101 ESSENTIAL FILMS
Poto takes its name from Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1978 film Poto and Cabengo, one of his Three Popular Films; the image on our purpose page is a still of JP directing Tout va bien (1972), which is available on a Criterion DVD (with Letter to Jane); and JP has had a large influence on several of us in the Poto community, as artist and mentor. For an introduction to his work, see Erik Ulman’s “Jean-Pierre Gorin” in the Senses of Cinema’s Great Directors series.
I can’t speak for all in the Poto community; but what follows is a personal list of 101 favorite films. Numerous favorites have been sacrificed to this arbitrary number. In some cases I have selected less well-known movies at the expense of more famous ones; and I have tried to balance variety with the natural predominance of particular enthusiasms. Directors were restricted to no more than three films, so that Ford, Godard, Rivette, Rossellini, Straub & Huillet, and a few others didn’t dominate too absolutely. Some omissions reflect ignorance—contemporary cinema is represented by very few items, as I don’t know much of what is probably the best work now being done; but I hope what follows may be of value.
—Erik Ulman
- Kenneth Anger: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1966 version)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: L’avventura (1960)
- Antonioni: L’eclisse (1962)
- Ingmar Bergman: The Virgin Spring (1960)
- Bergman: The Silence (1963)
- Bergman: Persona (1966)
- John Boorman: Zardoz (1974)
- Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man (1965)
- Robert Bresson: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)
- Bresson: L’argent (1983)
- Luis Buñuel: La fièvre monte à El Pao (1959)
- Buñuel: El angel exterminador (1962)
- Frank Capra: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
- John Cassavetes: A Woman under the Influence (1974)
- Charles Chaplin: Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
- Jean Cocteau: Orphée (1950)
- Edgardo Cozarinsky: La guerre d’un seul homme (1982)
- Carl Dreyer: Vampyr (1932)
- Dreyer: Ordet (1955)
- Dreyer: Gertrud (1964)
- Marguerite Duras: Le camion (1978)
- Sergei Eisenstein: Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2 (1943/46)
- Jean Eustache: La maman et la putain (1973)
- Federico Fellini: 8 ½ (1963)
- John Ford: My Darling Clementine (1946)
- Ford: The Sun Shines Bright (1954)
- Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
- Philippe Garrel: Le lit de la vierge (1969)
- Garrel: La cicatrice intérieure (1972)
- Jean-Luc Godard: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967)
- Godard: Weekend (1967)
- Godard: Nouvelle Vague (1990)
- Jean-Pierre Gorin: Poto and Cabengo (1978)
- D.W. Griffith: Intolerance (1916)
- Howard Hawks: His Girl Friday (1940)
- Hawks and Christian Nyby: The Thing from Another World (1951)
- Monte Hellman: The Shooting (1967)
- Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo (1958)
- Hitchcock: The Birds (1963)
- Dennis Hopper: Out of the Blue (1980)
- Miklós Jancsó: Szerelmem, Elektra (1974)
- Akira Kurosawa: The Seven Samurai (1954)
- Kurosawa: High and Low (1963)
- Fritz Lang: M (1931)
- Claude Lanzmann: Shoah (1985)
- Charles Laughton: The Night of the Hunter (1955)
- Albert Lewin: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
- Joseph Losey: These Are the Damned (1963)
- Ernst Lubitsch: Trouble in Paradise (1932)
- Christopher Maclaine: The End (1953)
- Louis Malle: Black Moon (1975)
- Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982)
- Leo McCarey: Duck Soup (1933)
- Kenji Mizoguchi: Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
- Paul Morrissey: Forty Deuce (1982)
- F.W. Murnau: Tabu (1931)
- Marcel Ophüls: The Memory of Justice (1976)
- Max Ophüls: Madame de (1953)
- G.W. Pabst: Die Büchse von Pandora (1928)
- Pier Paolo Pasolini: Medea (1970)
- Pasolini: Salò (1975)
- Sam Peckinpah: Straw Dogs (1971)
- Arthur Penn: Night Moves (1975)
- Michael Powell, etc.: The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
- Powell and Emeric Pressburger: I Know Where I’m Going (1945)
- Otto Preminger: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
- Carol Reed: The Third Man (1949)
- Jean Renoir: Le crime de M. Lange (1936)
- Renoir: La règle du jeu (1939)
- Renoir: Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)
- Alain Resnais: L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961)
- Resnais: Muriel (1963)
- Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia (1938)
- Jacques Rivette: Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre (1971/4)
- Rivette: Céline et Julie vont au bateau (1974)
- Rivette: Duelle (1976)
- Roberto Rossellini: Viaggio in Italia (1954)
- Rossellini: La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966)
- Rossellini: Blaise Pascal (1972)
- Raúl Ruiz: On Top of the Whale (1981)
- Don Siegel: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
- Michael Snow: La région centrale (1971)
- Josef von Sternberg: The Scarlet Empress (1934)
- Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: Nicht Versöhnt (1965)
- Straub and Huillet: Moses und Aron (1975)
- Straub: Le genou d’Artemide (2007)
- Erich von Stroheim: Greed (1924)
- Preston Sturges: The Lady Eve (1941)
- Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1977)
- Andrei Tarkovsky: Andrei Rublev (1969)
- Tarkovsky: Solaris (1972)
- Jacques Tati: Playtime (1967)
- Jacques Tourneur: I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
- Jean Vigo: L’Atalante (1934)
- Luchino Visconti: Il gattopardo (1963)
- Andy Warhol: Vinyl (1965)
- Warhol and Morrissey: The Chelsea Girls (1966)
- Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
- Welles: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
- Welles: Touch of Evil (1958)
- Wim Wenders: The State of Things (1982)