"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."

"As with Bresson, I could have picked almost any Godard flick. I went for this one because it’s the one Criterion carries that I’ve seen most recently. Also, the filmmaker (who credits himself in this movie as “JeanLuc Cinéma Godard”) could do no wrong in this period of fifteen films in eight years, starting with Breathless in 1959 (though I prefer his most recent, late movies). As is often the case in Godard films, characters in this one come to a bad end. The director has a deep, fatalistic, despairing streak. Truffaut, who conceived the original story for Breathless, described how, when at the end of that movie Belmondo is shot, Godard wanted one of the cops who’s responsible to shout to the other “Quick, in the spine!”—but Truffaut persuaded him it was excessive. While, again, what’s really striking about Band of Outsiders is the sheer thrill of life in it. It’s so pretty and overflowing with life it hurts. Even when the director is boring or a buffoon, it’s moving and happy to see. You feel like he wants you to come out and play with him. It’s inspiring, the way a guy could have Godard’s grasp of cinematic “language” and then just say to hell with it and do whatever he feels like: run away to the south, start dancing, turn the sound off. His sensibility in that eight-year period reminds me of Frank O’Hara more than anybody else. Godard is a great poet—and I mean as a writer, of film reviews, etc.—as well as a filmmaker."