A Declaration of What's To Come...

I know it has been far too long since my last post on here, but many exciting things have happened since the last time I wrote. I graduated from Bowling Green, and was accepted in the Film Studies Master's Program at the University of Miami. Florida life is certainly very different from that of Ohio. For one thing, there are tiny lizards roaming the sidewalks everywhere.


One of the first things I found out from the School of Communication is that at the end of my two years here, I will have to take what's called a Film Literacy Exam. Basically, they have devised a list of 100 films that have changed the world of film and are necessary viewing for anyone that wants to be taken seriously academically in this field. I'll include the list at the end of this post.

This new quest for academic enlightenment features many films that I have already seen before, and quite a few that I, embarrassingly enough, had not. So, over the course of the next two years, I will be writing about these films in preparation for the Film Literacy Exam. That being said, I will still critic current films that I have seen, particularly because the theatres here get a much wider variety of films that the theatres back home.

Let the epic journey begin...

And now for the complete list of films:

The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 1935)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
Aguierre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)
Asparagus (Pitt, 1979)
Awaara (Kapoor, 1951)
The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)
Betty Boop and Popeye Shorts (Fleischer, 1930s)
Bicycle Thief (de Sica, 1948)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)
The Blot (Weber, 1921)
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967)
Breaking the Waves (von Trier, 1996)
Breathless (Godard, 1960)
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1919)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel and Dali, 1929)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
City of God (Meirelles and Lund, 2002)
Cleo from Five to Seven (Varda, 1961)
The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)
Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1992)
Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989)
Don't Look Back (Pennebaker, 1967)
Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963)
Earth (Mehta, 1998)
El Norte (Nava, 1983)
The General (Keaton, 1926)
The Graduate (Nichols, 1967)
Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
Harlan County, USA (Kopple, 1976)
High School (Wiseman, 1968)
Hiroshima, mon Amour (Resnais, 1959)
The Hitch-Hiker (Lupino, 1951)
Hyenas (Mambety, 1992)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)
In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950)
In the Mood for Love (Wai, 2000)
It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934)
The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927)
L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
La Jetée (Marker, 1963)
Land without Bread (Buñuel, 1932)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
Late Spring (Ozu, 1949)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948)
Los Olvidados (Buñuel, 1950)
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutiérrez, 1968)
Menace II Society (Hughes Brothers, 1993)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren, 1944)
Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
Mon Oncle (Tati, 1957)
Morocco (von Sternberg, 1930)
Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)
On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954)
Open City (Rossellini, 1945)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940)
Primary (Drew, 1960)
Raise the Red Lantern (Yimou, 1991)
Red (Kieslowski, 1994)
Red Dust (Fleming, 1932)
The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986)
Salesman (Maysles, 1969)
Salt of the Earth (Biberman, 1954)
Scarface (Hawks, 1932)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
Sherman's March (McElwee, 1986)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, 1937)
The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophuls, 1971)
Soy Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964)
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950)
Tale of Winter (Rohmer, 1992)
A Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988)
Top Hat (Sandrich, 1935)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1953)
Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
What's Opera, Doc? (Jones, 1957)
Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage, 1962)
Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Almodóvar, 1988)
The World of Apu (Ray, 1959)
Xala (Sembene, 1975)

And that's that, folks! Just as a note, I do believe that the majority of these films are included on the Netflix Instant Watch!