Josh's Top 5 Most Influential Movies
Movies have always played a huge part of my life. Recently I've come to realize that virtually every interest I have in my life was born of a movie I'd seen. A number of them, to be expected, were incredibly influential. I think virtually everyone I know who wants to work in film feels the same. For example, there was that Movie Challenge on Facebook a while back, remember? Virtually every single person with whom I went to grad school participated in the challenge and took it very seriously. And rightly so! A person's favorite/most inspiring movies can tell you quite a bit about them. It's something I could talk about until i died of thirst, but here are 5 of the films that were most important to me.
“Dogma”
When I was in Jr. High School, there was a 2 week period in which my buddies and I became obsessed with the movie Dogma (a screwball comedy by Kevin Smith about Christian mythology, organized religion and the nature of God). My friends lost interest quickly. I didn't. The movie caused a snowball of questions that just kept rolling. I have a philosophy degree with a minor in religion because I saw a Jay & Silent Bob movie when I was 14.
“The Big Lebowski”
When I was a freshman in college, I took a gen-ed cinema studies class from someone who would ultimately become one of my favorite professors (I wound up taking multiple cinema studies classes from him). One day he screened The Big Lebowski and I had a pseudo-religious experience. It was the first time in my life I watched a movie and saw the intentionality behind it. It was like seeing the code behind the Matrix. I witnessed how the acting, writing, music, costumes, blocking and cinematography all worked together in harmony to create a masterpiece.
“Unforgiven”
My dad raised me on John Ford westerns. I probably saw Clint Eastwood's “Unforgiven” for the first time when I was ten. It was always one of my favorite movies. It was also one of the first DVDs I ever bought. After I saw “The Big Lebowski,” I watched “Unforgiven” for the millionth time soon after, and it was if it were the first time. The direction, referring to his shot selection and blocking, is so simple and so textbook. It was the first time I noticed how a director used shot selection and editing to address the emotional beats of a scene and use cinematic language to write the story.
“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”
When I was a senior in high school, as part of my senioritis, I took a film class in my final semester. It wasn't the best class. My teacher pronounced noir as 'noyay.' But we watched the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” a silent film from 1920s Germany, the posterchild of German Expressionism. It's dark and creepy, and typical of expressionistic films, it's filled with pools of shadow and cartoonishly gothic art design. In the film, I saw the origin story of the conventions of noir, my favorite genre of film, and gothic horror/sciencei fictions films like “The Crow” and “Dark City.” There is something eerily elemental about this type of art and lighting design, which is why filmmakers turn to it over and over again.
“Le Corbeau” (The Raven)
“Le Corbeau” is a a 1943 French film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. It was an occupation film, produced by the German company Continental Films and was banned in France until 1969. The film is a dark tale about a bucolic town in which a 'poison pen letter' campaign causes all the rural townfolk to turn on each other out of paranoia and fear. The French saw the film as a vilification of the French people pushed by the Nazis; more recent perspectives tend to see it as a subversive take on the effect of a facist regime on the psyche of a nation's people. It's a master class in subtext, subversion, writing, acting and cinematography. In my opinion, it’s one of the best films ever made. Incidentally, the film is also responsible for equating crows with informers, see both Bran and Varys in Game of Thrones.