José Carlos Avellar

Critic, Escrever Cinema

Brazil

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

Barren Lives	1963	Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Battleship Potemkin	1925	Sergei M Eisenstein
Entranced Earth	1967	Glauber Rocha
Memories of Underdevelopment	1968	Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Oedipux Rex	1967	Pier Paolo Pasolini
Passenger, The	1974	Michelangelo Antonioni
Pierrot le Fou	1965	Jean-Luc Godard
Providence	1977	Alain Resnais
Travelling Players, The	1975	Theodoros Angelopoulos
Twenty Years Later	1984	Eduardo Coutinho

Comments

As we all know, the ten greatest films of all time are hundred, or more, or still more. We must see the list just like we see a film: with eyes wide open to see what is outside the frame as well as within it. Here and there, we see mostly, first, or only the out-of-frame image, an image that the one on the screen projects in our mind. Every ten years, the real rule of the game is to see the ‘out of the list’ films – thus the ‘ten greatest’ includes many others that we cannot take out of focus. In my list these are works by Bergman, Bertolucci, Bresson, Buñuel, Dreyer, Erice, Kluge, Loach, Losey, Mizoguchi, Murnau, Ozu, Tarkovski, Visconti, Welles... Let’s imagine the ten greatest as a single frame taken by chance in the middle of a travelling shot: the previous and the following frame of this moving picture show a different ten.