Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, 75 min

“Soviet silent film of the 1920s represented a great creative moment in the history of cinema, and Battleship Potemkin is often regarded as its supreme achievement. In rendering his account of the 1905 Black Sea mutiny and the sympathetic response it received from the people of Odessa, Eisenstein makes brilliant use of montage – the juxtaposition of individual shots – both to provide drama through subtle alterations of space and time and to create striking metaphoric relationships that bolster his political arguments. The film’s formal beauty is balanced by the stark power and humanity of its realist depiction of the uprising and its brutal suppression.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Diary of a Country Priest
Robert Bresson, 1951, 110 min

"In this adaptation of the novel by the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, Bresson made his first film without professional actors and moved a step further toward his mature style with the concern for the life of the soul in a fallen world. The title figure lives a rather squalid existence in his isolated parish. When not subject to scorn and humiliation, he is simply ignored by those to whom he wishes to minister. Bresson makes of his lead actor, Claude Laydu – an incandescent presence – the first example of the successful use of a non-actor as a "model". The film’s unsparing use of realism and telling detail renders palpable both the priest’s suffering and his grace." – Harvard Film Archive

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Floating Clouds
Mikio Naruse, 1955, 123 min

A devastating adaptation of Hayashi Fumiko's final novel, Floating Clouds match-cuts between softened memories and brutal reality, past and present, sun-kissed images of French Indochina and a post-war Japan cloaked in shadows. Ignominy has overtaken Tokyo, where two former workers for the Imperial Forestry Ministry –Kengo, a married officer (Mori Masayuki) and Yukiko, a typist (Takamine Hideko) – reignite their wartime affair in a doomed attempt to revivify a past distorted by the ripe promise of endless imperial capital. Arguably Naruse's most famous and acclaimed film and perhaps his most formally ambitious, Floating Clouds was described in Ozu Yasujiro's diary as a "real masterpiece." – Kelley Dong

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Killer's Kiss
Stanley Kubrick, 1955, 64 min

“Written, edited, shot, produced and directed by Kubrick for a mere $75,000, his second feature is a moody thriller shot on location in the streets of New York, effectively capturing the dark underbelly of the city at night. The story concerns a down-at-heel boxer falls for a night-club dancer after saving her from being raped by her boss, who consequently determines to put an end to their romance. Kubrick employs gritty black-and-white photography, flashbacks and dream sequences, and the surreal climactic fight in a warehouse full of mannequins is unforgettable.” – Dundee Contemporary Arts

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Hiroshima mon amour
Alain Resnais, 1959, 91 min

A cornerstone film of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais' first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and a screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork.” – Janus Films

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L’avventura
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960, 145 min

“The first of Antonioni’s breakthrough film trilogy, L’avventura proved an “adventure” from its rough, perilous production to its troubled release, including charges of obscenity and immorality. Using a widescreen canvas for the first time, Antonioni’s signature experimental narrative style blossoms fully and radically around absence, initially in the form of a woman’s mysterious disappearance during a trip to an island. The ensuing search is composed of behaviors not fully comprehensible, desires abandoned and central plot points forgotten. Upon this dizzying post-war terrain, truth, love and happiness are unequally exchanged for money, sex and status, and all characters suffer from an emotional seasickness. Antonioni describes with stunning precision his indistinct, inarticulate explorers apprehensively treading toward, in his words, “the moral unknown.”” – Harvard Film Archive

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Time of the Heathen
Peter Kass, 1961, 76 min

Introduced by Tony Paley

Emerging from the void, mysterious drifter Gaunt (The Sting’s John Heffernan) wanders the upstate countryside in a daze with only his bible for company. But after happening upon the murder of a local female housekeeper at the hands of a rural deviant, Gaunt soon finds himself framed for the attack. Forced to flee deeper into the woods with the only witness to the crime – the woman’s young deaf mute son Jesse – the pair forge a complex bond that culminates in one of cinema’s most memorable, psychedelic, and unclassifiable endings. A “lost” marvel of independent filmmaking, Time of the Heathen is set in the immediate shadow of the atomic bomb, yet narrativized through the groundbreaking aesthetics and shifting racial politics of the 1960s. Directed by Peter Kass, best known for his pathbreaking work in the New York theatre world, and strikingly lensed by visual artist and avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, Heathen is major discovery for even the most well-versed cinephiles.

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The Trial
Orson Welles, 1962, 120 min

“Hailed as a masterpiece by European critics but dismissed as a failure by the British and American press, The Trial is arguably Welles’s finest film after Citizen Kane (and with Kane, the only other film over which he exercised complete creative control). Welles’s rendition of Franz Kafka’s nightmarish story of a man arrested for a crime that is never explained to him is entirely faithful to the novel, even with the necessary transpositions made to update the action. Anthony Perkins portrays Josef K., a sensitive, "twitchy" individual pursued by a repressive bureaucracy, obsessed by an undefined guilt, and bewildered by the burden of living. Replete with unforgettably baroque, expressionistic imagery, The Trial evokes a caustic vision of the modern world, where implausible events seem like everyday occurrences. ” – Harvard Film Archive

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L’eclisse
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962, 126 min

“Literally arranging art objects in a frame as the film opens, Monica Vitti tacitly calls attention to the ever-shifting frames of meaning within Antonioni’s entire, expansive cinematic space, reminding us of the inextricability of narrative and character within his cinema. Frequently framed or obstructed by the structures of modern architecture, wandering Vitti and a dashing Alain Delon manage to unite intermittently via a tentative affair. Like the mesmerizing dance of the stock market where he works, Delon’s handsome charms are mere distractions from a disturbingly cold opportunism, one of many indirect challenges within Antonioni’s formal, yet expressive composition in which the natural and the synthetic, the economic and the emotional attempt – as his film does – to create new, modern shapes which take increasingly abstract configurations. This inversion culminates in a stunning ending which retroactively reframes the entire film, throwing the world on and off screen into sharp, negative relief.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Red Desert
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, 117 min

“Colour film provided the gifted painter Antonioni with a dynamic canvas to explore the visionary hues that profoundly saturate Red Desert, forming a moving painting that softly shifts between Abstract Expressionism and the blurred photographic canvases of Gerhard Richter. Inseparable from this psychosomatic palette, Monica Vitti is again the emotional nucleus whose ennui of the previous films has bloomed into a diagnosed neurosis, further alienating her from the inhabitants of an unbalanced world. Subsumed by the dislocating, poisonous beauty of the industrial wasteland around her, she searches for a self within her family, vague ideas of a career and the empathetic attentions of Richard Harris’ modern nomad. Antonioni invokes an intricate spectrum of hazardous divides between the working class and bourgeois, humans and nature, and as always, a disturbed Eros. Traces of horror, fairy tale and science fiction are finely woven into an ineffable texture describing humanity’s unsettling shifts in and out of a spiritual haze, looking for a stable centre.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 110 min

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful colour imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved even further into radical cinema.

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Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson, 1966, 91 min

"The title character of Au hasard Balthazar is perhaps the most perfect example of the Bressonian "model": a donkey. Although clearly not acting, Balthazar becomes a compelling and profoundly moving protagonist. The film opens with a young Balthazar being acquired by a man with a young son and daughter. Over the course of the film, the lives of the donkey and the girl are shown in parallel as each approaches maturity.  As the film follows Balthazar from owner to owner, these figures present a panorama of human vices and virtues, and the narrative proceeds with the simplicity of a parable: the virtuous owners treat Balthazar well, and the vicious ones make him suffer." – Harvard Film Archive

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Brief Encounters
Kira Muratova, 1967, 95 min

"Shelved for 20 years by Soviet censors, Muratova’s first solo feature contains the building blocks of her experimental style including the use of flashbacks, a lack of clear or conventional narrative, montages of still photographs and audio discontinuities. Focusing on the woman’s realm, and depicting a love triangle between a provincial bureaucrat (played by Muratova), a wandering geologist and a country girl trying her luck in the city, this is nevertheless a documentary-like portrayal of Soviet life highlighting the divide between the urban intelligentsia and the under-privileged peasants." – Melbourne Cinematheque

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Portrait of Jason
Shirley Clarke, 1967, 105 min

“Playing the role of Jason Holliday on film and in life, Aaron Payne presents himself to Shirley Clarke and her crew doing what he wants to be doing: performing. In the spirit of Andy Warhol’s screen tests and his Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), Clarke filmed the theatrical hustler in her apartment with one camera over a twelve-hour period. Even with all obvious cinematic artifice stripped away – as Clarke demonstrated earlier in The Connection – naturalism and confession prove to be alternative protective masks. As a black, gay hustler with deferred dreams, Jason represents multiple strata of marginalization, and Clarke offers this outsider persona feature-length centre stage. Jason’s entertaining, anecdotal, emotional roller coaster ride reveals as much about the shadow side of American society as it is its flamboyant spokesperson. Off-screen, Clarke and her partner Carl Lee approach the roles of the prodding director and his cameraman from The Connection, as they attempt to wrangle emotional truth from their subject whose tears and laughter remain painfully layered and enigmatic. Pointing to film’s strange powers of psychological mediation, Clarke later revealed that viewing and editing the film changed her position toward her subject from amused and annoyed to fascinated and empathetic.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Le samouraï
Jean‑Pierre Melville, 1967, 105 min

“In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armour of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture – with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.” – Janus Films

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Mandabi
Ousmane Sembène, 1968, 91 min

“Shot primarily in Wolof, this second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first ever made in an African language – a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for the inhabitants of his home continent. After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbours, who flock to him for loans even as his attempts to cash the order are stymied in a maze of bureaucratic obstacles, and new troubles rain down on his head. One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, Mandabi – an adaptation of a novella by the director himself – is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty.” – Janus Films

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The Last Picture Show
Peter Bogdanovich, 1971, 126 min

“One of the key films of the American seventies cinema renaissance, The Last Picture Show is set in the early fifties, in the loneliest Texas nowheresville to ever dust up a movie screen. This aching portrait of a dying West, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, focuses on the daily shuffles of three futureless teens – enigmatic Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), wayward jock Duane (Jeff Bridges), and desperate-to-be-adored rich girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) – and the aging lost souls who bump up against them in the night like drifting tumbleweeds. Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal work in the career of invaluable film historian and director Peter Bogdanovich.” – Janus Films

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Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, 165 min

"Mindful that a space odyssey might find better favor with the Soviet film authorities following Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky reshaped Stanisław Lem’s metaphysical science-fiction novel to his own preoccupations with memory and sacrifice. A psychologist travels to a space station orbiting Solaris to explore rumors that the planet’s ocean may be a "thinking substance," materializing the astronauts’ memories. "I’ve noticed," Tarkovsky told an interviewer at the time, “[that] if the external, emotional construction of images… are based on the filmmaker’s own memory… then the film will have the power to affect those who see it." In this sense, the extraterrestrial ocean can be understood a figure for cinema itself, the means by which one’s innermost visions are to be extracted and reengaged. Magnificent set design notwithstanding, Solaris is surely the most intimate of science-fiction epics, a journey into inner-space revolving more around heartsick regret for lost love than blind terror of the unknown." – Harvard Film Archive

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The Conversation
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, 113 min

“The ultimate Watergate-era paranoia thriller, Francis Ford Coppola’s cold-sweat neo-noir stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, an obsessive audio-surveillance expert who has been hired to track and secretly record a young couple. When he uncovers a violent murder plot during the course of his investigation, Harry finds himself drawn into a terrifying web of suspicion and steadily mounting dread. Masterfully wringing tension from its intricate sound design, The Conversation is a tour de force of psychological suspense as well as a hauntingly prescient vision of life in an age of mass surveillance.” – Janus Films

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Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974, 102 min

"For the first time," he resolved, "I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks." Tarkovsky needed twenty rough cuts before arriving at the film’s intricately interflowing system of flashbacks and archival footage, often interpreted as unfolding in a dying artist’s final rays of consciousness. While Mirror, like all Tarkovsky’s films, pays homage to painting, music, and poetry, it also makes plain that the Russian director understood Mnemosyne to be the mother of the muses. Being a poet, he sought not only to retrieve the past but to reveal its essence – and in so doing to redeem an inherently flawed present. "The story not of the filmmaker’s life," observes Tarkovsky scholar Robert Bird, "but of his visual imagination." – Harvard Film Archive

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India Song
Marguerite Duras, 1975, 119 min

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men – with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other.” – Janus Films

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Central Bazaar
Stephen Dwoskin, 1976, 142 min

For this remarkable experimental film, the provocative avant-garde legend Stephen Dwoskin gathered a group of strangers and filmed them as they explored their fantasies over a period of five days. The ceremonial gowns and make-up here not only evoke the eroticism of European horror movies but also highlight the film’s interplay between performance and intimacy.

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3 Women
Robert Altman, 1977, 124 min

In a dusty, underpopulated California resort town, a naive southern waif, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), idolises and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate and “thoroughly modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her roommate, Pinky’s hero worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.

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Pixote
Héctor Babenco, 1980, 126 min

“With a blend of harsh realism and aching humanity, Héctor Babenco’s international breakout Pixote offers an electrifying look at youth fighting to survive on the bottom rung of Brazilian society, and a stinging indictment of the country’s military dictatorship and police. In a heartbreaking performance, Fernando Ramos da Silva plays a young boy who escapes a nightmarish reformatory only to resort to a life of violent crime, even as he forms a makeshift family with some fellow outcasts.” – Janus Films

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Sans Soleil
Chris Marker, 1983, 103 min

Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.” – Janus Films

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Stranger Than Paradise
Jim Jarmusch, 1984, 89 min

“With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at its most offbeat. Jarmusch follows rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and his visiting sixteen-year-old cousin, Eva (Eszter Balint), as they drift from New York’s Lower East Side to the snowy expanses of Lake Erie and the drab beaches of Florida, always managing to make the least of wherever they end up. Structured as a series of master-shot vignettes etched in black and white by cinematographer Tom DiCillo, Stranger Than Paradise is a nonchalant masterpiece of deadpan comedy and perfectly calibrated minimalism.” – Janus Films

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Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, 1984, 147 min

"The wide-open spaces of the American West turn into “a place for demons, a place for heartbreak,” in Wenders’s magisterial deconstruction of multiple myths: family, masculinity, and even America itself. Written by Sam Shepard, the film follows a Bukowski-like drifter (Harry Dean Stanton) as he staggers under a bright, uncaring Western sky, seemingly looking for another drink, but actually seeking his long-lost young son. Finally reunited, they search for Mom (Nastassja Kinski), and find her in a peep show. A slice of Americana as authentic as any John Ford film, Paris, Texas finds its darkness not in the terrain, but the heart." – Jason Sanders

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Wings of Desire
Wim Wenders, 1987, 127 min

"Angels perched atop the buildings of Berlin listen in on the innermost thoughts of mere mortals in Wim Wenders’s lovely, lyrical Wings of Desire, a soaring high-point of the director’s cinema and a moving, melancholic elegy to a Berlin still divided. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are brooding, compassionate angels who eavesdrop on the secret pains and fears of ordinary people. When Damiel falls for a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he renounces his immortality to return to earth as a human, hoping for a love that transcends life in the heavens. The stunning cinematography – crisp black-and-white, lurid Technicolor – is by French great Henri Alekan, whose many credits include Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast." – The Cinematheque

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Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, 98 min

“Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event – the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf – as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:
Opening Day of Close-Up
Nanni Moretti, 1996, 7 min

At his cinema in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, Nanni Moretti anxiously oversees preparations for the premiere of the film Close-Up. Meanwhile, Disney’s The Lion King is taking Italy by storm.

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Dreams
Akira Kurosawa, 1990, 199 min

"The eight episodes of this lyrical, painterly film depict a number of dreams that are vaguely intended to reflect the life and abiding obsessions of its director. Moving from childhood through war to the terror of nuclear pollution, each of the episodes – which, taken together, represent the director’s multi-faceted style – dazzles through its use of color and superbly wrought mise-en-scène rather than through dialogue or structure. In these stories of spirits, both ancient and modern, Kurosawa takes care to hint at his meanings rather than make them overtly manifest." – Harvard Film Archive

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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
David Lynch, 1992, 135 min

In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets – but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder. Homecoming queen by day and drug-addicted thrill seeker by night, Laura leads a double life that pulls her deeper and deeper into horror as she pieces together the identity of the assailant who has been terrorizing her for years. Nightmarish in its vision of an innocent torn apart by unfathomable forces, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is nevertheless one of Lynch’s most humane films, aching with compassion for its tortured heroine – a character as enthralling in life as she was in death.” – Janus Films

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24 Frames
Abbas Kiarostami, 2017, 114 min

For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images – most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife – and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.” – Janus Films

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Ash Is Purest White
Jia Zhangke, 2018, 136 min

“Visionary director Jia Zhangke’s mesmerizing, decade-plus spanning journey through China’s criminal underworld features a tour-de-force performance from his frequent star Zhao Tao as Zhao Qiao, the swaggering girlfriend of low-level gangster Guo Bin (Liao Fan). Upon her release from a five-year prison sentence for protecting him in a fight, she finds herself navigating life in a rapidly changing, turn-of-the-millennium China – visualized by Jia as a landscape of surreal, almost science-fiction strangeness – as she embarks on an odyssey to reconnect with Bin.” – Janus Films

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Dahomey
Mati Diop, 2024, 68 min

From acclaimed filmmaker Mati Diop (Atlantics), Dahomey is a poetic and immersive work of art that delves into real perspectives on far-reaching issues surrounding appropriation, self-determination and restitution. Set in November 2021, the documentary charts 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey that are due to leave Paris and return to their country of origin: the present-day Republic of Benin. Using multiple perspectives Diop questions how these artifacts should be received in a country that has reinvented itself in their absence. Winner of the coveted Golden Bear prize at the 2024 Berlinale, Dahomey is an affecting though altogether singular conversation piece that is as spellbinding as it is essential.

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