Eugène Green

Comments

Au hasard Balthazar

All of Bresson's films – with the exception of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne – are great films, but this one resumes the most perfectly his unique contribution to cinema.

L' eclisse

Perhaps the most powerful, by its aesthetic radicalness and the intensity of Monica Vitti's performance, of the trilogy beginning with L’Avventura.

KOHAYAGAWA-KE NO AKI

This film, besides the usual metaphysical poetry derived from the daily life of a middle-class family, provides, like Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds, a meditation on death.

The Last Laugh

Perhaps the most intense film by he who is, for me, the greatest director of the silent age of cinema.

FRANCESCO GIULLARE DI DIO

By the fact that its subject is not of the contemporary world, this film shows perhaps most clearly the real nature of Rossellini's cinematic genius. The chapter with the leper is one of the greatest moments in all the history of cinema.

Fellini-Satyricon

Petronius and Ancient Rome are simply pretexts for Fellini's masterful evocation, as in La dolce vita, of our declining civilisation, with a mixture of nostalgia and joie de vivre.

CONTE D'HIVER

One of Rohmer's rare films, with My Night at Maud's, where his spiritual concerns are explicitly expressed. It is also one of the most moving.

Ugetsu Monogatari

The most beautiful and poetic of Mizoguchi's historical films, but which also, under the costumes, contains some of the social thought about the role of women that is expressed in his modern-day films. With the apparition of the potter's dead wife, it contains, for me, the most powerful ghost scene in all of cinema.

Wild Strawberries

From the great period of Bergman's creation, a film in which psychology is still evoked with poetry.

O ESTRANHO CASO DE ANGÉLICA

At a first viewing, I was disturbed by the special effects, but subsequent contact with the film convinced me of its power and poetry. A sort of resumé of Oliveira's themes and style, which serves as a link between all his works, from Aniki-Bóbó to Gebo and the Shadow.

Further remarks

Choosing the ‘ten greatest films’ is very reductive, and depends, to a great extent, on the day on which one fills out the form. still have much fondness for Shoeshine, by Vittorio De Sica, and Gertrud, by Carl Theodor Dreyer, which were in my list the last time I participated in this exercise, and there are no doubt other films which I should have named if I had filled out the form yesterday, or if I were to do it tomorrow.