A film from every year

People always ask me about my favourite films, sometimes in general and sometimes with specifications (best Japanese film, best film with Myrna Loy) and I answer as best as I can. I also like to make lists, as many do. Some frown upon lists, finding them demeaning and distortionous.* And they can be, if done badly or taken too seriously. But as a service to anybody who wonders about my favourites and as an excuse to make lists, they will be a more regular feature on Fredrik on Film from now on. Different kinds of lists, with different aims.

Today's list is chronological, featuring my favourite feature fiction films from (almost) every year since 1913. Before 1913 films were rarely of any great length, and the few that exists I have not seen. Neither have I seen any from 1914, as far as I can recall. (Unfortunately I have seen very few films from the 1910s in general, but those I have seen have in general been good, not least those by Cecil B. DeMille, who is undoubtedly one of the best filmmakers of that decade. Perhaps the best, together with Victor Sjöström.) But here is the list in full. I have tried to choose only one for every year but accept my apologies for those years when it was impossible to do so. It was especially hard in those magical years after World War 2.**

1913 Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström)
1914 ?
1915 Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)
1916 Intolerance (D.W. Griffith)
1917 Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Mauritz Stiller)
1918 Old Wives for New (Cecil B. DeMille)
1919 Don’t Change Your Husband (Cecil B. DeMille)
1920 Erotikon (Mauritz Stiller)
1921 Tol’able David (Henry King)
1922 Phantom (F.W. Murnau) Nosferatu (Murnau)
1923 A Woman in Paris (Charlie Chaplin)
1924 Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton)
1925 Tartuffe (F.W. Murnau)
1926 Faust (F.W. Murnau)
1927 Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)
1928 The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg) A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks)
1929 Asphalt (Joe May)
1930 The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh)
1931 M (Fritz Lang)
1932 Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg)
1933 Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch)
1934 Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks)
1935 Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen) Toni (Jean Renoir)
1936 Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir)
1937 The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir)
1938 Holiday (George Cukor)
1939 Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
1940 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
1941 Stormy Waters aka Remorques (Jean Grémillon)
1942 In Which We Serve (David Lean) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
1943 Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock) Changing Trains (Hasse Ekman)
1944 Laura (Otto Preminger)
1945 Brief Encounter (David Lean)
1946 My Darling Clementine (John Ford) The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
1947 Odd Man Out (Carol Reed) Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur) Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger)
1948 The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed) Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls) Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky) The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger) Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Fallen Idol, with a for Reed typical angle.

1949 The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls) Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis) The Third Man (Carol Reed) Border Incident (Anthony Mann)
1950 All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
1951 An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli) Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher) Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock) The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith)
1952 Casque d’Or (Jacques Becker)
1953 Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini)
1954 A Star is Born (George Cukor)
1955 The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis)
1956 A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson)
1957 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick) Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa)
1958 Man of the West (Anthony Mann) Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk)
1959 Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks) The 400 Blows (François Truffaut)
1960 Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard) The Apartment (Billy Wilder)
1961 The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
1963 The Leopard (Luchino Visconti)
1964 Lilith (Robert Rossen) The Train (John Frankenheimer)
1965 Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger)
1966 Persona (Ingmar Bergman) Nayak (Satyajit Ray)
1967 Le samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville)
1968 Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
1969 The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
1970 The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci) Wild Child (François Truffaut) The Adversary (Satyajit Ray)
1971 A Touch of Zen (Hu King)
1972 Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah)
1973 The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann)
1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
1975 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
1976 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
1977 Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
1978 Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi) Fedora (Billy Wilder)
1979 Alien (Ridley Scott) Manhattan (Woody Allen)
1980 Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme) Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
1981 Southern Comfort (Walter Hill) Thief (Michael Mann) Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Blind Chance

1982 The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)
1983 The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan) Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola)
1984 A Passage to India (David Lean)
1985 A Room With a View (James Ivory)
1986 Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
1987 Hope and Glory (John Boorman)
1988 Chocolat (Claire Denis)
1989 The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley)
1990 Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami) Trust (Hal Hartley)
1991 La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette) The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
1992 Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood) In the Soup (Alexandre Rockwell)
1993 Remains of the Day (James Ivory)
1994 Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai) Quiz Show (Robert Redford)
1995 Heat (Michael Mann)
1996 Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis) Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson)
1997 Paper Airplanes (Farhad Mehranfar)
1998 After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda)
1999 Three Kings (David O. Russell)
2000 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
2001 Delbaran (Abolfazl Jalili) Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
2002 10 (Abbas Kiarostami)
2003 Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
2004 Collateral (Michael Mann)
2005 Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)
2006 Still Life (Jia Zhangke) I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Park Chan-wook)
2007 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov)
2008 The Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi)
2009 A Serious Man (Ethan & Joel Coen)
2010 Last Night (Massy Tadjedin)

It is perhaps worth pointing out that all films on the list are not equally good. There are many films not listed that are much better than some of those above, that is inevitable. And consequently some directors, such as Raoul Walsh and Wes Anderson, are not represented with the films I think are their best. And before you start writing an angry comment accusing me of dimwitted philistinism because your favourite film is missing, please remember that it is possible I have not seen it, or that it stands as a very close second on its year.

A final note: Murnau's reign in the 1920s is remarkable. He was some artist.

Faust

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*Why is not distortionous a word?
** This was harder than I thought. I got a few films attached to the wrong year and has made adjustments, and some films have been replaced. On some films I have noticed that my sources give different years, such as Gun Crazy (1949 and 1950), Journey to Italy (1953 and 1954) and The Adversary (1970 and 1972). I do not know why that is, but I have had to choose which year to use. Blind Chance was made in 1981 but the Polish censors kept it from being released until 1987.

Favourite films #2 (2013 version)

Last year Sight & Sound published their decennial list of "the best films" ever made. I published my top ten too. Since it was a pain to choose ten films I have now allowed myself to make a new list with films that might as well have ended up on last year's list. Here they are, in chronological order. I still enforce the rule that any director gets only one film. 15 films was the target this time but I failed...

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924, US)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau 1927, US)
La grande illusion (Jean Renoir 1937, France)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940, US)
They Were Expendable (John Ford 1945, US)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls 1948, US)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1948, UK)
Casque d'or (Jacques Becker 1952, France)
A Star is Born (George Cukor 1954, US)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks 1959, US)
The Apartment (Billy Wilder 1960, US)
Le doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville 1962, France)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962, UK)
The Leopard (Luchino Visconti 1963, Italy)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976, US)
After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda 1998, Japan)

Here are the ten films that were on the previous list:

Holiday (George Cukor 1938, US)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir 1939, France)
Laura (Otto Preminger 1944, US)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1946, UK)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946, US)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946, US)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948, US)
Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini 1954, Italy)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville 1967, France)
The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann 1973, UK/France)

Bergman's favourite films

It is well-known that Ingmar Bergman was a cinephile, and he watched films on a daily basis. After he moved to Fårö, far from the cinemas of the big city, he had his own cinema were he received prints of all films that were released in Sweden, and where he had his own archive of films on tape, 16mm prints and 35mm prints.

He also made lists. Here is one he made in 1994 of his then 11 favourite films:

Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström 1921)
The Circus (Charlie Chaplin 1928)
La passion de Jeanne d'Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer 1928)
Le Quai des brumes / Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné 1938)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder 1950)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa 1950)
La Strada (Federico Fellini 1954)
Kvarteret Korpen / Raven's End (Bo Widerberg 1963)
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky 1966)
Dyrygent / The Conductor (Andrzej Wajda 1980 aka The Orchestra Conductor)
Die bleierne Zeit / Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta 1981)

Here is another one, called "Bergman's 20th century", made in order to celebrate Swedish cinema at the turn of the millennium at Göteborg International Film Festival. It is 35 Swedish films Bergman considered to be particularly good. Notice that the list above has Raven's End by Widerberg whereas this list has Widerberg's Elvira Madigan instead.

Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage
Gösta Berlings saga / The Saga of Gösta Berling (Mauritz Stiller 1924)
Rågens rike (Ivar Johansson 1929)
Söderkåkar / Shanty Town (Weyler Hildebrand 1932)
Karl Fredrik regerar / Karl Fredrik Reigns (Gustaf Edgren 1934)
Dollar (Gustaf Molander 1938)
Karriär / Career (Schamyl Bauman 1938)
Ett brott / A Crime (Anders Henrikson 1940)
Den allvarsamma leken (Rune Carlsten 1945)
Pengar - en tragikomisk saga (Nils Poppe 1946) 
Bara en mor / Only a Mother (Alf Sjöberg 1949)
Flicka och hyacinter / Girl With Hyacinths (Hasse Ekman 1950)
En djungelsaga / The Flute and the Arrow (Arne Sucksdorff 1957)
Syskonbädd 1782 / My Sister My Love (Vilgot Sjöman 1966)
Här har du ditt liv / Here's Your Life (Jan Troell 1966)
Elvira Madigan (Bo Widerberg 1967)
Som natt och dag / Like Night and Day (Jonas Cornell 1969)
Harry Munter (Kjell Grede 1969)
Äppelkriget / The Apple War (Tage Danielsson 1971)
Vem älskar Yngve Frej (Lars Lennart Forsberg 1973) Made for TV
Det sista äventyret / The Last Adventure (Jan Halldoff 1974)
Trollflöjten / The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman 1975)
Giliap (Roy Andersson 1975)
Långt borta och nära (Marianne Ahrne 1976)
Ett anständigt liv / A Decent Life (Stefan Jarl 1979)
Barnens ö / Children's Island (Kay Pollack 1980)
Mamma (Suzanne Osten 1982)
Den enfaldige mördaren / The Simple-Minded Murderer (Hasse Alfredson 1982)
Midvinterduell (Lars Molin 1983) Made for TV
Mitt liv som hund / My Life as a Dog (Lasse Halström 1985)
Amorosa (Mai Zetterling 1986)
Miraklet i Valby / The Miracle in Valby (Åke Sandberg 1989)
Glädjekällan (Richard Hobert 1993)
Potatishandlaren (Lars Molin 1996) Made for TV
Fucking Åmål / Show Me Love (Lukas Moodysson 1998)

The list is certainly not the last word on which 35 films to watch, and my own 35 titles would be different, but for newcomers to non-Bergman Swedish films it is a good place to start. But avoid Ett brott / A Crime, a really bad film. 1940 was a good year in Swedish cinema, but Ett brott is not a reason why.

Career, by Schamyl Bauman, however is a very good film. Bauman was somebody Bergman was enthusiastic about, and envious of. He was also important for Hasse Ekman. I will be writing more about Bauman in a later post, long overdue. (Here)

Howard Hawks top 15

I said on twitter that this week I would post a list of my favourite films by Howard Hawks. Here it is:

Scarface (1932)
Twentieth Century (1934)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Ball of Fire (1941)
To Have and Have Not (1945)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Red River (1948)
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
The Big Sky (1952)
Rio Bravo (1959)
Hatari! (1962)
Man Favorite Sport? (1964)
El Dorado (1966)

"The Greatest Films of All Time"

I am back from my summer break and the first post of the season will be about last week's major list event, the release of Sight & Sound's decennial list of the "Greatest Films of All Time". It has generated a lot of blog posts, tweets, facebook status updates and face to face debates the world over, so it has been a very successful launch. It has also been attacked and ridiculed. The purpose of it has been questioned, it has been called racist, sexist and boring (the last complain was I believe from me in my initial show of displeasure on twitter and facebook). However.

Calling the list racist and sexist (and/or calling the contributors racist and sexist) is unfair. The list is the sum of  846 top-ten-lists from people all over the world, and it is quite possible that these lists were filled by works made in Africa, South America, the Middle East, and films by women. But even if every list was, say, gender neutral (having as many men as women filmmakers represented), the final list might still not reflect that due to the way the process works.

I made a top ten list (which I posted here three months ago) Of the ten films I listed only two would have counted had my list been part of the 846. By this I mean that La règle du jeu (Jean Renoir 1939) and Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini 1954) were the only ones on my list that were mentioned on other lists as well, so they would have been the only ones that ended up on the final list. My other eight films would never have been heard of again. So even if they had been made by female African filmmakers, that would not have mattered in the least for the final list.

It was inevitable that the list would end up looking pretty much the way it did. Why? Because in order to get many votes a film would have to be known by a large number of people. I think it is safe to assume that everybody who contributed had seen Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) and it is no surprise that they come out on top. The Senegalese film The Price of Forgiveness (Mansour Sora Wade 2001) is a great film but since hardly anyone has seen it, it does not matter how good it is, it still could not win. The same is true for the magnificent Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka 1937). It is mainly due to statistics that these 50 films ended up on the list. Let's call it an example of the weak law of large numbers.

At film festivals it is often the case that they have an audience award. Everybody gets to vote on the films they have seen and the film that gets the most votes wins. Democratic and fair. Only it is not in the least fair. Film A might have been shown three times in a relatively small venue, perhaps seen by 250 people, whereas Film B was shown four times in large venues, perhaps seen by 2500 people. So even if 100% of those 250 who saw Film A voted it "the best", and only 11% of the 2500 voted Film B "the best" it would still get more votes, and that is not fair at all. There is something similar going on with this list.

So it is of course wrong to say that these are the 50 best films of all time. It is not even necessarily the case that the 846 contributors think that Vertigo is the best film ever made. It would still have ended up as the overall winner as long as enough people considered it good enough to be among the top ten. (It would be different if the contributors were asked to name just one film each.) But you could say perhaps that these are the most liked well-known films of all time. They are the films that are shown on most film history courses, they are the films most written about, they are the films that end up on these lists. It is a closed set, a self-perpetuating process. This is why I think this list is somewhat meaningless. It has been said that this is a cinephilic list, but it really is not. It should have been much more diverse for it to have been a cinephile's list. It has also been said that this list is great to use for newcomers, in order to explore cinema history. But again, it really is not. There is not much history there, too much is lacking. The only valuable purpose of it is to see what the lowest common denominators are among scholars and critics today, and its function as a water cooler subject at film journals and department of cinema studies.

What would be interesting is a list of all the 2045 films mentioned on the 846 individual lists. That list has the potential to be much more varied, interesting and historic.

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This is not to deny that many of the 50 films on the list are very good. Some I find fantastic, and are on my top 50 too, namely these eight:
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau 1927)
La règle du jeu
Journey to Italy
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa 1954)
The 400 Blows (François Truffaut 1959)
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard 1960)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai 2000)

Ten best films

Due no doubt to a bureaucratic oversight I was not invited to send my top ten favourite films to Sight & Sound's decennial poll. But I can still share that list here, for all the world to read.

In order to make this project manageable I made a short lost of 30 films, and from these 30 I tried to pick out ten. That was hard. I had no problems making it a top 13 list but that would be cheating, and so three of them have been sent back to the short list. Below are the remaining ten. I decided to restrict myself somewhat, so no director will have more than one film on the list. (The short list had for example four films by Howard Hawks, two by Jean-Pierre Melville and two by Powell/Pressburger.)

So then, here is the top ten list. The films are in chronological order.

Holiday (George Cukor 1938, US)
The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, Jean Renoir 1939, France)
Laura (Otto Preminger 1944, US)
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1946, UK)
My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946, US)
The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946, US)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948, US)
Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini 1954, Italy)
Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville 1967, France)
The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann 1973, UK/France)

It is remarkable that three of the films are from 1946. Some year.

I feel bad for there not being a "silent" film among the ten, but I had to be ruthless. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau 1927, US) was among the 13 films and although it is cheating a bit I mention it here. The top ten has films from the US and western Europe only, and no female filmmakers, but again, I had to be ruthless. I offer my sincere apologies to the Japanese and Indian films that almost made it, and to Claire Denis who almost made it too. At the beginning of next year I will come back with a much longer list of my favourite films, part of my twitter project of tweeting a favourite film every Monday, and this list will be much more heterogeneous. If you feel that your favourite film is missing above do not despair yet, it might appear next time. To be continued...

My favourite filmmakers

I am frequently asked what my favourite film is, or my favourite actor, or my favourite filmmaker. In order to humour these people, and those who have been afraid to ask, I thought I write some blog posts on the subject. Today I will list my favourite filmmakers, actors will come later in the spring. As for favourite films I tweet one every Monday during 2012 (with the hashtag #mytop52) and at the end of the year I will blog about them here too.

Before the list I better say a few words about it. First of all, and obviously, all those listed have made great films. Films that move me, thrill me and dazzle me and films that I want to watch again. And again. But to qualify on this list there is more to it than that. They must have made great films over the whole of their careers. As an example, Michael Ritchie made some fantastic films in the 1970s but he then unfortunately fizzled out so he will not be listed. Some other filmmakers did not make the list because either they have made too few films or I have not seen enough of their films (which is the case with for example Jacques Becker and Abolfazl Jalili, even though their films that I have seen have been fantastic). Then of course there are a few filmmakers whose films I have not seen at all but that I am must eager to explore, such as Sacha Guitry or Fred Niblo. Maybe there will come a new list in the future.

Another important factor is that the listed filmmakers have a strong presence in the films that they have made. This presence is stronger with some (John Ford for example) and lesser with others (such as Satyajit Ray or William Wyler), but it is almost always there. These are also filmmakers who had (or still have) an idea about their work, conscious artists with a way of looking at the world and something to say about that world.

Finally, before the list, remember that these are my favourite filmmakers. If your favourite filmmaker is not listed, do not get upset. Make your own list instead. Also, I have listed 58 filmmakers. Instead of doing a top 10 or top 50 or any other neat, even number, I just listed all those that I felt must be on such a list. Restraining myself because of numerical reasons did not seem necessary. This is not science, it is for fun.

But enough said, here are the 58 filmmakers. First comes Howard Hawks, who is in a league of his own. The rest is alphabetical. Some of them I have written about before, and when I have there is a link after their name to one of these posts (on some of them I have written several posts, but I just link to one anyway). Some of the others I will write about, sooner or later.

Howard Hawks (read more here)

Akira Kurosawa
Woody Allen (read more here)
Wes Anderson
Ingmar Bergman (read more here)
Budd Boetticher
Jane Campion
George Cukor (read more here)
Claire Denis
Clint Eastwood
Hasse Ekman (among many posts, here is one)
John Ford (read more here)
Sam Fuller
Hal Hartley
Henry Hathaway (read more here)
Alfred Hitchcock (read more here)
Nicole Holofcener
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Buster Keaton
Abbas Kiarostami
Fritz Lang
David Lean
Sergio Leone
Joseph H. Lewis
Ernst Lubitsch
Anthony Mann (read more here)
Michael Mann (read more here)
Jean-Pierre Melville
Mikio Naruse
Vincente Minnelli (read more here)
F.W. Murnau
Max Ophüls (read more here)
Sam Peckinpah
Michael Powell
Otto Preminger (read more here)
Nicholas Ray
Satyajit Ray
Carol Reed
Jean Renoir (read more here)
Jacques Rivette (read more here)
Roberto Rossellini
Robert Rossen
Martin Scorsese
Don Siegel
Douglas Sirk
Aleksandr Sokurov
Steven Spielberg (read more here)
Josef von Sternberg
Arne Sucksdorff
François Truffaut (read more here)
Orson Welles
Peter Weir (read more here)
Billy Wilder (read more here)
Luchino Visconti
William Wyler

Wong Kar-Wai
Yasujiro Ozu
Fred Zinnemann

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addition after posting: it occurred to me that Sarrisians might be interested in this list. If any should drop by, my list here would be a combination of those directors suitable for Pantheon Directors and those suitable for The Far Side of Paradise. The implication of that is of course that I could narrow the list done to just Pantheon Directors, but it would be too short a list.

Corrections: 2012-02-16 I forgot Wes Anderson. This is unforgivable and unacceptable. But he is there now, and the list now has 58 instead of 57 names.

Canon

I don't want to get all Harold Bloom on you, but thoughts about canon appears every now and then and I'm fascinated by it. Usually they give birth to fierce discussions, and questions are raised such as, what are they for? who decides what's in them? do we really want this kind of elitism? since there are no objective truths in art, are not canons by definition bad?

But a canon, i.e. a selection of works deemed to be of special value, is in itself neutral, and can be whatever you want it to be. If we just keep to the art form at hand, hundreds of thousands of films have been made over the years, and it's simply impossible to see them all, or even keep track of them, and the older they are, the more anonymous they become. For me, that's when a canon can be an invaluable help, as a starting point, for the budding student of film history, or the young eager film enthusiast who wants to get ahead in the game and watch some seminal films on a rainy day.

And canons, just like any other lists, are almost always stimulating and thought-provoking. But if they don't come with a clear definition and an argument, they can easy become pointless, and the debates they bring about equally pointless. Like when Woody Allen mentioned his six favourite films last month. We only knew what films, not why and how they were selected, and then we're none the wiser.

When I was teaching last semester, we ended the course with discussing canon, and my students was wondering which films I would myself put on a list. I thought about it for a while and came up with the following list. It should, as I said, be seen only as a starting point for exploring film history, but with these films I believe that you get both a very good idea of all the possibilities that narrative feature films have to offer, as well as a bunch of brilliant films. (But if you asked for a list of my favourite films, it would be a rather different selection.) Among the films here you get early cinema and modern cinema, colour and black and white, polyester and digital, English and Iranian, fast and slow, short and long, conventional and modernist, comic and tragic, complex and simply, but all of them artful and essential.

Ingeborg Holm, Victor Sjostrom 1913, Sweden

Sherlock Jr, Buster Keaton 1924, USA

Ten Days That Shook the World / Oktyabr, Sergei Eisenstein 1928, Soviet Union (Russia)

Our Daily Bread, King Vidor 1934, USA

The Great Illusion / La grande illusion, Jean Renoir 1937, France
You Only Live Once, Fritz Lang 1937, USA
Only Angels Have Wings, Howard Hawks 1939, USA
Meet Me in St Louis, Vincente Minnelli 1944, USA
A Matter of Life and Death, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger 1946 UK
Summer Interlude / Sommarlek, Ingmar Bergman 1951, Sweden

Ugestu Monotagari, Kenji Mizoguchi 1953, Japan

Illusion Travels By Streetcar/ La ilusion viaja an travia, Luis Bunuel 1954, Mexico
Flowing / Nagareru, Mikio Naruse 1956, Japan
The Searchers, John Ford 1956, USA
L'eclisse, Michelangelo Antonioni 1962, Italy

The Battle of Algiers / La battaglia di Algeri, Gillio Pontecorvo 1966, France/Italy
The Spider's Stratagem / Strategia del ragno, Bernardo Bertolucci 1970, Italy
The Adversary / Pratitwandi, Satyajit Ray 1972, India

Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Sam Peckinpah 1973, USA
Je, tu, il, elle, Chantal Akerman 1974, Belgium
La belle noiseuse, Jacques Rivette 1991, France

In the Soup, Alexandre Rockwell 1992, USA
The Truman Show, Peter Weir 1998, USA
The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas Kiarostami 1999, Iran

Beau Travail, Claire Denis, 1999 Frankrike

Delbaran, Abolfazl Jalili 2001, Iran

Prize of Forgiveness / Ndeysaan, Mansour Sora Wade 2001, Senegal
Lovely and Amazing. Nicole Holofcener 2001, USA

Collateral. Michael Mann 2004, USA

Woody Allen's six films

Ah, the modern age of blogging and social networks. A week ago in an interview with the Times (of London), Woody Allen talked about his life and his career. He also, apparently just in passing, named his six favourite films among his own:

Zelig (1984) 7,7

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) 7,5

Husbands and Wives (1992) 7,4

Bullets Over Broadway (1994) 7,5

Match Point (2005) 7,8

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) 7,4

And a surprisingly large amount of people are getting worked up by these choices, because they are the "wrong" films. One example is the Guardian's film blog which says that Allen "misjudge" his films "spectacularly" and finds his "cluelessness" "weirdly endearing". Vanity Fair and New York Magazine are two other publications that are getting involved, as are of course bloggers (like myself).

But what is the problem with the list? Yes, neither Annie Hall (1977) nor Manhattan (1979) are among the chosen ones but for starters we have no clues as to what were Allen's reasons for choosing these particular films. He might have chosen them because they were the films which came as close to what he wanted to achieve as possible. Or because he had a particularly happy time when making them. Or because, today, these films are closest to Allen's view of life.

And there is nothing horrendous about those six films. I myself like all of them, they all got on average good reviews by the critics and they all got roughly the same ratings on imdb (that is the figure after the titles above). Why not compare imdb's list with Allen's:

Annie Hall 8.2

Manhattan 8.1

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) 8.0

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) 7.9

Match Point 7.8

Zelig 7.7

Purple Rose of Cairo comes in on 8th place, followed by Bullets Over Broadway and with Vicky Cristina Barcelona at 11th place, followed by Husbands and Wives.

It would appear then that Allen actually is a tune with the public mood, rather than being completely bonkers, as has been suggested by some commentators.

This is just a silly thing of course, and there is no need to waste a lot of time with it, but I think that the reactions reveal some things.

One is the way that people get emotional about it. This is a testament both to the power of films, and to the fact that it is personal. "I love these films and if you love those films, then that just proves that there is something wrong with you."

Another thing is that making lists is always a foolproof way of getting people aroused and upset. And it is probably partly due to the above mentioned reason.

Another thing is perhaps related to the phenomenon with people getting so attached to films (and books, comics, songs and so on) that they feel that they own it, that they have rights concerning those films. So when somebody, Allen in this case, is not giving due credit to these films, maybe people feel let down, betrayed even.

What is different with this list though, is that usually people complain because what are on the lists are conceived as being clichéd and ordinary. This time around the commentators are bending over backwards to be as conventional as possible.

If I had taken a guess as to what six films Allen would have chosen, I would have gone with the following:

Life and Death (1975) 7.6

Zelig

Broadway Danny Rose (1984) 7.4

Purple Rose of Cairo

Hannah and Her Sisters

Sweet and Lowdown (1999) 7.2

(I cannot link to the article in the Times since Murdoch prefers to hide behind pay walls. Here is a link to the Australian instead, which admittedly is also a Murdoch paper. For an example of fans making demands on the films they love and the filmmakers who made them, why not check out the documentary The People vs. George Lucas (2010))

Tarantino's favourite films

No, I will not now make my own list of my 20 favourite films since 1992, I just want to defend Anything Else (2003). Quentin Tarantino put it on his list of the 20 best films since 1992 (the year he became a director) and in the blogosphere people have been flabbergasted by this. But why is it only Tarantino, me and my dear cousin Sofia who has noticed that it's one of Woody Allen's best films (and I've seen all of them but two). It's witty and intelligent and apparently Allen himself thinks so since he borrowed so much from it when he made Whatever Works (2009). It's also the perfect companion piece to Annie Hall (1977). Allen's character Dobel in Anything Else is so clearly Alvy Singer from Annie Hall, only 25 years later. I love it.

Here's what others have said, and here's the list:

The Pope on Film

The late Pope John Paul II (who as Pope's go was rather progressive) was also into films, and The Vatican produced a list of 45 favourite films in 1995, to celebrate cinema's 100th birthday. I know I'm a bit late writing about it, but it wasn't until last week I finally took the time to go through the list. And the fact of the matter is that as film lists go, it's pretty good. It's not some kind of Catholic kitsch, but really good films, religious or non religious. And it's broadminded enough to include films by Fellini, Pasolini, Bergman and Buñuel. But, what I'm most happy about is the fact that it also includes The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), the wonderful Ealing comedy with Alec Guinness. It's got one of the best scripts ever written, by T.E.B. Clarke, and the fact that it's on the list is an even more depressing sign of how much I miss the previous Pope.

Yes, it's not hyperbole, the script is to clever, witty and rich and nuances and humour, it really is one of the best ever written.

I give you the trailer:

Meet Me in St Louis

There are so many great films out there, so many great directors. Meet Me in St Louis is definitely one of those films and its director Vincente Minnelli one of those directors. Smooth, complex camera movements and expressive colouring, exquisite tenderness and emotional frenzy, are the most obvious hallmarks of his films, but there's more. There's such passion, such depth of feeling, it's sometimes close to unbearable. But, as I said, there's also tenderness. Here's a beautiful scene with Judy Garland seducing the man she's after.

Andrew Britton has written about it, Geoffrey MacNab has written about it and it's on Stanley Fish's list of the "10 best American films". Yet I'm not sure everybody gets it, and its greatness. But it is there for the taking, in all it's warmth and surrealism.

(That Stanley Fish calls his list "The 10 best American films" is obviously just a way of inviting heated counterarguments. I will never understand how such a list can arouse such passion, anger and sometimes vitriol. Calling it "My 10 favourite American films" would of course have been more appropriate, but he would still have gotten angry comments and e-mails from people questioning his choices.)