For those who don't know, TSPDT decided to poll the general public about the greatest films of all time. I submitted a list, which I'll share here:
Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii, 1985)
Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)
Barravento (Glauber Rocha, 1962)
Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966)
Duel to the Death (Ching Siu-Tung, 1983)
Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter, 1941)
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin, 1947)
October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1927)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1973)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
Spontaneous Combustion (Tobe Hooper, 1990)
Swing You Sinners! (Dave Fleischer, 1930)
Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
Where is My Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
There are many films I would have liked to vote for. The reasons I didn't are varied. In many cases, I wanted to include a film to represent a different style or period of filmmaking, and another film I might have included wouldn't have done that given what I had already picked. Mostly though, these films were just closer to the subject matter, styles, and moods that I most often return to.
I needed to include a kung fu movie because I think about them quite a lot. It was either going to be Duel to the Death, A Touch of Zen, Hero, or one of the many great films directed by Lau Kar-Leung. I went with Duel to the Death because it bridges the other films. The beautiful and loaded imagery of Zen and Hero is there alongside the grueling violence of Lau's films.
I included Angel's Egg because I did not want the only anime films on the list to be Studio Ghibli films, but could never bring myself not to include the Ghibli films I did. I naturally went to Oshii first because he's one of my favorite directors. Among Oshii's films I actually prefer Ghost in the Shell, but it felt wrong for the only non-Ghibli anime film to be one of the most popular anime films among anglophones ever. I would say I also prefer Patlabor 2 and maybe Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, but I've only seen those movies very recently. I also didn't want the only animated films to be anime, so I included Swing You Sinners! as a prime example of classic United States cartoons and Tale of Tales, which is by far my favorite experimental animated film.
That said, Awaara is also a movie I watched very recently. But it also may be "the most successful film in the history of cinema," and yet doesn't appear on the actual TSPDT list. Popular success, by itself, doesn't mean Awaara is a great film. But it does mean that if Awaara is a great film, which it is, its absence is a pretty big oversight.
As for the rest, they're just films that all did something that struck me as unique, and which I often recall vivid memories of. One movie I felt bad about not including was Hollis Frampton's Surface Tension. A couple films on the list are can be called experimental, but they still have narrative ambitions that Frampton's structural films don't.
Now, I could try to explain why I made this list, since some people question the value of making lists like this. But the truth is I made it because I felt like it. Even if there was no "value" in it, fact is no one spends every waking hour doing something worthwhile, and none of the arguments that list-making is somehow pernicious have ever convinced be that it's all that pernicious. It's a minor inconvenience at worst.
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