10. L'Atalante
Gaumont Film CompanyJean Vigo followed up his 1933 short masterpiece about anarchy at a boarding school, Zero de Conduite, with L'Atalante the following year, a film which has gone down in cinematic history as perhaps as significant as F. W. Murnau's milestone Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a film which L'Atalante shares similar themes. Where Sunrise saw the young wife escape to the city after her husband attempts to murder her, in L'Atalante the newlywed wife's jaunt into Paris is motivated by something far less obviously dramatic - idle curiosity. But the film is no less astonishing for its lack of conventional drama; it captures a more pedestrian aspect of love and longing but does so with an impressionistic flair which makes the episodes of daily life seem almost magical. Tragically this was Vigo's first and last full length feature; a film which has rarely been matched.