IONCINEPHILE of the Month: Eskil Vogt’s Top Ten Films of All Time List

Have you ever wondered what are the films that inspire the next generation of visionary filmmakers? As part of our monthly IONCINEPHILE profile, we ask the filmmaker (in this case, Norwegian filmmaker Eskil Vogt) to identify their all time top ten favorite films. Worth noting: this was a last minute request on my part, meaning the Scandi helmer did not have much time to reflect on film history in it’s totality — but Eskil was a great sport and kindly obliged. Vogt’s Blind receives its NYC release on September 4th via the Kim Stim folks and receives its VOD release via Fandor. Here is his top ten as of September 2nd, 2015.

Annie Hall – Woody Allen (1977)

“I almost put Desplechin’s “Ma vie sexuelle” here, but I guess even Desplechin would forgive me for replacing him with this. We are so many filmmakers to admire how Allen seemingly effortlessly gave movies the freedom and depth of the novel while still being so very, very funny.”

Barry Lyndon – Stanley Kubrick (1975)

“The beauty, the irony, the humor, the wisdom of Barry Lyndon makes it one of my favorites of Kubrick’s. I was ecstatic when I learned that the Swedish actress (Vera Vitali) I had cast in my film Blind told me she was the daughter of Leon Vitali – Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon. The duel scene with him and Barry is one of the all time great movie scenes.”

Beau Travail – Claire Denis (1999)

 “A movie that has a more in common with music and dance than the literature it is inspired by (it’s a version of Melville’s Billy Budd). Denis and Agnès Godard’s stye just blew me away when I first saw it and I had to go right back to see it again.”

Don’t Look Now – Nicolas Roeg (1973)

“Manages at the same time to be a formalist art movie, a moving and realistic grief drama and a really, really scary horror film. One of the best endings in cinema (and I’m not thinking about the dwarf).”

Goodfellas – Martin Scorsese (1990)

“So much is said about this already so I won’t add much – I just love the energy of it, how it keeps moving, avoiding at all times conventional plot mechanics, always going out on tangents, losing itself in excessive detail, but keeping it all together by the sheer force of the filmmaking on display.”

Hiroshima Mon Amour – Alain Resnais (1959)

“Resnais. Marguerite Duras. Two major influences for me with these two. Resnais wanted to film thoughts and memories – something I think is still one of the great unexplored areas in cinema.”

L’eclisse – Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

“Best movie opening and especially ending I can think of. I’ve seen it several times, but still forget what comes in-between. Except that awkward minute of silence in the stock market and that Monica Vitti dances some African dance.”

Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock (1946)

“Close call with Vertigo, but the casting wins it over for me. Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains… A perfection to match Hitchcock’s style. And it’s such a perverse and twisted tale. Grant pimps out the woman he loves to spy for him and starts hating her for doing what he asks of her. Great stuff.”

Persona – Ingmar Bergman (1966)

“In a way it’s a movie is about the materiality of cinema – the film even breaks apart at one point to coincide with a persons breakdown. The meta-consciousness of this film is so uninhibited, a great reminder to me of how form isn’t in opposition to emotion in cinema – in this case it’s quite the opposite.”

Stalker – Andrei Tarkovsky (1979)

“This was the first time I ventured into Tarkovsky’s universe and the suspense of the film overwhelmed me as well as the poetry of it. I just couldn’t look away. The Mirror could just as easily have been on this list, but Stalker was the first.”