Kenji's Canon: THE BIG 1000
by Kenji
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Just my personal 1000 favourites, including some TV programmes. Yes, many popular and famous films are missing. Most films here are not in English but that simply reflects the reality of film-making worldwide.
Near misses/ substituted:
A Trip to the Moon (Melies),
Westinghouse Works (Bitzer),
Cabiria (Pastrone),
The Cheat (De Mille),
Broken Blossoms (Griffith),
The Phantom Carriage (Sjostrom),
The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac),
A Woman of Paris (Chaplin),
Die Nibelungen (Lang),
Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst),
The Love Parade (Lubitsch),
Working on the Douro River (Oliveira),
Aimless Walk (Hammid),
Light Penetrates the Dark (Vavra, Pilat),
Night of the Crossroads (Renoir),
Que Viva Mexico (Eisenstein),
Every Night Dreams (Naruse),
Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor),
Ministry of Fear (Lang),
Force of Evil (Polonsky),
The Pirate (Minnelli),
Portrait of Madame Yuki (Mizoguchi),
The Lady of Musashino (Mizoguchi),
The Golden Coach (Renoir),
El (Bunuel),
The Barefoot Contessa (Mankiewicz),
French Can Can (Renoir),
Toute la Mémoire du Monde (Resnais),
Nightfall (Tourneur),
The Magician (Bergman),
El Cid (Mann),
Placido (Berlanga),
Carnival of Souls (Harvey),
The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford),
Raven’s End (Widerberg).
I Fidanzati (Olmi),
She and He (Hani),
Go! Go! Go! (Menken),
Alphaville (Godard),
Ashes (Wajda),
Boniface’s Holiday (Khitruk),
The Commissar (Askoldov),
I Was Nineteen (Wolf),
Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger),
The Spider’s Stratagem (Bertolucci),
Walkabout (Roeg),
Papillon (Schaffner),
Three Days of the Condor (Pollack),
Providence (Resnais),
Les Mains Négatives (Duras),
Black Jack (Loach),
Vengeance is Mine (Imamura),
The Aviator’s Wife (Rohmer),
Company of Wolves (Jordan),
Taipei Story (Yang),
Mind of Clay (Kaul),
From the Pole to the Equator (Gianikian, Lucchi),
The Dead (Huston),
Sidewalk Stories (Lane),
Prospero’s Books (Greenaway),
The Last Seduction (Dahl),
Guimba the Tyrant (Sissoko),
Tierra (Medem),
Foreign Land (Salles, Thomas),
An Autumn Tale (Rohmer),
The Apple (S.Makhmalbaf),
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick),
Chunhyang (Im),
Mourning Rock (Koutsaftis),
Suzhou River (Lou),
Y Tu Mama Tambien (Cuaron),
Pistol Opera (Suzuki),
The Magdalene Sisters (Mullan),
Rabbit-Proof Fence (Noyce),
Russian Ark (Sokurov),
2046 (Wong).
Separado! (Goch, Rhys),
Archipelago (Hogg),
Blancanieves (Berger),
Cobra Gypsies (Treza),
Housemaiden (Park),
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck)
and TV Series
The Blue Planet,
Morecambe and Wise,
Top Cat,
Porridge,
Midsomer Murders,
Cheers.
Directors with most films included here:
Mizoguchi 13
Renoir 9
Hitchcock 9
Satyajit Ray 9
~
We didn’t have a TV till i was 12. My first memory of going to the cinema was Fantasia- my introduction to the devil and dinosaurs. Then there was a film called Emil and the Detectives. My small town’s cinema closed when i was 7- TV was too strong a competitor-, my sole memory of films there of “red Indians” on a hill. The bigger films were at the grand metropolis of the county town of 3,000 people 20 miles away, or an even greater city of a few thousand more in the other direction. How i wept when the childcatcher caught them in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the sky outside had changed, with castles hidden in the majestic domes of cumulo-nimbus. At 11, The Great Escape was the greatest adventure, at 12, El Cid. At 13, i joined the school film society. I gazed in awe at the naked female on a motorbike in Vanishing Point- more fun than that boring Wild Strawberries. In my mid teens, the best discoveries were North by Northwest and Fred Astaire. At uni, on a French course, my special subject was French Cinema of the 30s- Renoir and Pagnol.. but i really got obsessively hooked on world cinema once i’d bought a video player in the late 80s (ooh those Wenders road movies!) and John Kobal’s book The Top 100 Movies (see my list on that); Tarkovsky and Mizoguchi were new names to me. Soon i saw Andrei Rublev and the rain and light had changed. Then a few years on (less availability in those days) it was the turn of Sansho the Bailiff.
~
I’ve been asked to do a list of all my lists, but that would take time and anyway would get jumbled in with the others. So here are the ones i like or think are worthwhile:
Pastel Films
The Labyrinth
Kenji’s Japanese Canon
My 101 Favourite Films
The Kenji Awards
The Mubi/Auteurs World Cup Films (thanks to all who helped that groundbreaking event work)
The Welsh Connection
Mizoguchi Revered
Directors Round Mizoguchi
Le Cinéma, c’est Jean Renoir
Let there be Light: The Birth of Films
A Rosefinch Sang: the Czechoslovakian New Wave
19th Century Britain
Essential Films by Women
Portugal, Land of my Dreams
Satyajit Ray
A Library of Film Books
Essential French Films
The Silent Era: 1888-1929
The Best of British
Hidden Treasures
100 Directors’ Essential Films
500 Directors
Favourite Short Films
Essential Hitchcock
Essential Kubrick
Essential Godard
Tumbleweed and Tomahawks
The Caucasus
Spain: Mystery, Passion, Life
Canada: A Collection of Contraband Curiosities
Tarkovsky’s Legacy
Films Admired by Tarkovsky
Eric Rohmer
Alice Guy-Blaché, Queen of the Pioneers
An Exquisite Soirée at Baron Kenjitski’s Magnificent Chateau
Romanticism
Double Bills
Painters and Films
Mental Illness
Notable Films by Black Directors
Essential African Films
Essential Hungarian Films
Poland
Kazakhstan
Nepal
Belgium
They Do Not Exist: Palestine
Lesotho
Mali