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This list is, first, one of names rather than titles. With the exception of Marker’s inexhaustible master text —the first among equals on this particular roll — any of a half-dozen or more titles could have easily stood next to these names, as could any of the honourable runners-up (Pialat, Jancsó, Olmi, Pasolini, Ozu, Keaton, the Dardennes etc). Yet it is ultimately the names, rather than the works, that we assess when engaged in these exercises, I think. If the work is at least somewhat tangible, measurable and rankable, the name (as distinct from the actual person who bears it) points towards something larger: a certain idea of cinema that is concocted or wished for by us almost as much as by the bearer of that name – the work, no less so than a list of works, only fleetingly and imperfectly incarnates. If these exercises have any real purpose, it’s less to arrive at any impossible consensus than to give transitory form to those ideas we bear, or that perhaps are borne through us; after all, as one of the names on this list once remarked, we don’t think at the cinema but are thought.