30. Favourites in Film Art

These are the films that I could in no way exclude from the list of my favourites; in case of doubt, I left the film out. The 112 form a bit more than 20% of all the motion pictures I have seen in my life (yes, I do keep an account). The majority of them are included because of the narrative structure or style, which I generally find more appealing than the "message" or the content of the story. Where I could not decide which film of a director I should include —and considered two to be too much—, I gave both alternatives. And, of course, if I had compiled it yesterday (or next Sunday, or on my 25th birthday), the list would have been different. 

• The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (Auguste & Louis Lumière, 1896)
• Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922)
• Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924)
• The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
• Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
• The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
• City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
• M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
• L'atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
• Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
• Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
• Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)
• Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943)
• Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
• Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
• Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
• Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
• Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
• Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
• Tokyo monogatari (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
• Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
• Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
• The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
• The Unvanquished (Satyajit Ray, 1956)
• The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
• Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
• Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)
• Night Train (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1959)
• La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
• L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
• Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
• Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
• The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
• Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)
• The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962)
• 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
• Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1964)
• Red Desert (Michelangelo Antionioni, 1964)
• The Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
• Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
• The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
• Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
• Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
• Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
• Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol & Paul Morrissey, 1966)
• Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)
• Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
• The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)
• Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)
• Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
• Satyricon (Federico Fellini, 1969)
• My Night at Maud's (Éric Rohmer, 1969)
• The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969)
• Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
• Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971)
• The Emigrants (Jan Troell, 1971)  or  The New Land (1972)
• McCabe & Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
• Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
• Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
• Ciao Manhattan (John Palmer & David Weisman, 1972)
• The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
• Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)  or  Days of Heaven (1978)
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974)
• The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)
• A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)
• Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
• The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
• Grey Gardens (Albert & David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffy Meyer, 1975)
• Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
• Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
• Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
• Sebastiane (Derek Jarman & Paul Humfress, 1976)
• The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)
• The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
• Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
• Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
• Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
• Siberiade (Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, 1979)
• Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)
• Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
• Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
• Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
• Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
• The Decalogue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989)
• Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
• Sátántángo (Béla Tarr, 1994)
• Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994)
• Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)  or  Ten (2002)
• Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)
• Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
• Ulysses' Gaze (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1995)
• Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
• Eternity and a Day (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1998)
• Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
• In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
• Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hrantizky, 2000)
• Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
• The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)
• Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
• Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
• Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)
• Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003)
• Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
• The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
• The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

29. Epitaph for Amy

A penny for the Old Guy. London, 2007. I'm very pleased to meet you! You, the city where everyone has been already. Everyone but me, but the senses already alert! Dark greens and the delicate drum of the drizzle. A woman organising a party and a depressed war hero. The queen of literary elegance. The silent sense of content (contempt?) that everyone gets. A fresh sound — oh! but the hair and the eyes! —, we like to like her.

(But would we meet her in the House of Mystery?)

Today in Camden, a powdery mirror and a bottle of Jack Daniel's half full. Pockets filled with stones and a "Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again" in Sussex in 1941. Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace!

28. Unconscious intertextuality

In a fragment from The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa describes the functions of grammar in the creation of prose and, stating that grammar should merely be a tool and not a law, tries to illustrate the legitimacy of its use. He writes:

For example, it [grammar] divides verbs into transitive and intransitive; however, someone who understands what is involved in speaking, often has to make a transitive verb intransitive, or vice versa, if he is to convey exactly what he feels, and not, like most human animals, merely to glimpse it obscurely. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa; the Serpent's Tail's 2002 edition, fragment 231, p. 231).

 

Instinctively, I began to look for a verb that would exemplify Pessoa's discourse before going on to a real example of his. "To write" — that was the first word that occurred to me. 

Why that verb? Because writing is what I daily do, or at least want to do, and thus it forms an important part of my being? Or is it rather that my unconscious created a link between these words and an essay by Barthes ("To Write: An Intransitive Verb?") before I was even able to notice it?

27. Hypophora

Why am I not any more occupied with composing lists of literary classics that haven't been—shamefully, I used to say—translated to Estonian? For what reason am I now almost always hesitant, as far as my reading skills in English, German and French go, to found a relationship with a book on a version other than the original? Why am I so often ashamed of myself  for not being able to quickly recall the Estonian equivalents of the literary terms that form a significant part of my nocturnal consciousness?
—In a language run over by rampant reporters and real estate agents this passion of mine cannot be shared.

26. Tradition

For the third day in a row I feel that I cannot go to bed without having listened to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" and, as usual, having smiled at the following lines from the ninth stanza:

"And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers"

Is it a smile only? 

A code, an affirmation, perhaps?