Michel Hazanavicius

The Artist; OSS 117: Cairo; Nest of Spies

France

Voted in the directors’ poll

Voted for

City Girl	1929	FW Murnau
City Lights	1931	Charles Chaplin
To Be or Not To Be	1942	Ernst Lubitsch
Citizen Kane	1941	Orson Welles
Apartment, The	1960	Billy Wilder
Shining, The	1980	Stanley Kubrick
North by Northwest	1959	Alfred Hitchcock
Third Man, The	1949	Carol Reed
Raging Bull	1980	Martin Scorsese
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs	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.