Ron Peck's 10 best films.

They're crazy things these '10 Best Films' lists, but I suppose we all from time to time doodle with the idea and list a few titles. A couple of times in the past I was asked to put together a list for one survey or another and gave up in face of the absurdity of the task. The idea itself seems nonsensical. Do you claim objectivity or just fall back on your ten 'favourites'? Or ten that you know had enormous impact at impressionable moments, for whatever reason? Or the ten most ground-breaking?

The exclusion's the worst aspect. How can I not include Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, Fellini's Eight & A Half, Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Hitchcock, Minnelli, Preminger & Ford, Lang, Mann & Boetticher’s westerns, John Ford, Visconti’s The Leopard, Bill Douglas’s Trilogy, the new Iranian cinema? That’s why you just give up, the painful injustice of the exclusions.

But times have changed. Directors and films I thought would be safe for all time are already on many critics’ and filmmakers’ scrapheaps, neglected, or just plain forgotten, replaced in 10 Best lists by relatively recent films often so atrocious the heart sinks. The Piano? Titanic? Alien? These lists fire one up, deserve duelling over.

Since the essential dilemma remains insoluble, I have to propose a simple fiction to myself: the House of Cinema, in which all the works ever made anywhere for the screen are miraculously housed, but there is a fire, eating celluloid and digital storage systems faster than even the crowd of would-be rescuers can save the master materials; 99.99% of the history of the cinema will be lost forever. In the limited time, what would you brave the flames to save?

Let’s add an important qualification: the film archives of the world go straight to the more widely acknowledged masterworks… Not to worry, all of Godard, Fellini, Bresson and Bergman will be preserved and passed down to future generations. No need to worry about 2001, Blow-Up, The Big Sleep; they’ll all be saved. What, in such a situation, would I fight through the flames for myself? What might others miss? What, already being 57 years old, are the films that have persisted for me, good or bad, through most of those years, been comforts to me, obsessions I go back to again and again, always renewed by the contact? If these films are primarily those with meaning for me…

Let me start with a little film no one would rescue in the mad trample to get down all those Sirk, Hawks and Chaplin movies…

The Bigamist
A little film by Ida Lupino, about strangers who meet on a Hollywood touring bus – a waitress and a salesman… Edmond O’Brien giving his best ever performance… a simple if desperate effort at human contact by the kind of anonymous man in a suit everyone looks past and doesn’t notice in the crowd, talking of which -

The Crowd
King Vidor’s film on a similar subject, gloriously silent, homing in with great empathy on two little lives that come together in the new phenomenon of the Megalopolis as embodied by New York.

I choose randomly, as memory summons films up; I’ll curse later that I’ve forgotten others… There’s

The Lusty Men
Nicholas Ray’s rodeo film – at all costs there has to be a Ray film and, frankly it could be almost any one of them, so much understanding and exploration of cinema and life being inexhaustibly there. But this is the one that’s persisted in exciting me for more than 40 years. At its core a defining dilemma of contemporary life: play safe and steady like a good little democrat or risk everything to touch the fury of life… and the film, like all of Ray’s work, does nothing but explore all the complexities of the dilemma.

And if we’re talking Ray, let’s talk Kazan, on the next shelf of this burning warehouse, left to perish by the more politically correct zealots because of HUAC, his filmmaking derided. Kazan, a terribly underrated director. Again, you could take any one of them. I hesitate before Baby Doll, Wild River, Splendor In The Grass, America America, but no, dammit, it has to be

East Of Eden
one of the defining films of my adolescence, not just because of the riot of its ostensible subject-matter, but those incredible colours, the moves of James Dean, Jo Van Fleet, Julie Harris, Burl Ives, Richard Davalos and the rest of the cast, Rosenman’s scoring streaks ahead of anything anyone’s doing now -

But 4 of the 10 are already American. What of the rest of the world’s cinema? Guilt sinks in. I pass by the British wing of the burning archive knowing Powell’s films will all be rescued, the early Hitchcock, the best of Derek Jarman… There’s a film in the Belgian section that might just be missed

Jeanne Dielman
Chantal Akerman’s film that is for me a monument on the landscape, a film built out of all those small moments from which our daily lives are constructed, a character moving between rooms and undertaking one chore after another; Akerman heroises the process by choreographing Delphine Seyrig through it all, an incredible ballet really by a wonderful dancer -

And talking of monuments, there is one so central that even though many others clamber to rescue it from the flames, I must lend an extra pair of hands –

L’Avventura
Arguably the greatest film ever made… Never before did I feel characters so strongly related to landscape, buildings, rooms, a world that will outlive them all, recognised as the reality behind the little drama, but ‘little’ for whom, not the characters themselves… I go back and back to that rocky island searching for the missing Anna even though I know I will never find her…

Russia having more recently become so important a part of my life, I look quickly for a film that both evokes its deep spirituality and engages my mind in the way so many Russian films seem so able to do. Tarkovsky, I think…

Solaris
a film that evokes both Russia and the cosmos, Natalie Bondarchuk’s repeated resurrections unbearably moving

And after the grandeur of Space, I want the humility of the earlier Iranian cinema where the true clues of a future alternative cinema needing neither CGI nor vast budgets seem to lie -

Where Is the Friend’s House?
The best film I’ve ever seen with and about children, and I’m afraid I must cheat and include as well the companion film Life Goes On; in these films a respect for the earth and the humble; unsentimental, the aesthetics simple and direct and against the drift of the times…

Time to rescue just two further films -
A film from my childhood…

The Great Adventure
Arne Sucksdorff’s 1953 film about growing up in a world defined by Nature; not seen for 40 years or so but still remembered from a BBC transmission, especially those sounds of woodland birds, the
forest -

And one film by John Cassavetes –  

Love Streams
for its unembarrassed embrace of its subject – the quest for love, any kind of love, Gena Rowlands both fragile and tough, funny and sad, the torchbearer who just goes out into the night and tries again, and again, and again…

And as I run out of the collapsing warehouse, I mourn the fact that I’ve not rescued a single Warhol or Morrissey film, have let Advise & Consent & Carmen Jones perish if no one else grabbed hold of them; and what of Bandwagon and Written On the Wind, Vertigo, all of Fassbinder and Pasolini, so many East European films? But then I trusted that other hands rescued those works - but gone forever perhaps are all those epics that so transported me from the dullness of suburbia… The Vikings, Solomon & Sheba, Quo Vadis, King Of Kings… Well, they and all the rest will have to remain in the memory… Or maybe I didn’t make the right choices after all and should drop these ten (eleven) and run back in and rescue instead...

-- Ron Peck, July 15, 2005