Francesco Antonioni, The Passenger (1975)

Go Tell It On The Mountain (1984)

A fabulous adaptation of the auto-biographical novel with the same title by James Baldwin, a coming of age story set in historic Harlem.
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

John Singleton. Boyz n the Hood (1991)

Not visually very creative, but a movie with a powerful message and with a strong mark of its time. The acting and script of the movie are excellent, especially the capture in a mainstrain movie of the language of black subculture stands out. For its language and message alone worth while seeing.

David Lynch, Dune (1984)

Harmony Korine, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)

Wooooowww! Best Dogme-95 product yet! A classic product of cinema as art! This takes cinema right to the edge of our own time, this is what a creative mind in our era can show you. A great source of inspiration. If this man does not get the Oscar for his entire ouevre they are not worth shit.

Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian Marxist from Slovenia, the academic superstar, delivers a spectacular lecture on the Freudian psychoanalysis of cinema. From Hitchkock, Eisenstein, Marx Brothers, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch, and many other classics, he explains the replacement images that have rosen from the Id to the screen of the super ego, repressed, aggressive, mortified, idealized, but above all full of sexual desire. In a way it takes the first chapter of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types, in which he psychanalyzes world literature, and applies its method to the art form of the 20th century. If you don’t understand Freud, it is hard to recognize the artistic layers in these movies. Brilliant.

If you don’t like Bogart playing the archetype 50s good guy, watch him play in Sierra Madre. He creates a very credible role out of a difficult and ambiguous character. Worth while watching for Bogart’s acting especially. These old movies are not without really awful stereotypes: in this movie it’s not the blacks or women, but the Mexican natives (or Indians as they are called), they’re dumb, lazy or naive, but never as clever and complicated as the white roles. Alas.

Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986), Sweden

A display of visual theater, absolutely amazing and probably Tarkovsky’s best. The script is of a literary quality that is rare in cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986) Tarkovsky on cinema and time.

I watched The Defiant Ones movie because Desmond Tutu referred to it as one of the visual influences in his upbringing and the formation of his racial awareness. There are mainly two moving scenes: 1. As the black inmate is pulled out the river by the chained white companion, he thanks the white man, to which the white man replies: ‘Thanks for what? I didn’t pull you out, I prevented you from pulling me in.’ The second scene happens when they are freed from each other, their chains broken, but they have become bound by their soul and fate. As the white inmate falls down in exhaustion, urging the black fellow to move on without him, the black inmate holds out his arm stretched toward him, and says: ‘com’on, get up, you’re holding up the chain.’ The two main actors display an excellent classic performance, and it’s hard to forget their faces at these two scenes, once you’ve seen them. It’s a movie from 1958 and while it attempts the emancipation of race, it also displays a flaw in another way, and documents a shameful stereotype of gender. As the two prisoners reach a single woman’s home, she immediately falls in love with the white prisoner, then becoming hysterical etc. Race before gender, a tough bitter pill to swallow for the ladies, but a classic race movie with two tough guys.

Kar Wai Wong, 2046 (2005), China

Links:
2046 @wikipedia