How the directors and critics voted

Stig Björkman
Sweden

Top Ten

  1. Voyage to Italy (Rossellini)
  2. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
  3. Vertigo (Hitchcock)
  4. Touch of Evil (Welles)
  5. La notte (Antonioni)
  6. Le Mépris (Godard)
  7. Persona (Bergman)
  8. 1900 (Bertolucci)
  9. Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
  10. A Taste of Cherry... (Kiarostami)

Comments

Just before completing this list I saw Fassbinder's magnificently obsessive and moving Fear Eats the Soul again, so my only choice of a silent film disappeared. No Sunrise, no Chaplin, no Keaton, no Dreyer, no Griffith, no October (Eisenstein), no Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box). My list probably illustrates my favourites from the time when I became more aware of cinema as an art form, from the films that formed me as film-maker to be. It's no coincidence that three of the choices are Italian - all ten could have been in homage to the most incredible film country of all. De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Scola, Moretti and the Tavianis could all have been included. And Kiarostami - who is like the Renoir or Rossellini of the 1990s and 2000s - will have to represent the whole of the east from Mizoguchi and Ozu to Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-Wai.

Last Updated: 03 Aug 2011