Godfrey Cheshire

Critic

US

Voted in the critics’ poll

Voted for

2001: A Space Odyssey	1968	Stanley Kubrick
Battleship Potemkin	1925	Sergei M Eisenstein
Close-Up	1989	Abbas Kiarostami
Fear Eats the Soul	1974	Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Godfather: Part II, The	1974	Francis Ford Coppola
Intolerance	1916	D.W. Griffith
Man Escaped, A	1956	Robert Bresson
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The	1962	John Ford
Passion of Joan of Arc	1927	Carl Theodor Dreyer
Rear Window	1954	Alfred Hitchcock

Comments

In Tehran some years ago it was reported, perhaps apocryphally, that Jean-Luc Godard had said, “Cinema is Griffith to Kiarostami.” My list certainly reflects that idea, and I’m particularly glad to include Kiarostami’s Close-up as a way of extending the purview of the poll beyond the 1970s and Europe/America.