"I discovered this book at 15 at a time when society’s view of the gay world was fugitive criminal. Looking thru Genet’s poetic eyes into queer life in France grounded in criminality, in the margins of humanity was a both a validation of the people I was meeting, with their fierce sense of self identification and a window into my future in the NY Underground."

"Although this movie portrays the very real and gritty life on a river barge, there is something so poetic in it. You’ll never forget the contrast between Père Jules (Michel Simon)—who can puff smoke from a cigarette out of the face tattooed around his belly button—and the romantic belief of Juliette (Dita Parlo) that you can see the image of your true love in water."

"Channel Jean Renoir through Luis Buñuel—voilà!—Jean Vigo. This, his only feature, renders the mundane magical, the sad humorous, and the flesh transcendent as it portrays young newlyweds and their life on a river barge. “All day long it’s either smooching or squabbling,” laments a companion. And so it is in this poignant, poetic paean to the beauty and tribulations of married love."

"The apotheosis of the Italian Western. Sergio Leone had been examining themes from the West of a number of pictures and here they coalesced into one poetic fable that is strikingly beautiful to watch and very moving. Again, it was not a success when it came out, and was brutally cut after a number of engagements, but now has belatedly been appreciated and restored."

"I bought this film on a whim, mostly thanks to its eye-catching cover and my love of Yukio Mishima’s books. Turns out to be a classic, a real grade-A stubborn-man-on-a-mission tale told in a truly ambitious fashion. (Spoiler alert) the seppuku scene at the end is really poetic and tasteful, and Philip Glass is such a perfect match stylistically.'

"An Iranian poetess made this film on her own, upon a request from a leper’s house. She died three years after. I often show this most poetic and distressing film in festivals. The audience is always blown away, despite its monstrous side. I also think about the destiny of this woman, directing a movie in Iran in 1962, which must have been very difficult..."

"Poetic and oh-so-funky, Orson Welles’s filmic essay on deception has balls of experimental steel. Cobbled together in his later years of European exile, it’s both a cheeky thesis on the nature of fakery and the best example I can imagine of filmmaking as giddy, childlike play. Now if someone would only do a decent DVD of The Trial, we’d be in business. (Nudge, nudge.)"

"Number two is Fireworks by Takeshi Kitano. I remember when I saw it, I love the way he marries in that movie… it’s emotional and impressionistic but it still has these amazing outbursts of violence. I can’t think of a single movie [like it] that goes from, in one instance, being very delicate and poetic, to being almost obscenely violent. I think he’s remarkable."

"I can’t help but include this book on any list I’d ever make of books I love. It is bewitching, playful, poetic, and really beautiful. Ingrid Caven looks like Marlene Dietrich and sings like Lotte Lenya. She was Fassbinder’s muse on film and Schuhl’s in life, and the book creates a fictive plane of reality in between all four, plus postwar German history, plus the 1970s."