Indiewire’s Criticwire addressed today this question from a reader:
“I mentor a 14-year-old from Harlem and nothing would make me happier then to have her enjoy ‘art house’ movies. She goes to Hollywood movies in chain theaters, and doesn’t particularly like what she sees. Of course, the fact that she’s African-American makes it even harder for me to find movies that I think would speak to her. She is sophisticated and would probably not mind some subtitles and nontraditional narratives. Help!”
Various critics rang in with some really great suggestions. The truth is, I don’t know how you grow a cinephile. Attempting to influence anyone’s tastes or beliefs can be an exercise in futility, but if a curious teenager is open to exploration we can help by pointing in the right direction. As a parent, you can try. My daughter knows the lines from a few films I’ve shown her, like A Fish Called Wanda, Burn After Reading, The Social Network, No Country for Old Men. Does this mean she’s learned to love a better class of movies? I don’t know. She has her own interests and passions that have to do with how she was raised, the world she grew up in and what exactly she’s trying to escape from. Many movies, you see, are designed for escape, and the system makes movies one of the easiest escapes to access when we’re young. They were for me.
As an upcoming cinephile who’s African-American, finding great films and film directors who map your own experience can be especially hard. So the inclination would be to look for those filmmakers who reflect the culture. The most important African-American film director, to my mind, is Spike Lee who carved out a new narrative for what kinds of stories were being told. But he never played the Hollywood game right and before long, Lee was mostly written off. Still, he inspired many directors — and continues to do so. Other black filmmakers of note — Robert Townsend, Lee Daniels, and Denzel Washington. It’s harder to navigate in those currents so maybe it’s easier just to talk about movies.
My own passion for movies started at a very young age. My mother had four kids before she was 24 and raised us mostly on her own. Those were rough times, but there was one reliable escape for me. Some from my generation turned to drugs, sex and fun to escape; I turned to the movies. Our little black-and-white TV played soap operas, cartoons and old movies. My sister and I spent many hours laying down in front of it, eating bowls of cereal and cutting our teeth on Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Cagney, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers… we didn’t see our own life reflected in those movies. We saw a dramatic structure where things worked out, or else they didn’t. Everything about that world appealed to us though, at the time, we didn’t realize why.
Later, when we hit our early teens, there was the multiplex, where my mom would drop us off to let Hollywood babysit us and we’d watch either the same movie over and over again (we saw Jaws 14 times in the theater) or we’d theater-hop and watch a bunch of movies. We’d stay there all day watching movies. Did we know the difference between “good” and “bad” movies? Oh, probably not. We fell in love with the medium — the escape — the beauty — the mystery — the drama — the conflict/resolution. We were lucky; movies were a lot better then. Or at least there seemed to be less junk.
It was commonplace to stand outside ticket booths for a couple of hours, waiting in long lines that stretched around the corner to see a new movie, the latest blockbuster (hence, the term itself). But that stopped once there were enough theaters to meet demand. Demand rose and fell and eventually single-screen theaters began closing. As they vanished, the environment for endangered art-house fare shrank. Now it’s all about spectacle, 3-D and IMAX, with limited venues for the art house/film festival crowd. Things have changed in that there isn’t just the one movie now. There are many movies crowding in theaters at any given time and every weekend in summer is dominated by one. Wait a minute and another one comes along. When I was a kid it seems there was just the one movie towering above the rest. The movie everyone saw it and talked about it.
I came of age in movie theaters. A boy passed a box of Milk Duds to my sister and me once. And the things I’ve done in movie theaters since then? I never started saying I wanted to BE a cinephile. I just loved movies. Eventually that love would lead me to find people who also loved movies and many of them had much better taste than I did. I remember being 19 and having my boyfriend take to me to see a Jim Jarmusch movie. He was ten years older than I was and introduced me to, among many things, coffee the way French people drink it. I had no clue what was going on in that movie, but I recognized it as something I’d never seen before and I let my mind, like my legs, ever so slightly open.
Film and filmmakers were from that point on a mystery. The next movie I saw that changed the way I thought about film was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Again, another boyfriend took me to see it. What did I know except that it disturbed me in a significant way. More than that, though, I saw color like I’d never seen color before; I saw a filmmaker who was toying with my own personal knowledge of what an “Ingrid Bergman movie” was. And my mind ever so slightly opened again.
Pretty soon I could hold my own in conversations about film with the kind of people who smoked brown cigarettes and wore berets. I knew who Cocteau was, and had seen Last Year at Marienbad. But I still wasn’t a cinephile.
Eventually I fumbled my way through to college where I studied film from a professor who seemed to know everything there ever was to know about movies. And my mind, not my legs, ever so slightly opened. Hearing film taught by a professor who has no interest in how much money that movie made or what the critics, particularly, thought of it. His interest was in how a director creates a thumbprint, or a lasting legacy — what themes he or she decides to obsess on, what kinds of images mattered, how to spot symbolism and metaphor. I learned the language of film from that professor at UCLA and then by reading articles and reviews by writers who knew their stuff. You aren’t necessarily going to become a cinephile by reading online chatter about movies. It can help you make up your mind about how you spend your money but you aren’t going to feel that impulse to dig much more deeply because most people don’t choose to dig that deeply at all.
The truth is no one can make you a cinephile. No one can put you in front of any film and make you fall in love with movies. But if you are already in love with them you can find those films that help your mind ever so slightly open. The more you drink in, the more uncomfortable you make yourself, the closer you will get to being a cinephile.
I can’t make a great list the way so many others could — but I bet some of the readers on this site could. I can give you my list of essential movies — films I know my daughter will watch one day because, to me, they are the most important films I personally have seen. The lists made by better and more knowledgeable writers will take you to the next level. I am still not a cinephile but I love movies. If you see these movies and these movies only I can guarantee you that you will come out the other end loving movies more. So here are the ones I recommend — and believe me, this only scratches the surface.
The Essential Spike Lee
She’s Gotta Have It
Malcolm X
Do the Right Thing
The Essential Orson Welles
Citizen Kane
Touch of Evil
The Essential Alfred Hitchcock
Strangers on a Train
Psycho
Rear Window
North by Northwest
Rope
I Confess
Vertigo
The Birds
The Essential Coen Brothers
Blood Simple
Raising Arizona
Fargo
No Country for Old Men
Burn After Reading
A Serious Man
The Essential Woody Allen
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Stardust Memories
Sleeper
The Essential Mike Nichols
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Carnal Knowledge
The Graduate
Silkwood
Heartburn
Working Girl
Postcards from the Edge
Wit
The Essential Sam Peckinpah
The Wild Bunch
Straw Dogs
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
The Essential David Lynch
Blue Velvet
The Straight Story
Lost Highway
Mulholland Drive
Inland Empire
The Essential Stanley Kubrick
Dr. Strangelove
Lolita
The Shining
Paths of Glory
The Essential Steven Spielberg
Jaws
E.T.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Schindler’s List
The Color Purple
The Essential Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver
Raging Bull
The King of Comedy
Goodfellas
Hugo
The Essential David Fincher
The Social Network
The Game
S3ven
Fight Club
Panic Room
Alien 3
Zodiac
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Essential Jim Cameron
Terminator, Terminator 2
Aliens
Titanic
Avatar
The Essential Steven Soderbergh
Sex, Lies and Videotape
Traffic
Erin Brockovich
The Essential Jane Campion
Sweetie
An Angel at my Table
The Piano
The Essential Kathryn Bigelow
Near Dark
The Hurt Locker
The Essential Sidney Lumet
12 Angry Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
The Essential Clint Eastwood
Bird
Unforgiven
Mystic River
Flags of Our Fathers & Letters from Iwo Jima
The Essential Roman Polanski
Knife in the Water
Repulsion
Rosemary’s Baby
Chinatown
Frantic
The Pianist
The Ghost Writer
The Essential Frank Capra
It’s a Wonderful Life
Meet John Doe
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
It Happened One Night
The Essential George Cukor
Holiday
The Philadelphia Story
Gaslight
Adam’s Rib
Born Yesterday
My Fair Lady
The Essential John Huston
The Maltese Falcon
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Asphalt Jungle
The African Queen
Beat the Devil
The Misfits
The Essential Billy Wilder
Double Indemnity
The Lost Weekend
Sunset Boulevard
The Seven Year Itch
Some Like it Hot
The Apartment
The Front Page
The Essential Elia Kazan
Gentleman’s Agreement
A Streetcar Named Desire
On the Waterfront
East of Eden
Baby Doll
Splendor in the Grass
The Essential Quentin Tarantino
Reservoir Dogs
Pulp Fiction
Jackie Brown
Inglourious Basterds
The Essential Paul Thomas Anderson
Boogie Nights
Magnolia
Punch-Drunk Love
There Will Be Blood
The Essential Robert Altman
M*A*S*H
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Long Goodbye
The Player
Gosford Park
The Essential Jim Brooks
Terms of Endearment
Broadcast News
As Good as it Gets
There are so many more films I’ve not even begun to touch upon. Foreign film directors, specifically, have been ignored here. But you have to start somewhere. Might as well start in the mainstream.
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Your list is a bit odd. The person is asking for ‘art house’ movies not mainstream multiplex movies – or classic Hollywood. Capra, Wilder, Huston, Spielberg, Scorsese, Cameron? These are not art house directors! They never were. They are mainstream.
Note that the film that was ultimately chosen was Run Lola Run. Now that is an art house film – granted with some mainstream appeal.
The inclusion of Bigelow over Sofia Coppola saddens me.
WOW!!! WHAT A TOPIC!!!
BUT MORE THAN SUGGEST MOVIES BY THEIR DIRECTOR, I´D SAY THAT I´LL MENTION A FEW THAT DEFINED MY LOVE FOR MOVIES AND SOME OF THEM JUST MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK IN TIME AND WISH TO SEE THEM FOR THE FIRST TIME ( I´M INCLUDING FOREIGN FILMS CAUSE THERE WON´T BE A COMPLETE MENTORING IN CINEMA WITHOUT FOREIGN CINEMA)
TODO SOBRE MI MADRE AND VOLVER-SPAIN PEDRO ALMODOVAR
BOOGIE NIGHTS AND MAGNOLIA-DIR.PT ANDERSON
PSYCHO, REAR WINDOW AND THE BIRDS-DIR.ALFRED HITCHCOCK
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS-DIR.JONATHAN DEMME
PULP FICTION AND KILL BILL VOL. 1 AND 2-DIR.QUENTIN TARANTINO
NEVER ON SUNDAY-GREECE
LA VITA É BELLA- ITALY DIR.ROBERTO BENIGNI
LA PIANISTE AND THE WHITE RIBBON-FRANCE DIR.MICHAEL HANEKE
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE-DIR. ELIA KAZAN
GONE WITH THE WIND-DIR. VICTOR FLEMING
CASABLANCA-DIR.MICHAEL CURTIZ
BEN-HUR-DIR. WILLIAM WYLER
LA REINE MARGOT-FRANCE DIR. PATRICE CHÉREAU
ROSEMARY´S BABY AND THE PIANIST-DIR. ROMAN POLANSKI
DOG DAY AFTERNOON-DIR. SIDNEY LUMET
THE SHINING AND EYES WIDE SHUT-DIR. STANLEY KUBRICK
INCEPTION, MEMENTO AND THE DARK KNIGHT-CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
ZODIAC AND SE7EN-DIR. DAVID FINCHER
TAXI DRIVER-DIR. MARTIN SCORSESE
CARRIE AND SISTERS-DIR. BRIAN DE PALMA
MUNICH AND THE COLOR PURPLE-DIR.STEVEN SPEILBERG
CONTACT AND WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?-DIR. ROBERT ZEMECKIS
L.A CONFIDENTIAL-DIR. CURTIS HANSON
BROADCAST NEWS AND AS GOOD AS IT GETS-DIR. JAMES L. BROOKS
MOULIN ROUGE!-DIR. BAZ LUHRMANN
THE WIZARD OF OZ-DIR. VICTOR FLEMING
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST-DIR. SERGIO LEONE
FINDING NEMO,UP AND TOY STORY 3-PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS
THE PIANO-DIR.JANE CAMPION
I forgot to say that, from Sasha’s list, NEAR DARK and GASLIGHT are the bomb. They’re probably lower down on everyone’s must see list but they are extremely awesomesauce. Bump ’em up. 🙂
My three recommendations that to me are modern masterpieces are Poetry by Lee Chang Dong, Still Walking by Kore-Eda, and A Simple Life by Ann Hui.
I think keeping an open-mind is the hardest to teach, depending on the environment you grew up in and your own personality. For me, I’ve always watched movies when I was young, but I was born in Asia where big-budget Hollywood movies were played in most theaters (still are today). I did love the Disney old-fashioned animation pictures and still know the songs and the music:)
Then I moved to Canada and because I don’t know anyone and there were language barriers, so loneliness basically drove me to the theater, sometimes to unknown films and that basically opened up my mind about the unlimited potential of cinema. However, I didn’t start getting interested in the language and technique of cinema until a few months ago (thanks to a crush I had that ended terribly wrong), so I wouldn’t call myself a cinephile though. I don’t know if it’s too late to start when you have another career going and 30, but I don’t think it’s too late to try and venture out into something different, maybe forge a new path.
Another thing that’s easier to teach is probably critical thinking. That just comes with reading on your own and experience.
I think we all have our favorite directors and films (obviously Sasha is a huge fan of Fincher and Scorsese), and as a mentor, we want the others to experience our joy when we watch these directors. However, I always think a balance diet is always necessary. I can’t stand people who said they don’t like subtitles because they don’t want to read! How lazy! Let’s operate this power drill without reading the instructions! I watch Scorsese and Fincher, I admire them since they are masters of the cinema, but ultimately I let my guts and heart to do the reaction. Kubrick has always been a “cold” director when people describe him, but I find him to be extremely powerful and his films just make me glue to the screen completely. Still, reading Sasha’s list, I think I have a lot of catching up to do…
A Kubrick essentials list without 2001 OR Clockwork Orange is like a Woody Allen list without Annie Hall and Manhattan. And ALIEN 3? Seriously? Its not even a true Fincher movie! It was taken away from him and toyed with by the studio. He basically disowns it nowadays. I can see a case made for his other work, even Panic Room, but Alien 3? Come on.
It is debatable if all the films I mention qualify as “art” but definitely show the African-American experience as defined by Hollywood – Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Gone With The Wind, Pinky, A Member of the Wedding, A Raisin in the Sun, Gordon Park’s The Learning Tree, Sweet Sweatback’s Badass Song, Sounder, Lady Sings the Blues, The Color Purple, Boyz in the Hood , What’s Love Got To Do With It, Beloved and all of Spike Lee. If I was mentoring a African-American adolescent this is where I would begin.
The LITTLE FOXES is a brillant film with a brillant Bette Davis performance. This is a must see movie for everyone.
altman’s “3 women” and “nashville” should definitely be added to his essential films list.
How could you leave out Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, and Christopher Nolan?!
It’s definitely easier to become a cinephile than it was pre-home video. In the 70s, we relied on repertory/second run cinemas, double and triple feature midnight showings, and university film clubs, which, when you couple that with seeing virtually everything that came out that decade first run, was an experience in itself.
You would, sometimes by accident, see something you liked, read up on the director in actual books by critics (no internet websites), then wait. It took me 30 years to finally accumulate a decent viewing list.
The biggest attraction was making these discoveries on my own, however. Had somebody given me a list of what I should see when I was in my late teens or twenties, I probably would have rejected it. That’s the age when you’re creating your own persona. I loved Citizen Kane and Wild Strawberries more because I stumbled on them, not because they were homework. A bunch of us in ’69 were ripped on acid (pretty innocent thing to do back then) and dropped in on showing of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? My buddies couldn’t handle it and left, but I was mesmerised and stayed. All About Eve was run without commercials on PBS, I think – middle on the night and completely unplanned.
Films labeled “you must see”, however, never really caught on, though. To this day, I’m not keen on Casablanca, likely because of all the clips I’d seen hundreds of times and the ecstatic reveries that I didn’t share when I finally saw it. Great films like Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Jules and Jim also get this same flak when they are pushed too hard on budding cinephiles.
The secret is in the discovery.
I don´t think you can make someone to be a cinephile. I think it comes naturally. I loved movies all my life. But when I was 14 I fell in love with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. From that movie on I would call me a cinephile. After that movie I was introduced to movies like “Magnolia”, “Psycho”, “Requiem for a dream” etc. After that I started to love films like “Chinatown” and “Sunset Blvd”. In 2005 I remember seeing “Crash” (you know, the oscar winner of 2006) I loved what impact it had on me. I was probably the only one who predicted it´s Oscar win (just because it was the only one of the nominees I had seen.) It was also the first Oscar ceremony for me that year. Of course now I know that “Brokeback Mountain” was the better movie but “Crash” still holds a place in my heart.
I dont really think that it matters about watching ‘films and film directors who map your own experience’. Surely the escapism in cinema is about watching films that dont? I was raised a working class male from the North East of England and dont think that I can think of many films that fit into that (Billy Elliot for example) that has particularly spoken to me. I think I became a cinephile by watching films outside of my comfort zone and seeing how the other half lived so to speak, seeing films from different culture in different languages about different people.
Here are my additions to your list Sasha.
Kubrick:
I would add 2001 and Clockwork Orange
Essential John Waters:
Pink Flamingos
Female Trouble
Hairspray
Serial Mom
Essential Nolan
Memento
Batman Begins
Dark Knight
Inception
Essential George Lucas
American Graffiti
THX 1138
Star Wars
Terry Gilliam
12 Monkeys
Brazil
Holy Grail
Time Bandits
Essential Joseph L. Mankiewicz
All About Eve
A Letter to Three Wives
Guys and Dolls
Suddenly, Last Summer
Cleopatra
Essential Kevin Costner
Essential Charles Crichton
A Fish Called Wanda
The Lavender Hill Mob
Essential Preston Sturges
The Lady Eve
Sullivan’s Travels
The Palm Beach Story
Essential D. W. Griffith
Intolerance
Birth of a Nation (I saw this at Michigan for my film history class. The professor brought into the screenings the students from two sections of African American Studies classes. Talk about a discussion afterwards!)
Great lists Sasha, although I definitely would’ve included a few more works from some of those directors (especially Kubrick and Allen!). I would also personally have mentioned Chaplin , probably the first “great” film maker I was introduced to, at a very young age. City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush…his films just have so much “movie magic.” Another big turning point for me was when the Lord of the Rings films came out when I was around ten. That trilogy showed me just how magical and awe-inspiring the theatre-going experience could be, that was probably when I really started to fall in love with the art of film. I also went through a huge Tim Burton fanboy phase as a youngster (although I still believe that a sparse few of his best films are masterpieces!).
From there, I really got my start by sifting through the IMDB top 250 (which is not all that amazing but is a good easy access place for the budding young person to start out), as well as various IMDB message boards. I had parents who, though my dad is a huge film lover himself, were fairly strict about which films they allowed me to watch. For me, a large part of the excitement of discovering the world of cinema was watching mature films secretly on my computer in the middle of the night, listening intently for footsteps on the stairs, or going over to friends’ houses and forcing them to rent some film they had never heard of and that they considered “weird” (the pinnacle of this was watching and sharing American Beauty with a whole bunch of my friends, a film which really spoke to me as a teenager but which my mother would’ve been horrified to know I had seen). Considering myself oh-so-hip, I absolutely loved showing off to my friends all the “indie” films I had seen, mostly the type of quirky black comedies like Donnie Darko, Ghost World, or Little Miss Sunshine that nowadays seem so run of the mill (though LMS is still one of my favourites 😉 ). I rapidly grew out of my exclusive “angst=depth” phase to include a wider variety, but it was with films like these that I began to realize that there was a whole universe beyond the mainstream target demo fare my peers loved to spend money on at the multiplex. As an older teen, and with the help of my dad and some more secret night-time movie watching sessions, I would go on to discover directors like Woody Allen, The Coens, Scorcese, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarantino, Coppola, Polanski, and many of the other masters. These all now seem like household names, but what joy in such discoveries at the time! We all still talk about 2007 as being an amazing year for film, and that was an especially eye-opening year for me as it was when I first began Awards-Watching and reading Awards Daily (or I guess Oscar Watch when I first began), which helped me to discovery even more brilliance in directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes.
Sasha, your descriptions of watching brilliant films and not quite getting them but knowing you were seeing something new and amazing are spot on, particularly the parts about slowly having your mind and imagination opened. Even though I’m still quite young and still acquiring knowledge and developing my tastes, I am already getting nostalgic for my early days of discovery!
Thanks to everyone else who shared their stories, and thanks to anyone who actually reads this long-ass comment–I don’t comment all that often but its always such a joy to feel like I’m among more people who “get” where I’m coming from. Reading your stories was inspiring in the way that Ben Kingsley’s “come and dream with me” speech was at the end of Hugo. Sasha and Ryan, you two especially wonderfully inspirational people–Awards Daily has no doubt helped to contribute to the shaping of my obsession with cinema, and that obsession has in turn helped to shape who I am as a person! Thank you as usual to you both!
I really think that anyone who’s destined to become a cinephile, just becomes one…..you have a moment when you realize that the movies are more than just a fun diversion for you and you dig and seek education.
I first realized something was different about my relationship to the movies when I was going to see Working Girl for the 4th time and my friends made fun of me for not going with them to Bill and Ted. I was 14. It was also the same time I realized something was different about me altogether and I had a case of the homosexuality.
I don’t put any pretentious qualifiers on anyone who feels like a cinephile. If you have a passion for films, love digging into them and see them as more than just an entertaining diversion, you are a cinephile in my book. I love movies. I love people who love movies, even if it might be a particular genre they have an obsession with. I feel like we are all in the same club and I hate how we snipe at each other from time to time. I am guilty myself of doing this and I’m working on stopping it. We will never all share the same taste but we share something in our hearts that brings us all here to talk about pictures.
I second Ryan’s list to mentor the academy, who knows how many Oscar underdogs they never even saw.
It’s too bad you didn’t list him, although I realize he isn’t the most flashy director. Still, a young woman might find that William Wyler was very conscientious of the product he put out and the actresses that populated his films. His best:
Roman Holiday
Dodsworth
The Heiress
Ben-Hur
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Little Foxes
Funny Girl
The Letter
While I by no means agree with all of his opinions, Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies books are a great list to start from. That’s what I used when I first wanted to explore the wide world of cinema. I like a lot of what he picks, but not all. Even so, as a starting place for aspiring cinephiles, I have a hard time thinking of a better “list.”
As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a cinephile…
I guess it all started around the age of 10 or so. I used have a lot of sleepovers at my house and around the same time video stores had just arrived. Being a young man, there were really only two things we expected from a movie – to laugh or be scared. So the genre of choice was Horror or Comedy. My parents were quite relaxed in their parenting, so nothing was off the menu. By the age of 12, I had pretty much seen all the video store had to offer. My interests in the horror genre lead to purchasing Fangoria magazines, to read about upcoming movies, filmmakers, and generally cover my wall in horror filth. My first director that I followed was Sam Raimi, then Tobe Hooper. Always persuaded by a cover that said “From the Makers of…”
My love of horror eventually expanded to ‘real world’ horror films, like Taxi Driver, after seeing articles in my magazines. This lead to seeing other recommended films. I didn’t care for them much at the time, but I persevered…
I was given Ebert’s 4-star book in 1985 and I guess this was pivotal. I read reviews of films I had seen and I realised I had not seen them at all (with my young eyes) It intrigued me that he had seen so much in a film where I had seen very little. I made my way through the films, which started from 1970 onwards. I found Coppola, Scorsese, Allen, Mazurky, Cassavettes, Altman, Schrader and Bergman (at a young age I thought of foreign films as inferior because they were only available dubbed)
By 14-15 my genre of choice was all of the above. I started purchasing film books specialising in movie lists. This lead to going back in time to see what I had missed. Again latching onto directors where I had liked a particular film – then going through their entire repertoire.
After school ended, unemployment was useful. I was watching up to 15 films a week. This euphoric period didn’t last, but it was memorable. I eventually got a job in the arts industry. I met a lot of friends there, mostly gay males. They encouraged me to go to film festivals with them, which I did – along with a couple of trips a week to the movies in general. We talked all day about films. They’d bring me in videotapes to watch. One of them was a former film critic, who had interviewed filmmakers I admired – such as Greenaway. I was a kid in a candy store.
Pretty soon I was the guy who knew everything about films…at least that’s what my friends thought. That wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. I am and always will be just a guy who watches a lot of films.
[Cue Music]: Sid Vicious My Way
Even though I love David Fincher, I would probably take a few of his movies off (Alien 3, The Game, Panic Room…not really Fincher essentials. Benjamin Button is close call too) and have most, if not all, of Martin Scorsese’s movies on this list. The way he has ventured into different genres from gangster, to musical, to dark comedy, to biopic is just brilliant. I think that Scorsese, being a cinephile himself, would be the best director to learn from.
Also, I’d add ‘The Big Lebowski’ to the Coens, ‘Short Cuts’ to Robert Altman, ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ to Lumet, ‘Saving Private Ryan’ to Spielberg, and, even though not a movie, ‘Twin Peaks’ to David Lynch. Still a show way ahead of its time and absolutely unlike anything anyone had seen at that time.
I have to agree with Antoinette. Maybe I just don’t know “what it’s like” to be black, but as a Hispanic growing up in an (admittedly rather Americanized) Cuban family … I don’t think my hispanic-ness really influenced my growing love for film. I just loved movies. Still do.
I love your list, Sasha, but in response to a few commentors … there’s not “way” to become a cinephile, I think. You just need to love movies. Maybe she won’t *like* The Godfather. Lord help us all if that should happen, right? Everyone is different. If a movie makes you feel … something, and you want to keep coming back to that feeling, then, well, I guess you can call yourself a cinephile, even if you aren’t a student of film or it doesn’t influence your career choices – in which case you’d be a cinephile who has decided to make cinema your life. It’s very difficult, when you simply don’t have a lot of time to be devoted to cinema. I consider myself a cinephile, but have barely seen a fraction of the films you listed, Sasha. But I *have* seen a huge amount of movies of the last decade – as they have come out; they are a part of my own generation. I’ve seen the good the bad and the ugly – and have grown with them. I understand current cinema in a way I probably won’t EVER understand cinema of the 70s or 80s or 90s – because I’d be choosing only the movies that have stuck with time, the “classics”, ignoring the duds or those time has been less kind to, as opposed to the present, where I am seeing them and trying them out, testing the waters, as they are made and *evolve* in real time. My top ten movie list, off the top of my head, includes maybe two or three pre-2000 movies. Does that make me less of a cinephile?
Also, not everyone has a storybook-romance with films. I didn’t fall in love with films because I had to escape a harsh, dark reality. But hey … still love them all the same. It’s a very personal relationship.
That isn’t to say that you can’t influence a love for film. I’ve certainly had adult mentors.
It’s a tricky question – but I think introducing the girl to films made by blacks, because they are black-made films, is the wrong approach. If the director/actors happen to be black, so be it. For example, I would recommend to her The Great Debaters … because it is a beautiful and amazing film, not because it stars black actors and is directed by a black man.
I became a movie buff in my high school years because of Ted Turner. I used to watch old movies on TBS, TNT, and TCM back in the day. I was a non-film student at NYU when Pulp Fiction hit, and pretty much everyone became movie obsessed at the time. You had to be able to talk the lingo. After that it stuck with me and I would rent movies from Blockbuster and the New York Public library and go to the $3 movie theater on 50th Street at least once a week. I don’t think it’s there anymore.
In my old age, Netflix has recommended with scary accuracy movies that I will like. I’d never heard of Fassbinder before they recommended Querelle to me. Now I love him. And following the Oscar race used to help. And I still frequent sites like AintItCool which was pretty much the first place I went on the internet way back when they were casting LOTR. I try to recommend movies to people often, whether they asked for it or not.
I heart the list of directors, but Fincher has nine but Kubrick only four? Blasphemy-cut Alien3, Panic Room, The Game, Benjamin Button, and especially the god-awful Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and throw back in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you have two selections from both directors worth watching.
I would suggest visiting the works of Charles Burnett whose work has been unfortunately overlooked.
It’s just an interest, among many others. Even among us cinephiles, we can differ greatly in what films we love and hate, what aspects about filmmaking we like, and what genres we appreciate.
Personally for me, I grew up with Disney when young(this was pre-Pixar), which I think is a fine foundation. The all-round perfection of Beauty and the Beast, the beauty and fear of Sleeping Beauty, the comedy in the likes of Aladdin, Fern Gully, Dumbo, etc. Then I became obsessed with film series like Alien, Planet of the Apes, Terminator, LOTR, etc. Titanic was also a big moment for me at the cinema.
But I had always been curious and keenly aware of the classics I had never seen. My parents gravitated towards films like Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, Rob Roy, Last of the Mohicans, etc, however they gave me the likes of Alien, Planet of the Apes and Salvador, for which I am eternally greatful. But I was the oldest child and none of my friends were interested in the types of films I was seeing, so it was largely self-driven. Even today, my family mocks a lot of my favourite films for being too old, boring or weird.
When I turned 15, I felt that I started to become the person I am today, and I didnt look back. I rented out most of the classics. I quickly fell in love with the likes of The Godfather series, Amadeus, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, Bladerunner, etc, and started trying to see all the oscar contenders in a given year. From there, after I had left home, I got lost in the works of Kubrick, Leone, Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Mike Leigh, Coens, Von Trier, Cronenberg, Welles, Polanski, etc.
You need a deep artistic curiosity, regardless of influence, and probably need to show a preference for more oscar-fare than Box office fare by the time you finish high school. Attending films alone at times shouldnt deter. Eventual cinephile status probably requires being aware of all the great directors and their oeuvre, and not flinching at films that contain subtitles, black n white, pre-70’s, etc.
Practically everyone likes movies. We just differ in our tastes and our levels of passion for the medium.
“Of course, the fact that she’s African-American makes it even harder for me to find movies that I think would speak to her.”
God help us. It’s like, ‘Hey, there home girl, I would recommend a Woody Allen film to you, but since you’re just so damn black you really should stick with Tyler Perry. I mean they don’t even have neurotic black people up in Harlem where you all live in that one tenement with J.J. and you know, all the baby mamas, do they?”
If the kid, of any race, says I like movie A, B and C, you recommend movies you’ve seen that are like those films and you go on from there. To think any kind of art speaks to one race or another just creeps me the F out in 2012.
I don’t know enough about this girl, or even if she likes films? I would take her to see other arts as well. Maybe the Ballet, A symphony orchestra, live theatre, take her to the library. These things are important.
Back to film. The only advice I would offer would be to ask her what films she likes, or actors she likes? And then show her a another film in line with her tastes that you think will develop her palette. You need to find a hook though.
Most cinephiles are autodidactics, and much better off for it. I believe the kids these days use the word “creeper” in situations like this when older people are looking for lame excuses for power trips. Run 14-year old in Harlem, run!
“I believe the kids these days use the word “creeper” in situations like this when older people are looking for lame excuses for power trips. Run 14-year old in Harlem, run!”
supercool! What do kids these days call tryhard strangers who encourage them to run away from the trusted adult friends in their life?
“We Need to Talk About How to Mentor Academy Members”
How ’bout My Fair Academy? “Voting non-plain is mainly done in vain”
“S3ven”
This is how I’m going to spell ‘Se7en’ from now on. Love it.
About ten years ago the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto showed every single Cary Grant movie. In chronological order. Not just his starring roles: every. singe. film. I think one of his earlier roles lasted just a few minutes in a restaurant scene and the crowd applauded his entrance. Seeing Cary Grant’s screen personae in a condensed block of time grants new insight into the development of the mythic ‘Cary Grant’ idea and shows the versatility/rigidity of what it means to be a star performer. I think a mix of examining film through directors, actors, editors, composers, cinematographers helps foster viewing/critical practices less centered on ~The Auteur~
examples: Essential Charlie Kaufman, Essential Jack Cardiff, etc. Or even breaking it down into theoretical blocks (Essential Innovative Formalism: Trip to the Moon, Black Narcissus, Derek Jarman’s Blue, Panic Room, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Avatar)
Silent cinema is especially important for developing cinephiles but I don’t have room to even begin.
I love the way Sasha puts it: ” I never started saying I wanted to BE a cinephile. I just loved movies,” because that’s exactly how I approached my own cinephilia. The magic screen delighted me, inspired me, and now I’m still so young and movies are still so beautiful.
Seeing Cary Grant’s screen personae in a condensed block of time grants new insight into the development of the mythic ‘Cary Grant’ idea and shows the versatility/rigidity of what it means to be a star performer.
Watermelons, that’s so great. Sounds like immersive language study when the barrage of input stacks up, reaches critical mass and suddenly coalesces into natural grasp. My town’s library ran star-centered retrospectives too. To see an actor’s life flicker past before my eyes as a kid really helped me appreciate the through-lines and evolution of film styles, and made me realize Film History connected to movies Now Showing downtown — not to mention serving as a reminder that legends I was learning to respct were once as young as I.
Honestly, I can’t recall the actor surveys as much as the impression made on me by a month of Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and those female icons. Because, you know, born this way.
I’ve tried to get my 15 year-old daughter interested in a lot of the movies I love, but the only ones that have so far struck for her are an old Bernard Rose psychological chiller called Paperhouse and Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone. I tried to show her Frankenstein when she was little but had to turn it off after about 15 minutes when she said, “I don’t want to watch that sad, horrible movie!”
ok, somebody has to say it.
We Need to Talk About How to Mentor Academy Members.
Rock on, Sasha.
My mom had this demented form of parenting in which she wouldn’t let me watch certain R-rated movies but was totally fine if I saw them at my old man’s. I guess she figured that if I shot up the school she could blame him…
To me, the sort of divide between being a film lover and not is something like The Last Picture Show. If you watch that and really get something out of it, you’re on your way.
Sasha,
How did you leave out kill bill?? I remember you leaving out uma thurman too from the kickass female list a couple of months back..Thoughts on the movie??
Sasha,
It’s clear to me that you have good intentions in this article. However, when giving advise on “How to mentor an aspiring cinephile?” it is important not to overwhelm them with more than 100 film suggestions. I don’t know if you are responding directly to the reader’s question (I think you are), if so then give just a few strong suggestions. Your list of Spike Lee film was good and probably enough to get anyone started on their own personal journey into cinephilia.
Geremy, I’m not so sure.
I don’t think Sasha’s list is meant to be “This Is Your Assignment. Any of these dozens of titles might be on the final exam.”
Nope, I try to think back to the first time I took the plunge into more serious movies on my own. I think I would have balked at anybody telling me: Chose One of These 3 Films.
I sought out my own mentors in books. And those books gave me lots of options. I got to see the whole menu, and then asserted my own independence by choosing which exotic flavors to sample. Being entrusted with a degree of independent leeway is pretty important to teenagers.
The PBS channel in my town when I was a kid ran a series of new wave European films and I wasn’t ready for them. I can’t even tell you what they were, but I suspect Antonioni and Resnais. I couldn’t fathom them in middle school.
But the public library screened themed series that weren’t so obtuse. Truffaut one month. Then Preston Sturges. Kurosawa another month. Then a week of Hawks. Like that.
I could dip into those more comfortably as a 7th grader. And I didn’t feel like somebody was trying to push me down a narrow path.
“The more you drink in, the more uncomfortable you make yourself, the closer you will get to being a cinephile.”
It’s good to see a direct admission that high art equals disturbing stuff. Is the purpose of art to make us feel uncomfortable and depressed? I don’t think so. In my opinion, the purpose of cinema is make us feel emotions, live fantasies, tackle difficult life questions (sure, that too), explore different worlds and/or appreciate beauty. Dark, uncomfortable material should be a means to these ends, not an end in itself. It’s an important element when meaning (something of value) comes out of the difficult situations put on screen. In the words of one IMDb poster which I saved a while ago, “when you ignore the darker side of humanity, you can miss out on one of the most beautiful sights in life; a second chance on life pushing up through cracks in the pavement.” There’s no doubt that discomfort/darkness are often essential instruments to what I think should be art’s goal, but sometimes, filmmakers use them for their own sake and cinephiles and film fans applaud it. I take issue with that approach. I don’t think becoming a cinephile means looking for discomfort for the heck of it. Just my two cents.
Its really not that difficult. Its about being a different parent and go for it. For instance, instead of Disney with über beautiful creatures try Japanese anime for your kids where mystery, fantasy, interesting characters and a journey are the center tools of telling an incredible story.
Then you can go on and influence, talk about the movies you have seen with your kids and make them curious and be smitten by your enthusiasm and love for arthouse movies.
Again. Try to be a different parent and go for it. Most parents dont dare or have the will to stand against the enormous pressure or for that matter, does not have the time
P.S. I’m not thick – I posted that before Rich’s comment had appeared on my page…it was a long read!
More stories about How I Lost My Art Cinema Cherry!
“Dear Arthouse Forum, I know this will sound like a kinky Ôshima fantasy but every word of this story is true…”
I love how ‘The Essential David Fincher’ is every one of his films 😀
I like how the Essential Fincher is all of his films 😉
Add Bright Star to Campion.
For Foreign?
Bergman
Cocteau
Kurosawa
Fassbinder
Ozu
Godard
Truffaut
Fellini
S. Ray