December 2013 – Guy With Typewriter

This post came about in response to some horrid bucket list of film that everyone should see that was circulating on Facebook a few weeks back. It was mostly commercial garbage. And in many case movies that weren’t even worth wasting time on.

I felt the need to come up with a real list for film lovers and film makers.

I gave myself some initial rules: only one film per director, no animation (that’s a whole separate list), no films costing a hundred million dollars or more (no film needs to cost that much, it’s supposed to be a story, not a theme park amusement ride), nothing crazy obvious (Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Godfather, Night of the Living Dead, something from the Coen Brothers – because if you haven’t seen those films, then you shouldn’t even be reading this).

The hardest was the first of those rules. How to pick only one film from Hitchcock (and if my choice surprises you, it’s only because I’m surprised by how few people today have ever seen it), one from Chaplin, one from Woody Allen. But the hardest was picking between Kurosawa’s Rashomon and The Seven Samurai. The latter redefined a genre, while the former redefined story-telling. You can probably guess my choice.

I tried to run the gamut from early silent masterpieces right up to a hauntingly beautiful masterpiece from 2012, with a little bit of everything in between. The strongest year seemed to be 1962 with 5 titles on this list. In second place was 1984 with 4. And all of the films are easily available on DVD.

I’m not saying these are the greatest films ever made, and I’m sure there are some I’ve missed that really should be here. I’m sure I’ll think of great alternatives 30 seconds after hitting “publish.” But these are certainly all in contention. And they will give you an amazing overview of the medium. They will allow you to understand what film can do, how a story can be told a hundred different ways, and how film is the greatest of all art forms.

These are films to me that made a difference, to the medium, to story-telling, to me. They made me sit on the edge of my seat and go wow. Sometimes I’d tear up not at anything sad, but by their sheer power and brilliance.

And if you’re a filmmaker, or you want to be a filmmaker, then you really should see these films, you should see as many films as you can, whenever you can. You should be over-dosing on film, as if it were a drug. You really should intimately know what came before you (pre-Tarantino, that is).

Here now, my bucket list of must-see films, in order of release:

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

2. The Phantom Carriage (1921)