Florin Barbu

Critic, beWhere!; presenter, CINEMAS

Romania

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

Apocalypse Now	1979	Francis Ford Coppola
Battleship Potemkin	1925	Sergei M Eisenstein
chien andalou, Un	1928	Luis Buñuel
Citizen Kane	1941	Orson Welles
City Lights	1931	Charles Chaplin
grande bouffe, La	1973	Marco Ferreri
Magnolia	1999	Paul Thomas Anderson
Metropolis	1927	Fritz Lang
Ordet	1955	Carl Theodor Dreyer
Star Wars	1977	George Lucas

Comments

What can I say? Without elaborate explanation, I observe that the upper half of my list is occupied by the black-and-white movies – movies that can be simply called ‘pure art’. Does that mean that elementary, human emotion was left behind? Absolutely not! I’ve recently (re)saw Metropolis (the restored version, at the Transilvania International Film Festival in 2010) with live and very modern, industrial-sounding music performed by Antonio Bras – the efect was astonishing: eveything that cinema means was there: editing, tension, (melo)drama, acting, music… everything! Simply remarkable! A few words about Star Wars. It was the movie that made me love the cinema, the first film that made me feel like I was stepping into a brand new world when the lights turned off and silence covered the theatre. Well, except for the popcorn.