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Top Ten Films of all Time!!
moremojo:
--- Quote from: Kd5000 on September 22, 2007, 12:25:55 pm ---Silent films are even harder. I really did love Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La by Carl Theodor Dreyer. I'm not religious, but the film did move me. I strongly recommend it.
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Falconetti's performance as Joan is magnificent...surely one of the great performances of film history. This isn't my favorite Dreyer work, but it's certainly a masterpiece.
moremojo:
There are so many movies that I love intensely, but my ten choices here reflect those specimens that combine an uncommonly fine mastery of form with rich and enduring emotional content. Listed in chronological order:
Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (1932), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu's masterpiece, an alternately funny and sad story of the disillusionment of youth and the reconciliation to a compromised but still vital existence. A summit of film art.
Dekigokoro (1933), directed by Yasujiro Ozu. The most beautiful depiction of a father-son relationship I know of in cinema.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), directed by Vincente Minnelli. A perennially charming fantasy of an America that never existed. Endlessly watchable.
Ordet (1955), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Carnal love marries spiritual love, culminating in one of the most magnificent endings in film history.
Gertrud (1964), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Dreyer's testament, a story of the overriding importance of love in life.
Au hasard Balthazar (1966), directed by Robert Bresson. A strange parable of man's cruelty to animals and his fellow man. A work of rich, understated beauty, and one of the most important films ever made.
Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972), directed by Werner Schroeter. Ecstasy on film. Dreams haunted by the sights and sounds of love and loss.
The Scenic Route (1978), directed by Mark Rappaport. One of the finest depictions of complex adult relationships I have encountered in cinema, wedded to a fine and playful visual sensibility.
Tong nien wang shi (1985), directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou. Perhaps the single greatest film made anywhere in the 1980's. Impeccably nuanced and quietly beautiful portrait of a family's disentegration in an intractably troubled and contested corner of the world.
Brokeback Mountain (2005), directed by Ang Lee. The transfiguring power of love found, lost, and remembered. The single most important film yet made.
brokeplex:
1) Double Indemnity
2) Maltese Falcon
3) The Black Rose
4) The Fountainhead
5) The Day the Earth Stood Still
6) High Noon
7) Chinatown
8) Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
9) The Mark of Zorro (1941 version)
10) Brokeback Mountain
moremojo:
--- Quote from: Susiebell on September 23, 2007, 06:09:45 pm ---WOW! Impressive list Moremojo ... I couldn't even pronounce most of those! I'd like to see some of them, but they don't look like the sort of films that get shown too often on Satellite TV!
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Thanks, Susie. I know that Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (which is known in English-language discourse as I Was Born, But...) is available on DVD, and, here in the States, Meet Me in St. Louis, Ordet, and Gertrud are shown from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. The Scenic Route was released in videocassette format some years ago, but I don't know how easy it would be to find that.
But amazingly, probably the most obscure of my choices, Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The Death of Maria Malibran, in English translation), is available for complete and free downloading from the following website:
http://www.ubu.com/film/schroeter.html
The streaming quality here is not the greatest, and the film is presented without any English subtitles, but the full film is there--remarkable for a difficult, avant-garde (but potentially very rewarding) work such as this.
moremojo:
--- Quote from: Susiebell on September 23, 2007, 06:38:40 pm ---Thanks for the info moremojo .... is that downloadable one a German film?
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Jawohl! Actually, though, a few lines are in English, and if you and your dad watch it, be prepared for a film that is primarily non-narrative for its first half--understanding here can be challenge quite apart from the issue of language! Nonetheless, a masterpiece, in my opinion.
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