Barrett Hodsdon

Comments

Die NIBELUNGEN 1 TEIL: SIEGFRIED

Early model of monumental mythic drama of extreme static intensity.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

Summation of a pure poetic mode of silent narrative imagery.

Man with a Movie Camera

Precursor case of the filmic investigation of everyday reality replete with the pleasure of curiosity and reflexivity.

The Scarlet Empress

Deification of the star image via Dietrich's ecstatic triumphalism.

White Heat

A genre apotheosis through the vigour of Cagney's exultant performance via a fable of gangster annihilation,

Madame de...

The peak of elegance of camera mobility, precision, and subtle density,

Imitation of Life

A synthesis of 1950s America's social tensions through masterful fusion of tragedy, full-blown melodrama and ironic undercurrent.

Psycho

The zenith of narrative manipulation and audience assault as a challenge to prevailing censorship.

Persona

A masterwork of 1960s modernists and intense self-reflection, as well as probing formal reflexivity.

Au hasard Balthazar

The reverse of Disneyfication: a parable of animal sacrifice and the price of human foibles.

Further remarks

NUMBER 11

I have one addition to at least cover the avant-garde, Michael Snow's La Région Centrale (1971), which is outside the mainstream arena.

An hallucinatory exercise of the limits of camera perception tolerance.

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FURTHER COMMENTS

The term "greatest films" embraces a spectrum of possible definitions. I have chosen moments of high expressivity cum innovation, mapping a chronological path to 1970. After this date and the dissolution of filmic classicism, cinema is subject to ever increasing global dispersion and experimentation alongside commercial confinement.