Watch Restored Versions of Classic Fleischer Cartoons on Youtube, Featuring Betty Boop, Koko the Clown & Others

in Animation, Film, History | December 30th, 2022

Quite a few gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­can chil­dren have by now grown up know­ing the names of Max and Dave Fleis­ch­er — albeit know­ing even bet­ter the names of the char­ac­ters they ani­mat­ed, like Bet­ty Boop, Pop­eye the Sailor, and Super­man. The kids who first thrilled to Max Fleis­cher’s ear­ly “Out of the Inkwell” series, which he start­ed in the late nine­teen-tens and con­tin­ued into the late nine­teen-twen­ties, would nat­u­ral­ly have seen them in a movie the­ater. But most of us under the age of eighty would have received our intro­duc­tion to the live­ly, whim­si­cal, and often bizarre world of the broth­ers Fleis­ch­er through the tele­vi­sion, a medi­um hun­gry for car­toons prac­ti­cal­ly since its incep­tion.

Now view­ers of all ages can enjoy Fleis­ch­er car­toons on Youtube, and in new­ly restored form at that. “The Fab­u­lous Fleis­ch­er Car­toons Restored team is ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing Fleis­cher’s films by restor­ing them from orig­i­nal prints and neg­a­tives,” writes Boing Boing’s Rusty Blazen­hoff, adding that “Adam Sav­age’s Test­ed vis­it­ed the Black­hawk Films scan­ning facil­i­ty in Cal­i­for­nia and spoke with restora­tion expert Steve Stanch­field about the process of bring­ing these clas­sic films back to life.”

The charm of Fleis­ch­er car­toons may still feel effort­less a cen­tu­ry after their cre­ation, but any­one famil­iar with ani­ma­tion knows how painstak­ing that cre­ation would have been; by the same token, bring­ing the sur­viv­ing films back to pris­tine con­di­tion is a more com­pli­cat­ed job than most view­ers would imag­ine.

The cur­rent offer­ings on Fab­u­lous Fleis­ch­er Car­toons Restored’s chan­nel include Bet­ty Boop and Pudgy in “Hap­py You and Mer­ry Me,” Bim­bo the Dog in “Teacher’s Pest,” and even the short but lav­ish Tech­ni­col­or fan­ta­sy “Some­where in Dream­land,” which bright­ened up the grim days of the Great Depres­sion for all who saw it. The restor­ers have also worked their mag­ic on Fleis­ch­er hol­i­day car­toons like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer” and “Christ­mas Comes But Once a Year” (includ­ing with the lat­ter a side-by-side com­par­i­son of the new restora­tion with the exist­ing six­teen-mil­lime­ter DVD print). Yes, Christ­mas has just passed, but it will come again next year, and bring with it the lat­est gen­er­a­tion’s chance to be delight­ed by Fleis­ch­er car­toons crisper and more vivid than the ones with which any of us grew up.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Sur­re­al 1933 Ani­ma­tion of Snow White, Fea­tur­ing Cab Cal­loway & Bet­ty Boop: It’s Ranked as the 19th Great­est Car­toon of All Time

The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Bet­ty Boop: Meet the Orig­i­nal Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther”

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

The Trick That Made Ani­ma­tion Real­is­tic: Watch a Short His­to­ry of Roto­scop­ing

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Junky’s Christmas: William S. Burrough’s Dark Claymation Christmas Film Produced by Francis Ford Coppola (1993)

in Film | December 20th, 2022

Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs wrote and nar­rat­ed a 21 minute clay­ma­tion Christ­mas film. And, as you can well imag­ine, it’s not your nor­mal hap­py Christ­mas flick. Nope, this film – The Junky’s Christ­mas – is all about Dan­ny the Car­wiper, a junkie, who spends Christ­mas Day try­ing to score a fix. Even­tu­al­ly he finds the Christ­mas spir­it when he shares some mor­phine with a young man suf­fer­ing from kid­ney stones, giv­ing him the “immac­u­late fix.” There you have it. And, oh, did we men­tion that the film was pro­duced by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs’ Scathing “Thanks­giv­ing Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

Andy Warhol’s Christ­mas Art

Demen­tia 13: The Film That Took Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la From Schlock­ster to Auteur

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The Avant-Garde Animated Films of Walter Ruttmann, Still Strikingly Fresh a Century Later (1921–1925)

in Animation, Film | December 19th, 2022

Though regard­ed by many as near-impos­si­bly dif­fi­cult to judge, avant-garde art can be put to its own test of time: does it still feel new ten, twen­ty, fifty, a hun­dred years lat­er? Now that most of Wal­ter Ruttman­n’s short ani­mat­ed films have passed the cen­tu­ry mark, we can with some con­fi­dence say they pass that test. A few years ago, we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture his Licht­spiel Opus 1, the first avant-garde ani­ma­tion ever made. Now, with this playlist, you can watch it and sev­er­al of its suc­ces­sors, which togeth­er date from the years 1921 through 1925.

“A trained archi­tect and painter,” writes Car­toon Brew’s Amid Ami­di, Ruttmann “worked as a graph­ic design­er pri­or to becom­ing involved with film. He fought in WWI, suf­fered a ner­vous break­down and spent time recov­er­ing in a sana­to­ri­um.”

It was after that har­row­ing expe­ri­ence that he plunged into the still-new medi­um of ani­ma­tion, and he evi­dent­ly brought the com­bined aes­thet­ic refine­ment of archi­tec­ture, paint­ing, and graph­ic design with him. His four-part Opus series (top) shows us “how abstract ani­ma­tion doesn’t become dat­ed as quick­ly as rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al ani­ma­tion because its cre­ation is not pred­i­cat­ed upon the styl­is­tic trap­pings of its era.”

This also holds true for Ruttman­n’s adver­tis­ing work, includ­ing the three-minute Der Sieger just above. Por­tray­ing “the strug­gles of a durable Excel­sior tire that climbs entire build­ings and wraps itself around the sun to pro­tect it from tri­an­gu­lar shapes with mean-look­ing faces,” as this sum­ma­ry of a talk by film schol­ar Michael Cow­an puts it, the short “is a per­fect exam­ple tes­ti­fy­ing to how a lot of avant-garde artists — con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — nev­er lost sight for a cer­tain applic­a­bil­i­ty of their art in that their con­cepts of form also implied a cer­tain idea of ‘form­ing’: the poten­tial to take dif­fer­ent shapes through mor­ph­ing, to find order­ing prin­ci­ples, or even to com­mu­ni­cate the ide­o­log­i­cal impe­tus of form­ing a nation­al body.”

That last holds espe­cial­ly true for Ruttman­n’s “lat­er work with­in the con­text of Nation­al Social­ism”: an unfor­tu­nate-sound­ing con­text, though it must be not­ed that he dis­pleased Adolf Hitler enough to be per­son­al­ly removed by the dic­ta­tor from the project that would become Leni Riefen­stahl’s Tri­umph of the Will. His artis­tic phi­los­o­phy may have been com­pat­i­ble with sell­ing tires, but it seems not to have served the much more bom­bas­tic and lit­er­al form of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da. That is, of course, to Ruttman’s cred­it, as is the fresh­ness his ear­ly ani­ma­tions still exude these hun­dred or so years lat­er. As Amid writes, “the graph­ic forms used in his film are the same build­ing blocks — raw and unadorned — used by artists today.” But how many artists today use them with such ele­gance?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

The First Mas­ter­pieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale (1924)

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Despised by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

The Exper­i­men­tal Abstract Films of Pio­neer­ing Amer­i­can Ani­ma­tor Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s)

Spheres Dance to the Music of Bach, Per­formed by Glenn Gould: An Ani­ma­tion from 1969

The Gold­en Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Clas­sic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold Beautiful Original Movie Posters for Metropolis from France, Sweden, Germany, Japan & Beyond

in Design, Film | December 16th, 2022

Of Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, the crit­ic Siegfried Kra­cauer wrote that “the Amer­i­cans rel­ished its tech­ni­cal excel­lence; the Eng­lish remained aloof; the French were stirred by a film which seemed to them a blend of Wag­n­er and Krupp, and on the whole an alarm­ing sign of Ger­many’s vital­i­ty.” By Wag­n­er, Kra­cauer of course meant the com­pos­er; Krupp referred to the arms man­u­fac­tur­er Friedrich Krupp AG. We must remem­ber that Metrop­o­lis first came out in the Ger­many of 1927, and thus into a sociopo­lit­i­cal con­text grow­ing more volatile by the moment.

But the film also came out in the gold­en age of silent cin­e­ma, and every seri­ous movie­go­er in the world must have been enor­mous­ly eager for a glimpse of the spec­ta­cle of the elab­o­rate dystopi­an future Lang and his col­lab­o­ra­tors had put onscreen.

And screen around the world that spec­ta­cle did, albeit in a ver­sion cen­sored and oth­er­wise cut in a vari­ety of ways that Lang found ter­ri­bly dis­pleas­ing. How­ev­er bowd­ler­ized the Metrop­o­lis seen by so many back then, it proved to be so much of an attrac­tion that its adver­tis­ing mate­ri­als became near­ly as artis­tic as the film itself.

At Stephen O’Don­nel­l’s blog Gods and Fool­ish Grandeur, you can see a selec­tion of the posters for Metrop­o­lis put up dur­ing the late nine­teen-twen­ties and ear­ly nine­teen-thir­ties in the movie the­aters of var­i­ous coun­tries, includ­ing Swe­den, France, Japan, and Aus­tralia.

All are visu­al­ly strik­ing, but it prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise that the Amer­i­can ones — prod­ucts, after all, of the cul­ture that gave rise to Hol­ly­wood — get espe­cial­ly breath­less with the accom­pa­ny­ing text.

“FANTASTIC FUTURISTIC FATALISTIC,” promis­es one poster, but not with­out adding “IMAGINARY IMPRESSIVE IMPOSSIBLE” and “EROTIC EXOTIC ERRATIC.” Anoth­er sheet holds out to view­ers a flight “HIGH INTO THE AIR!” Lest they sus­pect that would­n’t give them their quar­ter’s worth of fan­ta­sy, it also promis­es them a plunge “DEEP IN THE EARTH!” A dif­fer­ent tagline, also used in oth­er Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries, declares of the film that “Every­one is talk­ing about it, yet no one can describe it!”

That’s not for lack of try­ing, least of all by the dis­trib­u­tor’s pub­lic­i­ty depart­ment: anoth­er poster’s detailed para­graph boasts of a “mighty, surg­ing love dra­ma of the two worlds that work out their moil­ing des­tinies with­in the con­fines of a great city.” But over the gen­er­a­tions — and after restora­tions — Metrop­o­lis has sur­passed these claims with its val­ue as a work of cin­e­mat­ic art, and indeed become as time­less as a ques­tion once used to pro­mote it: “What’s the world com­ing to?”

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch Fritz Lang’s 1927 Mas­ter­piece

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

H. G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

Gaze at Glob­al Movie Posters for Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch 80 Free Documentaries from Kino Lorber: Includes Films on M. C. Escher, Stanley Kubrick, Hannah Arendt, Hilma af Klint & More

in Film | December 16th, 2022

M. C. Esch­er, Han­nah Arendt, Hierony­mus Bosch, Hilma af Kint, Stan­ley Kubrick: if you’re a reg­u­lar read­er of Open Cul­ture, you’re no doubt fas­ci­nat­ed some or all of these fig­ures. Now, thanks to film dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber, you can watch entire films about them on Youtube. Hav­ing evi­dent­ly put a good deal of ener­gy toward expand­ing their Youtube chan­nel in recent months, Kino Lor­ber has uploaded such doc­u­men­taries as M. C. Esch­er: Jour­ney to Infin­i­ty, Vita Acti­va: The Spir­it of Han­nah Arendt, Hierony­mous Bosch: Touched by the Dev­il, Beyond the Vis­i­ble: Hilma af Kint, and Film­work­er (about Kubrick­’s right-hand man, the late Leon Vitali) — all of them free to watch.


So far, Kino Lor­ber’s playlist of free doc­u­men­taries con­tains 80 films, a num­ber that may vary depend­ing on your loca­tion. Some pop­u­lar selec­tions focus on music: that of Elvis Pres­ley, that of Lev­on Helm and The Band, that of Green­wich Vil­lage in the nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties.

But the doc­u­men­tary is a ver­sa­tile form, able in the right direc­to­r­i­al hands to con­tain a wide range of real-life sub­jects, from art (Louise Bour­geois: The Spi­der the Mis­tress and the Tan­ger­ine, The Jeff Koons Show) to food (Sushi: Glob­al Catch, El Bul­li: Cook­ing in Progress) to nature (More than Hon­ey, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes) to reli­gion (Bril­liant Moon: Glimpses of Dil­go Khyentse Rin­poche, The Last Dalai Lama?), to cin­e­ma itself (Cap­tured on Films: The True Sto­ry of Mar­i­on Davies, Blank City).

All this gives only a hint of the sheer aes­thet­ic, intel­lec­tu­al, and cul­tur­al vari­ety of Kino Lor­ber-dis­trib­uted doc­u­men­taries. To get a fuller sense, you’ll have to explore the playlist itself, down to its most recent addi­tions like Find­ing Fela, Nol­ly­wood Baby­lon, and Lina Wert­müller: Behind the White Glass­es. Like all doc­u­men­taries worth watch­ing, these don’t just address sub­jects of inter­est, but leave their view­ers with new­ly open avenues of curios­i­ty to fol­low. Your jour­ney may begin with films about Glenn Gould, Char­lotte Ram­pling, John­ny Cash, or Maya Deren, but to what realm it will take you — that of the Bal­lets Russ­es, of Mex­i­can lucha libre wrestling, of the female Bud­dhists of the Kath­man­du Val­ley — can­not be fore­told.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

The 10 Great­est Doc­u­men­taries of All Time Accord­ing to 340 Film­mak­ers and Crit­ics

50 Must-See Doc­u­men­taries, Select­ed by 10 Influ­en­tial Doc­u­men­tary Film­mak­ers

The Atom­ic Café: The Cult Clas­sic Doc­u­men­tary Made Entire­ly Out of Nuclear Weapons Pro­pa­gan­da from the Cold War (1982)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the Best of Angelo Badalamenti (RIP) from 1986–2017: Features Music from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks & More

in Film, Music | December 15th, 2022

The late Ange­lo Badala­men­ti com­posed music for singers like Mar­i­anne Faith­full and Nina Simone, for movies like The City of Lost Chil­dren and Nation­al Lam­poon’s Christ­mas Vaca­tion, and even for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. But of all his musi­cal work, no piece is more like­ly to begin play­ing in our minds at the men­tion of his name than the theme from Twin Peaks, the ABC series that both mys­ti­fied and enrap­tured audi­ences in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties. Look­ing back, one would expect any­thing less from a prime-time show co-cre­at­ed by David Lynch. And though Twin Peaks’ ini­tial run would come to only three sea­sons, Lynch and Badala­men­ti’s col­lab­o­ra­tion would con­tin­ue for decades there­after.

It was with his work for Lynch, in fact, that Badala­men­ti first broke through as a film com­pos­er: 1986’s Blue Vel­vet may have estab­lished Lynch as Amer­i­ca’s fore­most pop­u­lar “art house” auteur, but it also intro­duced its view­ers the world over to the seduc­tive and unset­tling beau­ty of Badala­men­ti’s music.

That film’s song “Mys­ter­ies of Love” (with its Lynch-penned lyrics sung by Julee Cruise, who also died this year) comes ear­ly in the chrono­log­i­cal best-of-Badala­men­ti Youtube playlist embed­ded above. Span­ning the years 1986 through 2017, it also includes music from such motion pic­tures as Cousins, Holy Smoke!, The Beach, Cet amour-là, and The Edge of Love.

The bulk of the playlist’s selec­tions, how­ev­er, were com­posed for Lynch. You’ll hear music from Wild at Heart, The Straight Sto­ry, Mul­hol­land Dr. (a film fea­tur­ing a brief but mem­o­rable appear­ance by Badala­men­ti him­self), and of course, Twin Peaks — not just the orig­i­nal series and the 1992 movie Fire Walk with Me, but also the 2017 con­tin­u­a­tion Twin Peaks: The Return, for which Badala­men­ti returned as com­pos­er. In all these eras, his work sound­ed dis­tinc­tive, some­how tra­di­tion­al, uncon­ven­tion­al, earnest, and iron­ic all at once — a mix­ture that could hard­ly have been bet­ter suit­ed to the Lynchi­an sen­si­bil­i­ty. And so it is with a thor­ough­ly Lynchi­an salute, in the mid­dle of one of his dai­ly weath­er reports, that the man him­self sends Badala­men­ti off.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ange­lo Badala­men­ti Reveals How He and David Lynch Com­posed the Twin Peaks‘ “Love Theme”

Get a First Lis­ten to David Lynch & Ange­lo Badalamenti’s Long-Lost Album, Thought Gang

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

David Lynch Cre­ates Dai­ly Weath­er Reports for Los Ange­les: How the Film­mak­er Pass­es Time in Quar­an­tine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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480 Filmmakers Reveal the 100 Greatest Movies in the World

in Film | December 8th, 2022

Nobody knows more about cin­e­ma than crit­ics. But in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent way, nobody knows more about cin­e­ma than direc­tors. That, per­haps, is one of the rea­sons that Sight and Sound mag­a­zine has, for the past thir­ty years, con­duct­ed two sep­a­rate once-in-a-decade polls to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. Last week we fea­tured the results of Sight and Sound’s lat­est crit­ics poll here on Open Cul­ture, but the out­come of the direc­tors’ vote — whose elec­torate of 480 “spans exper­i­men­tal, art­house, main­stream and genre film­mak­ers from around the world” — mer­its its own con­sid­er­a­tion.

As all the cinephile world knows by now, Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles came out on top of Sight and Sound’s crit­ics poll this year. That tem­po­ral­ly expan­sive mas­ter­work of pota­toes, veal cut­lets, pros­ti­tu­tion, and mur­der did­n’t place quite so high­ly in the direc­tors poll. It ranks at num­ber four, below Ozu Yasu­jirō’s Tokyo Sto­ry, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s The God­fa­ther, Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane, and — at num­ber one — Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, for those who make movies, evi­dent­ly remains the “ulti­mate trip” that its late-six­ties mar­ket­ing cam­paign promised.

The roundup of indi­vid­ual bal­lots at World of Reel reveals that 2001’s sup­port­ers include a wide range of auteurs — Olivi­er Assayas, Bi Gan, Don Hertzfeldt, Gas­par Noé, Joan­na Hogg, Edgar Wright, Mar­tin Scors­ese — not all of whose own work shows clear evi­dence of hav­ing been influ­enced by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s at once lav­ish and stark vision of mankind’s des­tiny in the realms beyond Earth. But 2001’s real achieve­ment was less to tell its par­tic­u­lar sto­ry, no mat­ter how mind-blow­ing, than to expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma itself: to exe­cute, as exam­ined in the video essay above, a kind of cin­e­mat­ic hyp­no­tism.

Of course, Kubrick is huge­ly admired by view­ers and mak­ers of movies alike. Bar­ry Lyn­don appears on both top-100 lists, though it seems as if crit­ics favor The Shin­ing more than film­mak­ers. The lat­ter group cast more votes for Kubrick­’s Cold-War com­e­dy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb. Also among the dozens of titles only in the film­mak­ers’ top 100 include Abbas Kiarosta­mi’s Where Is the Friend’s House? and Taste of Cher­ry, Kuro­sawa Aki­ra’s Throne of Blood and Ikiru, Sergei Para­janov’s The Col­or of Pome­gran­ates, and even Steven Spiel­berg’s Jaws — which, no less than 2001, sure­ly appeals to any film­mak­er’s innate sense of spec­ta­cle.

See the direc­tors top 100 films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films: The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The 30 Greatest Films Ever Made: A Video Essay

in Film | December 7th, 2022

Last week, we fea­tured the results of this decade’s Sight and Sound poll to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. Nobody could pos­si­bly agree with every sin­gle one of its rank­ings, but then, some of the joy of cinephil­ia lies in dis­agree­ment — and even more of it in doing a few rank­ings of one’s own. Such is the project of video essay­ist Lewis Bond in the video just above from his Youtube chan­nel The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy. It presents a list of the thir­ty great­est films, begin­ning at num­ber thir­ty and end­ing at num­ber one, weav­ing through a vari­ety of time peri­ods, cul­tures, and aes­thet­ics.

We would expect no less from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for videos on sub­jects like cities and places in film, cin­e­matog­ra­phy, and ani­ma­tion, as well as on spe­cif­ic auteurs like David Lynch, Quentin Taran­ti­no, and Andrei Tarkovsky. None of Taran­ti­no’s films make the cut for the top thir­ty here, though they do face for­mi­da­ble com­pe­ti­tion, includ­ing Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dr. and both Andrei Rublev and Mir­ror by Tarkovsky — not to men­tion works from the likes of Stan­ley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Ing­mar Bergman, Peter Green­away, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Ozu Yasu­jirō, and Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la.

“The idea of a canon, or any form of list, is both a mean­ing­less as well as a obses­sive endeav­or,” says Lewis Bond in the video’s intro­duc­tion. “What­ev­er the thought process was, these were the films that clear­ly, some­where, res­onate with me at my deep­est lev­el. For all I know, I could orga­nize the exact same list in a year’s time, and every entry could be dif­fer­ent.” No mat­ter to what you devote your cul­tur­al life, you sure­ly know the feel­ing, but you also know the val­ue of see­ing some­one else’s set of pref­er­ences clear­ly arranged and artic­u­late­ly jus­ti­fied.

You may not feel exact­ly the same as Bond does about both My Din­ner with Andre and the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy (a rare dual enthu­si­asm in any case), but see­ing where he places them in rela­tion to oth­er movies can help to give you a sense of whether and how they could fit into your own per­son­al canon — as well as the kind of con­text a film needs to earn its place. It’s easy to get a bit too obses­sive about this sort of thing, which on some lev­el just comes down to end­less­ly order­ing and re-order­ing a bunch of movies on a list. But as cinephiles know, our canons are our­selves: com­plex, idio­syn­crat­ic, sub­ject to cease­less change, and — so we hope, at least — coher­ent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

The Nine Great­est Films You’ve Nev­er Seen

The 100 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 1,639 Film Crit­ics & 480 Direc­tors: See the Results of the Once-a-Decade Sight and Sound Poll

Quentin Taran­ti­no Names His 20 Favorite Movies, Cov­er­ing Two Decades

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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