Films
A list of films I would like to watch, in no particular order. I prefer to watch by director (essentially the authorial approach to film), with no particular worry about chronology.
- Eric Rohmer
Colorful, allegorical, highly Catholic, highly sexually-charged. I wonder: what is the right moment in life to watch films, proceding from an ethics of the body? People often watch them before sleep. Do they anticipate the dream, or (with more hazard) replace the dream? I like to watch films on my laptop while I write, the images flowing into the images of my imagination: but is this synthesis or destruction? Do I rob my own mind?
2. Francois Truffaut
Yes, most of these directors are Europeans who made black-and-white movies in foreign languages, because I like that: not because it is inherently good, but because it is what I like. So what? These movies are panicky and novelistic, and Rohmer’s are broad and light and sexual.
3. Jean-Luc Godard
I’ve actually never seen any of these, but they seem interesting. Again, they are entertainments — but some of them stick in your mind and add actual color to the events of daily life, and even when that color is disgusting it’s FUN.
4. Agnes Varda
Color and light and sun.
5. Claude Chabrol
The appeal of old movies is that everyone is dead now.
6. Alain Resnais
‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ gave me an emotional experience. I learned what ‘mis en scene’ is, or whatever it’s called, because of the little insert part where it’s in the past and she’s in love with a Nazi soldier in occupied France.
7. Jacques Rivette
Improvisation is apparently an important part of these films, and they’re lengthy and breathy. I wouldn’t know, since this is a list of movies I havent’
8. Andrei Tartovsky
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Even though I tell people I can speak Russian, I’m barely conversational.
9. Federico Fellini
These are very light.
10. Pier Paolo Pasolini
A gay filmographer pursued with violence.
11. Akira Kurosawa
I’ve really enjoyed the 10 or so minutes I have seen of this director before.
12. Wong Kar Wai
These are poppy and Western in style. It was inevitable that hairspray would look dated sooner or later, but if you put yourself back into the hairspray moment there is something handsome and dignified about that impassive immobile hair.
13. Ingmar Bergman
14. Roman Polanski
15. Masaki Kobayashi
16. Satyajit Ray
