The Nine Greatest Films You’ve Never Seen

Whether we know it or not, we have all absorbed a cin­e­mat­ic vocab­u­lary and set of film his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences through the film and tele­vi­sion we’ve watched through­out our lives. We can leave it to the film­mak­ers, crit­ics, and cinephiles to mem­o­rize glos­saries of tech­niques. It’s enough that we under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing on screen because hun­dreds of visu­al nar­ra­tives have been con­struct­ed in more or less the same way. This lan­guage did not come out of a pri­mor­dial soup but took shape over the last 120 years or so: from the Lumière Broth­ers and Georges Méliès to Wes Ander­son and Denis Vil­leneuve and so on — each stage along the way absorb­ing influ­ences and ideas from the most inno­v­a­tive films.

Take, for exam­ple, My Din­ner with Andre, an intense­ly philo­soph­i­cal film that con­sists of only two main char­ac­ters, one set­ting, and no real plot to speak of. Instead, the film exploits the tech­niques of shot/reverse shot to their fullest, cre­at­ing extra­or­di­nary inti­ma­cy between two char­ac­ters, and the view­er, with the cam­era. Louis Malle’s 1981 film became a stan­dard for filmed exis­ten­tial con­ver­sa­tions. Yet behind it stands an even more icon­ic con­ver­sa­tion, one lit­er­al­ly con­cerned with life and Death. Ing­mar Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal is a cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence for count­less movies, and a film that undoubt­ed­ly expand­ed the ways film­mak­ers could tell sto­ries.

But there is anoth­er film we should see, says the Cin­e­mat­ic Car­tog­ra­phy above, if we want to know where else the philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion in film might go: Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor Zoltán Fábri’s 1976 The Fifth Seal, a grim moral­i­ty play set in Nazi-occu­pied Hun­gary in which four friends in a bar pro­pose a thought exper­i­ment that becomes ter­ri­fy­ing­ly real. The film cuts between the con­ver­sa­tion on screen and scenes of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights. “All through the film,” one crit­ic writes, “an intel­li­gent view­er will note the char­ac­ters in the film con­stant­ly reassess their philo­soph­i­cal stance or points of view, accord­ing to cir­cum­stances.”

The entire move­ment of the film turns on a sin­gle ques­tion, a stark restate­ment of the Hegelian master/slave dialec­tic. Rather than a philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion between two sta­ble points of view, The Fifth Seal shows us per­spec­tives that shift accord­ing to the char­ac­ters’ self-per­cep­tions, our per­cep­tions of them,  and the influ­ence of Bosch on what we see, adding lay­ers of dra­mat­ic irony and extra-diegetic ten­sion. Influ­en­tial in its own way, if The Fifth Seal had been as wide­ly seen as The Sev­enth Seal, we might have seen cin­e­ma take a dif­fer­ent turn in the last few decades. Such is the case with all nine films dis­cussed. See them list­ed below, learn about them in brief in “The Great­est Films You Don’t Know,” above, and imag­ine the direc­tions cin­e­ma might go if it took more cues from these under­val­ued clas­sics.

0:00 Intro­duc­tion (Ash­es and Snow, A Time to Live A Time to Die, Strangers In Good Com­pa­ny, Borom Sarat, Dead Man’s Let­ter’s, Killer of Sheep, Napoleon, Still Life)
1:50 The Fifth Seal — Az ötödik pec­sét (Dir: Zoltán Fábri)
7:29 The House Is Black — خانه سیاه است (Dir: For­ough Far­rokhzad)
9:57 Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks — 铁西区 (Dir: Wang Bing)
14:12 As I Was Mov­ing Ahead Occa­sion­al­ly I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beau­ty (Dir: Jonas Mekas)
18:37 The Enclosed Val­ley — La val­lée close (Dir: Jean-Claude Rousseau)
19:37 Pas­toral: To Die in the Coun­try — 田園に死す (Dir: Shūji Ter­aya­ma)
23:44 Pun­ish­ment Park (Dir: Peter Watkins)
28:03 The Cre­ma­tor — Spalo­vač mrtvol (Dir: Juraj Herz) 30:28 O Pagador de Promes­sas (Dir: Ansel­mo Duarte)
31:39 Con­clu­sion (Lucifer Ris­ing, An Ele­phant Sit­ting Still, Mar­ke­ta Lazaro­va, White Noise, Plat­form, The Burmese Harp)

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Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

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