victmanu wrote:Friederidch Murnau:
Nosferatu.
Sunrise : a song of two humans.
Tabu.
Jean Cocteau
La belle et la Bête.
Orphee.
Jean Vigo --Zéro de conduite.
Jean Renoir --La Grande Ilusion.
.
If you're a fan of Renoir and liked La Grande Ilusion, you'd love The rules of the Game, La Règle du jeu, in which Renoir also acts, probably my favourite Renoir film. A few other favourites The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Boudu Saved From Drowning, Boudu sauvé des eaux, where the great Michel Simon, who played Pere Jules in L'Atalante, is a tramp who is rescued from a suicide attempt by a kindly bookseller and adopted and given a place to live by his family, but Boudu turns the sedate bookseller's house to chaos with his anarchic lifestyle and seduction of the women of the household. Great film.
Also if you ever get a chance to visit the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, that's where the world premier of Zero de Conduite was and they had, at least several years ago, lots of 1930s original posters and memorabilia on the wall. It was there in the early '90s, that I first saw in a double bill in with "If" by the late Lindsay Anderson, who then gave a talk afterwards about Vigo's influence on his work. Fantastic.
Anderson claimed the black and white moments in "If" were inspired by Brecht's idea of distancing or alienation effect to make the audience more objective, although I later read the real reason was the film's budget was running out and they could only afford black and white film.