Welcome to the next iteration of Board 8 Watches and Ranks films! Throughout the last few lists, there's been a lot of discourse around one particular question: what is an art film? And while this label might mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask, I've thrown together a list of 30 films I personally consider artistic to try and shed some light on that question.
So what makes an art film? Is it a movie that challenges our conceptions of narrative and cinematic structure? Is it one that eschews an easily comprehensible plot to try and create an experience you feel your way through instead of thinking? Is it one that deeply examines society and its cultural assumptions? Or is it one that asks philosophical questions about the meaning of life and humanity's place in the universe? On this list you will find assembled many answers to that question, and hopefully many portals to a moviegoing experience unlike anything you're used to.
Although I feel this aspect could've been taken further, I made an effort to make this our most diverse list yet both in nationality and time period. I believe this is the first list since the anime rankings where the United States of America is not the most-represented country and a minority of films are in English. We have many French films, two with African directors, a Mexican film and a Spanish one, a few Italian films, some Swedish, Danish, and German representation, an Indian film, a Taiwanese film and a few Japanese ones, and of course a few from the USSR and its exiles. We have a silent film, a World War 2 film made during the war itself, a film that took decades to release in its own country, and even a few Best Picture nominees to round things out.
Your 30 films, along with their year of release and directors:
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) - Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Rules of the Game (1939) - Jean Renoir
Citizen Kane (1941) - Orson Welles
Ikiru (1952) - Akira Kurosawa
Tokyo Story (1953) - Yasujir Ozu
Ordet (1955) - Carl Theodor Dreyer
Pather Panchali (1955) - Satyajit Ray
Harakiri (1962) - Masaki Kobayashi
8 1/2 (1963) - Federico Fellini
Black Girl (1966) - Ousmane Sembne
The Battle of Algiers (1966) - Gill Pontecorvo
Persona (1966) - Ingmar Bergman
Playtime (1967) - Jacques Tati
The Conformist (1970) - Bernardo Bertolucci
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) - Werner Herzog
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) - Victor Erice
The Holy Mountain (1973) - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Mirror (1975) - Andrei Tarkovsky
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) - Chantal Akerman
Eraserhead (1977) - David Lynch
The Ascent (1977) - Larisa Shepitko
Three Colors: Red (1994) - Krzysztof Kielowski
Vive L'Amour (1994) - Tsai Ming-liang
Beau Travail (1999) - Claire Denis
Amlie (2001) - Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) - Guillermo del Toro
Synecdoche, New York (2008) - Charlie Kaufman
The Tree of Life (2011) - Terrence Malick
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) - Wes Anderson
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - Cline Sciamma
Send completed lists to me either by email at
[email protected] or Discord @peopleranimals2