Cinephilia

Von Stroheim wanted to make McTeague into a film without sacrificing what he saw were necessary plot details, because he wanted to reproduce the book on film, with ambitions probably partially inspired by Griffith. He created a masterpiece, but studio heads decided to cut the film to around two hours.

Von Stroheim said the film he previously worked on, Foolish Wives, became, "only the skeleton of my dead child," and unfortunately Greed suffered the same fate.


Recommended Reading
A blog post about the influence of paintings in Greed.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Fables of the Reconstruction
Roger Ebert's Review

Original Length: 9 hours (a lost film)
Edited Length: 2 hours, 20 minutes (the only surviving complete copy)
Restored Legnth: 4 hours (film stills or production photos were used to restore the film with the directors' notes).

Recommended Reading

Dekalog

Stanley Kubrick's opinion about The Decalogue.
Jonathan Rosenbaum's comparison of The Decalogue to Fargo.
Roger Ebert's review - it's one of his favorite films.
Length: Ten films about one hour each.

This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we've come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

You should watch the blu-ray version (it has English subtitles, but was only released in Russia).
Length: 165 min

Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as expressiveness, in the sense that he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured, nothing that smacks of deliberate generalisation. - Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (taken from TSPDT)

Recommended Reading

Jonathan Rosenbaum's article The Last Filmmaker
Roger Ebert's review

Robert Bresson's Filmography

Length: 95 min

As a critic, I already thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still consider myself a critic, and in a sense, I’m even more of one than before. Instead of criticism, I make a film, but that includes a critical dimension. I consider myself an essayist, producing essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only instead of writing, I film them. - Jean-Luc Godard, 1962

Recommended ReadingBreathless as Film Criticism by Jonathan Rosenbaum - if you own the Criterion edition of the film, you can watch this as a film essay narrated by somebody else.
Roger Ebert's Review
Length: 90 min

Recommended Reading

In the earliest days of cinema, the Russian director Kuleshov performed a famous experiment in which he juxtaposed identical shots of a man's face with other shots. When the man was matched with food, audiences said the man looked hungry, and so on. The shots were neutral. The montage gave them meaning. - Roger Ebert

According to the famous “Kuleshov experiment” in silent Russian cinema, the same close-up of actor Ivan Mozhukhin seen by separate audiences with a bowl of soup, or a coffin, or a little girl automatically conjured up a hungry man, or a mourner, or a pervert. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length: 112 min

…this lovely, moody film, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands. For its evident contemplations of a singular…transfer of personality between an older mental patient and her pretty, lonely nurse is rich in poetic intimations of subconscious longings and despairs, and it is likely to move one more deeply as poetry than as thought... - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

Recommended Reading
Roger Ebert's review
Length: 85 min

Children Of Paradise is the ultimate theater-as-life movie, rich in historical allusions past and present, a landmark production that overcame constant harassment by the Germans and stands as a key testament to the spirit of the French Resistance. But apart from mere dissertation fodder, the film remains an exemplary piece of popular entertainment, full of vibrancy and wit, with unforgettable characters and a delicate, bittersweet tone that considers their emotions in balance. - Scott Tobias, A.V. Club

Recommended Reading
Roger Ebert's review
Length: 163 min

He's the Shakespeare of cinema. Period. Watch his films and you'll know instantly. - Werner Herzog, Rotten Tomatoes - 5 Favorite films (Listal)

...the film launched ideas about associative editing that have been essential to the cinema ever since, from Soviet montage classics to recent American experimental films; and for the sheer generating of suspense through crosscutting and action the film’s climax hasn’t been surpassed in 77 years. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length: 163 min

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? - Sergei Eisenstein

Potemkin…has achieved such an unholy eminence that few people any longer dispute its merits. Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though -- it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message…[It] looks astonishingly like a newsreel, and the politically naïve have often taken it as a 'documentary.' The more knowing have a graceful euphemism: Eisenstein, they say, 'sacrificed historical facts for dramatic effect.' - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (1992)

Recommended Reading
Roger Ebert's review
Length: 75min

To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter. - Alfred Döblin, in the preface to the book Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf

Recommended Reading

an essay on Criterion

Length: 14 hours, 28 minutes

The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature. - Dziga Vertov

Recommended Reading

Roger Ebert's review
Length: 68 min

Length: 225 min

Erich von Stroheim, one of Griffith's assistants, said that he was the pioneer of filmdom. The first to put beauty and poetry into a cheap and tawdry sort of amusement. - Martin Scorsese, from A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

Recommended Viewing
Martin Scorsese on Griffith from A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies .
Length: 3 hours, 10 minutes

Length: 89min

I would argue that Godard’s eclecticism must be acknowledged and understood before one can genuinely appreciate the film. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length:103 min

Major spoilers: The greatest controversy about the film is Kiarostami's Brechtian decision to show us that we saw was only a film; after the moving shot of the protagonist laying to die, the audience sees Kiarstami filming the movie, and some critics may have found the experience jarring (I did).
Recommend Reading
Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay Shouts and Murmurs, a response to Ebert's criticism

Then along came Angelopoulos from Greece and Kiarostami from Iran, with their fashionably dead films in which shots last forever, and grim middle-aged men with mustaches sit and look and think and smoke and think and look and sit and smoke and shout and drive around and smoke until finally there is a closing shot that lasts forever and has no point. - Roger Ebert

This documentary shows film preservation is important because of the cinematic experience.

Films are more harmonious than life, Alphonse, there are no bottlenecks in films, no dead-time, films keeps rolling forward, like trains, you understand, like trains in the night. People like you and me, you know, are only happy in our work, our work in the cinema. - Ferrand, Francois Truffaut's character

Recommend Reading
Godard and Truffaut's letters to each other; they had a fall out over this movie.

Godard said the cinema is Nicholas Ray. Truffaut said people unable to appreciate Johnny Guitar are blind to what cinema has to offer, and should stop going all together (or something to that effect).

Recommended Reading
Roger Ebert's review
Jonathan Rosenbaum said he didn't see Fanny and Alexander and thought Persona was his best film, despite never seeing the film many crtics consider to be Bergman's masterpiece (source), before writing Scenes From an Overrated Career; Roger Ebert responded with Defending Ingmar Bergman.
Full TV Version: 5 hours, 12 minutes

Length: 7 hours, 30 minutes
Read Aftewards
Jonathan Rosenbaum: The Importance of Being Sarcastic and his response to Béla Tarr's request to write for Sátántangó's 15th anniversary.

An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Read Aftewards
Roger Ebert's review
Length: 3 hours, 40 minutes

Recommended Reading
Jonathan Rosenbaum's review
Length: 3 hours, 21 minutes

Well over a decade in the making, this eight-part, 264-minute video (1998) is Jean-Luc Godard’s magnum opus, but it’s never been widely seen... - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Recommended Reading
Jonthan Rosenbaum's Essay

Watch AfterwardsA short essay about the film
Length: 4 hours, 33 minutes

Length: 5 hours, 13 minutes

One of Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorite films.

Feuillade is today arguably a good deal more entertaining than Griffith, and unquestionably much more modern: his mastery of deep-focus mise en scene is astonishing, and its influence on Fritz Lang as well as Luis Buñuel and other Surrealists remains one of his major legacies... I can’t recommend it too highly. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Read Afterwards
The Birth of a Notion by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Length: 6 hours, 39 minutes
Note: maybe buy the bluray

A cinematic event...a massive, nearly 16-hour chronicle of life in Germany, from 1919 to 1982, as reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of the members of one family, initially peasant-farmers, in the fictitious village of Schabbach in the Rhineland....In spite of its intimidating length, Heimat is immensely, easily watchable, an extraordinary succession of mostly ordinary events and characters -- history seen from ground level -- vividly acted by a huge cast of both professional and nonprofessional actors. - Vincent Canby, New York Times

One of Stanley Kubrick's favorite TV shows.
Length: 15 hours, 24 minutes

Here's a trailer for the entire Heimat trilogy -

Note: I'm waiting for the restoration.

Length: 1 day, 1 hour, 32 minutes
Read AfterwardsStephen Holden's review.

Length: 11 hours, 39 minutes
Read AftewardsAn interview with Edgar Reitz about the Heimat trilogy.

I choose “Out” as the opposite of the vogue word “in”, which had caught in France and which I thought was silly. The action of the film is rather like a serial which could continue through several episodes, so I gave it the number “One”. - Jacques Rivette

Read AfterwardsNew York Times review
Length: 12 hours, 9 minutes

Length: 4 hours, 12 minutes

Length: 4 hours, 30 minutes

Length: 3 hours, 37 minutes

Though many of his films were popular successes when they came out, Barnet is known among cinephiles mainly as the greatest forgotten master of the golden age of Soviet cinema. - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length: 98 min

"Kings of the Road" is a film of great depth and beauty, and its black and white photography is worthy of comparison with John Ford's. But it is rarely played commercially, maybe because of its three-hour length...
[There's] not a moment too long. Wenders needs the time to pace the developing relationship between his two main characters. - Roger Ebert

Length: 3 hours, 15 minutes

...A Brighter Summer Day is probably the greatest Taiwanese film ever made... - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length: 237 min

Read Afterward
Jonathan Rosenbaum's review
Length: 173 min

Among the subjects addressed are Vietnam, political battles throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Che Guevara, Nixon, and Eisenstein’s Potemkin; the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries. This is often thoughtful and informative, but it assumes a grasp of political struggles of the period that some American viewers won’t share. Marker’s poetic notations are generally quite effective... - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Length: 4 hours

Length: 3 hours, 30 minutes

Length: 4 hours, 39 minutes

Length: 3 hours, 25 minutes

Length: 4 hours, 56 minutes