Even though Jean-Luc Godard turned 86 this past Sat­ur­day, cin­e­ma schol­ar David Bor­d­well would no doubt still call him “the youngest film­mak­er at work today” — as he did just two years ago, in an essay on Godard­’s most recent pic­ture Good­bye to Lan­guage. Over his more than 65-year-long career, which began in film crit­i­cism and arguably nev­er left it, the man who direct­ed the likes of Breath­less, Alphav­ille, and Week­end in his very first decade of film­mak­ing has kept his work intel­lec­tu­al­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive when most movies seem resigned, and even con­tent, to explore the same tram­pled patch of cin­e­ma’s cre­ative space over and over again.

“Godard has been the lib­er­a­tor of weird­ness,” wrote New York­er film crit­ic and Godard biog­ra­ph­er Richard Brody on the occa­sion of the auteur’s 82nd birth­day. “He was always ahead of the game in terms of movie-mad­ness, rec­og­niz­ing that the habit of think­ing in terms of images and sounds didn’t detach him from emo­tion­al engage­ment with his sub­jects but added a new dimen­sion to it.”

He secured cre­ative free­dom for him­self from the begin­ning when he “cast ama­teurs along­side pro­fes­sion­als, mixed gen­res and tones, called atten­tion to the arti­fices of movies he loved and of gen­res he reju­ve­nat­ed, over­turned con­ven­tion with an anar­chic fury and an ana­lyt­i­cal pas­sion.”

Godard, Brody con­cludes, “hasn’t just rethought movies; he has recon­ceived the cin­e­ma, as a prac­tice and as an expe­ri­ence.” But what does that look like for the audi­ence? These five video essays plunge into Godard­’s work, iso­lat­ing and cel­e­brat­ing ele­ments that have mer­it­ed our close cinephilic atten­tion. At the top of the post, we have a brief aes­thet­ic overview in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion-spon­sored “Godard in Frag­ments,” where­in video essay­ist kog­o­na­da (cre­ator of pieces pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Wes Ander­son, Alfred Hitch­cock, Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and neo­re­al­ism) spends six and a half min­utes mes­mer­iz­ing­ly “high­light­ing the icon­ic director’s sig­na­ture themes and devices,” from cam­eras and hand­guns to wom­en’s faces and bot­toms to the very con­cept of death.

But to under­stand Godard requires first under­stand­ing Breath­less, his 1960 debut fea­ture and, in the words of the Nerd­writer in his video essay on the film, “an extend­ed inves­ti­ga­tion of a French filmic iden­ti­ty in the shad­ow of Hol­ly­wood dom­i­nance — of, indeed, whether an iden­ti­ty informed by anoth­er nation’s cul­ture can exist at all.” Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors made the movie a lit­tle more than a decade after the end of World War II, which meant just over a decade after French restric­tions on the screen­ing of Amer­i­can films had van­ished, plung­ing Godard­’s impres­sion­able gen­er­a­tion straight and deep into the sights, sounds, style, and tropes of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing.

Breath­less, in all its low-bud­get excite­ment and illus­tra­tion of the notion that the sever­est lim­i­ta­tions cre­ate the most favor­able con­di­tions for art, also func­tions as a piece of film crit­i­cism: it inter­prets and repur­pos­es all that Godard and his col­lab­o­ra­tors had learned, con­scious­ly as well as uncon­scious­ly, from and about Amer­i­can movies, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­ca’s breath­less (as it were) genre pic­tures. “It wants to par­tic­i­pate in the Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing it admires, but it knows that such an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is impos­si­ble, so it deals with this by being self-con­scious, by using jump cuts, awk­ward tran­si­tions, by rob­bing the clas­sic moments of their force or mak­ing the hero’s bloody final steps way longer that it could ever pos­si­bly be, forc­ing you out­side the film’s text — or back into it again.”

Five years lat­er came Alphav­ille, anoth­er simul­ta­ne­ous trib­ute to and assault on genre from Godard and com­pa­ny. In it, accord­ing to Patri­cia Pis­ters’ “Despair Has No Wings: a Trib­ute to Godard­’s Alphav­ille,” he “plays with film noir ele­ments to tell a sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry that unfolds many oth­er lay­ers,” drop­ping the extant pulp-fic­tion detec­tive Lem­my Cau­tion into a new, “strange” con­text. “Pop­u­lar audi­ences were shocked by this worn-out and alien­at­ing ver­sion of their hero,” turned by Godard into a “cos­mo­nau­tic secret agent who trav­els in his Ford Galax­ie” into a futur­is­tic, author­i­tar­i­an Paris of rul­ing super­com­put­ers, seem­ing­ly mechan­i­cal cit­i­zens, “use­less vend­ing machines,” and stark, impos­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture.

But Godard­’s use of archi­tec­ture start­ed before Alphav­ille and con­tin­ued after it, argues Richard Mar­tin in the British Film Insti­tute video essay “Jean-Luc Godard as Archi­tect.” He uses the term in a broad sense to mean “some­one inter­est­ed in build­ing, cap­tur­ing, and arrang­ing, spaces,” an inter­est man­i­fest in Breath­less’ “almost joy­ful” Paris of “peo­ple run­ning through the Lou­vre, juke­box­es, cafés, din­ers, and bars,” Pier­rot le Fou and Week­end’s pre­sen­ta­tion of “the car crash as a kind of archi­tec­tur­al sce­nario,” and Con­tempt’s jour­ney from the grand­ly “dilap­i­dat­ed lots of the Cinecit­tà film stu­dios on the out­skirts of Rome” to its thir­ty-minute cen­ter­piece in one of that city’s new mod­ern apart­ments to Capri’s Casa Mala­parte, “one of the most thrilling pieces of archi­tec­ture not just in Godard­’s career, but in the whole his­to­ry of cin­e­ma.”

Maybe it makes sense that some­one who first got behind the cam­era to make a con­struc­tion doc­u­men­tary (watch online here) would con­tin­ue to pur­sue an inter­est in the orga­ni­za­tion of space. But as Godard­’s atti­tudes, ideas, tastes, and even pol­i­tics have changed, the oth­er qual­i­ties of his movies have changed along with them. Hav­ing worked in black-and-white, col­or — its use exam­ined in the super­cut “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” below — and with Good­bye to Lan­guage even in 3D, Godard has long shown a will­ing­ness to enter new visu­al ter­ri­to­ries as well.

Not only will his work past, present, and future con­tin­ue to give video essays a wealth of mate­r­i­al to work with, he him­self, accord­ing to Richard Brody, made the form pos­si­ble, hav­ing under­stood since the 1970s that “home video would be the basis for a new­ly ana­lyt­i­cal under­stand­ing of film his­to­ry, because it would allow for the easy copy­ing of clips and their manip­u­la­tion via video edit­ing with such tech­niques as slow motion, freeze-frame, and super­im­po­si­tions of oth­er images and text.” Thus “every video essay that turns up online owes him a debt of grat­i­tude,” as do many of the oth­er inno­v­a­tive types of visu­al media to which Godard has shown the way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

The Entire­ty of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less Art­ful­ly Com­pressed Into a 3 Minute Film

Watch Meetin’ WA: Jean-Luc Godard Films Woody Allen in 1986 Short Film

Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opéra­tion béton (1955) — a Con­struc­tion Doc­u­men­tary

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick (1971)

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best Amer­i­can Films Ever Made (1963)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

As each semes­ter in my film course rolls around, it’s more and more appar­ent how time depletes the pop cul­ture cur­ren­cy of those direc­tors who did not make it into the 21st Cen­tu­ry. A knowl­edge of Stan­ley Kubrick used to be a giv­en, as was the under­stand­ing of what “A Stan­ley Kubrick Film” meant to film fans. Now he is a solu­tion to a weird join-the-dots, as I watch stu­dents who know The Shin­ing as a clas­sic hor­ror film grok sud­den­ly that the same direc­tor made the head­trip 2001: A Space Odyssey. And what’s this Bar­ry Lyn­don film? And this Spar­ta­cus that looks like it’s from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent time? It can baf­fle a young cineaste, and it baf­fles them in a dif­fer­ent way, I sup­pose, than how Kubrick baf­fled his con­tem­po­raries from film to film. Yes, there’s more of my stu­dents who have seen Dr. Strange than Dr. Strangelove, but the joy of dis­cov­ery is still there, as is the thrill of being in a spe­cial fan club when you do dis­cov­er Kubrick.

For­tu­nate­ly, we are also hav­ing a renais­sance in film cri­tique in the medi­um of video, as fol­low­ers of this site know. Along with Tony Zhou and Evan Puschak, Lewis Bond (aka Chan­nel Criswell) has cre­at­ed some of the most in depth video essays on YouTube. Hav­ing authored overviews of the work of Hayao Miyaza­ki, Yasu­jiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Tri­er, and David Lynch, Bond offers an excel­lent intro­duc­tion above to Kubrick’s oeu­vre.

Not con­tent to use his knowl­edge of Kubrick’s films, Bond vis­it­ed the Kubrick archives in Lon­don, learn­ing first­hand the metic­u­lous way the direc­tor cre­at­ed a film.

“His work eth­ic bor­dered on the obsessed,” he says. “This expe­ri­ence was how I imag­ined it is to see a great painter’s brush­es. It was a way to gain a brief glimpse into the mind of a mas­ter at work.”

Bond makes the case that Kubrick’s atten­tion to detail through all stages of pro­duc­tion, includ­ing edit­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and even attend­ing screen­ings and check­ing the qual­i­ty of the prints, is exact­ly what makes him one of the best direc­tors. Every choice seen in the films, all the way down to the small­est prop, has Kubrick’s DNA on it. It’s no won­der that peo­ple pore over every frame of The Shin­ing, read­ing into it all sorts of mean­ing.

“He changed the way visu­al sto­ries were told,” says Bond, where Kubrick­’s mise en scene and com­po­si­tion both deliv­er the essen­tial nar­ra­tive and the sym­bol­ism under­neath.

Kubrick could only have reached these heights with the com­plete cre­ative con­trol his fame afford­ed him from the 1960s onward. There was time to plan, time and mon­ey to shoot, and time to edit, some­thing directors–before or since–rarely get. And not all direc­tors have the dis­ci­pline to deliv­er when they get such free­dom.

There’s much more in Bond’s essay so check it out. Side note: Lewis Bond’s girl­friend Luiza Lopes (aka Art Regard) also cre­ates video essays on direc­tors like David Cro­nen­berg, Roman Polan­s­ki, and Ing­mar Bergman. Could this be the first ‘celebri­ty cou­ple’ of the video essay era?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

The Film­mak­ing Craft of David Finch­er Demys­ti­fied in Two Video Essays

The Geo­met­ric Beau­ty of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

They say a film­mak­er qual­i­fies as an auteur if you can iden­ti­fy their work from any giv­en shot. That might strike even cinephiles as a dif­fi­cult task unless the film­mak­er in ques­tion is Wes Ander­son, who for twen­ty years’ worth of fea­ture films now has defined and refined a cin­e­mat­ic style increas­ing­ly unique to him and his host of reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors. What qual­i­ties con­sti­tute the unmis­tak­ably Ander­son­ian? Vibrant col­ors, espe­cial­ly red and yel­low. Old build­ings. Uni­forms. The sounds of the British Inva­sion. Per­fect sym­me­try. The tech­nol­o­gy of the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry as well as vin­tage Amer­i­can and Euro­pean design of that era. An eye for the imag­ined past as well as the past’s imag­ined future (and its use of Futu­ra). And of course, Bill Mur­ray.

Ander­son has used dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of these and oth­er aes­thet­ic choic­es not just in all his full-length films from Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel, but also in his com­mer­cials. Giv­en the uncom­pro­mis­ing look and feel of his “real” fil­mog­ra­phy as well as its over­all suc­cess at the box office, one might not at first imag­ine Ander­son as the kind of auteur with the need, desire, or even abil­i­ty to make adver­tise­ments.

But make them he does, an aspect of his career that actu­al­ly began with a self-par­o­dy­ing 2004 Amer­i­can Express com­mer­cial star­ring the direc­tor him­self, hard at work on his lat­est, albeit fic­tion­al, qui­et spec­ta­cle of metic­u­lous­ness and anachro­nism (which also has explo­sions).

Ever the throw­back, Ander­son next shot a com­mer­cial for Japan, that land where, in the days before Youtube, so many Amer­i­can celebri­ties used to go to cash in on their image unbe­knownst to their West­ern pub­lic. Specif­i­cal­ly, he shot it for the Japan­ese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant Soft­bank, cast­ing Brad Pitt as a Jacques Tati-style vaca­tion­er, good-natured if bum­bling and pos­sessed of an eye for the ladies, in the French coun­try­side. Two years lat­er, he and fre­quent writ­ing part­ner Roman Cop­po­la returned to his beloved ear­ly 1960s for Apartomat­ic, a spot for Stel­la Artois (a brand that has also employed the likes of Wim Wen­ders) that brings to life every young man’s fan­ta­sy of the ulti­mate auto­mat­ed bach­e­lor pad.

In 2012, Mod­ern Life and Talk To My Car, a pair of thir­ty-sec­ond com­mer­cials for a new Hyundai sedan, brought Ander­son back into the present. Nat­u­ral­ly, he deliv­ered a present deeply root­ed in the dreams of decades past, which, when the idea is to sell a prod­uct as sat­u­rat­ed with the mythol­o­gy of the post­war years as an auto­mo­bile, does the job ide­al­ly. “After months of cre­ative devel­op­ment on the new Hyundai Azera we were almost out of time to pro­duce the launch spots,” writes cre­ative direc­tor Robert Prins. “At the last minute some­one sug­gest­ed ask­ing Wes Ander­son to direct. We all laughed. Then he said yes.” Imag­ine the result­ing jeal­ousy in the con­fer­ence rooms of ad agen­cies all over the world, where the talk con­stant­ly ref­er­ences Ander­son­’s work with­out ever touch­ing the gen­uine arti­cle.

The fol­low­ing year, we fea­tured Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Ander­son­’s eight-minute short film star­ring Jason Schwartz­man (who became an Ander­son reg­u­lar, and a star in his own right, in Rush­more fif­teen years ear­li­er) as a race car dri­ver who crash­es into a strange­ly famil­iar vil­lage some­where in 1955 Italy. He shot it at Rome’s leg­endary Cinecit­tà stu­dio at the behest of a cer­tain Ital­ian brand called Pra­da (per­haps you’ve heard of them) and in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cop­po­la also put togeth­er Pra­da: Can­dy, a series of three some­what more straight­for­ward com­mer­cials embed­ded as a playlist just above. Set in France this time, they tell the Jules and Jim-esque sto­ry of twin broth­ers vying for the atten­tion of the same girl, a blonde bon viveuse who hap­pens to have the same name — and if you believe the mar­ket­ing, the same per­son­al­i­ty — as Prada’s fra­grance.

Just yes­ter­day we fea­tured Come Togeth­er, Ander­son­’s lat­est com­mer­cial direc­to­r­i­al effort with Adrien Brody play­ing the ded­i­cat­ed con­duc­tor of a bad­ly delayed pas­sen­ger train on Christ­mas Eve. Though it osten­si­bly comes as noth­ing more than a pro­mo­tion for fast-fash­ion retail­er H&M, thou­sands of fans have already thrilled to this new glimpse into Ander­son­’s world — a make-believe one, but “we are all make-believe, too, every one of us,” as GQ’s Chris Heath puts it, “each self-assem­bled from a hotch­potch of dreams and expe­ri­ences and wish­es and ambi­tions and set­backs (and, yes, what we buy and what we say and what we wear and the way we choose to wear it, and all the rest of it).” Ander­son him­self might well agree. But when, we all won­der, will a brand come his way wor­thy of a com­mer­cial star­ring Bill Mur­ray?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Has Wes Ander­son Sold Out? Can He Sell Out? Crit­ics Take Up the Debate

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Watch the Coen Broth­ers’ TV Com­mer­cials: Swiss Cig­a­rettes, Gap Jeans, Tax­es & Clean Coal

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Why does the hol­i­day sea­son no longer feel com­plete with­out a Wes Ander­son movie? Sev­er­al of his fea­tures have opened in late fall or ear­ly win­ter, sure­ly the most Ander­son­ian time of year. Some have come out right around Christ­mas (The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou on the day itself), and some, most notably The Roy­al Tenen­baums, take place par­tial­ly in the sea­son. While it looks as if we’ll have to do with­out a full-length Ander­son pro­duc­tion this Christ­mas, since the past year has report­ed­ly seen him in pre-pro­duc­tion on an as yet unti­tled stop-motion ani­mat­ed movie, the auteur of poignant and fun­ny anachro­nism has nev­er­the­less found time to direct Come Togeth­er, a brand new not-quite-com­mer­cial for “fast fash­ion” retail­er H&M.

Ander­son­’s unusu­al niche in the world of film­mak­ing allows him to both work as per­haps the most metic­u­lous cin­e­mat­ic vision­ary alive, and also to make ads with impuni­ty. We’ve fea­tured the pair of com­mer­cials for the Hyundai Azera he did in 2012, and more recent­ly the less overt Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, a sev­en-minute short spon­sored by Pra­da. These are in addi­tion to spots for the likes of Stel­la Artois and Amer­i­can Express, the lat­ter of which starred the direc­tor par­o­dy­ing him­self.

This time reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor Adrien Brody, pre­vi­ous­ly seen in The Dar­jeel­ing Lim­it­ed and The Grand Budapest Hotel and heard in The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox, takes the lead role of Con­duc­tor Ralph, the man in charge of a train that has fall­en far behind its sched­ule as Christ­mas Eve becomes Christ­mas Day. Still, dis­play­ing the same atti­tude most of Ander­son­’s char­ac­ters take toward mat­ters of aes­thet­ics and tra­di­tion, he takes seri­ous­ly indeed the job of mak­ing Christ­mas spe­cial for his pas­sen­gers. We glimpse these pas­sen­gers one at a time through their cab­in win­dows from out­side the train, a sequence rem­i­nis­cent of the cross-sec­tion shots of The Life Aquat­ic’s R/V Bela­fonte.

What will enliv­en the pale greens and mat­te grays of this slight­ly for­lorn but still dogged­ly rolling con­veyance? It takes less than four min­utes, dur­ing which Ralph, and Ander­son, sum­mon all the resources of this unspec­i­fied, dream­like past at their dis­pos­al, to find out. After­ward, Come Togeth­er leaves only one lin­ger­ing ques­tion. The famous­ly metic­u­lous Ander­son who appears to demand a cer­tain vin­tage yet time­less solid­i­ty in every­thing from his set­tings to his devices to his cui­sine to his wardrobe — he can’t pos­si­bly be into fast fash­ion. Can he?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s New Com­mer­cials Sell the Hyundai Azera

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

The Auteurs of Christ­mas: Christ­mas Morn­ing as Seen Through the Eyes of Kubrick, Taran­ti­no, Scors­ese & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Despite liv­ing for only 37 years, and with­in that hav­ing a career that last­ed for only fif­teen, the Ger­man auteur Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder cre­at­ed so pro­lif­i­cal­ly that his final list of accom­plish­ments includes direct­ing forty fea­ture films, three shorts, and two tele­vi­sion series, as well as appear­ing in 36 dif­fer­ent roles as an actor — to say noth­ing of his works in oth­er media and his con­sid­er­able influ­ence on sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers around the world. Sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty aside, many of these works have either stood the test of time, like The Bit­ter Tears of Petra von Kant and Berlin Alexan­der­platz or, like philo­soph­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion World on a Wire, enjoyed recent redis­cov­er­ies.

What could have inspired in Fass­binder such unre­lent­ing cre­ativ­i­ty? His list of ten favorite films, drawn up a year before his death in 1982, pro­vides some clues. “Fassbinder’s very favorite was Visconti’s The Damned, a visu­al­ly sump­tu­ous panora­ma of soci­etal col­lapse and decay in Third Reich Ger­many and no doubt an influ­ence on the Ger­man auteur’s own “BRD Tril­o­gy,” in par­tic­u­lar the bawdy, bor­del­lo-set Lola,” writes Indiewire’s Ryan Lat­tanzio. He also “loved Max Ophuls’ 1955 Lola Montes, the sad sto­ry of a kept woman shot in the kind of glo­ri­ous­ly ren­dered col­or Fass­binder would lat­er employ in his own work. As with many top 10 lists com­piled by con­fronta­tion­al film­mak­ers, Pasolini’s beau­ti­ful­ly ugly descent into hell Salò was also close to his heart.”

Fass­binder’s final favorite-films list runs, in full, as fol­lows:

1. The Damned (1969, Dir: Luchi­no Vis­con­ti)
2. The Naked And the Dead (1958, Dir: Raoul Walsh)
3. Lola Montes (1955, Dir: Max Ophuls)
4. Flamin­go Road (1949, Dir: Michael Cur­tiz)
5. Salò, or the 120 Days Of Sodom (1975, Dir: Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni)
6. Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes (1953, Dir: Howard Hawks)
7. Dis­hon­ored (1931, Dir: Josef von Stern­berg)
8. The Night Of The Hunter (1955, Dir: Charles Laughton)
9. John­ny Gui­tar (1954, Dir: Nicholas Ray)
10. The Red Snow­ball Tree (1973, Dir: Vasili Shuk­shin)

If one qual­i­ty unites all of Fass­binder’s motion pic­tures of choice, from all the afore­men­tioned to the stark, near-Expres­sion­ist noir of Night of the Hunter to the super­hu­man­ly snap­py com­e­dy of Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes to the West­ern genre rein­ven­tion, high­ly appre­ci­at­ed in Europe, of John­ny Gui­tar, it might well be vivid­ness. All of these movies, each in their own way, allowed Fass­binder to release the vivid­ness — and cin­e­ma his­to­ry has remem­bered him as a mas­ter of the vivid as well as the vis­cer­al — res­i­dent in his imag­i­na­tion. Alas, no mat­ter how much he man­aged to real­ize, a great deal more of it sure­ly passed away with him.

via Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

Woody Allen Lists the Great­est Films of All Time: Includes Clas­sics by Bergman, Truf­faut & Felli­ni

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cin­e­mat­ic Cre­ations)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.