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

in Film | July 30th, 2013

Image by Moody Man, via Flickr Commons

When, over the past weekend, I noticed the words “Stanley Kubrick” had risen into Twitter’s trending-topics list, I got excited. I figured someone had discovered, in the back of a long-neglected studio vault, the last extant print of a Kubrick masterpiece we’d somehow all forgotten. No suck luck, of course; Kubrick scholars, given how much they still talk about even the auteur’s never-realized projects like Napoleon, surely wouldn’t let an entire movie slip into obscurity. The burst of tweets actually came in honor of Kubrick’s 85th birthday, and hey, any chance to celebrate a director whose filmography includes the likes of Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’ll seize. The British Film Institute marked the occasion by posting a little-seen list of Kubrick’s top ten films.

“The first and only (as far as we know) Top 10 list Kubrick submitted to anyone was in 1963 to a fledgling American magazine named Cinema (which had been founded the previous year and ceased publication in 1976),” writes the BFI’s Nick Wrigley. It runs as follows:

1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944)
7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940—above)
9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930)

But seeing as Kubrick still had 36 years to live and watch movies after making the list, it naturally provides something less than the final word on his preferences. Wrigley quotes Kubrick confidant Jan Harlan as saying that “Stanley would have seriously revised this 1963 list in later years, though Wild Strawberries, Citizen Kane and City Lights would remain, but he liked Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V much better than the old and old-fashioned Olivier version.” He also quotes Kubrick himself as calling Max Ophuls the “highest of all” and “possessed of every possible quality,” calling Elia Kazan “without question the best director we have in America,” and praising heartily David Lean, Vittorio de Sica, and François Truffaut. This all comes in handy for true cinephiles, who can never find satisfaction watching only the filmmakers they admire; they must also watch the filmmakers the filmmakers they admire admire.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of 87 Essential Films Every Aspiring Director Should See

in Education, Film | July 29th, 2013

I’m sure you’ve heard by now: wealthy, successful film director Spike Lee hopes to fund his next film via a Kickstarter campaign. Yes, that’s right, he wants you to pay for his art. His campaign, perhaps needless to say, is hardly popular with the average film fan, many of whom find it hard enough to scrounge up the skyrocketing prices of tickets these days. Lee has responded to his critics, but somehow I doubt his reasoning will go over well.

But we’re not here to talk about alleged crowdfunding abuses (have at it in the comments if you must). Instead, today we have for you—in the tradition of our many posts on famous teachers’ syllabi—one of Lee’s teaching tools in his role as an NYU professor. Where all of our previous posts have featured reading lists, Lee’s is a list of films, which he hands out to all of the students who take his graduate class–not required viewing, but recommended as “essential” for every aspiring director.

In the video at the top of the post, see Lee introduce the list of what he considers, “the greatest films ever made.” “If you want to be a filmmaker,” he says, “you should see these films.” The list, above and continued below, includes some of the usual critical favorites—Rashomon, Vertigo, On the Waterfront—and some pretty left field choices, like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.

Slate, which first published the list, notes the omission of usually revered directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Yasujirō Ozu as well as the paucity—or near non-existence—of female directors (only one makes the list, the co-director of City of God). In addition to possibly ranting about, or defending, Lee’s use of Kickstarter, many of you may find yourselves quibbling over, or defending, his definition of “essential.” And so, I say again, have at it, readers!

Note: When Spike originally released this list, many noted the lack of female filmmakers. Lee accepted that critique and released an updated list. Find it here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch D.W. Griffith’s Silent Masterpiece Intolerance Free Online — It’s the “Ulysses of the Cinema!”

in Film | July 28th, 2013

In 1915, D.W. Griffith shot one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema. Birth of a Nation “was a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism,” writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But, despite being “titanically original,” the film was outrageously racist in the way that it depicted African-Americans during the Reconstruction Era. Even in 1915, audiences knew that the film had crossed a line. The NAACP protested against the film’s fabrications and inaccuracies. Riots broke out in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. And Griffith’s legacy never recovered, even if he tried to atone (some say) in 1916 with the release of Intolerance, another masterpiece of the Silent Era.

Billed as a “colossal spectacle,” Intolerance featured massive sets, extravagant period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras, and, in grand fashion, it wove together “four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrated mankind’s intolerance during four different ages in world history.” A century later, Birth of a Nation might not get many public viewings. But this past weekend a restored version of Intolerance began a weeklong run at the Film Forum in New York City. If the restored version doesn’t make it to a city near you, you can view the original film, all three epic hours of it, online for free. Intolerance is catalogued in our collection of 525 Free Movies Online.

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The General, “Perhaps the Greatest Film Ever Made,” and 20 Other Buster Keaton Classics Free Online

in Film | July 26th, 2013

What motion picture did no less an auteur than Orson Welles call “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made”? Why, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton’s 1926 The General, unsung in its day but heaped with critical acclaim ever since. The General, as Roger Ebert describes it, “is an epic of silent comedy, one of the most expensive films of its time, including an accurate historical recreation of a Civil War episode, hundreds of extras, dangerous stunt sequences, and an actual locomotive falling from a burning bridge into a gorge far below.” This and all of Keaton’s movies, Ebert adds, showcase “a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music.”

You can watch The General online right above. If you then find yourself moved to take in more of Keaton’s filmography, have a look at this list of his freely viewable pictures helpfully compiled by MUBI. Its still-active links include all of the following movies:

They also provide a list of available films Keaton made in collaboration with his fellow silent star and mentor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle:

These 21 films will give you a thorough primer on the joy of silent comedy as perfected by Buster Keaton, in Ebert’s words “not the Great Stone Face so much as a man who kept his composure in the center of chaos. Other silent actors might mug to get a point across, but Keaton remained observant and collected. That’s one reason his best movies have aged better than those of his rival, Charlie Chaplin. He seems like a modern visitor to the world of the silent clowns.”

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Walter Benjamin’s Philosophical Thought Presented by Two Experimental Films

in Film, Philosophy | July 24th, 2013

Literary theorist and scholar Walter Benjamin was part of a small but incredibly significant cohort of German-Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis in the thirties. The group included thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and Bertolt Brecht. Of all of the names above, only Benjamin succumbed, committing suicide by morphine overdose in 1940 at a Catalonian hotel, when it became clear that the Spanish, with whom he had sought refuge, were going to turn him back over to Germany.

Of all of the thinkers above, most of whom are fairly well-known by U.S. students of the liberal arts, it can (and should) be argued that Benjamin was the most influential, even if he rarely appears on a syllabus, excepting one well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” a staple of film and media theory classes. All of the thinkers listed above adored Benjamin, and all of them figuratively sat at his feet. And while Benjamin—often by reference to the aforementioned essay—gets pegged as a Marxist thinker, he was also something else; he was a mystic and a sage, the critical equivalent, perhaps, of Kafka.

The 1993 experimental film above—One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin—is part documentary, part low-budget cable-access editing exercise. The film provides an introduction to Benjamin’s life and thought through interviews with scholars, re-enactments of Benjamin’s last days, and montages centered around his many aphoristic expressions. One Way Street opens with an epigram from Benjamin’s pupil Brecht, from the latter’s poem “On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.,” in which Brecht eulogizes his mentor’s prophetic strain: “the future lies in darkness and the forces of right / Are weak. All this was plain to you.” Indeed, it is this mystical aspect of Benjamin that defies his strict categorization as a dogmatic Marxist materialist. Through the considerable influence of his friend Gershom Scholem, Benjamin acquired a deep interest in Kabbalistic thought, including a messianic streak that colored so much of his writing.

In reference to this Jewish mysticism, Anson Rabinbach, editor of New German Critique summarizes Benjamin’s thought above:

The world is… dispersed in fragments, and in these fragments, the fragments of the world that God has now turned his back on, reside certain presences, which attest to the former existence of their divine character. You cannot actively go about to discover these divine presences, but they can be revealed.

According to Rabinbach, Benjamin’s method was, similar to Freud’s, an attempt to “unlock” these “emanations” by “juxtaposing things that don’t quite necessarily appear to be related to each other… And this is the Kabbalistic sense, that you cannot go directly at the task, because the disclosure of the emanation is blocked.” Benjamin’s fragmentary “method” produced prodigious results—hundreds upon hundreds of pages of essays, and a frustratingly unfinished book published as The Arcades Project.

His thought is so diverse that one commenter in the film above—Michael Jennings, author of Benjamin study Dialectical Images—says that “the way that Benjamin is used most in this country, is to dip in and take a quotation out of context, in support of any argument one could think of, and I used to take umbrage at this, until I realized that this was precisely Benjamin’s own practice.” In this way, Benjamin occupies a similar place in the humanities as Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Where he is famous, he is famous for creating whole conceptual fields one can invoke by uttering a single word or phrase.

One of the most potent words in the Benjamin lexicon is the French term flâneur. The flâneur is a “stroller, idler, walker,” a “well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century—a shopper with no intention to buy, an intellectual parasite of the arcade” (as Benjamin website “The Arcades Project Project” defines it). The flâneur is an individual of privilege and a progenitor of the male gaze: “Traditionally the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, education, and idleness. He strolls to pass the time that his wealth affords him, treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure.” The flâneur is not simply a passive observer; he is instead a kind of lazy urban predator, and also a dandy and proto-hipster. Perhaps the most sinister representation of this character (in a different urban context) is the creepy Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

In the 1998 film above, Flâneur III: Benjamin’s Shadow, Danish director Torben Skjodt Jensen and writer Urf Peter Hallberg collaborate on an impressionistic black-and-white meditation on Paris, overlaid with Hallberg’s ruminations and quotations from Benjamin. Benjamin’s fascination with nineteenth-century Paris drove his massive, unfinished Arcades Project, an excavation of the inner workings of modernity. Where One Way Street is marked by a very dated 90’s aesthetic (which may look chic now that the decade’s back in fashion), the above film is both classical and modernist, a testament to the beauties and contradictions of Paris. I think in this respect, it is a more fitting tribute to the critical and contradictory aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Richard Wright Stars as Bigger Thomas in a 1951 Screen Test for Native Son

in English Language, Film, Literature | July 22nd, 2013

Stick to what you know goes the conventional wisdom. Author Richard Wright won acclaim documenting the African-American experience in the 30’s and 40’s. Literary standing in the bag, he could have explored any number of avenues through his writing, or chosen to delve deeper into the rich territory from which his career had been mined.

Or, you know, he could’ve starred in a 1951 film adaptation of Native Son, his best selling Book of the Month Club selection.

Which only really counts as sticking with what one knows when one has the acting chops to back it up —something the 40 year old Wright, playing a character 20 years younger than himself, did not. It doesn’t help that the period dialogue sounds stilted to modern ears, and Buenos Aires makes a bizarre geographic substitute for the original’s Chicago location. In the age of the digital connection, his turn in the little seen production assumed train wreck status.

A cursory online search reveals a long line of amateur critics busting on Wright’s ultimately ill-advised celluloid foray. Let us come at things from a slightly adjusted angle. Most of us have seen, if not been, an imaginative child at play, whispering invented lines for favorite dolls and action figures’ spur of the moment scenarios.

Couldn’t we hold that that is what Wright is up to here? He may not be the most convincing handling of a prop gun, but he still bests your average 7‑year-old believer. Those willing to overlook an untrained actor’s less-than-Oscar interpretation-caliber might be rewarded with insight…

via The Paris Review

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Star Wars Gets Dubbed into Navajo: a Fun Way to Preserve and Teach a Fading Language

in Film | July 19th, 2013

On July 10, Indian Country Today announced the first film ever dubbed in the Navajo (or Dine’) language, with the headline “Jedis and Indians!” Yes, it’s a 35-year-old movie that’s been digitally enhanced and taken on new meaning (some would say cheapened) in the light of the three “prequels,” but it’s a film that will never lose its cultural cachet as a touchstone for several generations of movie lovers. I’m talking of course, about the first Star Wars (or Episode IV: A New Hope). Despite the fact that the film has been dubbed into hundreds of languages for billions of non-English speakers, this event is entirely different—the viewers of the Navajo Star Wars are all native English speakers who have understood and loved the original perfectly well.

Rather than introducing the film to a new audience, the point of this exercise is to bring a very popular, familiar piece of media to an audience eager to connect with their fading traditional language. Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum in Arizona, conceived of the project to preserve the language for generations, including his own, who are losing touch with Dine’. In the short video above, watch Wheeler and the voice actors and translators discuss the project’s success in inspiring young people to speak more Navajo. Wheeler told NPR’s All Things Considered, “Language is at the core of a culture. And I felt we needed a more contemporary way to reach not just young people but the population in general.” He also said that he is not fluent and that “there are thousands and thousands of us out there that are in that same situation.”

So what better way to introduce those thousands to the fine complexities of Navajo than with a movie almost everyone knows all the dialogue to? The translation was not without its challenges. The team of five translators had to find ways to convey concepts unfamiliar to the language, such as “robot,” which was translated to the equivalent of “a machine that thinks for itself.” The newly-dubbed film’s premier at a Window Rock, Arizona rodeo stadium thrilled the small crowd of 200 people. As Indian Country Today reports, the crowd “erupted in cheers and screams when they heard familiar characters like C‑3PO and Darth Vader delivering classic dialogue in their beloved Dine’ language.” And as Wheeler puts it above, “people were very engaged without feeling like they were in a lesson.” As anyone who’s studied languages—their own or others—knows, pop culture nearly always trumps lectures and workbooks.

Speaking of learning languages, don’t miss our handy collection: Learn 46 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, English, Chinese & More. And if anyone knows of free online Dine’ lessons, let us know and we’ll happily add them to the list.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch 25 Alfred Hitchcock Trailers, Exciting Films in Their Own Right

in Film | July 19th, 2013

“Murder!” exclaims the first word in the trailer above. “Mystery!!” the next continues. “Treachery!!! Romance!!!!” Before these claims can rack up a fifth exclamation point, we learn the plight of the protagonist — “hounded by spies,” “hunted by police,” and “double-crossed by the woman he loves.” The film? Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, (watch free online here) his 1935 British thriller starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. The film has taken so many critical laurels since its release that the way this trailer ballyhoos it like a potboiler comes as a shock. “It STARTS with a MURDER,” “and ENDS in a THRILL” — not to mention a certain cinematic craft in between.

If you simply let the video run, it will treat you to 24 more trailers in a row for various Hitchcock features, from 1940’s Foreign Correspondent, “the thrill spectacle of the year,” to 1946’s Notorious, “daringly directed by that master of suspense,” to 1976’s Family Plot, by which point breathless onscreen text had gone out of style, replaced by silly gags. These come courtesy of archive.org, which maintains an Alfred Hitchcock Trailer Collection. Their repetitious promises of thrills, suspense, mystery, and intrigue of all stripes reminds us that, for all his pure filmmaking skill, Hitchcock also acted simultaneously as his own best salesman: or rather, his pictures, presented in these tantalizing condensed forms, sell themselves. Can we assume that, like everything else about a Hitchcock movie, this didn’t happen by chance?

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teaching List of 87 Essential Films Every Aspiring Director Should See

Watch D.W. Griffith’s Silent Masterpiece Intolerance Free Online — It’s the “Ulysses of the Cinema!”

The General, “Perhaps the Greatest Film Ever Made,” and 20 Other Buster Keaton Classics Free Online

Walter Benjamin’s Philosophical Thought Presented by Two Experimental Films

Richard Wright Stars as Bigger Thomas in a 1951 Screen Test for Native Son

Star Wars Gets Dubbed into Navajo: a Fun Way to Preserve and Teach a Fading Language

Watch 25 Alfred Hitchcock Trailers, Exciting Films in Their Own Right

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