"As delightful as any other film of the early thirties. Their influence on sound films in general, and musicals in particular, is underestimated."

"As delightful as any other film of the early thirties. Their influence on sound films in general, and musicals in particular, is underestimated."

"I love Robert Wise’s strange and vibrant career. The Haunting is probably one of the best films about ghost seekers of all time."

"Black Moon is a quintessential “surreal” film. What interests me is that so many films that we would label surreal were made in the sixties and seventies, decades (and many art movements) after surrealism’s inception. By the time so many of these surreal films were being made, the prevalent trend in art was toward conceptualism and minimalism, approaches aimed at stripping away the non sequitur . . . which is, in essence, the guiding principle at work in Black Moon. What is also interesting to me is the tenor of most of these films. While Zéro de conduit captures a certain joie de vivre and sense of humor, which, I feel, is indicative of the early surrealists, the nature of many later surreal films generally seems much darker—more Max Ernst than, say, Magritte."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."