Jonathan Rosenbaums List

[Rick Schmidlin]

My ol' pal JR sent me this story before it was printed a few years back, we had a lot of dialog about the AFI list. This is well worth the read.

http://www.chireader.com/movies/100best.html

[LA]

Indeed it is, his list was brought up a few days ago on the thread "more lists, more lists". I prefer his list to the AFI's, because there's more diversity, and more films I've seen that I thought the AFI should have included, and more films I haven't seen. Also, more great filmmakers are represented, there's more Griffith, Ford, Hawks, Lang, Von Stroheim, more Von Sternberg, Preminger, of course, more Welles. Some of these, of course, could hardly fail to be better represented than in the AFI list, especially Howard Hawks, who only got BRINGING UP BABY in the AFI list (at 97), and Von Stroheim, who wasn't included at all.

[Jaime N. Christley]

Yeah, that's an excellent piece - and since it's created with an eye on potentially expanding the horizons of those who read it, it's a perfect alternative to the AFI 100, which was created to validate unbroadened horizons and to close discussions.

Here's JR's 10 favorites, published in Senses of Cinema:

Jonathan Rosenbaum

(in alphabetical order)

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1966)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
Une Condamné à Mort s’est Echappé (Robert Bresson, 1956)
Day of Wrath (Carl Dreyer, 1943)
Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974)
The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsen, 1993)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
Tih Minh (Louis Feuillade, 1918)
Le Tunnel sous le Manche (George Méliès, 1907)

The basic idea here--obscured when the list is given alphabetically--was to pick one film per decade and, if possible, avoid some of the more obvious titles that have dominated previous ten-best lists, my own included (e.g., Gertrud, Ordet, Playtime, The Magnificent Ambersons).

But how could I have possibly left out Dovzhenko (Earth), Godard (Alphaville), Hawks (Rio Bravo), Mizoguchi (Story of the Late Chrysanthemums), Ozu (I Was Born, But...), Resnais (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad), and Rivette (Out 1), among countless others? And, come to think of it, Kiarostami's Regularly or Irregularly may be even better in some ways than Close-Up.

[LA]

That's another interesting list, again, lots of variety. Nice to see Louis Feuillade, one of those (too) often overlooked directors, get a place there. Another good thing about both that favourite 10 list and his Alternative 100 is that he mentions his second thoughts, the films he didn't put on his list, but doesn't want to omit ethier, whereas the AFI didn't want to leave any room for indecision, or debate. As you said, they wanted to close discussions. Thanks for posting that list, Jaime C.

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

its nice to see a list with other orson welles movies listed in it.