Comments

My choice was guided firstly by my own taste, most of all for a visual cinema that offers, through its images, pleasures of a kind that invite you to return over and again to them. I also selected films that seemed to me to have made a difference, artistically, historically, politically. Rex Ingram’s brilliant transposition of Ibanez’s best-selling anti-war novel made a star of Valentino and of its young director. It’s still extraordinary, still being performed live with an orchestra, still drawing in new audiences. At the other end of the list, chronologically speaking, Kiarostami abandoned his 35mm camera for digital technology and created an ensemble piece of intimacy, anger and energy. Political filmmaking had found a new language.