The Artist; OSS 117: Cairo; Nest of Spies
France
Voted in the directors’ poll
Voted for
1929 |
FW Murnau |
|
1931 |
Charles Chaplin |
|
1942 |
Ernst Lubitsch |
|
1941 |
Orson Welles |
|
1960 |
Billy Wilder |
|
1980 |
Stanley Kubrick |
|
1959 |
Alfred Hitchcock |
|
1949 |
Carol Reed |
|
1980 |
Martin Scorsese |
|
1937 |
David Hand et al |
Comments
City Girl: The poetic power of images, the universality and the purity of the narration. It’s the essence of cinema.
City Lights: Chaplin was the best at everything: actor, director, screenwriter, producer, clown, acrobat, dancer, musician. The art of counterpoint: scenes that are still funny today, in a melodramatic script that’s stayed touching. It’s impossible not to cry in the last scene, one of the most beautiful scenes ever made.
To Be or Not to Be: The perfect comedy. Extremely funny, irreverent, visionary, savage. Lubitsch’s Berlin humour stays a reference and a model to this day.
Citizen Kane: The foundation. The Bible. The ABC of cinema. Seeing this film at the right moment opens up perspectives completely unsuspected until then.
The Apartment: The perfect director, the perfect balance between commercial contingencies and artistic requirements. Wilder was always at the right distance from mankind. To paraphrase a Jewish proverb, he knew man very well, but loved them all the same.
The Shining: Mastermind. The perfect mechanism. So perfect that it stays in the irrational. Hyper-visual, hyper-cinematographic, hyper-perverse and at the same time accessible to everyone.
North by Northwest: cinema in all its splendour. Charming, graphically perfect, joyous, intense, fun, full of second-degree stuff, stylish.
The Third Man: The ultimate atmosphere film. More than a story or situation, it's the context, the scenery, the shadow play, and of course the music which gives the film its power.
Raging Bull: Surely the best biopic ever made, or how to give a supposedly true story an exceptional dramatic power. Scorsese and De Niro at their peak. Simultaneously tragic, visually perfect, epic and flamboyant.
Snow White: Without a doubt the first film to ever come close to painting. A senseless enterprise, the first time that children's entertainment was really taken seriously and which gave a departure point for a series of childrens' films of great quality that were innovative and creative and continue today with Pixar films.