The Leopard | Luchino
Visconti
One of the greatest films ever made by a director
who, almost forty years after his death, is still an intimidating and
disturbing figure in the history of cinema. Visconti’s films stand outside the
borders of the medium, by their ambition, by their scope, uniting past and
present, individuals and history, both deeply human and transcendent. The
Leopard, his most translucent, towering achievement, embodies everything the
best filmmaking can be, grand, profound, entertaining, physical and
metaphysical, sharp as a blade and melodramatic. It stays with you, forever.
Pickpocket | Robert Bresson
Andrei Rublev | Andrei
Tarkovsky
I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert
Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be,
showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed
me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to.
Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved
effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I
don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him.
White Material | Claire Denis
A Christmas Tale | Arnaud
Desplechin
Chungking Express | Wong
Kar-wai
Dazed and Confused | Richard
Linklater
Frances Ha | Noah Baumbach
Moonrise Kingdom | Wes
Anderson
Yi Yi | Edward Yang
Often, when I read filmmakers’ lists (including
mine), I am frustrated by the absence of their contemporaries. The present is
always the hardest to read, and no one will argue if you focus on masters of
the past instead. But here are a few names, filmmakers whose work I have been
lucky to follow since their beginnings; we’ve crossed paths, more or less
frequently, but I have admired them constantly, also because they have been an
inspiration. I feel I have had a dialogue with them, or with their films, and
it is reflected in my own work. Edward Yang is gone, I miss him a lot, he
invented modern Chinese cinema alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien, he was my friend.
Nashville | Robert Altman
Between 1971 and 1975, Robert Altman could do no
wrong, and Nashville is the culmination of that streak. There had rarely been
before him in Hollywood such a sense of liberty, of independence, of genuine
spontaneity. The long takes, the tracking shots, the space he gives actors, the
way he lets them overlap, the looseness and the depth of the narratives—it was
a breath of fresh air in a usually stuffy and hostile environment. It didn’t
last long, though.
Heaven’s Gate | Michael
Cimino
I saw this one again a few weeks ago in its
incredible restored director’s cut. I have always admired Michael Cimino, and I
loved Heaven’s Gate when it was released—with some quibbles. Now, I can’t
believe I could have had any quibble about this masterpiece. It’s not just that
it ages well; it wipes away any doubt: for some reason the passing of time
(remember the only genuinely moving tagline ever? What one loves in life are
things that fade.) reveals this film as the extraordinary, transcendent triumph
I could not see then. And the way it finally reaches us through the echo of
time only makes it more moving, heartbreaking, even.
Videodrome | David Cronenberg
Cronenberg is a genius. He reinvented genre
filmmaking, giving it the depth of the most ambitious fiction. This truly
visionary work must be one of his masterpieces. When it was released, I
couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe a filmmaker could have not just
captured the very soul of our present, or its hidden meaning, but also found
its poetry, the mysterious beauty of it. eXistenZ, shot fifteen years later in
a very different world, echoes it in fascinating ways. I consider David
Cronenberg to be one of the great modern artists.
Che | Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh totally rocks. He is the bravest,
smartest, most original filmmaker in the U.S. today. I don’t like all his
films, but I not only like but admire most of them; and even in his minor work
there is still more genuine love and understanding of cinema than in the most
accomplished works of some others. Che, the one movie ever made that seriously
deals with military strategy, helped me imagine Carlos on a scale that
otherwise would have intimidated me.
La dolce vita | Federico
Fellini
Army of Shadows | Jean-Pierre
Melville
I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for
me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city;
in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian
film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean
Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone
who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a
culture now all gone.
My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been
growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in
the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the
visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of
gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their
world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a
semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the
French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free
French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical
circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of
Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a
national treasure.
Fanny and Alexander — The
Television Version | Ingmar Bergman
Topsy-Turvy | Mike Leigh
The television cut of Fanny and Alexander, of course,
which is the one and only version Bergman approved of. It is called the
television version because that’s how it was financed, but this is meant to be seen
on a big screen with one intermission. It is Bergman’s final masterpiece. Well,
not exactly, as he kept on making great films for years afterward. But in the
master plan, this is the last actual film, the closing of his main body of
work—others are supposed to be footnotes (they’re not). Initially, this film
was overlooked because, in the shortened so-called theatrical version, it lost
some of the richness of its texture. It was only gradually, when it was
revisited in its full version, that it imposed itself, at least on me, as the
key to his whole body of work.
I had to fit Topsy-Turvy into this list. It is also a
period piece. This misunderstood, underrated biography of Gilbert and Sullivan
must be one of the most touching, funniest—and cruelest—depictions of show
business, split between art and commerce. We see both the torments of creation
and the anxieties of the box office. To me, it compares only with Jean Renoir’s
French Cancan.
Désiré | Sacha Guitry
Judex | Georges Franju
I can’t believe how the genius of Sacha Guitry is
misunderstood outside the borders of France. He is actually one of the most
important figures in the history of French cinema, on a par with the greatest.
I suspect he has this marginal status because when he started making films—the
minute you could record sound—he was already a middle-aged ultra-recognized,
ultra-successful figure of the stage. His style owes nothing to the silent era;
he is the first French filmmaker, in a long line, who relies on language. But he
was of course never content to simply record his own plays; he was obsessed
with using the specificities of cinema to transcend them, and in doing so he
pioneered a whole new language. Inspired by his wives—first Jacqueline Delubac,
then Geneviève Guitry, then Lana Marconi, who most often had the lead—Guitry
was the first French writer/director, and possibly the greatest.
Désiré is a remarkable film. I wish Criterion would
release Le comédien, a portrait of his father, the famous actor Lucien Guitry,
and my personal favorite.
Another misunderstood French director is Georges
Franju, who’s mostly known for Eyes Without a Face but actually the author of a
very consistent body of work, including Judex, a quietly disturbing poetic
adaptation of Louis Feuillade’s serial.
Rififi | Jules Dassin
Thief | Michael Mann
Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a
typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the
first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his
powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous
film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his
masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I
discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its
violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely
influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but
also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole
syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time.
I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most
inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the
start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full
circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with
precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a
geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is
genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat.
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