eric brochu

Edward Copeland has undertaken an ambitious project on his blog: trying to assemble a Top 25 list of non-English language films. Interestingly, he’s running it in two rounds: in the first, an invited group of people submitted their lists, which were whittled down to 123 films. Voting on those 123 films is now open to the public (until September 16, so get those lists in!).

One side-effect of doing it this way is that the list has the feeling of ranking the existing canon of Generally Acknowledged Foreign Masterpieces (yes, that’s the required capitalization), because only films that already had some kind of consensus behind them made it to the second round. This is probably unavoidable, but it does have the effect of pruning idiosyncratic, controversial and/or obscure choices. As much as I may love Even Dwarfs Started Small, there’s not much hope of it making it onto a list like this: it’s an idiosyncratic, controversial and fairly obscure choice. The comments on Edward’s blog have been full of people’s personal top choices of films that didn’t make the list, a lot of which look more interesting to me than all the Bergman, Godard and Fellini films that made it on.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my own (very half-assedly ranked) Top 25 from the 74 films on the list that I’ve seen:

1. neurontin 400 mg The Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa
2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God directed by Werner Herzog
3. Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa
4. Ran directed by Akira Kurosawa
5. Spirited Away directed by Hayao Miyazaki
6. Yi Yi: A One and a Two directed by Edward Yang
7. Nosferatu the Vampyre directed by Werner Herzog
8. Wings of Desire directed by Wim Wenders
9. Chungking Express directed by Wong Kar-Wai
10. M directed by Fritz Lang
11. Yojimbo directed by Akira Kurosawa
12. The Wages of Fear directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
13. High and Low directed by Akira Kurosawa
14. Amelie directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
15. Throne of Blood directed by Akira Kurosawa
16. Das Boot directed by Wolfgang Petersen
17. Run Lola Run directed by Tom Tykwer
18. Le Samourai directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
19. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser directed by Werner Herzog
20. Andrei Rublev directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
21. Children of Paradise directed by Marcel Carne
22. City of God directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund
23. Three Colors: Blue directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
24. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by Ang Lee
25. The Blue Angel directed by Josef von Sternberg

Of course, it’s very likely that if and when I see the rest (many of which are on my to-see list), this list would change. The ones I haven’t seen are: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar); Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville); Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda); Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette); The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci); Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard); The Cranes Are Flying (Mikheil Kalatozishvili); Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer); Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa); The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski); The Earrings of Madame De… (Max Ophuls); Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel); Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju); Forbidden Games (René Clément); The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini); The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci); I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini); La Strada (Federico Fellini); Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais); Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu); L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni); The Leopard (Luchino Visconti); Lola Montes (Max Ophuls); The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder); Masculin-Feminin (Jean-Luc Godard); My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer); Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer); Orpheus (Jean Cocteau); Pickpocket (Robert Bresson); Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard); Playtime (Jacques Tati); The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni); Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti); Satantango (Béla Tarr); Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman); Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller); Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut); Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman); Stolen Kisses (Francois Truffaut); Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi); Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar); The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff); Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu); Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi); Umberto D (Vittorio de Sica); Viridiana (Luis Bunuel); Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara.

And for the record, some movies that would be in my own Top 25 if they had been on the lost of nominees: Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog); Hard Boiled (John Woo); Legend of Drunken Master (Chia-Liang Liu); Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky); El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky); The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky); The Killer (John Woo) and Spring Summer Fall Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk).