Gateway Films/Directors

Every once in a while, someone will ask me what got me into films. It's a conversation that's always interesting because I enjoy hearing how others got started, too. As for me, I'm relatively new to all this. I enjoyed watching movies when I was growing up, but they were never a priority in my family—we never had cable and were still using an old hand-me-down Betamax machine after everyone else had moved on to the VCR. I do remember one notable title that I still think of as my own gateway film, though the gate really didn't swing wide open until years later. That film is Citizen Kane. I can't remember when or how Kane came to my attention; I just remember really wanting to see it. When I was around 15 or so, I found out that it was going to air on PBS, so I recorded it. I was especially interested in seeing if it would live up to all of the hype. To my absolute delight, it did. This was cinema that somehow felt different.

Then several years passed, and I know I watched films from time to time and even loved some of them, but I didn't actively seek them out or think about them critically. My college offered no film classes (though students there can now minor in film), and since I was an English major/history minor, most of my time went to reading, anyway (not that I regret that).

I've kept a film journal for each year since mid-2003, which was when I started participating in an online film community. When I look back at that year's viewings, I see many mediocre titles on the list. Those were my pre-Netflix days, and I was just getting my feet wet. I relied on my library a lot, and then I finally joined Netflix late in the year and began receiving titles I’d waited a long time to see. I won’t even attempt a top 10 for that year, but I will mention a few films that really intrigued me: Punch-Drunk Love, with its strange and dizzying world of colors and sounds and seesawing emotions; Picnic at Hanging Rock, which provides a mystery it absolutely refuses to solve; A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which is a mess in some ways, but I’ll own up to finding it quite interesting; and Charles Laughton’s curious and brilliant expressionistic gem, The Night of the Hunter.

So I guess I would consider those more early gateway films. I've definitely encountered several gateway directors over the years; they're the ones that stopped me and really shook me up. Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Dreyer are just a few.

Anyway, thinking about this made me look over all of my film journals and try to come up with "best of" lists. More accurately, though, I was looking for the films that had an impact on me. My rules for choosing were loose. I was aiming for 10 titles per year, but I cheated and went with 11. I’m not even sure about the criteria these titles had to meet. Some I've named below are films that deeply disturbed me, maybe even films I have no immediate desire to see again, yet they helped shaped my viewing habits and woke me up to the idea of cinema as an art form. Some of these I started, gave up on, then returned to later. Some may not have struck me at the time, but looking back now, they definitely belong on the list. I limited myself to one title from a director per year, meaning I had to throw out Stalker in favor of Solaris, and Persona for Cries and Whispers. This whole process was tough—now I see why I usually avoid making lists.

2004:
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Le Fils (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)
Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Under the Skin of the City (Rakhshan Bani Etemad, 2001)
Wit (Mike Nichols, 2001)

2005:
L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski, 2002)
Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)
The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1962)

2006:
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003)
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindô, 1964)
Red Beard (Akira Kurosawa, 1965)
3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
The Up Series (Paul Almond/Michael Apted, ongoing)
The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

Now I'll turn the question over to you. If anyone would like to share how you got into films or if you have any gateway films or directors, please do.