Roberta Ciabarra

Programmer, Australian Centre for the Moving Image

Australia

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

8½	1963	Federico Fellini
400 Blows, The	1959	François Truffaut
Age of Innocence, The	1993	Martin Scorsese
Barton Fink	1991	Joel & Ethan Coen
Bicycle Thieves, The	1948	Vittorio de Sica
Blue Velvet	1986	David Lynch
Conformist, The	1970	Bernardo Bertolucci
Conversation, The	1974	Francis Ford Coppola
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind	2004	Michel Gondry
Vertigo	1958	Alfred Hitchcock

Comments

It seems preposterous if not outright shameful to have ignored all film production before 1948 (my earliest entry), not to mention entire continents, and I certainly didn’t deliberately confine my selection to the first five letters of the alphabet (and one consonant very late in the spectrum). With those qualifications made, the films in my list are ones whose originality and bravura fairly winded me with exhilaration in my initial encounters with them – on 35mm in dedicated cinema environments, for what it may be worth (a great deal, to me) – and to which I habitually return, their aesthetic and existential pleasures undiluted by repeat viewings (lesser viewing formats notwithstanding).