40 films to help you understand the art of the cinema...

Before The Birth of a Nation the cinema had barely got beyond the fairground, after The Birth of a Nation it was well on the way to being the greatest art that our species had created. In these 'enlightened' days, the film is difficult because of the overtly white supremacist approach to a particularly difficult era in American history, but, to echo what I said in the introduction, to understand the cinema, one must forget the moral or socio-political thrust of the content and appreciate the extraordinary way in which this enormous dramatic canvas is presented in, for its time, incredibly subtle nuances of framing, acting and montage. Modern audiences seem ignorant of the fact that the view of the Reconstruction represented in the controversial second part of the film was, at the time, the academically accepted view of that era via the Dunning School, which was not challenged until the 1950s. Moreover, the caption that introduces the second part explicitly states "This is an historical representation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period and is not meant to reflect on any race or people today." If the film is 'stained by racism', as has often been claimed, the stain is on the back of the canvas, not on the front. To appreciate this magnificent masterpiece no more makes one a racist than to appreciate Battleship Potemkin makes one a Marxist, to appreciate Triumph of the Will makes one a Nazi or to appreciate Psycho makes one a psychopath... Through this film one learns the shape and structure of a good part of film aesthetics – the concept of thematic association through montage, the concept of parallel action, and simultaneity in the cinema, and all of the ‘basics’ of characterisation and mise en scène. They were to be the touchstones of film aesthetics for all of the silent era and many of them continue to dominate the way that ideas and emotions are visually expressed in films today. In my view, with the possible exception of Homer's 'The Iliad', there has never been a work of art that has defined its medium the way that this film defines a large part of the art of the cinema.

How can it be that a film of only a bit less than 30 minutes long deserves a place in some universal list? The Adventurer is edge to edge brilliance: a narrative sonata on the number 3... three locations - all triangular with one on a different level from the others. Three main characters in each scene. And then there is the incredible originality and joy of Chaplin's comedy that fizzes out of nearly every shot. I must have seen it fifty times and new wonders reveal themselves on each and every occasion. This film demonstrates how structure can be embedded in a simple film at an incredibly deep level.

Probably the main reason why the cinema is the greatest of the arts is that it seems to have a direct line to the deepest part of our psyche. My belief is that the reason for this is that films have the structure of dreams; and our minds take the same total immersion into great films as they do with dreams. So here is a dream of a film that accesses our emotions by the mainline. Sentimental? No, this is a film that exposes and illuminates perhaps the most elemental part of the human condition - the need to be with someone that you love. In The Kid Chaplin give a copy-book example of how mise en scène enhances emotional engagement.

Of all of the great artists of the cinema, Erich von Stroheim is one of the most difficult to appreciate. Stroheim, in Greed, effectively makes a film with the same intensity of expression that great writers achieve in their best novels. The problem arises when one discovers that the film is only about one quarter of the length that it was originally (10 hours). It was sequentially reduced twice by Stroheim himself (with Rex Ingram) to six then four hours, and then by another hour and a half by an un-credited editor against the director's will. How can a 'butchered' film be that good? Well, the only way to find out is to see it - repeatedly, actually, as it is a very complex work. The historian William K Everson also pointedly remarked in 'The American Silent Film' that what remains of Greed is so good that it is incredibly difficult to imagine that that level of expression could have been maintained for over twice the length of film.

Between 1915 and the end of the sound era, great strides were made in developing the grammar of cinema. The Soviet 'school' was among the forefront with its creative use of montage (editing) following experimental works by Lev Kuleshov and Eisenstein's own essay: 'The Montage of Attractions'. This is the most important work by that 'school' of film making. Eisenstein uses the story of a naval mutiny against the cruel czarist régime to demonstrate the poetics of montage, with rhythmic and tonal elements to the spectacular editing. In fact, this, in common with all of Eisenstein's films, exhibits a far greater range of expressive visual devices than just montage, but it is for the montage that the film is most and justly celebrated.

Possibly the most unambiguously enjoyable and popular of all silent films, The General shows Buster Keaton's art off to perfection. Keaton had a wonderful if worrying view of the world as being slightly too much for us ordinary humans to contend with. Gravity, friction, kinetic energy, they frequently conspire to make Buster's life difficult, but shining through is his extraordinary resilience and ingenuity, which allows him to triumph over the third law of thermodynamics and create order out of chaos..

Although Nosferatu is Friedrich Willhelm Murnau's best-known and loved work, The Last Laugh his most theoretically interesting, being 'wordless' and Tabu his most aesthetically pleasing, for our purposes, Sunrise is the one. In it, Murnau creates a unique sense of the film world being a 'continuous space' in the same way that he had with other 'kammerspiel' scripts by Carl Meyer. This creative partnership was one of the most fruitful in all cinema.

The nature of an art is usually to be found in the way that it permits the artist to transcend its technical limitations through the exploitation of its creative possibilities. Silent cinema is a different concept from 'wordless cinema'. The world that Chaplin created in his greatest silent films reached extraordinary levels of subtlety. At a time when the rest of the cinema was generally peopled by characters gabbling for no reason other than, in the sound era, they could, City Lights persented a story where words were barely necessary, but through the director's conceptual brilliance, we experience the sound of life without hearing it. This was the last time that this type of cinema was made until 1989, the young director, Charles Lane made a black and white silent film called Sidewalk Stories that had many of the stylistic and thematic characteristics if Chaplin at his best.

It is true, but difficult to imagine, that at the time of this film, in the English-speaking world, Ernst Lubitsch was probably the best-known film director after Chaplin. Trouble in Paradise is not only his greatest film, but also his most enjoyable - a romantic comedy that set the standard for sophistication and subtlety. What we see in Trouble in Paradise is the concept of grace in film style. It is light and insouciant, but also expressive and profound.

Von Sternberg's films, most of which are quite short, are, for me, exquisite examples of the way in which every visual aspect of accommodation can be employed to express the thematic threads of a story and the subtleties of characters' emotions. This light-hearted telling of the rise to power of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia thrusts the viewer into the machinations of the czar's court and delicately but unforgettably, shows the sweep of a turbulent period of European history in an inspiring and delightful way. Von Sternberg's came to the cinema during the period of German Expressionism and his use of set design recalls Dr Caligari.

Funny yet tragic, logical but paradoxical, and brutally ironic, Renoir's masterpiece is regularly placed in 'all-time top fives' by film historians and fully engaged critics. Often imitated yet never approached, let alone surpassed, the film proceeds to represent an aristocrat's weekend hunting party in which infidelity and deceit create a toxic atmosphere upstairs and downstairs. The final twenty-five minutes - following the 'Dance of Death' sequence is, for me, the most perfect extended sequence of film ever made. Again, it sometimes needs a couple of viewings to 'get it'.

Vying with Singin' in the Rain and Sunset Blvd as the greatest Hollywood film made about Hollywood, Preston Sturges' magnificent socio-comedy asks a load of difficult questions about the relationship between the artist and society, but unlike most other films that try to do the same, it never forgets to entertain. Preston Sturges, for a time, was Hollywood's most celebrated writer-director. Sullivan's Travels, one of the very best satires in the cinema. is also one of the finest examples of great script-writing in American cinema.

Any catalogue of excellence in the cinema that omits Welles' phenomenal first feature just isn't to be taken seriously. At a level of density of expression, it is difficult to find a film that comes even close. And that is precisely where one finds greatness and excellence in the cinema. Virtually every single creative element of cinematic expression is utilised to turn this thinly disguised bio-pic of Randolph Hearst into the greatest cultural icon of the mid-20th Century. When one begins to see its incredible layers of meaning, it is difficult not to weep at its perfection.

Although Rome: Open City is better known and critically admired, I find much of it fairly turgid. Rossellini's second film, however, is a joy to behold. Consisting of six episodes during the allied invasion of Italy, the film confronts many of the 'issues' of the sociology of modern warfare. These have been so frequently played out by infinitely lesser films and TV shows in the intervening sixty years, that they might seem slightly clichéd here, but they are not, because these are the true originals. Neo-realism was able to inject poetry into the filming of hardship. Above all, Rossellini always seemed to know exactly where to place the camera, and how to light his sets for greatest effect. This is the true cinema of immediacy.

This list is, perhaps, rather short on barn-stormers. When it comes to barn-storming musicals, however, you can't get better than Singin' in the Rain, a film that lightly satirises the end of the silent era in Hollywood. The result is a film that is funny, fascinating, intriguing, breathtakingly beautiful, hilarious and incredibly moving by turns. All films are composite works of the creativity of several different people. For the most part, it is the director who gets the credit, and that is the case for almost all of the films on this list, but there are exceptions and Singin' in the Rain is a rare example of a genuinely collaborative masterpiece. Anyone who doesn't understand when film enthusiasts go into raptures about the original Technicolor process should see a good print of this film - it is stunning! And Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" number is an an incredible piece of formal camera choreography.

A model of stylistic and narrative simplicity, Tokyo Story glides across the screen with a grace and serenity only matched elsewhere in the work of Robert Bresson. Nearly all art is grounded in human emotion and the emotions portrayed in Tokyo Story are possibly the most authentic in all cinema. Ozu exquisitely dissects the causes and effects of human fallibility, the gulf between generations and the ability of the human psyche to make the best of a bad situation. His films make life both more enjoyable and more endurable. If you think 'subtlety' and 'clarity' in filmic expression are mutually exclusive, take a look at this wonderful work.

I have the sense that, of all non-English speaking directors, Kurosawa is 'overvalued' - being given a status that really belongs to Renoir or Bresson, for example. But that is also, I think precisely because so much of his work is heroic, and clearly on a higher level than American films that seek the same qualities. But that does not in any way deny the towering place of the great director's masterpiece in the list. To be 'heroic' is often an aspiration for films, but it is seldom achieved. When it is (achieved), it is usually through the theme and, sometimes, the acting. Seven Samurai is not only thematically heroic, it is structurally and stylistically heroic, as well and features one of the finest examples of black and white cinematography in all cinema.

It is easy to forget just how brilliant a director John Ford was. Of course his timeless imagery of Monument Valley, and columns of cavalry charging against the Indians remain in the memory, but when one re-sees a Ford film after a period of years, one is always struck by the extent to which his magnificent imagery is utilised throughout his films and not just in the spectacular scenes. If, as I contend, the art of the cinema is like the other arts, the 'how' is more important than the 'what' - as long as the 'what' is not so banal that the 'how' becomes irrelevant. Throughout the work of John Ford , and especially in The Searchers, exquisitely subtle insights into character and motivation are layered one upon another by simple gestures and camera positions that tell us more about the theme than a page of dialogue would have done. The Searchers is the Ford film that has received the greatest critical acclaim in the time since his death and its savage theme and mournful denouement set it apart from even the greatest Westerns of its era. 'Consistency of vision' is one of the tenets of film aesthetics both across and within films - Ford is arguably the finest exponent of this in his westerns.

Virtually any of the films that Hitchcock made between 1951 and 1966 could have been chosen for a place in this list. By that stage in his career, Hitchcock was such a master of cinematic expression that the films, when repeatedly viewed are like masterclasses in the film-maker's art. I have chosen the two (Vertigo and Psycho ) with one-word titles ending in 'o'. Alternatively, I have chosen two of the three which most clearly demonstrate his mastery. I came to Vertigo late, as Hitch had withdrawn it from circulation just after I became interested in the art of film, and it was not until after the director's death that I saw it. Like virtually all of the films on this list, it is a film that grows in stature each time you watch it. Probably the most important of many reasons why it is on the list is that it demonstrates the cinema's ability to get totally within the mind of a character. Scotty is one of the great tragic heroes that the cinema has created. Though the spectacular perspective foreshortening is its most famous attribute, its greatest achievement from my perspective is that it monumentalises the 'falling' part of falling in love.

If this list has been entitled 'How to understand the cinema in two films', this would have been one of them (the other would have been Citizen Kane). The reason is very simple, both these two magnificent masterpieces use all of the major elements of cinema to create something great, something profound and something wonderful. Psycho, based on a lowly, but interesting, crime novel by Robert Bloch, is very spare on dialogue, but we get to know everything we need to know about Marion Crane, her dilemma and what she feels about having stolen $40,000 through Hitchcock's exquisite visual expression. Witness, for example the car headlights in the rain searing into Marion's guilty soul like the eyes of God, only to be replaced by a scene in blinding sunlight where the black eyes of the malevolent (just threatening really) traffic cop in sun glasses, like the eyes of the Devil! There is barely a single shot in the film that does not contribute to its thematic core. Nowhere else in cinema is the audience conducted like an orchestra. Some horror enthusiasts may protest that many of the best horror films have the same irresistible effect, but Psycho is not a horror film, it is a very funny and very deeply profound black comedy in which Hitch 'puts us through it' better than in any other of his films.

Perhaps the quality which gives film its pre-eminence as an art is its innate ability to mimic mental processes - memory, dream, musing. If there is one film that one must see in order to understand this, it is L`Année Dernière à Marienbad. Set in a huge hotel or mansion, it chronicles the menacing relationship between three un-named characters. The main reason it is so important in the history of film aesthetics is that it occupies a very curious and complex mental space. That mental space is part dream, part recollection, part uncertainty. At the time of its release (shortly before I became interested in cinema), much was made by the film press of the alleged dispute between the writer of the avant garde novel/scenario, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais as to whether the central characters did, in fact meet the previous year, in Marienbad or elsewhere. But, as so often, the journalists were looking in the wrong place. L`Année Dernière à Marienbad expands our understanding of what a film can be.

Welles has twice contributed to the misunderstanding of his work - once in his own inactivity in the last 15 years of his life - much of which, in my researches, seems to be from self-induced problems. Secondly, since his death, much of his later work has been tied up in pointless and damaging legal disputes that has made them barely available for us to remember the magnificence of them. Chimes at Midnight was, according to his mammouth and wonderful interview for BBC's Arena programme, 'the film he would use to get him into Heaven'. And it deserves to be put alongside Citizen Kane and what remains of The Magnificent Ambersons as his greatest work. For Welles, films came to life in the cutting room (which is why the butchering of Ambersons was such a tragedy). In this film, the lyricism of his montage is transcendental. Welles' Shakespeare adaptations help us define the nature of cinema and its relation to the superficially similar but ontologically very different art of the theatre.

The first draft of this list had no films by Godard in it, partly, at least because I have never really forgiven the director for abandoning aesthetics for ethics in his work at the end of the 1960s - Pravda and onwards where he abandoned the discipline of fiction for the tedium of didacticism. However, the more I thought about it, the more important Godard's contribution to modern cinema seemed to be, and eventually his two major innovatory works found their way into the list. Richard Roud, one of my two most admired film critics, called Pierrot le Fou "The first film set in the conditional tense". Not all of it is in the conditional tense, but large sections in the middle of the film give alternative versions of the story, concomitant on decisions made by the characters - it is a device most famously used much later in Sliding Doors - a very engaging but minor work. Godard uses it to express the mental chaos of l'amour fou. Maybe it isn't as unnerving now as it was at the time (I haven't seen it in over 20 years) and all great stylistic innovations are gradually absorbed into the body aesthetic, but this is, still, in my view the definitive use of the device.

Incidentally, (pace the IMDb summary), it is not Pierrot who escapes with Marianne, but Ferdinand, who becomes Pierrot in the process.

If there is any film of this era that ought to be extremely dated, it is Blow-Up - a vaguely existentialist fable set right in the heart of Swinging London, in which the central character is a fashion photographer with high-minded ideas. But it isn't dated, it is as fresh as the day it was made. Several of Antonioni's films were in the mix for inclusion in the list - the baffling L`Avventura, L'Eclisse for its extraordinary final sequence amongst others. But Blow-Up trumped the rest because it contains a sequence that actually explains how the art of cinematic montage creates logical associations - a kind of masterclass in the discoveries of Lev Kuleshov. I don't want to say any more on this subject for fear of spoiling one of the cinema's most exquisite experiences for the uninitiated. Antonioni's most unique quality otherwise is his extraordinary ability to create and reveal resonant three dimensional spaces in both natural and architectural contexts.

Looking again at this list as I write these introductions, I am amazed how the films up to and including Psycho are largely straight-forward narratives while seven of the following eight films are complex works that either play fast and loose with conventional narrative structures or tackle thematic or stylistic ideas that made them decidedly challenging for contemporary audiences. But that was the 60s... Ingmar Bergman was already one of the world's foremost and best-known directors at the beginning of that decade following The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. In the 60s, he started to make films that peered into the depth of the human psyche, which anticipated, to some large extent, his major themes for most of the rest of his career. The most instructive of these, for our purposes was Persona in which he explores the way in which our dealings with others define and transform our image of ourselves. This he does through exquisite mise en scène and precise visual expression. The cinema advances.

Robert Bresson has a position in the cinema unlike any others, in post-war cinema, at least. While other directors made their films with an aesthetic that was clearly related to those of their contemporaries, Bresson ploughed his own aesthetic furrow, making films whose subjects were spiritual and dense in a style that had only a tangential relationship with the drama that is at the heart of almost all other films. In a way, I could have chosen any of the films he made from Diary of a Country Priest onwards, as all of Bressons films are masterworks in what I can only describe as 'stylistic distillation of meaning'. In Bresson's films, every shot, every gesture, every sound has a focussed contribution to the spiritual function of the scene. I chose Au Hasard Balthazar because it is, IMHO the purest and most perfect of his films; for many years I regarded it as the greatest film ever made, but it is also an enigma. It can deliver the most crushing and transcendental experience that you are ever likely to experience from a work of art, but on other occasions, it can leave you slightly empty. It is as though your psyche needs to have resonance with Bresson's wondrous art while you are watching it. This is not 'difficult', it is not an intellectual process, indeed to allow the intellect to function too actively is likely to destroy the moment, but if the film gets through to you, you will never, never forget it.

In this first list update, Howard Hawks' wonderful comedy Western was first on the list to replace the slightly rather soulless Memento. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine two films more different. Hawks film, a rich re-working of his earlier, highly successful Rio Bravo. Although the film is shorter than Rio Bravo, it has a structure that makes it seem longer and more complex than the earlier film.This is an example of how magnificent the script, by Leigh Brackett, was. In fact, according to Leigh Brackett, it was the best script she ever wrote, but Hawks would not accept the tragic denouement that she has planned, so to her disappointment and our pleasure, Hawks increasingly played on the irony between the comic aspects of the story and the highly dramatic and morally challenging central theme. Two of the key parameters of cinematic expression are the expression of character and the expressive use of camera placement. After a career of making many of the greatest American films of their era (Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Red River, by the time of El Dorado, cinematic expression was second nature to Hawks. Film theorists frequently, in fact usually, ignore the function of pleasure in films, largely, I expect, because they fear that the spectator is being deceived by their pleasure in thinking that the film has cinematic qualities. El Dorado has immense cinematic qualities, but it also gives pleasure in almost every scene.

With Belle de Jour, Buñuel stepped up a gear from his brilliantly scathing iconoclastic satires of the early 60s. The story is an only mildly shocking tale of a well-to-do housewife, who, for unexplained reasons, decides to become a prostitute in a down-market Paris brothel while her husband is at work. Onto this situation already replete with meaning and frisson, Buñuel weaves a narrative structure of wish-fulfillment musings, dreams and, maybe, reality. Along with Last Year at Marienbad it is the perfect way to understand how film mirrors the mental process, but in a different way.

Often people say that film is 'like a language'. But that is not exactly right, it is like language itself, and, just as one can use language to write novels and poems of exquisite complexity and profundity, one can also use it to write political or sociological essays. The language one uses for these two related, but different, forms of writing is the same for both, just the content is different. Jean-Luc Godard's films from Masculin Féminin until Week-End plus Le Gai Savoir corresponded to the auteur's increasing wish to express political ideas alongside cinematic ones. The result was an extraordinary series of films in which contemporary fiction or quasi-fictional stories were interlaced with leftist rhetoric to create a very aesthetically exciting but very challenging form of cinema. Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d'elle is the most lyrical of these films and the most thought-provoking. In it, a lower middle class housewife wants to increase her spending power and becomes a prostitute. There is clearly some similarity in situation between this film and Belle de Jour on the one hand and Godard's earlier Vivre sa Vie on the other, but, in essence, what makes this film important is not its subject, but its conceptual and stylistic structure. Godard punctuates the undramatic story with philosophical and sociological musings to create a philosophical fiction that exists in literature but only rarely in film. Sadly, the advances of these six fascinating and sometimes wonderful works were not pursued and Godard became, largely, a tedious propagandist who preached to the converted and frequently forgot, or chose to ignore, the discipline of narrative fiction in his films.

For a while, I doubted if this magnificent masterpiece belonged in the list, then I re-viewed it , and was immediately reminded why, without it, the list would lack a certain special something that is at the heart of great cinema. This is the most unflinching stare into the depths of a tortured human soul that the cinema has produced - a sort of 'Crime and Punishment' without the crime. Even that might not have been enough to get it into the list, but Bertolucci's mise en scène is exquisite, showing characters behind distorting glass and shut off from a large part of the frame by some enclosure. The contrast between the two men in Jeanne's (Maria Schneider) life could barely be greater - Paul (Brando) tortured, damaged, old, deep, is contrasted with Tom (Léaud) gay, carefree, young, frivolous. The theme - the meaning and limits of love and mortality - is challenging, but it is monumentalised by Brando's performance which, as far as I am concerned is easily the finest piece of acting in all cinema. Like all of the films in this list, it delivers more and more with each subsequent viewing - watch, for example, for Brando's gestures that repeat but subtly change through the course of the film.

Incidentally, IMDb's description of the film is inaccurate, Paul is not a businessman, but simply the husband of a hotelier, and the agreement between Paul and Jeanne is not 'only for sex', it is for an anonymous relationship: "No names!!!" screams Paul.

What, one might ask, if one exists, is the single common quality of all truly great filmmakers? I would answer with great confidence that it is that they all love the cinema with an abiding passion and want to express their love for it through the films that they make. Of all of the truly great filmmakers, the one whose love for the cinema was best known and most celebrated was François Truffaut, and the film that most expresses his love for the cinema is Day For Night. There have been several films set in the world of film production, but, fine though some of the others are, as films and as representations of filmmaking, none comes within a distance of Truffaut’s masterpiece. The film expresses the complexity, the difficulty, the insecurity and the joie de vivre of film production, and it is infused with Truffaut’s love in every frame.