Al Weisel - CDNow's 10 Essential International Films
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| The 10 Essential International Films
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Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
Selecting just 10 great films out of the entire cinematic
output of the non-English-speaking world is a difficult if not
impossible task. The 10 films on this list are intended only
to be representative of different times and places.
Every country on this list has only one entry, with the
exception of Russia, which appears twice only because Sergei
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin happens to be the most
important film of the silent era, while Andrei Tarkovsky gives
us a peek into what films of the 21st century might look like.
But for every country on this list, there's a host of great
directors whose films have been left off.
And unfortunately some regions of the world have been left
off entirely: From Eastern Europe, Poland's Andrzej Wajda
(Kanal),
from Latin America, Cuba's Tomás Gutiérrez-Alea (Strawberry
and Chocolate), from the Middle East, Iran's Abbas
Kiarostami (Taste
of Cherry), and from Africa, Senegal's Ousmene Sembene
(Xala, unavailable on video). So this list should be
taken only as a starting point, a guide book for a quick,
whirlwind tour.
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| 1. Rules of the Game (1939) |
 One of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's
masterpiece is part moving drama, part comedy of manners, part
satire about an amoral French aristocracy. During a weekend at
a country estate a French Lindbergh (Roland Toutain) becomes
romantically entangled with a shallow, upper-class beauty
(Nora Gregor, who is ravishing in her only film role), whose
husband also has a mistress. Despite the characters' amorality
there is something sympathetic in the way that the world they
know is crumbling around them. As it follows the characters as
they hop from bed to bed, the constantly moving camera
practically becomes a character itself.
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| 2. The Seven Samurai (1954) |
 This epic film by Japan's greatest director Akira
Kurosawa is about a group of farmers terrorized by bandits who
hire some wandering samurai to defend them. With non-stop
action, slapstick comedy, and a charismatic, scene-stealing
performance by one of cinema's greatest actors, Toshiro
Mifune, The Seven Samurai is not only artistically
accomplished but incredibly entertaining.
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| 3. Battleship Potemkin
(1925) |
 With this film Sergei Eisenstein invented a narrative
technique that revolutionized the way stories are told in
film. Although "montage," which edits together images in a
rhythmic, non-linear way, is taken for granted now, movies
were shot like filmed plays until Eisenstein had his
revelation. The Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin is
perhaps the most celebrated sequence ever filmed and still
retains its power to this day.
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Battleship Potemkin
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| 4. 8 ½ (1963) |
 The title of Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical
paean to filmmaking refers to the number of films the director
had made up to that time. Marcello Mastroianni plays the
director's alter ego, struggling to juggle his girlfriends and
ex-wives and get his next film off the ground. Cutting from
the present to flashbacks to dream and fantasy sequences the
film brings everyone in the director's life together at the
end for a surrealistic dance that's the perfect climax to this
idiosyncratic phantasmagoria.
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| 5. The Sacrifice (1986) |
 Andrei Tarkovsky's mesmerizing, poetic last film is
the masterpiece of one of the late-20th century's greatest
directors. His enigmatic imagery (which inspired the video for
R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion") is as striking as it is often
ambiguous. Erland Josephson plays a man who receives a
horrible vision of the end of the world and is given a chance
to save humanity if he makes a great sacrifice. The film's
ending, consisting of one long continuous shot, is
devastating.
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| 6. M (1931) |
 German expressionistic filmmaker Fritz Lang directed
this harrowing account of a child murderer (Peter Lorre, in
one of the most remarkable performances in film history) being
pursued by Berlin's underworld. Unlike most serial killer
films, M, while not shying away from the monstrousness
of his deeds, depicts Lorre's character as a human being
rather than simply as a monster, who is as much a victim of
the sickness that afflicts him as his own victims, and not so
different from the sick society that produced him (and would
soon produce the Nazis).
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| 7. The Passion of Joan of Arc
(1928) |
 Carl Dreyer's silent film about the French saint
burned at the stake for heresy is told to a great extent with
close-ups of the expressive face of Maria Falconetti, in her
only film performance. In addition to Falconetti's wrenchingly
realistic performance, the script is taken almost verbatim
from trial transcripts giving it the authenticity of a
documentary. Dreyer uses almost every filmic technique
available to him at the time, including montage, to create a
film that is as powerful today as it was when it was
made.
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| 8. Wild Strawberries (1957) |
 Less despairing than Ingmar Bergman's other work,
Wild Strawberries is a touching look at an aging
professor looking back over his lonely life as he travels to
pick up an honorary degree. Through flashbacks, dreams, and
encounters with people he meets along the way the professor
(played by Bergman's mentor, the great Swedish director Victor
Sjöström) comes to terms with the possibility that life has
passed him by in some ways, yet in that realization comes a
sort of redemption.
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| 9. Pather Panchali (1955) |
 This Satyajit Ray film, the first part of a three-film
series known as the Apu
Trilogy (followed by Aparajito
and The
World of Apu) introduced the Indian art film to
Western audiences and marked the debut of one of the world's
greatest directors. With an evocative score by Ravi Shankar,
it's the lyrical story of a young boy growing up in an
impoverished village.
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| 10 Raise the Red Lantern
(1981) |
 Throughout the history of movies oppressive societies
have somehow become fertile ground for great filmmaking. At
the moment Iran is being recognized as a hotbed of cinema. In
the early part of the 20th century, it was Russia; in the
'60s, Eastern Europe; and at the end of the last century,
China. Zhang Zimou's Raise the Red Lantern, starring
China's greatest actress, the beautiful Gong Li, is a
gorgeously photographed film about a woman forced into
marriage with a man who has three other wives.
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