Well, when I first saw Evil Dead sometime between the ages of ten and twelve, I realized that movies weren’t just something made by mythic figures in far away places, but an art form that could be achieved in the woods with your friends and some cameras.
But that’s to do with changing my perception of production, not aesthetics or narrative.
I’m tempted to say Star Wars, Ghostbusters, etc., all the movies I saw a hundred times as a kid and must have formed many of my basic nueral pathways but I suppose it was the adult movies I saw as a kid that really started me along the path of ideas I’m still on: Lost Highway, Stalker, In the Mood For Love, all of which I saw as a teenager. And Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite, when I was 15 or 16, I had never seen anything so violent, sexual and SLOW – a part of me still wants to make movies like that, just mean assaults on the viewer but I met Dumont and he does not seem happy.
As a kid I always liked movies. They were always just movies though, just entertainment. When I started watching Fellini though, that changed everything. 8 1/2, Roma, Satyricon, Amarcord, Nights Of Cabiria…they just vaulted cinema up to the stars. I never realised it could be so powerful before.
8 1/2 completely changed how I saw a film. I think my earliest memory of being in awe was The Godfather. Though recently, I’ve fallen in love with Godard again after listening to the commentary on the Criterion Collection’s issue of Contempt.
“The Searchers” and “Unforgiven” changed forever the way I perceive the myth that is the American Western. These films challenge not only the western but the American experience and worldview. It is not as simple as good vs. evil, bad vs. good, moral vs. immoral. I feel these film are extremely important to American culture as a whole.
“Masculine Feminine”
The first Godard film I ever saw; in a cinema and not knowing at all what to expect. It was a great liberation to me- the use of text, film as comment rather than illustration, exploration of emotions without becoming subservient to them…
Each subsequent Godard has effected me in different ways (the next two on my list for changing my views on cinema would be “Week End” and “First Name: Carmen”), but none have ever had the ice-water shock of that first viewing.
“Glen or Glenda?”
I saw this when I was very young, 10 or so. I saw it shortly after seeing “Plan 9”, which I sought out because of my already well cultivated taste in old low-budget sci-fi and horror (Thank you, MST3K, for giving me access to such marginalized beauty). My primary cinematic interests at this time were The Twilight Zone and 30s Universal horror, which I was eased into during countless hours of late night TV. A feeling I relished at the time was the occasional lapses of logic, the world of absolute confusion and nonsense that I could be flung into by these films. “Glen or Glenda?” is that sensation, incessant and concrete, for its entire running time. It is suddenly 3 AM, no matter what time you view the film.
“In A Lonely Place”
I viewed it, and realized what it meant for a film to be perfect. The rare film that can still bring me to tears, no matter how many times I view it; not only due to its content, but its form, the way it moves, the way it sounds; a film which has always felt to me to be as much about the individual viewing it as it is about the characters within it, or the director who made it.
Gotta say Woody Allen was the first director I ever followed religiously. He fused intellectual vigor with humor in my mind, and his example inspires me to this day.
Other random films that miraculously appeared in video stores in Skagit County in the ’80s: Blue Velvet, Brazil, Ran, My Life as a Dog…
Fanny and Alexander and Farewell My Concubine really did it for me, although I was into foreign films way before that.
Although I have already mentioned Stalker and the films, in general, of Tarkovsky under other posts as favorite films, I would like to analyze here why I would include Stalker in this post. It made me re-evaluate what I thought a film should be. Not only was I taken by the slow moving storyline, cinematography, use of complex imagery, I was amazed by the soundscape, too. I then saw more, or returned to other Tarkovsky films, and was equally amazed at his soundscape – how the sounds of nature or, more appropriately super-natural nature, reverberated in his films. I am still amazed by this aural quality. that adds to the element of something just out of earshot or haunting in its mystery. It really helps to explain why I return to his films for more revelations each time – because he uses all the mediumd of cinema: picture, sound, image, landscape, so creatively.
Of course, one of my other favorites, 2001, made me re-evaluate because it used the medium so effectly to create a super-real cinematic reality. I felt like I was out in space myself, or , indeed, had no need to venture into space, as Kubrick had already provided me that opportunity. A completely different type of director and film, but another good example of how the technical medium of film can be extended by a visionary director – a true auteur.
I’m going to have to say Breathless. I started holding films to a higher standard after I watched it.
When I was 8 I saw ‘Jurassic Park’.
When I was around 13 I saw ‘Magnolia’. This in particular had a profound effect on me.
Last year I saw ‘The Diving Bell & The Butterfly’.
I do not consider these the greatest films of all time, or anything like that, but the question is about what changed me and opened me to “new worlds” so to speak. I’d just as well not have answered this question because I’m not sure if anyone’s answers could be appreciated as they ought.
I’d have to say Breathless and The 400 blows. This was about the time I started crossing my legs, wearing berets and raising my brow.
Breathless really changed how I look at cinema, and taught me a lot about it.
When I was 14, I saw a couple of films that changed everything not only in my view towards cinema, but towards everything, but it wasn’t the films themselves, but the man behind them, he really transmitted his passion for films to me. The films were:
Taxi Driver: I couldn’t really understand it at that time, but I knew it was special and different to everything I had seen.
My Voyage to Italy: The way Martin Scorsese talks about Italian cinema is just amazing, you can trully feel the same way he feels about those films, even if you haven’t seen them.
BE HONEST PEOPLE!
I am 27, and it wasn’t until about two years ago I discovered “real” cinema. I have always loved Kubrick and Hitchcock as artists and Monty Python. I grew up on horror films ,so I discovered Argento a few years back and was amazed by his work. It kind of opened my eyes to what was out there. The Bicycle Thief shortly after blew me away. Then I watched Sunset Blvd, which opened my eyes to American classics. I loved the cynical darkness of it. This year I have fallen in love with Woody Allen and Bergman, amongst several others who have changed my life in the past year. All I live for now is films. Directors who have moved me greatly recently are Henri-Georges Clouzot and Ernst Lubitsch. To sum things up, I am still discovering films every week that are changing the way I look at film in general and I think I always will. I must say I am astonished no one else listed The Bicycle Thief.
Pulp Fiction was a shot in the arm for me. Up until then, I had never seen a film with such a flippant regard for profanity, violence, and everything unholy and ungodly in the view of my sheltered Christian upbringing. But the part that really makes this movie so influential for me is the jumbled chronology. I had never seen anything like it. Damn near singed my brain when I realized the story was running circles around itself.
The film that changed cinema for me and my life was “The Outsiders” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. I watched it in middle school after we read the book. The book was OK but the movie Wow, I never had anything effect me like that before. It changed the way I looked at people and it showed me the power that films could have.
There are a few moments in my life that I can remember a significant paradigm shift in how I approach filmmaking. The first was when I saw Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Robert Downey, Sr.’s Chafed Elbows on the same day. That pretty much blew the roof of the sucker. The next time was many many years later when I saw Outerspace by Peter Tscherkassky, which has to be one of the best movies ever made. EVER. Period. EVER. Soon after Outerspace was Figure/Ground (The Snowman) by Phil Solomon. Both Tscherkassky and Solomon continue to make awe-inspiring films and every single one that I have seen has been a jaw-dropping experience.
My English teacher showed us Run by Kurosawa when I was in School, because of the correlation between it and Shakespeare.
Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind really made me realized what kind of films I love to watch.
Mulholland Dr. only solidified that fact.
i’m gonna have to say “Manhattan” by Woody Allen or “The Assassination Of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” by Andrew Dominik. Both used lighting in incredible ways and the shots paired with the writing just blew me away.
2001.
Unfortunately, I have never had a life-altering experience inside a cinema, but have had to rely on my television and laptop to experience many films I otherwise would never have seen. For me Chungking Express was my introduction to film as art and free-form, something outside the parameters of Hollywood convention that touched me, gripped me on the inside and it still hasn’t let go.
Also, Last Year at Marienbad didn’t so much change the way I looked at cinema – since I was familiar with the film’s structure and direction before my first viewing – but instead changed how I looked at myself: I suddenly realized while watching it that I had no need for the Hollywood blockbuster because I had something better; not just a better movie but a reason to watch movies, to actually be seriously engaged in a film and not have to suffer the mindless elements that go into so many movies today.
But I suppose my most personal experience would be when I first watched Apocalypse Now at the age of 13 or 14, it was my first “serious” film in that it touched upon subject matter that I’d always thought of as too mature for me, it presented its story is such a strangely constructed way that it felt like I was watching someone’s horrific, yet beautiful memories of Vietnam. When the montage occurs of Willard killing Kurtz while the bull is slaughtered I was no longer a victim to the artificial goodness of Disney animation, I had grown, evolved and I wasn’t going back.
Royal Tenenbaums. This was the one that opened the door for me into the film world.
re: R.S. Brown –
i’ll echo you on The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. Great film, but this one changed the way i looked at writing. as an aspiring writer, it really showed me what it meant to be dedicated to my craft.
When I saw Elephant I realized that I was in to different movies than what there were previews for on TV
and Seven Samurai opened my eyes to foreign films
Requiem For A Dream. Watched it and then listened to the commentary(which listening back to it is actually pretty boring) showed me at the ripe age of probably 13 or 14 that there’s thought and reason to what the camera does and such. Changed my life.
When i first saw “THe Royal Tenenbaums” if was not for Wes Anderson I wouldn’t have got into french new wave films.
For me it was “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” And maybe “Double Suicide” by Masahiro Shinoda.
David B
Anyone have any films that changed the way they looked at film in general – its aesthetics, narrative, culture, history, etc.? EDIT – also about how films are made. Not necessarily your favorite films, just ones that have challenged your standards on what film is, both in style and cultural significance.
Derek Jarman’s “Blue”
Maysles Brothers’ “Salesman”
Dardenne Brothers’ “L’Enfant”
I’m sure there’s more for me…it’s tough to come up with many off the top of my head.