First Iteration: The Great Films List

by Teal Greyhavens

As Entertainment Weekly wrote on publishing its list of the 100 greatest films of all time, "Lists are silly." They are inadequate and usually foolhardy. But we love them, and I love them. I'm keeping my list to 50ish for now in recognition of how few films I've seen, but will update this as the years go on.

Occasionally movies are paired on this list. I've done this in cases where I think two films offer similar treatises on life or similar arguments about humanity, where two filmmakers from disparate parts of the world have created works that complement each other and it is therefore impossible to pick one over the other. These comparisons may tick people off — so write to me at teal.greyhavens@gmail.com and we can duke it out.

Things you won't find on this list: movies about despicable men who shoot each other — so no The Godfather, no Taxi Driver, no Goodfellas — and Hollywood epics just because they're Hollywood epics, like Gone with the Wind or Ben-Hur. This list is my take on the most trenchant, inventive, and rhapsodic movies out there, and it is as international as I can make it (titles in italic are written in their original language); I am consuming films from Africa and Asia every week and look forward to one day compiling a truly global list of great movies, which is a hard thing to find.





Fellini's may be the self-absorbed white man's take on why we make movies, but as a deconstruction of the creative mind it is fascinating, and as cinema it is ravishingly hypnotic. Marcello Mastroianni's Guido fairly glides through this dreamscape of his own making, as women fanciful and serious float in and out of view, until it all comes together——first in the delirious harem scene, and then in the ebullient closing circus march. These and countless other moments (Who can forget the magician rising into the spotlight at the dinner party?) consummated a decadent, hallucinatory signature style which today we simply call, "Felliniesque."





Truffaut's winsome, semi-autobiographical tale of adolescence is the most heartfelt of the much-ballyhooed French New Wave films, and therefore the most accessible. It's also a pitch-perfect capsule of the frustration and wonder that burn through those years when boys the world over do things that make their parents shake their heads. Jean-Pierre Léaud is the ragamuffin Antoine, doing the things that any boy loose in Paris would do, all the while running from everything that feels wrong, until he is shipped off to boarding school and suddenly the whole world begins to feel wrong. The final shot is a reflection and a question, asking us, now that we have grown up and can no longer be children: What now?




Visionary directors from Griffith to Lang have tried to explode conventional notions of what movies can do, but none have done it with such philosophical aplomb and eye-popping grandeur as Kubrick, one of the only directors who believed that film was a vehicle for ideas more than emotions. 2001 rises like a floating spaceship over trivial things like plot and characters, and invites us to revel in the sheer awesomeness of human evolution, from our ape ancestors to an imagined, enlightened superbeing. Its stark, almost scientific approach leaves many viewers cold (Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative"), but see it on the big screen and you will experience one of the most transcendentally optimistic visions of our future ever argued.




One of Ray's least-known films, and the only one he ever made with the great  actress Waheeda Rehman, Abhijan is a slow-burning tale of sleaze and redemption, as gracefully constructed as the scripts of Robert Zemeckis or Frank Darabont in America. Soumitra Chatterjee plays a cab driver who gets waylayed in a small town with dreams of better things, and finds himself drawn into a fringe business transporting opium. The events unspool with the grim calm of the Italian neorealists who so inspired Ray, and with none of the sentimentality of his Apu trilogy. Though it's a cultural world apart, to me Abhijan evokes Wilder's The Apartment; both films follow characters mired in the cynical morass of our modern world, who in the end manage to extract a quiet redemption that will make you weep.



Here are two towering entries in the "humanity is ruled by evil and mania" school of thought, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview and Klaus Kinski as Aguirre both channeling versions of the burning, power-starved demon that lurks in the hearts of all men who quest for greatness. Herzog's misty, visceral journey ends in a sort of spiritual transcendence that rises above the madness; while Blood is like  the surpassingly optimistic 2001 run backwards: instead of enlightened superbeings, we are all equally likely to end up as shrieking, murderous madmen wielding bowling pins like apes.





It's almost impossible to describe the way imagination worked when we were children——the way stories could twist and turn into fantastical realms on little more than a feeling, always with a kind of sideways logic and consistency——which is why the achievements of Miyazaki and the early Disney animators  with  these twin fairy tales are to be cherished by viewers young and old. Whether we're cowering in the dark with the Mome Raths or chasing a wounded dragon across an infinite sea, these films make us feel like children again——and that, surely, is something only cinema can do.




Between Chow Yun-Fat sliding iconically down the railing, both guns blazing, and Sigourney Weaver shouting "Get away from her, you bitch!" to roars of audience delight, each of these films could easily claim the title of Greatest Action Movie Ever Made. But each, in its way, transcends the "action" label. By the time Chow is fending off gunfire while cradling a newborn baby——having waded through a shootout spanning two stories in one three-minute-long  single take——Woo has created something like ballet with bullets; meanwhile, the final hour of the full Aliens (don't settle for the dumbed down theatrical cut) contains the most relentless and terrifying series of sense-stunning action sequences ever filmed.





War may be hell, but so is making movies——according to these two withering tales of cinematic giants being devoured by the industries they helped create. Anne Baxter plays Eve, the is-she-or-is-she-not-pure-evil ingenue who slowly pulls the red carpet out from under a radiant Bette Davis, and Guru Dutt plays a doe-eyed director named Suresh who, tragically, might as well be the real-life director himself——Dutt committed suicide five years later. Their descents into obscurity are made epic by striking imagery from Milton Krasner and V.K. Murthy, including the shaft of light number in Phool and the evocative final shot from Eve, reflecting infinite aspiring Eves, all waiting to claw their way to the top.




Classically speaking, a tragedy will always end in death, and a comedy will always end in marriage. The singular brilliance of Wilder's greatest film is that for all of its wry, trenchant 125 minutes, indeed up until its final seconds, when a terrified Shirley Maclaine rushes up to Jack Lemmon's door to find... it is unclear whether we are watching a comedy or a tragedy. Maclaine as the coy Fran Kubelik and Lemmon as the flu-stricken C.C. Baxter have their feet planted so firmly in reality that they make the sort of coldly practical decisions unheard of in most Hollywood romances; so when they both finally  rise above the cynical trappings of their  world——Lemmon with the light clunk of a key and Maclaine with a rapturous run through the streets——their liberation brings vicarious tears to our eyes. If only life were like this.


By 1925, Eisenstein had refined film editing almost to a science, and this was his resounding proof of the power of association. Each shot represents an idea, and a series of shots in sequence constitute an argument——in this case a powerful emotional argument. Much of Potemkin is questionable Bolshevik propaganda, but the shocking Odessa steps scene late in the film can still make viewers gasp today, and the calm, relentless rhythm of the cutting makes this impassioned saga feel something like cinema in its purest form.

•   •   •

MORE STUFF

On Christianity, Zombies, Terrorists, and Right-wing Nutjobs

Words: A Finite Resource

Terrence Malick & Chemical Nostalgia

MORE TO COME...