30 Favorite Foreign-Language Movies

To this meme, I offer my least resistance. I was thinking of restricting myself to one movie per director, but I enjoy the work of certain directors too much to do this. The ordering below is not arbitrary, but neither can it be held to an absolute meaning.

1. "Close-Up" - Kiarostami
2. "Five" - Kiarostami
3. "Where is the Friend's House?" - Kiarostami
4. "Day of Wrath" - Dreyer
5. "Duelle" - Rivette
6. "Sacrifice" - Tarkovsky
7. "Mirror" - Tarkovsky
8. "The Passion of Joan of Arc" - Dreyer
9. "Celine and Julie Go Boating" - Rivette
10. "Au Hasard Balthasar" - Bresson
11. "Diary of a Country Priest" - Bresson
12. "Tokyo Story" - Ozu
13. "Devi" - Ray
14. "Antonio Gaudi" - Teshigahara
15. "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" - Reiniger
16. "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" - Tati
17. "Contempt" - Godard
18. "Syndromes and a Century" - Weerasethakul
19. "Tales of Ugetsu" - Mizoguchi
20. "8 1/2" - Fellini
21. "Rules of the Game" - Renoir
22. "The Earrings of Madame de..." - Ophuls
23. "Spirited Away" - Miyazaki
24. "Dancer in the Dark" - von Trier
25. "Russian Ark" - Sokurov
26. "Viridiana" - Bunuel
27. "Volver" - Almodovar
28. "Sans Soleil" - Marker
29. "Beauty and the Beast" - Cocteau
30. "The Piano Teacher" - Haneke


Some omissions are due to ignorance - I've watched nothing by Dovzhenko, Demy, Erice, Tarr, Panahi, Iosseliani, Kitano, Lang, Murnau, Vertov, Fassbinder or the Dardenne brothers, and next to nothing by Eisenstein, Ruiz, Pasolini, Akerman or Wenders. I wanted to include something by Melies, but his films are indistinguishable in memory.

For certain others I had no room; yet other omissions are deliberate.

Paradox Redux

What makes me happy is to wish that I had been... And yet I don't wish that I had been... For if I had been..., I would not have been able to wish that I had been..., would I?

Incommunicado

I wish no two people spoke the same language. People are so much nicer to each other when they don't understand each other.

List: Definitions of Poetry

1. William Carlos Williams - "A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words"
2. Ezra Pound - "Dichten = Condensare"
3. Raymond Queneau - "Un jeu simple/que j'invimple/dans la nuimple" = (translation?) "A simple game/that I made up/in the dark"
4. Robert Frost - "Where words become deeds"
5. Wallace Stevens - "Poetry is the pheasant disappearing in the brush"

Special mention: Carl Sandburg - "Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly" (quoted by Wislawa Szymborska)

Definition of Art

The discovery of solutions to a problem that doesn't exist.