It is hard work being a cinephile. There are just so many great movies out there. Even if you watch everything under the sun on TCM, there will still be the odd classic of French cinema you haven’t seen and once that is complete, do not forget about contemporary Iranian cinema. Pretentiousness comes at a cost.
As with any lists, there is no definitive list to what is necessary to watch. In a span of over a 100 years of movie making, from the Lumiere Brothers to Christopher Nolan, there has to be roughly a million films that have been released and thousands of classics among the bunch. To include them all is a pointless endeavor. Here is a short list of directors that were not included on the list based solely on no real criteria other than preference; Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Vigo, Fritz Lang, Francis Ford Coppola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa etc etc. A separate ”Top Ten” could have been easily made using the films of these directors alone.
But, the films on the list are all influential on its own right. Each one provides a seminal moment in the art of cinema in which it changed the landscape and the way people looked at films. In order not to incite a heated debate in the comment section about the ordering, these films appear in chronological order by release date.
10. Battleship Potemkin
Joseph Goebbels once called Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, “The greatest propaganda film of all time.” And indeed it is. Having started out as a film theorist, Eisenstein’s use of editing garnered as much sympathy for the plight of “the people” against the Tsarist by depicting the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin in 1905. Here, he innovated the montage in which images are shown by cutting from one image to another successively. The Odessa Staircase scene, in particular, is still widely regarded as one of the most dramatic and pivotal sequence in the history of cinema and has influenced films such as Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables”.
The film, itself, still holds up to contemporary standards as the images such as the maggots on bread can still garner a visceral reaction. It moves like a symphony of images, flowing frame by frame. Eisenstein’s editing techniques accomplishes the job as I challenge anyone to watch the Odessa Staircase sequence and not be enthralled by it.
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9 Comments
400 blows should top the list but atleast shining or 2001,or vertigo one of em in the list would have bee been great
Great list.
Maybe not having seen all these films would not have been as shameful if I actually knew about or heard of them.
Eh, some good picks-mainly Kane and The Bicycle Thieves-but the others do not define cinema in any abundance. They are amazing films, that certainly define their times, but only Kane and Bicycle Thieves entropy cinema as a whole.
I think the list is pretty solid, but really, without watching a Kubrick movie, I would not call anyone a cinephile
I am the first to admit that this list is truly a fickle one. It gave me opportunity for my first article on this site to gush about some films that really influenced me and touched me in my years of movie watching. I love Kubrick but who doesn’t. But, people do not know about the genius that is Mizoguchi or just how great John Ford was, so I left Kubrick out in favor of the undervalued. Everyone loves Vertigo but Sunrise is such a piece of cinematic brilliance and Close-Up was one of the most daring films that I have ever seen that I chose to include those instead. That’s why I did that honorable mention list at the end.
Chaplin should at least be amongst the 10.
Nice to see Sunrise in here.
Very good list overall. I have a few misgivings, however. Firstly, I wouldn’t consider Double Indemnity to be top ten material. Secondly, The Bicycle Thieves is more popular than it is important I think. A film like Rules of the Game or even anything by Godard or Antonioni is far more important than either one of the aforementioned two. Just my thoughts though.