"Persona" (written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1966) Has the cinematic breakthrough represented by "Persona" been so abused by generations of TV commercials and music videos that it now appears trite? People whose taste I generally respect think so, but that point of view is simply impossible for me. I first saw "Persona" in a college film series around 1980 and could hardly sleep afterward. The hard-edged psychological realism in the relationship between nurse Bibi Andersson and the mute (or is she?) psychiatric patient Liv Ullmann, combined with the pomo film-history explosion in the middle of the movie, blew my mind worse than any drugs I've ever had before or since. I went back to see it the next night and the night after that. A friend of mine used to check out a print from the Baltimore public library every weekend and project it against his bedroom wall. "L'Avventura," "Last Year in Marienbad" and "Pierrot le fou" had already done considerable damage to the boundary between narrative and experimental film, but after "Persona" it would never be convincingly rebuilt. (For some unimaginable reason "Persona" isn't available on DVD, and even the VHS cassette is pretty hard to find.)

"The Red Shoes" (directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) I told a friend to watch "The Red Shoes" about a year ago, when the superb DVD came out. He looked it up on IMDB. "You mean the ballet movie?" he asked, a mixture of disgust and contempt in his voice. I did. I meant the ballet movie, the fairy tale (adapted from Hans Christian Andersen), the sadomasochistic love triangle, the hallucinatory Technicolor spectacle and the parable about the destructive power of art. English director Michael Powell, one of the screen's true half-demented visionaries, was excavated from obscurity in the '80s and '90s, thanks largely to devoted fan Martin Scorsese. Those who appreciate this bizarre and beautiful fable will want to graduate to the next level: "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "A Matter of Life and Death" (aka "Stairway to Heaven"), "The Small Back Room," "The Tales of Hoffmann" and the tremendously influential "Peeping Tom."

"Rules of the Game" (directed by Jean Renoir, 1939) Neglected on its first release, Renoir's country-house comedy -- an alternately scathing and genial portrait of European class warfare on the eve of the Great War -- was rediscovered in the years after World War II and rapidly became enshrined on the short list of Greatest Films Ever. (It ranks at No. 3 on this year's Sight and Sound critics' poll, after "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo.") Its never-stable combination of violence and humor, the breadth of its sympathy and the exquisite choreography of its ensemble comedy are hugely influential and have been endlessly emulated, if never quite matched. But as the class system it documents fades ever deeper into history, "Rules of the Game" is increasingly in danger of becoming a dated, semicomprehensible oddity. (The multitude of scratchy VHS editions -- and lack of a DVD -- sure aren't helping.)

"The Searchers" (directed by John Ford, 1956) My brief dissertation on John Ford is found in the next entry. This tale of a tormented Civil War vet (John Wayne, of course) hunting for his long-missing niece -- and the Native American warriors who apparently abducted her -- is Ford's acknowledged masterpiece, the work where all the sexual and racial anxieties partly submerged in his masculine mythologizing burst to the surface. Its echoes reach almost everywhere in film history: Kurosawa, Clint Eastwood, "Easy Rider," "Taxi Driver," John Woo, George Lucas.

"Stagecoach" (directed by John Ford, 1939) It's become fashionable in critical circles to bash Ford in general and this stagy (har, har) ensemble drama in particular. With the western in near-total eclipse as a genre, they might not have shown "Stagecoach" in that undergrad film class of yours, and it's a shame. If Ford's filmmaking combined the cornball optimism and thoughtless racism of his country, is that really his fault? It's a richly engaging tale, effortlessly and economically shot (at just 96 minutes), that introduced most of the character and scenery tropes that would define the western. And it launched bluff, agreeable John Wayne on his iconic trajectory. As for Ford himself: Give me a break. Sure, his politics are fatally confused and he was no great intellect, but people will still be watching "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "My Darling Clementine," "The Quiet Man," "Rio Grande" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" when the films of Antonioni and Alain Resnais are decaying digital data in the basement of history.

"Tokyo Story" (directed by Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) It's asking a lot of contemporary Americans, I admit, to appreciate the almost imperceptible dramatic currents in Ozu's deceptively simple tale of an older couple's journey to visit their children in Tokyo. The minimalism and restraint of "Tokyo Story" not only became the fountainhead of modern Japanese cinema, but also became seen, after its U.S. release in 1964, as a powerful antidote to Hollywood's melodramatic excess. In terms of technique, Ozu's most notable American disciple is Jim Jarmusch, but I think Ozu's true influence is more general: Any filmmaker who believes that movies shouldn't be about themselves or about their makers or about sensational acts of violence, but rather about real people's lives, is following his example.

"Wings of Desire" (U.S. title of "Der Himmel über Berlin," directed by Wim Wenders, 1987) OK, it's a personal choice: The apotheosis, and also the renunciation, of black-clad '80s hipster culture. Why has this beautiful and heartbreaking romance -- in which an angel watching over a still-divided Berlin falls in love with a human -- been so thoroughly abandoned in 15 years? Because Hollywood remade it, with Nicolas Cage and other noxious ingredients, as "City of Angels"? Because Wenders' subsequent career has been a series of ever more baffling embarrassments? Because so many of us who lived through that decade would prefer to forget it? Well, I guess those are reasons. Still, a thrilling cinematic accomplishment that strongly influenced '90s indie film and shaped a moment in late-bohemian world culture. But in order for viewers too young to have seen "Wings of Desire" to catch up with it, we may need a definitive DVD edition (reportedly, one has just been released in Europe).

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