Self-Portrait in Ten Films

There are those that think list-making to be a rather low way to spend one’s time. How can anyone declare with any authority what the greatest xxxxs of all time are? And canonisation certainly goes against the subjectivity of the human experience, and does nothing whatsoever to serve our various idiosyncrasies. But I think that it certainly does no harm. Has the increasingly popular, decennial Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll had any adverse effect on the world of film? Of course not! And there is no denying the fun that can be had reliving one’s favourite experiences as one racks one’s brains in search of that elusive top ten (a horribly arbitrary number.) In fact, I would say that top ten lists can even be quite enlightening, potentially revealing our personal, cultural, political, spiritual, and ideological tastes and prejudices; revealing the human being hidden beneath the artifice of public persona and tribal camouflage.

And so, in an effort to reveal who I am today, the 28th January 2009, (I know that it’s a horrible cliché, but on another day the list could have been quite quite different, so capricious is the nature of human taste,) here is a list of ten films that continue to move me greatly. In alphabetical order:

• The Apartment (1960)
• A Blonde in Love (1965)
• A Canterbury Tale (1944)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• Close-Up (1990)
• Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
• Don't Look Now (1973)
• Ikiru (1952)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)
• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
• Persona (1966)
• A Swedish Love Story (1970)
• Tokyo Story (1953)

In the end I couldn’t quite manage to whittle it down to ten films, and even so I still had to leave out Allen, Scorsese, the Coens, the Dardennes, Hitchcock, Altman, Kazan, Renoir, Egoyan, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Romero, Kieslowski, Lean, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Will Hay, Frank Randle, the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, amongst many others. And if I hadn’t edited myself, the list could have quite as easily ended up containing only Bergman, Davies, and Kurosawa films. Does the end result reveal anything about me? You must be the judge of that.