Zsolt Gyenge

Assistant professor, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

Hungary

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

chien andalou, Un	1928	Luis Buñuel
Close-Up	1989	Abbas Kiarostami
Death of Mr Lazarescu, The	2005	Cristi Puiu
Dogville	2003	Lars von Trier
Great Dictator, The	1940	Charles Chaplin
Hidden	2004	Michael Haneke
Mirror	1974	Andrei Tarkovsky
Pierrot le Fou	1965	Jean-Luc Godard
Sátántangó	1994	Béla Tarr
Wavelength	1967	Michael Snow

Comments

When choosing films for the impossible list of the ten greatest, I had three criteria in mind. First, in order to be considered as one of the greatest, movies should always look for new ways of cinematic expression or should try to analyse, to reflect on the problems, possibilities and boundaries of representation. Second, it is also important that it doesn’t become a purely formal innovation, so it should also be able to have an emotional and/or intellectual effect on its viewer through its thematic content – it should deal with relevant issues. And the third criteria is about a film’s contemporaneity in 2012: I chose films that didn’t seem outdated, obsolete neither in their formal or thematic treatment, irrespective of their year of production.