Pier Marton’s Favorite Films (10 & 50)

When asked by (now, the missed) Milos Stehlik of Facets what were my ten all time favorites, I cheated and gave him these eleven titles, in no particular order:

• La Jetée by Chris Marker
• Ménilmontant by Dmitry Kirsanov
• Shoah by Claude Lanzmann
• The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Has
• Pickpocket by Robert Bresson
• Playtime by Jacques Tati
• L’Amour à Mort by Alain Resnais
• Hotel Terminus by Marcel Ophuls
• The “historical” films of Roberto Rossellini (you could start with Rise to Power of Louis XIV)
• Warning Shadows by Arthur Robison
• The Gleaners and I by Agnès Varda (don’t miss the sequel on the DVD)

Around that time I was asked by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? to come up with a list of 50 films.
So, in no particular order, here is a list:

• Night and Fog (Resnais)
• 7 Up series (Apted)
• A Man Escaped (Bresson)
• Night Mail (Wright/Watt)
• Lovers on the Bridge (Carax)
• The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
• Greed (von Stroheim)
• 20 The Great Dictator (Chaplin)
• Army of Shadows (Melville)
• L’Atalante (Vigo)
• The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas/Getino)
• An Andalusian Dog (Buñuel/Dali)
• The Battle of Chile (Gúzman)
• In the Mood for Love (Wong)
• The Fiancés/i Fidanzati (Olmi)
• Earth (Dovzhenko)
• Distant/Uzak (Ceylan)
• 30 The Last Chrisanthemum (Mizoguchi)
• Ozu – a film by him
• L’Avventura (Antonioni)
• Potemkin (Eisenstein)
• Mutum (Kogut)
• A Film Unfinished (Hersonski)
• The Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov)
• Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
• Flamenco/Tango/Fados Trilogy (Saura)
• Rio Zona Norte or Vidas Secas some other film (dos Santos)
• 40 Sunless (Marker)
• Open City (Rossellini)
• Repulsion (Polanski)
• Stalker (Tarkovsky)
• Nosferatu (Murnau)
• Rashomon/Throne of Blood (Kurosawa)
• Blood of a Poet (Cocteau)
• Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
• North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
• The Powers of Ten (Eames)
• 50 Red Psalm or some other film (Jancsó)

PLEASE SEE BELOW!

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(you will find films you cannot find elsewhere, some amazing surprises and treasures)

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Competing very close (some could go back among the list of fifty) – again, no particular order: Chile, Obstinate Memory; Nostalgia for the Light (Guzmán); L’Ange (Bokanowski); Les Cartes Postales (Cahen); From Language to Language (Aviv); Voyages (Finkiel); Latcho Drom (Gatlif); Faithless (Bergman); Os Fuzis (Guerra); Vidas Secas (dos Santos); Some Like It Hot (Wilder); Port of Shadows (Carné); Winged Migration (Cluzaud – Debats – Perrin); Children of Paradise (Carné); Portrait of Jason (Clarke); 79 Springs (Álvarez); Talk to Her (Almadóvar); Night of the Hunter (Laughton); Black Orpheus (Camus); Niagara (Hathaway); The Eclipse (Antonioni); The Society of the Spectacle (Debord); L’Enfant (Dardenne Bros); Into Great Silence (Gröning); Saló (Pasolini); The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski); Hiroshima mon Amour (Resnais); tonight’s headlines (Doron Solomons); The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer); Before the Rain (Manchevski); Jeanne Dielman (Akerman); AR (Kubelka); Butoh (Eiko and Koma); Fateless (Koltai); Black Is Black Ain’t… (Riggs); Der Lauf der Dinge (Fieschli and Weiss); Vukovar Poste Restante (Draskovic); Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne); The Violin (Vargas); The Story of Qui Jiu (Zhang); F for Fake (Welles); Wavelength (Snow); Letter from Siberia (Marker); Peace (Soda); Ran/Ikiru (Kurozawa); After Life (Koreeda); Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai), Family Romance, LLC (Herzog), Les Modèles de Pickpocket (Mangolte), Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne), City of God (Meirelles), a great many Cinema Novo films like Black God/White Devil, Os Fuzis… Italian filmmakers like Antonioni, de Sica, Olmi… Japanese filmmakers like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Teshigahara, Koreeda, and others like Bruno Dumont (France), Jia Zhangke & Zhang Yang (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), Roy Andersson (Sweden)…

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