Kian Bergstrom

A Short Personal Canon

111 utterly essential films, restricted to one entry per director. Some of these are astoundingly great, others only middling great (They are all unambiguously great). Each of these films transformed and enhanced my appreciation of the capacities of cinema in some sense. For some directors (Hawks, Ford, Warhol, and others) it was nearly impossible to choose a single title; many others of their films could easily be swapped into the list in another iteration. For some other directors (Ed Wood, Shirley Clarke, Farocki among them), choosing a single title was very easy, either because one film towers above all their others for me, or because I don’t know their careers well enough to judge their other works.

In every way, this list reflects both my biases and my prejudices, my areas of special interest and my vast gaps in familiarity.

• Fantasmagorie (1908) .. Emile Cohl
• Traffic in Souls (1913) .. George Loane Tucker
• Fantômas (1913/14) .. Louis Feuillade
• The Dying Swan (1917) .. Yevgenii Bauer
• The Burning Stake (1923) .. Ivan Mozhukhin
• Ballet Mécanique (1924) .. Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
• Go West (1925) .. Buster Keaton
• By the Law (1926) .. Lev Kuleshov
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) .. James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber
• Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928) .. Hans Richter
• October (1928) .. Sergei M. Eisenstein
• Where East Is East (1929) .. Tod Browning
• Liliom (1930) .. Frank Borzage
• Enthusiasm (1931) .. Dziga Vertov
• Frankenstein (1931) .. James Whale
• The Struggle (1931) .. D.W. Griffith
• The Mummy (1932) .. Karl Freund
• The Bowery (1933) .. Raoul Walsh
• Design for Living (1933) .. Ernst Lubitsch
• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) .. Fritz Lang
• The Black Cat (1934) .. Edgar G. Ulmer
• Rose Hobart (1936) .. Joseph Cornell
• The Long Voyage Home (1940) .. John Ford
• The Leopard Man (1943) .. Jacques Tourneur
• A Canterbury Tale (1944) .. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
• Duel in the Sun (1946) .. King Vidor
• The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) .. Bob Clampett
• Eaux d'Artifice (1953) .. Kenneth Anger
• The End (1953) .. Christopher Maclaine
• Glen or Glenda (1953) .. Edward D. Wood Jr.
• Night and Fog (1955) .. Alain Resnais
• Street of Shame (1956) .. Mizoguchi Kenji
• The Tarnished Angels (1958) .. Douglas Sirk
• Advise & Consent (1962) .. Otto Preminger
• Shock Corridor (1963) .. Samuel Fuller
• Chumlum (1964) .. Ron Rice
• The Killers (1964) .. Don Siegel
• Marnie (1964) .. Alfred Hitchcock
• The Masque of the Red Death (1964) .. Roger Corman
• Ako (1965) .. Teshigahara Hiroshi
• Brick and the Mirror (1965) .. Ebrahim Golestan
• The Flicker (1965) .. Tony Conrad
• Breakaway (1966) .. Bruce Conner
• Cul-de-sac (1966) .. Roman Polanski
• Lupe (1966) .. Andy Warhol
• Our Trip to Africa (1966) .. Peter Kubelka
• La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966) .. Roberto Rossellini
• Fuses (1964-67) .. Carolee Schneemann
• Point Blank (1967) .. John Boorman
• Portrait of Jason (1967) .. Shirley Clarke
• 23rd Psalm Branch (1967) .. Stan Brakhage
• Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) .. Ken Jacobs
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) .. Billy Wilder
• Rio Lobo (1970) .. Howard Hawks
• A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) .. Sergio Leone
• Fat City (1972) .. John Huston
• Images (1972) .. Robert Altman
• Last Tango in Paris (1972) .. Bernardo Bertolucci
• The Killing Kind (1973) .. Curtis Harrington
• F for Fake (1974) .. Orson Welles
• Sweet Movie (1974) .. Dusan Makavajev
• The Beast (1975) .. Walerian Borowczyk
• Dersu Uzala (1975) .. Kurosawa Akira
• In the Realm of the Senses (1976) .. Oshima Nagisa
• The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) .. Nicolas Roeg
• Grin Without a Cat (1977) .. Chris Marker
• Martin (1977) .. George A. Romero
• Suspiria (1977) .. Dario Argento
• In the Year of the 13 Moons (1978) .. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Cruising (1980) .. William Friedkin
• The Falls (1980) .. Peter Greenaway
• Heaven's Gate (1980) .. Michael Cimino
• Blow Out (1981) .. Brian De Palma
• Spacy (1981) .. Ito Takashi
• Videodrome (1983) .. David Cronenberg
• Special Effects (1984) .. Larry Cohen
• No End (1985) .. Krzysztof Kieslowski
• Street of Crocodiles (1986) .. Brothers Quay
• Images of the World and the Inscription of the War (1989) .. Harun Farocki
• White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) .. Clint Eastwood
• Fallen Angels (1995) .. Wong Kar Wai
• Showgirls (1995) .. Paul Verhoeven
• Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) .. Jan Svankmajer
• Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) .. Martin Arnold
• Audition (1999) .. Miike Takashi
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999) .. Stanley Kubrick
• Unbreakable (2000) .. M. Night Shyamalan
• Monsoon Wedding (2001) .. Mira Nair
• Mulholland Dr. (2001) .. David Lynch
• Storytelling (2001) .. Todd Solondz
• The Decay of Fiction (2002) .. Pat O'Neill
• Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) .. Guy Maddin
• Citadel (2006) .. Atom Egoyan
• Déjà Vu (2006) .. Tony Scott
• Miami Vice (2006) .. Michael Mann
• Death Proof (2007) .. Quentin Tarantino
• Zodiac (2007) .. David Fincher