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)

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: 

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

I can guar­an­tee almost every day I get some­one going, ‘Hey, you’re the guy from E.T.’, usu­al­ly fol­lowed by, ‘What are you doing now?’ And not a day has gone by when some­one hasn’t shout­ed ‘E.T. phone home’ at me.” —  Actor Hen­ry Thomas

Should I ever bump into Hen­ry Thomas, I may exclaim, “Okay, kid, you got the job,” just like direc­tor Steven Spiel­berg does at the end of the remark­able screen test, above.

Thomas, now — brace your­self — 50, was just 9 when Spiel­berg flew him in from Texas to audi­tion for the role of Elliot in E.T. the Extra-Ter­res­tri­al on the strength of his sin­gle screen cred­it, play­ing Sis­sy Spacek’s son in Raggedy Man.

Before we go fur­ther, a cau­tion­ary tale.

Anoth­er young­ster had the part of Elliot all sewn up until screen­writer Melis­sa Math­i­son host­ed a Dun­geons and Drag­on game to get a feel for the chem­istry between the film’s child actors.

“In about three min­utes it became very clear that nobody liked this lit­tle boy,” cast­ing direc­tor Mar­ci Liroff recalls. Ouch.

That would be a heavy bur­den to car­ry through life, know­ing that youth­ful bossi­ness cost you the role of a life­time.

Enter Hen­ry Thomas.

Spielberg’s long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor, pro­duc­er Kath­leen Kennedy, recalled that he was no great shakes read­ing from pre­pared sides of the script, but then came an improv with leg­endary cast­ing direc­tor Mike Fen­ton.

If only every aspi­rant method actor shared Thomas’ knack for emo­tion­al recall. Dur­ing the improv, as the pres­sure to give up the beloved alien crea­ture hid­den in his clos­et mount­ed, he drew on mem­o­ries of his pet ­chi­huahua, Urso, who had been killed by a neighbour’s dog in front of him.

“Poor Urso, it may have won me the role but it was a sad price to pay,” Thomas told The Mir­ror some 30 years lat­er.

His per­for­mance reduced every adult in the room to tears.

It was also remark­able for its sub­tle­ty. As Spiel­berg remarked in a 1982 inter­view with Pre­miere mag­a­zine:

He’s a very con­trolled, method­i­cal per­former who mea­sures what he does and feels what he does and yet broad­casts it in a total­ly sub­tle way. His per­for­mance is so con­trolled, unlike most kid per­form­ers, who seem to be giv­ing you 150 per­cent on every shot. Henry’s per­for­mance is just a bread crumb at a time, but he takes you in a won­der­ful direc­tion to a very, very rous­ing cathar­sis. He’s just a “once in a life­time” kid.

The direc­tor likened Thomas’ tears in the final moments of E.T. to the arrival of the moth­er ship in Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind — “a super-colos­sal spe­cial effect” root­ed in human emo­tion.

By then, Thomas no longer need­ed an assist from Urso:

I couldn’t stop cry­ing because I worked with E.T. every day and he was real to me.

The con­nec­tion was not imme­di­ate. Thomas’ laugh­ing response to his first gan­der at the alien reas­sured Spiel­berg that the child actor could han­dle com­e­dy but Thomas, a huge Raiders of the Lost Ark fan, had been hop­ing for some­thing a bit more swash­buck­ling. As he told Esquire’s Paul Schrodt:

When I saw this alien with the weird feet and the tele­scop­ic neck, I was like, ‘What the hell is this? Where is my lightsaber?’ But I guess I got a fly­ing ­bicy­cle, so I can’t com­plain.

It’s was­n’t exact­ly a Hol­ly­wood end­ing, per­haps because Thomas didn’t stay in Hol­ly­wood, but rather returned to school in San Anto­nio, where he fell prey to kids who resent­ed the overnight sen­sa­tion in their midst.

On the oth­er hand, he has worked steadi­ly as an actor since leav­ing home at 17, and abid­ed by his res­o­lu­tion to avoid drugs and oth­er pit­falls that plague some oth­er child stars. (“I nev­er want­ed to give any­one the sat­is­fac­tion of get­ting that pic­ture of me rob­bing a liquor store.”)

In his inter­view with The Mir­ror, tongue firm­ly in cheek, he spec­u­lat­ed about pos­si­ble E.T. sequels and admit­ted that he’d hate to see some­one oth­er than him­self play­ing Elliott:

It could be like an inter­galac­tic ­reunion with Elliott and E.T. at a beach resort… I don’t think Spiel­berg will touch it, although I’d love to see Elliott and E.T. ­sit­ting at the end of the bar: “How’s it been for you man?” “Good, man, anoth­er beer?”

A few years lat­er, the stars did indeed reunite for a hol­i­day advert that owes a large debt to Peter Pan, and puts its thumb on the scale with a clip of Bing Cros­by croon­ing “White Christ­mas.”

As if Hen­ry Thomas needs help mak­ing us cry.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Orig­i­nal Audi­tion Tapes for Break­ing Bad Before the Final Sea­son Debuts

Audrey Hepburn’s Mov­ing Screen Test for Roman Hol­i­day (1953)

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­maol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.