You are given the opportunity to teach a class on great directors. You must choose five films that illustrate directing at its best. The direction must be flawless, which means it either has stood or will stand the test of time.¬†¬† Ideally, these films execute the story with perfection. They don’t stand on script alone because no one else but these distinctive directors could have made these films. You are teaching a class and thus you have to give talking points about why you chose these films. It shouldn’t just be because they moved you; they should be films that elevate the medium and teach while doing so. Five films. The catch: you only have about ten minutes to figure it out. What five films pop into your head?
Here are the ones I think of as flawless -and I wish I could have come up with absolutely incredible choices that included works by Truffaut, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Fellini – but alas, I cannot stray from the obvious:
1. Citizen Kane. It remains the film by which all others are judged. There are so perfectly shot sequences, but the ones I would highlight would be the moment Susan finishes her singing and Kane is the only one left clapping. It says so much with so little.  The scene where Susan silently plays a jigsaw puzzle next to that giant fireplace.  The truth is you could stop the film at any point and discover what great film directing is. Perfectly lit, unusually shot, and then there is Orson Welles himself, aging throughout. It is a perfect study of character, cinematography, acting, writing and directing.
2. Notorious. It’s tough to choose from Hitchcock’s movies – they are all deserving of study. But there is something concise about Notorious that the others don’t have. The scenes I would highlight would be the way the camera follows Ingrid Bergman around with the key to the cellar that she must steal. Notorious takes you to the point where you really think Ingrid Bergman is going to die. Hitchcock was keen on letting the audience in on criminals early because that is how you build suspense, best illustrated by the moment Bergman discovers that they have been poisoning her coffee.
3. Blue Velvet. There are some directors who are painters and artists first (Kathryn Bigelow is one of those, incidentally), but few directors create art pieces whenever they make a film. David Lynch is one of those and Blue Velvet manages to be artful with color, while funny and menacing with the characters. Blue Velvet represented a turning point in American cinema – he took it all to a completely different level. When people walked out of that movie they were either horrified or thrilled. The scenes I would use would be the his use of the color blue in the film, how we see it and what we ultimately discover it means.
4. Lolita. At first I thought I would choose either Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, or Dr. Strangelove — but Lolita is flawless from beginning to end, and way ahead of its time. It is full of brilliant composition shots and inside jokes. Because he wasn’t allowed to be as literal as the novel called for, everything had to be suggested. I would probably use most of the scenes involving Peter Sellers in his various incarnations throughout the film. It gets more disturbing as it goes along and finally becomes a tragedy. It never loses its smirk, though.
5. Taxi Driver. It is not easy choosing five. I had to dump the Coen brothers and Woody Allen, not to mention Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, Coppola, etc. But Taxi Driver would be easy to teach because of the creative ways Scorsese directs. You can see his artist’s eye all over this thing but specifically the way he films the taxi itself running through town. One of the cinematic achievements in the film, among many, is the shot of the greasy twenty dollar bill Harvey Keitel (“Sport”) tosses on the seat. To Travis it is a reminder of the evil in the world and how he isn’t doing anything about it. Taxi Driver is three things. Scorsese, De Niro and Paul Schrader’s script. Without either of these things it would not be the masterpiece it is. However, I would still teach the film because it is cinematic perfection.