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US
Top Ten
Apocalypse
Now (Coppola)
Battleship
Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Citizen
Kane (Welles)
Dr.
Strangelove (Kubrick)
Faust
(Murnau)
Last
Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
My
Darling Clementine (Ford)
The
Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Raging
Bull (Scorsese)
The
Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
Comments
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Coppola made the ephemeral dynamics
of the mass psyche's celebratory nihilism, its self-destructive
urges and transience, concrete and operatic. A fabulous
picture.
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Eisenstein invented
not just film form, but a dialectical theory of the construction of
cinematic narrative. He laid the theoretical foundation in 1924 and
embodied it in cinema's greatest classic. Its influence in British,
Weimar and American cinema is extraordinary.
Citizen Kane
(Welles)
A watershed that perceives and expresses content in a
grand way, never done before.
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
The
whole picture is a third act. It codifies and presents as outrageous
satire the totality of American foreign and nuclear policy and
political/military culture from 1948 to 1964. And it's more
effective for being wicked ridicule than any number of cautionary
fables.
Faust (Murnau)
Invented what had never been done
before and delivered magic in both its human pathos and visual
effects. (My selection is based on having viewed an excellent 35mm
print.)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
A defining film. It's
almost the end of modernism when counterposed against Godard.
My
Darling Clementine (Ford)
Possibly the finest drama in the
classic Western genre, with a stunningly subjective Wyatt Earp
(Henry Fonda). And it achieves near-perfection as cinematic
narrative in its editing and shooting.
The Passion of Joan of Arc
(Dreyer)
Human experience conveyed out of the abstract elements
of the human face and pure compositions. No one else has shot and
realised human beings quite like Dreyer in this film.
Raging Bull
(Scorsese)
We are so sucked into the failing and besotted life of
La Motta and his need for and pursuit of redemption. The humanity of
the picture is as extraordinary as Marty's execution, with its
near-perfection in the economy, staging, blocking and
compositions.
The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
No other picture
captures the poignancy of 'the last of', a fin-de-siècle sense of
the West, of ageing, of the pathos of
twilight. |
