My Top 10 Most Influential Movies: Part I
There is a Facebook game going around among filmmakers, film industry workers, and cinephiles. The game is to post the movie poster of your ten most influential movies. They don’t have to be your favorite films, but they should be films that inspired you to go into filmmaking. I thought I would share my ten films and why they inspire me:
#1: Chungking Express (Hong Kong, 1994)
I saw Chungking Express for the first time in film school in a postmodern international film class. It was also my introduction to non-Kurosawan Asian filmmaking. I remember being floored by the visuals. The beautiful compositions were a perfect juxtaposition of the gritty Hong Kong world surrounding the film’s group of characters.
Chungking Express is also a film that is hard to categorize. It’s more of a series of vignettes that happen between a couple of police officers, a drug smuggler in a blond wig, a flight attendant, and a girl that works for a lunch counter. It’s a very 90s film, yet feels contemporary. Wong Kar-wai experiments with various shutter speeds to throw off the viewer’s sense of time and space, resulting in an other-worldly snapshot feel. The various shutter speeds force us to focus on the characters and what they are thinking.
#2: Strike! (USSR, 1925)
While most cinephiles sing praises of Sergei Eisenstein’s magnum opus Battleship Potemkin, I prefer Strike! Although Strike! is straight up Soviet propaganda, its simple story about a factory workers’ strike will suck you in, all without dialogue. Just like Chungking Express, Eisenstein experiments with camera angles, shutter speeds, and his signature editing juxtapositions.
The film starts with this controversial quote from Lenin:
The strength of the working class is organization. Without organization of the masses, the proletariat is nothing. Organized, it is everything. Being organized means unity of action, unity of practical activity.
Depending on your view of Lenin, the above quote will either inspire you to fight for the underprivileged or dismiss Lenin as a hypocritical elitist. Either way, watching the workers attempt to strike only to subsequently fail and die en masse will make the viewer examine their own struggles against an unbeatable system.
The film is in public domain.
#3: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (USA, 1971)
I remember first seeing this film tucked away in my father’s closet on VHS. I didn’t watch it, but I started to wonder what type of movie would have so many s’s at the end of the word badass. And it was “Rated X by an all-white jury”? What did that mean? I was still a child and wasn’t ready.
I got the opportunity to actually watch the film as a film student and was intrigued by the process in which this film came to be. After getting the runaround from film studios, Melvin Van Peebles decided to make his own film. He cast himself and his son Mario as the main character. He shot it guerrilla before guerrilla was a thing. And although his film was categorically black, Van Peebles cut his teeth in Paris. Sweetback has elements of French New Wave.
Every black filmmaker considers this film part of the Important Black Film Canon. And Van Peebles continues to blaze his own trails.
#4: Steel Magnolias (USA, 1989)
Steel Magnolias is your Southern mother’s favorite film, and for good reason. On the surface, the film doesn’t look like much. But what sets the film apart is its examination of Southern feminism.
Southern feminism is an interesting thing: many Southern women would not consider themselves to be feminist, but Southern women strongly identify themselves as independent, feminine, strong, sassy, and clever. All while wearing red lipstick and teased hair.
Steel Magnolias is indeed a feminist film. The majority of the film takes place in traditionally feminine spaces, such as a beauty parlor, and the men play secondary roles in the film. Many of the more rebellious women, such as myself, identified with Louise “Ouiser” Boudreaux, the eccentric rich woman who expressed disappointment in her ex-husbands, her children, her neighbors, and society’s expectations of her.
#5: Tokyo Story (Japan, 1953)
Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story is the kind of film that makes me call my mother with tears running down my cheeks. I consider Tokyo Story to be one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen. At its core, it’s a nihilist film about familial disappointment and the existential crisis in aging and dying. Many of Ozu’s post-war films touched on the futility of life, mirroring the collapse of the Japanese Empire and the introduction of nuclear weapons into modern warfare. Tokyo Story, however, takes that nihilism developed from post-war strife and weaves it into a simple, yet calculating and impactful family drama.
In the film, an aging couple decides to visit their successful children in the city. While the couple is obviously proud of their children’s accomplishments, they are disappointed in their children’s treatment of them. Their children are too busy to deal with them. The couple had another son who died in World War II, and they try to encourage their widowed daughter-in-law to remarry. She doesn’t see the point in remarrying.
The film also has hard-hitting lines like, “Isn’t life disappointing?”
Sniff. Excuse me while I call my mom.
Films #6–10 will be posted tomorrow.