http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO5mMVeFZEQ
Yesterday I wrote about the hugely influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma. It is not hyperbole to say that the publication not only altered the course of cinema history but it also, most likely, affected the way that you understand film. If you think of The Shining as a Stanley Kubrick movie instead of a Jack Nicholson flick, you can thank Cahiers du Cinema.
In 2008, Cahiers published its list of the 100 best movies of all time. The list is filled with both film school staples and some odd, unexpected entries. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane tops the list – no surprise there – but coming in at number two is Charles Laughton’s strange fairy tale The Night of the Hunter. European art house masterpieces like The Rules of the Game, M and L’Atalante place high on the list along with Hollywood greats like The Searchers and Singin’ in the Rain. But so does Tod Browning’s cult film Freaks and Nicholas Ray’s baroque western Johnny Guitar.
Jean Eustache’s little-seen masterpiece The Mother and the Whore is the highest-ranking film by a Cahiers veteran at 23. Not Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows, the clarion call of the French New Wave, or Jean-Luc Godard’s fractured, modernist, effortless cool noir Breathless, which rank at 58 and 63 respectively.
You can see the entire list below, and perhaps you can use it to build up your Netflix queue. We’ve linked to 11 films you can watch online right now, including Nosferatu above:
1. Citizen Kane – Orson Welles
2. The Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton
3. The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) – Jean Renoir
4. Sunrise – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
5. L’Atalante – Jean Vigo
6. M – Fritz Lang
7. Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
8. Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock
9. Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) – Marcel Carné
10. The Searchers – John Ford
11. Greed – Erich von Stroheim
12. Rio Bravo – Howard Hawkes
13. To Be or Not to Be – Ernst Lubitsch
14. Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
15. Contempt (Le Mépris) – Jean-Luc Godard
16. Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) – Kenji Mizoguchi
17. City Lights – Charlie Chaplin
18. The General – Buster Keaton
19. Nosferatu the Vampire (above) – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
20. The Music Room – Satyajit Ray
21. Freaks – Tod Browning
22. Johnny Guitar – Nicholas Ray
23. The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) – Jean Eustache
24. The Great Dictator – Charlie Chaplin
25. The Leopard (Le Guépard) – Luchino Visconti
26. Hiroshima, My Love – Alain Resnais
27. The Box of Pandora (Loulou) – Georg Wilhelm Pabst
28. North by Northwest – Alfred Hitchcock
29. Pickpocket – Robert Bresson
30. Golden Helmet (Casque d’or) – Jacques Becker
31. The Barefoot Contessa – Joseph Mankiewitz
32. Moonfleet – Fritz Lang
33. Diamond Earrings (Madame de…) – Max Ophüls
34. Pleasure – Max Ophüls
35. The Deer Hunter – Michael Cimino
36. L’Avventura– Michelangelo Antonioni
37. Battleship Potemkin – Sergei M. Eisenstein
38. Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock
39. Ivan the Terrible – Sergei M. Eisenstein
40. The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola
41. Touch of Evil – Orson Welles
42. The Wind – Victor Sjöström
43. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick
44. Fanny and Alexander – Ingmar Bergman
45. The Crowd – King Vidor
46. 8 1/2 – Federico Fellini
47. La Jetée – Chris Marker
48. Pierrot le Fou – Jean-Luc Godard
49. Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d’un tricheur) – Sacha Guitry
50. Amarcord – Federico Fellini
51. Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) – Jean Cocteau
52. Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder
53. Some Came Running – Vincente Minnelli
54. Gertrud – Carl Theodor Dreyer
55. King Kong – Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
56. Laura – Otto Preminger
57. The Seven Samurai – Akira Kurosawa
58. The 400 Blows – François Truffaut
59. La Dolce Vita – Federico Fellini
60. The Dead – John Huston
61. Trouble in Paradise – Ernst Lubitsch
62. It’s a Wonderful Life – Frank Capra
63. Monsieur Verdoux – Charlie Chaplin
64. The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Theodor Dreyer
65. À bout de souffle – Jean-Luc Godard
66. Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola
67. Barry Lyndon – Stanley Kubrick
68. La Grande Illusion – Jean Renoir
69. Intolerance – David Wark Griffith
70. A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) – Jean Renoir
71. Playtime – Jacques Tati
72. Rome, Open City – Roberto Rossellini
73. Livia (Senso) – Luchino Visconti
74. Modern Times – Charlie Chaplin
75. Van Gogh – Maurice Pialat
76. An Affair to Remember – Leo McCarey
77. Andrei Rublev – Andrei Tarkovsky
78. The Scarlet Empress – Joseph von Sternberg
79. Sansho the Bailiff – Kenji Mizoguchi
80. Talk to Her – Pedro Almodóvar
81. The Party – Blake Edwards
82. Tabu – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
83. The Bandwagon – Vincente Minnelli
84. A Star Is Born – George Cukor
85. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday – Jacques Tati
86. America, America – Elia Kazan
87. El – Luis Buñuel
88. Kiss Me Deadly – Robert Aldrich
89. Once Upon a Time in America – Sergio Leone
90. Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) – Marcel Carné
91. Letter from an Unknown Woman – Max Ophüls
92. Lola – Jacques Demy
93. Manhattan – Woody Allen
94. Mulholland Dr. – David Lynch
95. My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) – Eric Rohmer
96. Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) – Alain Resnais
97. The Gold Rush – Charlie Chaplin
98. Scarface – Howard Hawks
99. Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio de Sica
100. Napoléon – Abel Gance
Related content:
The Cahiers du Cinéma Names the 10 Best Films of the Year, from 1951 to 2014
Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dramatic Reading of Hannah Arendt’s “On the Nature of Totalitarianism”
Jefferson Airplane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Captures It (1968)
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.