For a man who created forward-thinking, boundary-pushing cinema embraced by small, devoted sects of cinephiles, Andrzej Żuławski‘s Sight & Sound list of favorite films is, in so many words, surprisingly traditional. Few would look upon it and say it contains a single bad film on it, but those who’ve experienced his work might expect something other than Amarcord; maybe, in its place, an underground Eastern European horror film that’s gained no real cachet since the Soviet Union’s collapse.
That isn’t to suggest something inexplicable, however. The Gold Rush‘s fall-down comedy could be detected in some of Possession‘s more emphatic moments of physical exhaustion, and, while we’re at it, visual connections between On the Silver Globe and 2001‘s horror-ish stretches aren’t so out-of-bounds. So while this selection may not open your eyes once more to cinema’s many reaches, one might use it to peek inside Żuławski’s mind — and there, I believe, do exist ways of experiencing the form in a new light.
Explore below:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
Amarcord (Federico Fellini)
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)
The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
Hamlet (Laurence Olivier)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica)
The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)