Marco Müller

Comments

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

A masterpiece of visual music - one of the movies that introduced viewers to the notion of film as art.

By the Bluest of Seas

An ethology of the euphoric human body: probably the most unclassifiable Soviet film ever.

Bringing Up Baby

One of the fastest, screwiest comedies ever made.

The River

A film that makes the screen disappear in favour of what it reveals: the immemorial cycle of childhood, love and death.

Europa '51

Unity of film fragments is one of the possible forms of maturity of the 'modern' method.

Ordet

Mise en scène as miracle (a miracle repeated at each viewing).

Vertigo

Hitchcok's supreme and most mysterious piece - as cinema and as emblem of the art. Paranoia and obsession have never looked better on a film screen.

My Darling Clementine

Ford is Cinema, like Aeschylus or Sophocles are Tragedy.

Late Spring

Through the quiet tensions of generational conflict, "happiness comes only through effort" - the same in film history.

Moonfleet

"The exercise was beneficial, Sir".

Further remarks

I was born in 1953. And modern cinema is reborn in 1953 through two films - Jack Arnold reinvents 3D sci-fi cinema adopting the aliens’ point of view, showing humanity as seen through the lens of their very different eyes; and Roberto Rossellini is shooting Voyage to Italy. My first cinephile years were the mid-60s and the place was the second-run theatres on the outskirts of Rome (before revival and arthouse houses were created). I could not include in the list three of the directors I intensely loved then (and continue to love): Jacques Tourneur, Sam Fuller and Terence Fisher. Also, I could not add two films that will always exist for me outside the conventional limitations of time and space: Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) and Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967). Starting from 1975, Chinese cinema became an integral part of my life and I would have loved to include at least one of the masterpieces of my teacher Xie Jin, Wutai jiemei (Two Stage Sisters, 1964). I started working in festival manufacturing in 1978: it has proved impossible for me to choose in a list of ten films one or two (against all the others) of the filmmakers I could choose to become closely associated with in the course of the last 45 years.