to the people,” thereby creating a democratic cinema free of neocolonialist and Hollywood rule. Nearly 4½ hours long, La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia y la liberación, a collectively-made “guerrilla” documentary, staked out an enduring example.

     The cooperative meant for their film to be an educational tool for debating various issues, including the role of violence in effecting social, political and economic change. Therefore, the film’s reputation as a clarion call for violent revolution is not entirely accurate; but the tumultuous, eclectic nature of the film, into which are crammed on-the-spot documentary, newsreel borrowings, cinéma vérité, reconstructions, Godardian visual sloganeering, you-name-it, generated a richly contradictory result. Moreover, events subsequent to the film have given it an even more problematic cast. Student uprisings led to Perón’s return from exile and assumption of the presidency in 1973. (Perón had ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955, when a military junta removed the Laborist, who had focused on improving workers’ lives, and whose wife successfully campaigned for women’s suffrage.) Perón eventually purged his administration of leftists, lending Solanas’s Hour, retroactively, a coda of disillusionment.

     Encompassing both (first-wave) Perónist and post-Perónist Argentina, Hour is perhaps most trenchant in documenting the miserable work conditions (in the fields, in mines, in factories) to which poor, ordinary Argentines were subjected, and in contrasting this with the high life of the ruling oligarchs. It remains a massive document of oppression whose energetic radical propaganda reaches into historical testimony to forge a kind of national epic.

1969

75. THE MILKY WAY (Luis Buñuel, France).  According to Buñuel, a “journey through fanaticism,” La Voie Lactée follows two poor pilgrims in the present, one young, one old, an atheist and a believer, through southern France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where St. James the Apostle’s bones are presumably interred. Their various encounters, along with a stream of historical vignettes, compose a surreal landscape of Christian dogma, heresies, hypocrises, blasphemies. There are also visions and miracles. This brilliant comedy is as fluent as spun silk.

     At a village inn, where the pair stop, a priest and a police officer genially converse. Painstakingly the priest explains the dogma of transubstantiation to the officer: the body of Christ is not contained in the wafer, but in the sacrament of the Eucharist the wafer becomes Christ’s body—actually; not symbolically. When the restauranteur mildly asserts that the body of Christ is in the Host like the hare is in the pâté he is serving, the vexed priest counters that in the sixteenth century the Pateliers were burned for that heresy. Now the priest has a revelation: the restauranteur is correct! When the officer expresses surprise at this contradiction, the priest, really vexed, flings hot coffee in his face. Men in white cart away the priest. Thus Buñuel exquisitely mocks religious dogmatic “thinking” (such as currently afflicts Islamic and U.S. Christian fundamentalists). A subsequent argument, about grace versus free will, between a Jesuit and a Jansenist leads to a duel.

     Jesus—he spits on the blind and they can see!—and the Marquis de Sade are among the cast of characters. Sometimes, historical characters cross paths with our twosome.

     Buñuel: “Bourgeois morality, for me, is immoral and to be fought[—t]he morality founded on our most unjust social institutions, like religion, patriotism, the family, culture.”

     Buñuel!

76. FATA MORGANA (Werner Herzog, West Germany).  Herzog’s hallucinatory Fata Morgana is a non-narrative work, filmed in different places in Africa, including the Sahara Desert and Kenya, its mesmerizing shots, including many traveling shots, pieced together into a visual poem of an alien visit to scenes of a mysterious world, heretofore unknown to Herzog, his crew and, likely, us. Many shots include, on the distant horizon, “fata morgana,” that is, mirages: visible things—water, islands, vegetation, moving automobiles, etc.—that, although capable of being photographed, are not really there: phantasms originating in reflections and refractions of light transporting images of actual occurrences to the eye over vast intervening space.

     Comprising three increasingly sardonic sections, “Creation,” “Paradise,” “The Golden Age,” Fata Morgana is, according to Herzog, a science-fiction film with the story—for, originally, a story had been planned—removed. Accompanied by readings from the Popol Vuh, the sacred text that includes the Mayan myth of creation, the images of “Creation” suggest a primordial wasteland, a vast region of hills and sand dunes at some dead-end of civilization. Strewn over the landscapes are the carcasses of vehicles and other things abandoned by European soldiers in World War II. Tracking shots disclose empty gasoline drums in the dunes—more evidence of Western intrusion. We see Ground Zero, where the French, performing atomic tests, exploded a bomb. The juxtaposition of the creation myth and these sullied images, which hint invasion and appropriation, accumulates an aura of sadness, resignation, defeat. Africa is thus portrayed as “Europe’s backyard” or dump—the scene of Western colonialist and neocolonialist presumption.

     Europe used Africa but did little or nothing to alleviate African poverty. The pianoed parlor of a Western-style brothel provides an example, post-“Creation,” of what Europe did give to Africa. Europeans in Africa were the ultimate fata morgana.

1970

77. IL CONFORMISTI (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, France).  The quality of Bertolucci’s films is all over the map, but it is universally agreed that, from Alberto Moravia, The Conformist, about Fascism’s ghosts, is exceptionally beautiful.

     For many of us, when we were in graduate school or college, The Conformist was the film to see. When two glamorous young women danced together in a

working-class dance hall, incongruity deliciously compounding incongruity, a heady intoxicant of perversity overtook our senses. The Conformist has remained one of the films of our dreams.

     Mild-mannered Marcello Clerici’s mania to appear “normal” and to disappear into the crowd drives him into an ill-suiting marriage and into becoming a Fascist assigned to assassinate a former professor of his, an antifascist activist. The film begins in the 1930s and ends after the war, by which time Clerici appears to embody Italy’s determination to deny its political past.

     The Conformist dazzles with its bits and pieces juggling the present and different degrees of the past. Vittorio Storaro’s color cinematography—at a level of achievement beyond what he contributed to the films that account for his three Oscars—deepens the impression that everything in the film is haunted by memory. Italy’s past is flypaper; but in the disposition of the Clericis’ marriage at the last, Bertolucci also summons echoes of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (see above).

     Bertolucci is famous for eliciting superlative performances: Adriana Asti, Before the Revolution (1963); Marlon Brando, Last Tango in Paris (1972); Ugo Tognazzi and Anouk Aimée, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981); John Lone, The Last Emperor (1987); Keanu Reeves, Little Buddha (1993). On this occasion, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli, however, Bertolucci broke the bank. The Conformist may be the most brilliantly acted movie ever made.

1972

78. AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (Werner Herzog, West Germany, Peru, Mexico).  Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes is the highest attainment of the German New Wave, a leftist movement, begun in the sixties and reaching fruition in the seventies, that disdained any sweeping under the rug of Germany’s role in the Second World War or possible German cultural predisposition to fascism. Like Ford’s The Searchers (see above), Aguirre is about a madman, not as a case study, but as a revelation of cultural presumption, cultural insanity. It takes on Western “civilization.”

     Based on the Spanish quest for El Dorado, this richly colored work—the cinematographer is Thomas Maunch—follows a conquistador who imposes his will on a splinter group of Pizarro’s army in Peru, in a mad effort to re-create the world in his own image: shorn of rationalization, the colonialist impulse. The film begins and ends loftily, in both instances with an extreme long shot suggesting an implacable God’s-eye view of human endeavor: first, in the beginning, ordered, united, intoxicated by dreams of glory, questers on a steep mountain of aspiration; at the last, amidst taunting monkeys, deprived even of his daughter, the one soul capable of calming his paroxysms, only the conquistador left alive, on a raft in the Amazon River. Herzog, a bit mad himself, committed those making the film—himself, cast, crew—to a daunting experience paralleling the one that the film depicts, perhaps hoping, like his protagonist, to validate both his own existence and the existence of God. He achieves, if not enlightenment, suasive fear and trembling, especially from the contribution of his “best fiend,” lead actor Klaus Kinski, whose ferocious, nearly intolerably moving performance gives the conquistador the massive emotions of Goya’s Saturno.

1973

79. THE AGE OF COSIMO DE MEDICI (Roberto Rossellini, Italy).  Rossellini’s three-part examination of Florentine society and culture in the fifteenth century begins with a banking family. Aligned with merchants and the explosion of European trade, the Medicis embody a new pursuit of wealth and power. In its style, this 3¾-hour film is heir to Rossellini’s sober, immaculate Rise of Louis XIV (1966), which inaugurated his series of minimalist present-tense histories treating figures such as Socrates and Pascal. According to critic John Wyver, the world that Rossellini reveals in his Medici film “is both patently artificial and startlingly real.” Stately formalism and documentary roughness balance each other, creating a secular vision in which the religious, more primitive world of Francesco, giullare di Dio (see above) still hangs lightly about, a ray of residual simplicity in a new world of enormous complication.

     Leon Battista Alberti, philosopher, painter, sculptor, musician and architect, embodies the humanistic impulse that is also integral to this world. “What use is beauty?” a merchant asks as he peruses art. Art reflects humanity. Masaccio’s painting of Jesus gives scientific attention to human anatomy at the expense of a more traditional, “spiritual” approach. Its linear approach applies principles of mathematics. Art, then, incorporates a range of knowledge and attainments—including the financial, with the couple who paid Masaccio to paint the portrait themselves appearing in the piece!

     We see Masaccio’s painting as it is discussed from various perspectives. Indeed, this amazing film contains many conversations on a wide range of matters, including the Florentine tax code. It is especially steeped in architecture and certain organizing ideas: freedom; “the city” as being based on families; the marriage of art and science, which have in common “the progress of mankind.” Alberti is referring to architecture, but, surely, Rossellini also has cinema in mind.

1975

80. THE PASSENGER (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, Spain).  Written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and the director, Antonioni’s The Passenger, a baleful, delicately mournful mystery, tests assumptions about identity, responsibility, authority. Antonioni also prods our perception to the full—for instance, by setting critical action just beyond the camera’s range so that we must listen carefully to hear what is going on.

     David Locke, a fatigued, jaded journalist, starts anew by exchanging identities with a corpse in a North African hotel. Maintaining professional distance, seeing detail but always missing the larger picture, Locke has held himself aloof from the revolutionary upheavals he has been covering, discounting their relevance to his own life. Now his new identity places him dead-center in the opportunistic, politically non-committed world of gunrunning.

     The Passenger critiques the assumption that the only connections the West can have to the Third World are colonialist, insisting instead on a shared humanity that links all people’s fates. As reporter, Locke stresses the eye (“Tell me what you see now . . .”); as artist, Antonioni stresses the soul.

     Antonioni’s penultimate shot resolves his material. (To be precise, it’s a gyroscopically “smoothed” meshing of shots whose outcome gives the appearance of a single slow camera movement.) From inside to out, through a close-barred window in a Spanish hotel, the (seemingly) steadily moving camera draws connections among disparate humans, including Locke, and elements of geographic and political space—indoors, outdoors, indoors again (now using a doorway instead of a window)—before the camera returns to Locke, dead, in his room. Failing to perceive all the connectedness that the camera has just elegantly drawn, Locke has taken a circular stroll into the arms of his own defeatism, uncovering the death lurking beneath the mask/metaphor of the original identity-exchange in Africa: for us, a cautionary experience.

1977

81. KHAK-E SAR BEH MORH (Marva Nabili, Iran).  Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil revolves around eighteen-year-old Rooy-Bekheir, beautifully played by Flora Shabavis. The rest of the cast consists of actual inhabitants of a small Iranian village. By her age, her mother had borne four children, but Rooy-Bekheir has declined all matches arranged for her. She cannot explain her reluctance to marry. That would take a voice in a place where women unroll a rug so men can sit and decide things—although social upheaval is contriving to undermine even their authority. Rooy-Bekheir is given to tarrying in the woods, deep in thought. One day, shown from the back, she is alone there, seated in silence except for luminous rain. She undresses from the waist up and breathes deeply, her shoulders delicately inflecting as she steals a liberated moment. Soon after, she hysterically kills a chicken. Someone is summoned to exorcise her “demons.” The rituals may have worked, for at film’s end Rooy-Bekheir seems resigned to marry.

     We watch sewing, meal preparations—daily routines. Outside the family’s primitive home, squawking chickens and unseen wild birds both interrupt and underscore the quiet. All the shots are static, many with Rooy-Bekheir either walking towards or away from the camera—sometimes alongside a road outside the village, generating incongruous images of the traditionally clad girl and a few motor vehicles in the same frames. The cumulative result of the fixed camera set-ups is an exquisite stillness ironically also denoting, for Rooy-Bekheir, a straightjacketing existence.

     The Sealed Soil suggests a more meditative version of Jean-Louis Bertucelli’s powerful Ramparts of Clay (1968). Like that film, Nabili’s ran into political trouble. Once Islamic fundamentalists came to power, the film’s rough cut had to be smuggled out of Iran. The remaining work was done in the United States.

1979

82. CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (Francesco Rosi, Italy).  Among the twentieth century’s greatest works, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945) is Carlo Levi’s account of his forced exile in Gagliano, an impoverished southern Italian village in Luciana province, after his arrest for antifascist activities—Levi was a Jewish socialist—in 1934. Levi wrote this account in the form of a novel, bringing into concert his use of the past tense and the spontaneity of

stream-of-consciousness. With its clarity of detail, suffused, poetically, by melancholy, the book is glorious. So is Francesco Rosi’s deeply moving film of it, in its 228-minute version available on VHS from Canada’s Lear Media. The abbreviated 145-minute version available on DVD is less satisfying.

     Somber, mysterious, Rosi’s film mines the nostalgic properties of memory. We go back in time, guided by an elderly Levi’s haunted memory. This will be a secular man’s last testament. His memory will become our own.

     The strangeness of the village customs; because of his medical training, Levi’s acceptance by the villagers; his witnessing of petty politics; the mistreatment of the alcoholic village priest with a past: the film provides a vast, rich canvas of humanity. The title refers to the villagers’ sense of isolation and wretchedness, which they explain by the fact that Christ never visited their village, stopping short of it.

     Rosi captures the sense of a pause in one’s life, with its opportunity to observe and learn. This “pause” is two-fold: the temporary derailment of Levi’s political activism; forty years hence, Levi’s facing natural death. This is a reflective and humanistic film. Everyone whom Levi has met, including the peasants of Gagliano, has become a part of him. This helps explains why he never returned to the village.

     Gian Maria Volontè, as Levi, gives the performance of a lifetime.

1984

83. THE HOME AND THE WORLD (Satyajit Ray, India).  From a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare-Baire is Satyajit Ray’s most majestic and splendiferous film. The protagonist is Bimala Choudhury, who recalls her marriage in the early twentieth century. Nikhilesh, her spouse, a wealthy Bengali landowner and merchant, encourages her education and departure from traditional Hindu ways. Bimala eventually has an affair with an old college friend of his, Sandip Mukherjee (Soumitra Chatterjee, brilliant), a leader of the incendiary nationalist movement Swadeshi, whose first female member she becomes. Nikhilesh opposes Sandip’s politics, which he foretells will further divide Hindus and Muslims in a region that the ruling British have partitioned in order to short-circuit an alliance between the two groups. Sandip’s call for a boycott of British imports, Nikhilesh contends, will further impoverish Muslim merchants who are already struggling to survive. When his local agitation falls flat, Sandip organizes and unleashes a terrorist response.

     This is no facile Reds (1981), Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Gone with the Wind (1939), where history supplies a sweeping backdrop for soap opera. Ray, instead, creates a rich tapestry in which British imperialism, Indian nationalism, the Choudhurys’ marriage, Bimala’s tentative moves toward a liberated modernism, and her extramarital affair are tightly interwoven, generating a complex vision of a society in upheaval. Bimala is portrayed as existing uncertainly between two worlds, while the two men in her life, political opponents, are each certain of themselves but only in partial possession of the truth. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see the political views of others apart from the prism of your own views? Ray’s final masterpiece enables us to take in a myriad of sociopolitical shades and inflections in a complex, combustible situation. Moreover, it concludes with a devastating shot telescoping a devastated life.

1986

84. HORSE THIEF (Tian Zhuangzhuang, China).  In the tradition of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (see above), Tian Zhuangzhuang’s fictional, objectively toned Dao ma zei, nonprofessionally cast, documents an ends-of-the-world existence, in Tibet, amidst an incarnation of Nature that is as fierce as it is gorgeous to behold so long as one does not live in it and has to cope with it. The prevailing silence, especially in terms of the sparseness of dialogue, is correlative to the primitive existence of the film’s protagonist, Norbu (Tseshang Rigzin, wonderful). His is an elemental life—and an awesome odyssey. Norbu is devout; despite this, due to his harsh existence, he steals from his Buddhist temple and, as a result, when he is caught, he, his wife, Dolma, and their son, Tashi, are banished from their clan. Stripped of communal protection, they are at the mercy of the elements. Tashi dies. Another son is born, steeling Norbu’s determination to ensure the newborn’s protection, no matter what this may take.

     Here is the masterpiece of the Fifth Generation Movement in Chinese cinema—a portrait of such human hardship and impossible life choices as to unsettle viewers’ complacency and expand their sympathies. Tian has created an ordeal of enlightenment, a celebration of unearthly beauty—his astonishing color cinematographers are Zhao Fei and Yong Hou—that is perpetually disrupted by assaults on the human condition from within and without. His Horse Thief is also a piercing meditation on social organization, on the family unit within the larger group. We are moved to ponder issues of social responsibility in either direction, between family and community, divorced from the prism of ideological prejudice. Horse Thief is heartrendingly humane, as also would be, in a more conventional narrative mode, Tian’s epic of China’s Cultural Revolution, The Blue Kite (1993).

1988

85. DEKALOG (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland).  Written by lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the director, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-hour Dekalog consists of ten episodes, each of which reflects on one of the Ten Commandments. The action involves residents in a Warsaw apartment complex; another point of unity is a sad, silent observer who, appearing in most episodes, suggests a surrogate for Kieslowski or God, or both. Kieslowski’s moody, somber entries compose a probing portrait of humanity caught in moral dilemmas. The Ten Commandments aren’t always the guide by which human behavior can be morally measured. In the initial episode, a scientist unwittingly sacrifices his son by the faith he places in computers and calculations—a faith, though, that had helped father and son to bond. Often, the commandments seem a codification of moral standards that’s too rigid to provide much guidance through the complex maze of modern realities. Profound mystery permeates most everything we see in the film; but Kieslowski is a secularist, not a religionist, and certainly not a fundamentalist. His Dekalog never degenerates into judgmentalism or pat irony.

     In the second episode, Krystyna Janda brilliantly plays a woman with a lover and a hospitalized sick spouse. She is pregnant, and her husband cannot be the father. Should she have an abortion and choose her husband, or keep the fetus, banking on the fact that her husband will be dead soon, and choose her lover? She defers the impossible choice to her husband’s doctor—a marvelously elusive application of taking the Lord’s name in vain; but the doctor’s “decision” comes out of the complex of his own conflicted life, and the patient’s fate confounds everyone’s “choices” anyhow. All this is typical of the film’s rich procedure.

     Another episode finds the stricture “Thou shalt not kill” falling equally on the killer and the state.

1990

86. THE WALL (Jürgen Böttcher, Germany).  The final days of the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Berlin, East and West Germany: this is the subject matter of a tremendous work, perhaps the last important East German film, by

painter-filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher.

     Die Mauer is without commentary, music, “talking heads.” It is pure cinema. It opens with a series of panning shots of dismantled pieces of the wall, their graffiti broken up. A skyward pan discloses a flock of birds; the camera descends to the wall—solid, but in the process of being deconstructed and memorialized by cameras. Pans to the right, pans to the left: the eerily deserted Postdamer Platz subway station encapsulates the moment of transition: everyone, except two subway workers, is aboveground, witnessing history.

     Celebratory fireworks light up the sky, echoing the time when Allied bombs rained upon Germany.

     Intermittently presented, the film’s most haunted material also unfolds in the darkness of night. Black-and-white newsreels-- Böttcher’s film is in color—are projected onto a still standing portion of the wall. There is Emperor Wilhelm riding through the Brandenburg Gate; there are the Nazis again, in a torch-lit procession: the Wall has become a repository of German history leading up to it. People smiling in the street at the end of the war: Böttcher segues from this, startlingly, to the current, more youthful celebration.

     Through a hole in the wall, people test the air on the other side. Into the next night, heavy equipment continues the job of creating an uncertain future.

     The Wall is becoming part of the history the film projector projects onto it. The past possesses insufficient allure to contest the sensationalism of the moment, in this case, fueled by a media frenzy to which the young are highly susceptible—ironically, an echo of the Hitler phenomenon.

1991

87. EUROPA (Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland).  The conclusion of Lars von Trier’s stunning “European trilogy” that began with The Elements of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1988), Europa is like some ghastly prophetic warning that’s couched in such elusive, ambiguous terms that you don’t know how exactly to protect yourself. As Welles did in The Trial (see above), Trier captures, in a stream of highly suggestive, potent

black-and-white (and, also, color) images, the helpless way many of us felt in our Century of Sorrows, the twentieth, which thus far is predicting the twenty-first as its unearthly continuation.

     Defeated in the war, 1945 Germany is occupied. Leopold Kessler, an American of German descent, relocates to Germany, where an uncle gets him a job as a sleeping car conductor on the Zentropa train line. Soon, Leo becomes the pawn of two competing sides, the Hartmanns, who own the line, and the occupying forces ferreting out former Nazis. Leo’s neutral position becomes untenable once he falls in love with Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa, giving the decade’s most brilliant performance—as she had done in the previous decade, as Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemberg). Post-war, then, eerily feels like pre-war and wartime, with Nazism still an able, if, now, creepily insinuating, force. Max von Sydow’s disembodied narration looms as a voice of doom: European history, which is repetitive, compulsive, tragic. The Holocaust, in particular, strikes Trier as a nightmare there is no coming out of.

     One of Trier’s darkest films, Europa (called Zentropa in the States) wraps one up in its grim, gorgeous images (Henning Bendtsen, Edward Klosinski and

Jean-Paul Meurisse are Trier’s cinematographers), tightening the folds until one feels like a mummy. The glorious impish comic of The Idiots (1998), Trier’s Dogme 95 masterpiece, isn’t in evidence here. He shouldn’t be.

1995

88. SPIRITUAL VOICES: FROM THE DIARIES OF WAR (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia).  Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices chronicles a troop of soldiers he and his two-person crew accompanied to a frontier post on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border in 1994. Russia had inherited the Afghanistan conflict from the Soviet Union, whose dissolution has rendered the conflict meaningless, providing Sokurov with a stunning metaphor for the absurdity of war. Boys and men go through the motions of soldiering in a remote place seemingly out of time, their Taliban enemy mostly lost to the eye amidst a primitive landscape of blowing sand and dust. “War is hideous,” Sokurov tells us in voiceover; “. . . There is nothing but dust, the smell of burning, stones, hot shrapnel, blood, and the hint of fear.”

     This 340-minute film is absorbing for every shot of its length. Its immaculate, haunting first “episode” consists of an angled long shot of frigid terrain in St. Petersburg before Sokurov has embarked on his documentary mission. (Of course, it may actually have been shot afterwards.) As the time-lapsed image very gradually transforms, at times with a burning fire in the distance, Sokurov guides us through an aural tour of classical music, including bits of Mozart and Beethoven, encapsulating the “civilization” Sokurov is about to leave behind for war. The final episode shows him packing for his return to Russia, leaving behind, in their monotonous, dutiful existence, soldiers who cannot return, and who have toasted with champagne, in their commander’s quarters (a cave), the coming of the new year—a point of withering irony. In between the bookending episodes, long takes and slow camera movements à la Andrei Tarkovsky, Sokurov’s mentor, enjoined by a rocky terrain bleached of color, associate war with a dreamlike No-Man’s-Land. When snipers attack, though, the event is all too real.

1996

89. ARISTOTLE’S PLOT (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, France).  A satirical gangster film stylistically indebted to early Godard,

Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Le complot d’Aristote turns on a plea for post-colonialist Africa to come more fully into its own.

     Gangsters gathered at the Cinema Africa bug out their eyes and brains on nonstop-action movies. Their leader is called Cinema. Cinema’s opponent is Cinéaste, who wants African films to liberate itself from cultural neocolonialism and express African cultures, not Hollywood, not U.S. popular culture. Hilariously, the government investigates the reappearance of characters who have already died in previous movies. Clearly, films can usurp, redirect and reinvent reality—a capability all the more dangerous when the “reality” that films serve is of the Hollywood sort, where the values, implicit or explicit, almost invariably support economic exploitation of the Third World.

     Can Africa emerge from the shadow that made it “the dark continent” in Western eyes?

     The scene of crossing railroad tracks that frames Aristotle’s Plot equally suggests African possibilities and African confusion, with the “civilized” Western view of Africa opposing a homegrown African view or, even, impulse toward such a view, inhibiting the latter from achieving clarity.

     Bekolo’s film resists the narrative tyranny that charts a plot for complacent audiences. (Thus the film opposes complacency.) Things unfold in Aristotle’s Plot in a haphazard way. This tack accomplishes two seemingly contradictory things. One, it reflects the uncertain, ambiguous nature of existence, the absence in our day of clear definitions and categorical boundaries. At the same time, it contests rigidly plotted films in their seduction of viewers into accepting the most outrageous confections as reality. Like Godard’s, Bekolo’s filmmaking is much about distancing his materials in order to spur thought. Nothing ingratiates in his method, nor is there much that is likeable about this brilliant film.

1997

90. THE SALTMEN OF TIBET (Ulrike Koch, Germany).  Ulrike Koch’s Die Salzmänner von Tibet documents elemental, nomadic existence. Four tribal men—Old Mother, Old Father, Lord of the Animals, the Novice—journey to a lake in northern Tibet in order to extract salt to sell for grain. The day before, there is a communal discussion; the price of salt currently being very low, how many yaks can they spare, if necessary, to sell for barley? (Seemingly offhanded; actually,

life-and-death.) The trek itself is punctuated by religious rituals, singing, cooking, meals, conversations, and recollections spoken into the camera. A bus passes the quartet on a nearby road, disrupting our sense of theirs being a world unto itself. Indeed, a tribal woman earlier prayed for world peace.

     Because it is packed with purposeful activity (including startling shots of people’s hands at work), the tribe’s existence, as represented by the salt-traders, seems sturdier than that of Werner Herzog’s Herdsmen of the Sun (1988). It isn’t. Koch and Pio Corradi, his brilliant color cinematographer, thus conjure images of ephemera. The camera rises to capture voluminous smoke rising from a cooking pot; shadows shimmer across the ground, their substance—yaks—lagging behind. We see the immense shadow from an overhead airplane, whose substance we only hear, its engine’s sound shattering silence. These saltmen shared their experience with the filmmaker, in fact, precisely because they fear  that theirs is a vanishing life.

     Koch details the arduous labor of raking the salt and collecting it into mounds for the gathering, sacking, and transport by yak. The conclusive shot of the return home, the longest take in a film full of long takes, evokes not only the slow, steady rhythm of tribal existence but also, powerfully, the hope of survival contained in the saltmen’s patience, tenacity, perseverance.

91. MOTHER AND SON (Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia, Germany).  Mat i syn is about the familial bond between a dying mother and her grown son, who is her caregiver. It’s a visual poem, spare, spiritual, intense.

     The setting is one of sublime isolation: a remote country home amidst ravishing landscapes and skies of pristine, unearthly beauty. (Outdoor space was shot by reflection in gigantic mirrors, giving the film a haunting glow.) These formidable surroundings set off the intimate humanity at the movie’s center. Enfeebled, the woman receives from her son the care she once gave him. He carries her outdoors and “walks” her in his arms.

     Aleksandr Sokurov and his cinematographer, gorgeous colorist Alexei Fyodorov, have applied special lenses that appear to collapse space and remove depth, converging the two characters and thus distilling their close connection; as a result, their relationship seems to define rather than fill space.

     Exhausted, the mother must take her leave; now her son must let her go. A peculiarly Russian form of irony—it soothes rather than pricks—translates the son’s assurances into the very comfort that the mother needs to pass freely from the earth. Son lays down Mother for her last nap. A butterfly lights on her hand. Walking outside, in sympathy and exhaustion, the son also lies down, while land and sky—rolling-off mists; in the distance, a train’s passing—relate to him his mother’s passing, her journeying out. He rejoins his mother; the butterfly hasn’t quite left her hand. Gently stroking her other hand, he whispers to her spirit, which is to say, himself, “Be patient, Mother; wait for me at the place we agreed on”—this, his final loving assurance.

     Humane, mysterious, bathed in tenderness, Mother and Son evokes the stillness of a poet’s soul amidst the silent, steady passage of time.

1998

92. FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan).  We do not expect a “period piece” from Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, but Shanghai hua, an exquisitely wrought piece about the hapless lives of prostitutes, is set in China in the 1880s. We follow a number of prostitutes in elegant, richly upholstered “flower houses”—brothels—as they try to eke out a bit of self-determination in claustrophobic surroundings, where their destinies are at the whim of madams, clients, and their own schemes and anxieties. The entire action of Flowers of Shanghai unfolds within windowless brothel walls.

     Beautifully lit, the film is formally brilliant. The rigorous sculpting of each image is correlative to the restricted lives of the “flowers,” but it also, ironically, consigns the men to a structured existence—this was colonial China—in which the women who serve them become an index of the men’s also limited possibilities. The central relationship is a long-term one; but Wang (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, superb), taciturn and in the grip of melancholy, is tiring of Crimson and dallying with Jasmine, who is younger, much to Crimson’s dismay. The bonds that tie these individuals together are what they have in lieu of love, and their temper-tossed intrigues play out against another prostitute’s circumstance: Emerald buys her freedom from the brothel where she works. It is a meticulous arrangement.

     Austere, relentless, nearly merciless, Flowers of Shanghai lacks the tednerness and overflowing ordinary humanity we associate with much of Hou’s work. It is a portrait of blighted lives. Behind their polite, efficient veneer, the brothels hide beatings and instances of sexual sadism. It is hard to believe that Hou isn’t groping for a metaphor for Communist China. (Artists often venture into the past to comment on the present.) In any case, Hou’s least typical film is devastating.

1999

93. THE WIND WILL CARRY US (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, France).  In Bad ma ra khahad bord, a fish-out-of-water comedy, a man from Tehran arrives in Siah Dareh, a small, backward village in Iranian Kurdistan, along with a crew. While he waits to record the anticipated death of a 100-year-old resident, Behzad encounters strange people and customs, and copes with the failure of modern technology in so remote a place, encapsulated in his ringing cellular phone, which compels him to seek ever higher ground to try to find the signal that will enable him to hear whoever is calling him. This running gag befits a film that keeps significant action offscreen; very often we must glean what we can from the sounds that we hear. In this, the film is indebted to Antonioni’s The Passenger (see above), whose method, however, writer-director Abbas Kiarostami extends, alienating even more decisively passive viewers who demand plots with all the dots connected.

     Kiarostami is as sensitive to the arid landscape as to the animals crawling across it; but what engages him most is humanity. One of the characters whom Behzad encounters is a ditch-digger. We hear the ditch-digger’s voice; that’s it. Eventually, the hole he is digging collapses on him, and Kiarostami’s unorthodox presentation—not only no closeups of the man, but no shots whatsoever—conveys a searing sense of the victim’s reality. Pursuing fresh milk, Behzad also meets this man’s fiancée, deep down in a dark family cellar, where she is milking a cow—a stunning visual descent into the very idea of how people, how whole peoples, remain hidden to us, invisible.

     The Wind Will Carry Us moves us to believe in the reality of other people(s). Once we do, we can better grasp that their lives are no less important than our own.

2000

94. DOKFA NAI MEUMAN (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand).  French poet André Breton founded Surrealism in the mid-1920s, inventing the parlor game cadavres exquis, in which members of a gathered group each contributes the next sequential part of a made-up story as a means of unearthing group unconsciousness, thus affirming group consciousness. This “pure psychic automatism,” as Breton called it, could generate fantastic, unexpected images that social strictures would otherwise suppress.

     Educated at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has adopted Breton’s “Exquisite Corpses” to create a mind-boggling documentary. Weerasethakul traveled throughout rural and urban Thailand interviewing ordinary people, each of whom contributed a line, an episode, whatever, to a continuous piece of make-believe about a handicapped child and his teacher, Dogfar. Some of the shown interviewees are making up their contribution; others, plainly, are drawing upon their own experiences. The result that Weerasethakul fashions, in beautiful black and white, is a seamless, breathing fabric of people at work and in their daily routines, each in their different environment, interwoven with whatever each soul contributes to the ongoing "story,” as well as Weerasethakul’s visual imaginings—dramatic enactments—of these contributions. A good deal of Keatsian negative capability is needed to navigate this eclectic, un-signposted movie. 

     Weerasethakul has said he is “interested in the possibilities of involving both fact and fiction in the same film.” His method sounds out the space where reality and imagination intersect and interact. Although this isn’t a lyrical film, the outcome resembles Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934), whose sum is a composite national portrait. Weerasethakul has achieved a rich, humane canvas, a hymn to humanity.

     Incidentally, the title Dokfa nai meuman translates literally as Dogfar (or Heavenly Flowers) in the Hands of Devils. Here, it is called Mysterious Object at Noon. Close enough.

95. LA COMMUNE (PARIS 1871) (Peter Watkins, France).  Fiction yielding to documentary; documentary, to fiction: British filmmaker Peter Watkins, on this occasion working in French, achieves an exhilaratingly elastic result with his

ten-hour La Commune (Paris 1871), of which only a version shortened by four hours has been exhibited outside France.

     In this film about the doomed Parisian commune that popularly arose during the last gasps of the Franco-Prussian War, a huge cast of nonprofessionals playing the communards slip out of their historical roles to reflect on the state of France and of the current world, engaging in citizen discussions—in their period costumes!—that (like so much else in the film) stress the connections between past and present. Frames interrupting the action provide, moreover, a wealth of relevant written information, not to mention shafts of irony, as the past and the present each becomes a lens through which we apprehend the other. Watkins, then, has fashioned an eclectic work that captivates by capturing a number of levels of flux.

     Although he is scarcely known for his merriment, Watkins wrings wry humor from his present-tense disclosure of the past by interjecting into it modern televised media coverage of the unfolding events, thereby comparing accounts that differ according to the reporters and commentators involved—that is, according to their independence or allegiance to the state.

     Shot in thirteen days in and about an abandoned warehouse on visually rich, black-and-white Beta Digital videotape, this amazing film allows viewers to feel they are entering history, which here has an immediacy that makes the tragic end of the Paris Commune devastating to watch. 

     A people’s film, it reflects the feelings of working-class men and women who want to better their own and their children’s lives, and details the reactionary forces that are arrayed against them.

2001

96. MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, France, U.S.).  Spectral, deeply mysterious, writer-director David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. charts the consumption of hopeful innocence by experience and betrayal in a shifting dream landscape that measures each disappointment against an atmosphere of perpetual possibility, which deepens the disappointment. Dream eventually becomes harrowing nightmare. The dreamer commits suicide, and still the nightmare continues. Fluent and terrifying, Mulholland Dr., like Dreyer’s Vampyr (see above), is a work of sinister enchantment.

     All but one of the lead characters shift identities. One of these, Diane (Naomi Watts, phenomenal), has come to L.A. as Betty in search of stardom. Girls and boys in two speeding cars careen down Mulholland Drive and smash into another car, killing the children and ejecting from the third car a woman, setting her off on an amnesiac adventure that crosses her path with Diane/Betty’s—until, that is, it turns out that their paths had already long since meshed into a single path across which their identities have exchanged.

     Lynch intuitively addresses one of the core issues of our time: given our heightened self-awareness, the problem of identity. Moreover, he pursues it in a context that suggests its lack of possible solution; for life has become a replaying tape, an illusion, he flat-out declares at the Club Silencio, a theatrical club where musicians play and a singer sings her heart out—only, all the music is prerecorded: a poignant fatalistic touch. Identity, too, is an illusion; at any moment our identities may shift, or seem to shift, poising us in the direction of our becoming strangers to ourselves and each other over and over.

     Mulholland Dr. recalls August Strindberg’s late expressionism and Luigi Pirandello, and resembles a darker version of Jacques Rivette’s intricate, magical film Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). It is also unlike anything else.

2002

97. MONDAY MORNING (Otar Iosseliani, France).  Gently satirical, Georgian/Soviet-born Otar Iosseliani’s Lundi matin is a great French comedy.

     Vincent, Iosseliani’s Everyman, is a welder at a chemical plant, where he endures voluminous industrial smoke daily. At home, he is a creature of habit; after home repairs, he paints landscapes. One day Vincent doesn’t pass through the gate into the factory. He pauses long enough to turn around and spend the day instead on a grassy hill in deep contemplation of things. He decides on a vacation, an adventure, leaving behind wife, kids, home, job. Others may negotiate a mid-life crisis by having an extramarital affair; he will simply take off for a bit. His gravely ill father donates his life’s savings to give his son the means. Venice, Cairo, Constantinople: the itinerary is set. Without word to anyone else, Vincent is gone.

     Pickpocketed, Vincent gets no farther than Venice—although he creates the illusion of wider travels by sending various postcards home, all of which his miffed wife rips up without reading. (Her mother-in-law must break into her backyard-buried pot to get at her savings so that the family may continue during her son’s absence.) In Venice, Vincent escapes his routines; ironically, though, his excursion crosses the circle of other people’s routines.

     This isn’t a film that connects narrative dots. We must therefore bring our Keatsian negative capability to it. The movie’s elliptical, elusive quality accumulates into a wondrous metaphor for the thread of his life that Vincent feels has slipped out of his grasp. Once back at work, Vincent cannot see what we see, but doubtless he feels its effect: a stunning long shot of the fume-belching factory.

     Iosseliani’s moving, roving camera is exactly correlative to the riches of life—and humanity’s appetite for these—with which his life-affirming masterpiece abounds.

98. Final Segment, 11’09’’01(Shohei Imamura, Japan, France).  For 11’09’’01 (the DVD here is titled September 11) eleven filmmakers, each from a different country, were invited to contribute an eleven-minute film responding to the 2001 attack on the U.S. Shohei Imamura’s Japanese contribution is brilliant.

     World War II continues. Outdoors, a snake is slithering on the ground. On the floor of a family hut, a man wearing an army cap is also slithering. Not using his hands, he drinks water out of a container on the floor. “He fought for his country,” a relation notes. In addition to compassion, Yukichi’s family feels disgust. In becoming a snake, Yukichi has shed his human skin; humanity now, for him, is identified with war’s inhumanity. But it is precisely for field combat that Yukichi was trained to crawl on his belly.

     He devours a large rat, head first. Yukichi’s blank eye shows he is dissociated from the act, much as he attempted to dissociate himself from what was happening while in combat; but dissociation from his home environment, ironically, implies Yukichi’s entrenchment in memories of war.

     Imminent humiliating defeat has transformed the villagers’ impression of the war. Yukichi’s reduced state now reminds them of their reduced state. Driven out of his home, Yukichi is hunted as a criminal—a scene out of Imamura’s beautiful Ballad of Narayama (1993).

     “What does the Holy War mean to you?” Yukichi asks a comrade-in-arms in a flashback. An image of humility because he is close to the ground, Yukichi now seems human, sacred. We see a pristine waterfall in the moonlight and trees animated by wind. Yukichi crawls into the river.

     Is it Imamura’s voice we hear reading aloud the script that appears on the left side of the screen? There is no such thing as a Holy War.

99. ALEXEI AND THE SPRING (Motohashi Seiichi, Japan).  Motohashi Seiichi’s incandescent documentary Alexei to izumi is set in Budische, in Belarus, a rural farm village emptied of nearly all its 600-some residents by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Fewer than sixty stayed, all older, except for Alexei, who lives with elderly parents. Other young people (including Alexei’s older brother and younger sister) return periodically to help parents and grandparents with planting and harvest. Spiritually sustaining villagers is the local spring, whose waters, inexplicably, remain uncontaminated. Ultimately the film becomes an elegy—a delayed elegy waiting upon the demise of Budische—for the Soviet Union.

     Static wintry long shots introduce the village, a wasteland of trees and abandoned huts. There is a sad, haunting overhead shot of the percolating spring, all white with snow, into which fresh snow falls: an epiphany of the mystery of Nature and existence.

     The film principally shows villagers at work inside and outside their homes, farming, buying and selling, washing laundry, weaving baskets, hauling logs, and so forth.

     Carrying two buckets of water from the spring toward the house, Alexei appears. Indoors, a closeup of the virulent fire in the fireplace introduces the first vivid patch of color. “In this village,” Alexei explains, “to work is to eat.” He says at planting time, “When you are planting potatoes, you dig with your whole body”—a remark to whose accuracy the accompanying images of people at work attest.

     Throughout, Seiichi implies Soviet shortcomings. Alexei notes how Soviet tractors and other equipment, purchased from communes, are continually breaking down, frustrating the determination of people to get on with their work.

     Why Alexei remained in Budische is a mystery even to him. Perhaps the spring kept him there—that, and all the mysterious familial and communal connections it embodies.

2004

100. MOOLAADÉ (Ousmane Sembène, Senegal, Burkina Faso).  “The father of African cinema,” Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène, was 81 when he made Moolaadé, a movie both elegant and incendiary. Its topic is tribal female circumcision; its theme, tradition clung to in order to maintain the status quo, in this instance, male supremacy. The action takes place in Djerisso, a tiny, impoverished village in Burkina Faso, in East Africa. Female circumcision, however, is practiced throughout Africa, in thirty-eight countries.

     A marker of the village is its bizarre, irregular mosque, which is patterned after the adjacent termite hill. Showing male elders emerging through its arched doorways, dark, irregular gaping holes, Sembène applies a satirical spin to their humorless demeanor and reactionary activities.

     The protagonist is the village chief’s wife, Collé Ardo, who refused to have their daughter, Amsatou, cut because her own genital mutilation cost her two babies in childbirth. Collé is publicly whipped by her husband for her declaration of Moolaadé, that is, “Protection,” for four girls who have fled their parents and taken refuge with Collé rather than be cut. During Collé’s beating, one of the mothers kidnaps her daughter from the protected compound, thereby ending the Moolaadé, and has her daughter cut. The girl dies as a result. Now radicalized, the mother joins Collé in opposing the practice of female cutting and in confiscating the circumcision knives from the women elders who use them.

     Sembène’s finely judged distancing techniques gradually dissolve; their disappearance following their use makes all the more powerful the representation of reality that remains. Intended as the middle part of a trilogy begun with Faat Kiné (2000) and yet to be completed, Moolaadé is stark, humane and radical, as befits an artist who studied under Mark Donskoi (the Maxim Gorky trilogy,

1938-40; The Rainbow, 1944), no less, in Moscow.