Ling Zhang

Ph.D student, Department of Cinema and Media Studies University of Chicago

China

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

Battleship Potemkin	1925	Sergei M Eisenstein
Brighter Summer Day, A	1991	Edward Yang
Cleo from 5 to 7	1962	Agnès Varda
enfants du paradis, Les	1945	Marcel Carné
Passenger, The	1974	Michelangelo Antonioni
Roue, La	1920	Abel Gance
Spirit of the Beehive, The	1973	Víctor Erice
Spring in a Small Town	1948	Fei Mu
Sunrise	1927	F. W. Murnau
Travelling Players, The	1975	Theodoros Angelopoulos

Comments

Spring in a Small Town delicately employs female voiceover and ambiguous multiple narrative perspectives, which was rare in the 1940s; the film takes interesting stylistic inspiration from both Hollywood film noir and traditional Chinese operas. Cleo from 5 to 7 has an innovative narrative structure in terms of the unfolding temporality and movement of both characters and the camera. A Brighter Summer Day is a very intricate epic of the heterogeneity of Taiwanese society in the 1960s, with a complex multi-layered soundscape.