Welcome to MovieJawn’s first ever Sound & Vision Poll, where our writers share why they love their 10 favorite movies of all time!

by Dan Santelli, Staff Writer

Listmaking is one of those treasured activities practiced by cinephiles about which I’m decidedly ambivalent. There’s a tremendous value to creating a list that contextualizes film in a certain genre, cycle, or mode, not to mention one that emphasizes the ephemeral attributes of various scenes that start a dialogue between films that hitherto has not occurred. On the other hand, I’m wary of productiveness (or lack thereof) tied to declaring a grouping of titles the Greatest Films of All-Time. How does my taste apply to that of everyone else? Even if it was to be framed as my Favorite Films of All-Time, who’s to say that this grouping of titles is definitive, as taste is fluid and ever-evolving, with the potential of making some movies that meant something to us at an earlier age all but irrelevant in the now. Nevertheless, I can’t help but want to take part in the conversation, and the cavalcade of lists that’s come down the MovieJawn pipeline over the last few weeks has proved inspiring and enlightening. My colleagues are not just that, they’re consummate soldiers of cinema, marching along with their heads held high as they impart the wonders of this medium on our readers with good cheer and bottomless enthusiasm.

Before we proceed to the list itself, I’d like to note that the following is neither a definitive assortment of favorites nor is it meant to suggest an objective evaluation of the history of cinema. My methodology in assembling it was simple. I selected three movies I love dearly and knew I wanted to include; thereafter, I typed 22 additional titles into a random selector on the internet and the first 7 selected were the titles that completed the list. I also chose to draft my list alphabetically, as ranking them felt a little like comparing apples and oranges.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (dir. Werner Herzog, 1972)

With the possible exception of Lessons of Darkness, there is no other film in Werner Herzog’s illustrious career that best encapsulates his sense of vision and philosophy than this early feature, about Spanish conquistadors in search of El Dorado and succumbing to the indifference of nature as self-delusion, tyranny, and madness overtake the expedition. The sins of the German fathers are explored through sublimation here, as European colonialism runs amok and one of the conquistadors, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), insidiously destabilizes the hierarchy as a step toward realizing his power-mad dreams. That makes the film sound a lot less subtle than it is, for this is a complex, mystical, and, at times, transcendental work that’s realized in a matter-of-fact style that dips between documentary observation to fever-dream absurdity. It climaxes at an intersection of the sublime and ridiculous that’s so haunting and dumbfounding that it could’ve only come from someone who’s both genius and madman.

Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

Kubrick’s greatest achievement. The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut give it a run for its money, yet even those stunning imitations of perfection bow down to this adaptation of Thackeray’s picaresque. Ryan O’Neal adopts a brogue and a poker face in the role of an Irish scalawag whose journey begins and ends with a duel and sees him rise from the bottom before falling straight back down, while Kubrick constructs a lavish, shimmering vision of the mid-18th century as a moving painting occupied by actors under the spell of the director’s deliberateness. Told with obsessive linearity by a narrator who comments on the action as much as he recounts it, Kubrick’s cinematic game of chance is both monumental and intimate, as well as impassive and funny, a naturally-lit production that effectively revives the period through rigorous detail and sees Kubrick running the emotional gamut not through the expressions of his actors but that of his camera, staging, editing, and leisurely pace. If ever there’s a movie that dispels the myth of Kubrick as an automaton, this is it.

Daisy Kenyon (dir. Otto Preminger, 1947)

This Postwar melodrama, about an artist/protofeminist (Joan Crawford) and the two men she’s torn between (Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda), amounts to 100 minutes of director Otto Preminger firing flaming arrows into the Hollywood melodrama template, curbing all desire to frame character as broad or incident as heightened (Dana Andrews compulsively shutting off Daisy’s phonograph is a perfect shorthand) for something more empathic, suggestive, and progressive. Nobody is either good or bad, just flawed. They’re always changing, always revealing, constantly on the move, at once noble (Daisy’s sophistication and independence, Dan’s commitment to social justice, and Peter’s veiled emotional acumen), and still running away (from their true selves, their insecurities, their past pains).

Preminger’s mise-en-scène approach does wonders to coax out their inner lives and uncertainties in extended shots (fewer cuts, fewer lies), effectively transfiguring the studio sets into an emotional space. His refusal to moralize and, instead, ground behavior and impulse in psychology and understanding still feels modern, and the same goes for his peripheral ganders at familial tensions, child abuse (keep an eye out for Chekhov's Slap), and racial prejudices. Only the very last scene comes off explicitly as a Hayes Code capitulation, but the rest is so impeccable that I’ll carry the water and write another ending for myself. Why this remains absent from the Postwar Hollywood canon is a total mystery.

The Devil Probably (dir. Robert Bresson, 1977)

Here it is. Apocalypse Bresson. The Beginning of the End. In this thorny, still controversial film that was a scourge upon its release, the world of Robert Bresson, a master of the cinema and my favorite filmmaker as of this writing, begins to crumble under the weight of modernity. It’s a vision of man despoiling the land as much as he pollutes the soul. As is his wont, Bresson remains true to form, capturing post-’68 youth, its laments, and failings, with utter clarity, via the ever-present 50mm lens. However, the liminal spaces between objects and “models” (he never hired professional actors), this time huddled in cramped interiors (such as garrets, bookstores, buses, and even a Medieval community center), are now stifling and gasping for breath in a muted palette of rust and gray. When a group congregates to discuss Catholicism’s relevance to contemporary life, a tuned organ belts out a sardonic aside. When a bus of inquisitive riders strikes a vehicle, disrupting a debate of who’s pulling the strings, the camera contemplates an open door, waiting for a presence to pick up where the passengers left off – nothing but car horns and bare sidewalk.

The subject of Bresson’s penultimate feature is an all-consuming nihilism that arises from perceived powerlessness. Charles’ end is as tragic a suicide as that of the eponymous figure in Bresson’s earlier Mouchette, but the character’s path is determined from the outset with no ambiguity, as the first two shots following the credits let the cat out of the bag. What is Bresson up to here? It’s open to interpretation, but, given the pessimistic tenor of his late work, I believe he’s urging us to dwell on Charles’ demise as a potentially logical response to the inaction/refusal of those who could create betterment and change. You could argue it’s single-minded, but Bresson’s articulation bears a forcefulness that suggests that considering a counterargument is akin to disavowing the damage already done, a self-blinding act to shut out the rot. The Devil Probably may not be as bleak as his final film, L’Argent, but even still this might be Bresson’s most corrosively depressing work.

Edvard Munch (dir. Peter Watkins, 1974)

A radical work of art. Peter Watkins’ nearly 4-hour biopic about the tortured Symbolist painter is the most powerful and incisive movie about an artist ever made, the Grand Poobah of mockumentaries, and a profound, haunting work about personal dejection, social transgression, and the artistic sublimation of desire. The robust grain and soft-lit sheen of the spastic, zoom-happy 16mm photography, at times approximating the texture of Munch’s paintings, lend a heightened immediacy to this erratic portrait of the painter’s life in a 19th-century society bound by bourgeois institutions and social constructs; being Watkins, he positions the ruling (middle) class, family, patriarchy (sexism), and marriage as the roots of all-embracing social/psychological ills.

Watkins' film is, at once, deeply empathetic toward and slyly critical of its subject, specifically in that it's more suspect of Munch's conflicted view of women than people let on. More to the point, no film has ever better captured the functions of art, the purgative power of creating it, and the illuminating possibilities of experiencing it. Every shade of color is imbued with psychology and feeling, just as every brushstroke represents a political act of a sort. His paintings, especially those of the 1890s, are practically artistic renderings of the man's neuroses and cognitive distortions, publicizing pain and delusion while effectively ushering in a new era of art. But riddled by paranoia, fear, and lack of fulfillment, Munch also dooms himself to become a caricatured embodiment of his own artistic obsessions — art ultimately devours the artist. 

One of the supporting characters, Mrs. Heiberg seems the ideal figure here, a hope for a future predicated on social liberation and reform (not to mention female independence and autonomy), but, in her time, is confined by marriage and the projection of the painter’s desire. Munch and Heiberg operate singly as transgressors haunted by the status quo, yearning for a freedom that eludes them; he strives to quell his demons while pushing art into new directions of texture and emotion, and she longs to break society’s glass ceiling and, subliminally, transcend the edges of Munch’s canvas.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (dir. Hara Kazuo, 1987)

I still can’t seem to fully unpack this annihilating docu-inquiry into Japanese national history and identity. Its subject is Kenzo Okuzaki, a convicted murderer and “truth terrorist”, as film critic Richard Brody put it, on an obsessive quest to expose Emperor Hirohito's enabling of heinous war crimes committed by the Japanese during the Second World War, and the camera's complicity in his travails, which include abortively assaulting no less than two former Regiment officers in front of their families, does more to make the viewer question the relationship between documentarian and subject, as well as the ethics and scruples of documentary production, than most films would dare. Unlike in Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, in which he partly uses the making of a documentary about his ex-wife seeking autonomy as an excuse to stalk her, the invasive motives of the filmmaker are upended by the urgency and forcefulness of Okuzaki – the headline of Vincent Canby's New York Times review labeled him a “psychopath”. Just like the men whose fates were decided by those who led them, he's as much a casualty of war, and ultimately seems too addicted to the chaos he generates amid his search for the historical truth that he carries on well after it's time to quit. This undoubtedly inspired Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, but that film only hinted at the depths Hara and Okuzaki plumb. A truly revelatory and draining experience that might leave you feeling sick.

Hellzapoppin’ (dir. H.C. Potter, 1941)

My favorite comedy. 83 minutes of pure, unbridled hysteria whose DNA permeates the works of directors like Frank Tashlin and Joe Dante. The plot is practically nonexistent – what there is involves the vague notion of “let’s put on a show” – but the gags are nonstop and bountiful, with director H.C. Potter intermittently layering the frame with jokes that run against each other. It’s a brazenly self-aware slapstick farce that prefigures everything from the Tex Avery School of Anarchic Mayhem to Mystery Science Theater 3000 and comments on Hollywood cynicism, the creative process, and film craft, while the relentless self-reflexivity positions it as one of Hollywood’s first out-and-out meta-movies. You may need two viewings just to register all the jokes in this smorgasbord of laughs, but only one viewing is necessary to leave you hospitalized with a collapsed lung. Due to rights issues, this is sadly unavailable on home video here in the States. However, you can watch it online, for free, at the link provided here. It’s a total crowd-pleaser that still, after 80+ years, achieves a feverish pitch and jokes-to-laugh ratio that puts most comedies to shame.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman, 1975)

No other film directed by a woman has left as great an impact on me as a cinephile (and a human being) than Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Clocking in at just shy of three-and-half hours and propelled by the eponymous figure’s daily routine, Akerman delivers a feminist tour-de-force of slow cinema which chronicles three days in the life of Jeanne, a single mother living in Paris with her son, whose daily preoccupations consist primarily of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and turning the occasional trick; she’s played by Delphine Seyrig, in a performance that deftly explores and interrogates the virtues and limitations of self-possession.

Here’s a movie that practically alters the viewer’s understanding of cinema, chiefly our preconceptions about narrative temporality. It isn’t devoid of ellipses, but the protracted depictions of Jeanne’s recurring activities — and how each cycle contrasts with the others — transfigure the ordinary into the monumental; this is that rare movie wherein the preparation of dinner, played out step-by-step and often in real-time, emanates more suspense and immediacy with each successive rendition. Akerman realizes all this with a formal clarity to rival that of Bresson. Her visual sense is rhythmic and cyclical, frequently blocking Jeanne within doorways and envisioning her domain as claustrophobic and theatrical, while the soundscape emphasizes and aestheticizes mundanities (dripping water, kneading of meat, etc) to generate a hypnotic aura of unease.

No brief capsule can do this movie justice, as there's much ink to spill over Dielman’s retooling-cum-reclamation of the “gaze”, as well as its portrayal of self-actualization and the imprisoning effects of habit, but, I think, any serious lover of the movies should sit with it at least once. It’s one of those movies for which the words “brilliant” and “innovative”, terms so regularly overused that their grand implications tend to be undermined, are not only pertinent but justified. At only 25, Akerman didn’t just conquer the medium, she reconfigured it.

The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955)

My pick for “The Great American Film”. A total masterpiece from a one-and-done director, actor Charles Laughton’s Southern Gothic combines noir chiaroscuro, American pastoralism, expressionist shadows, and a fairy-tale naivete that varyingly makes it feel like a child’s dream and the ultimate nightmare. A tale of darkness and light, in which Robert Mitchum’s psychotic preacher Harry Powell inverts the Pied Piper characterization and dramatizes a sinister intersection of American greed and organized religion – a malicious blend that’s as American as apple pie. For a film so cloaked in shadow and the macabre, it nonetheless makes time for occasional dips into poetic lyricism, none more intoxicating than a nighttime boat ride down the Ohio River that morphs into a visual poem, as the two newly-orphaned children find solace in a lullaby only heard by spiders, rabbits, and the starry sky. I still envy anyone who sees this for the first time with no expectations.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974)

The most “American” film on my list is the granddaddy of 70s Horror, a sadistic exercise in escalating tension, unblinking nihilism, and visceral madness. The 1960 trifecta of Psycho, Eyes Without A Face, and Peeping Tom ushered in Modern Horror with contemporary themes and domesticated killers that put a more human face on the monster, only for Tobe Hooper to place that face over Gunnar Hansen’s in creating a figure both pathetically human and tragically monstrous. In TCM, horror is at the heart of the American Family, capitalism spurs a society to essentially eat itself, amber-stained tableaux beautify the grotesque and the mundane, and occasional docu-stylistics exacerbate the horror to an agonizing pitch. It’s the ultimate American Grand Guignol, a horror film and a gallows comedy that depicts the American Heartland as a total dystopia and allegorizes the War in Vietnam as a War at Home, where human beings desperately try to survive amid conflicting outlooks and contexts.