Walter Salles

“Starting with Andrei Rublev. It’s– that’s a film I absolutely love. I try to go back to it every single year. Tarkovsky used to say that cinema only exists if everybody who’s doing a film is in the artery of that film, and I have the impression that Andrei Rublev somehow epitomizes this. It’s an extraordinary film.”

“Stranger Than Paradise by Jim Jarmusch. I completely love this film. I think it was so refreshing to see that narratives could be actually told in a different manner than the Greeks had taught us at the beginning, the structure with five acts and character arcs and everything else, and what Jim Jarmusch offers us here is something that transcends that kind of classical perception of narrative. And another film I go back to just to renew my faith in cinema.”

“Drifting now to new Cuban cinema, Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Rarely does a film manage to blend what is of a documentary nature and what is of a fictional nature. The impurity of that film on a conceptual level is so ever present and creates a narrative that is constantly surprising. I have the impression that the film is kind of sucked by the reality of a country also being redefined. The journey of the character and the journey of the society as a whole intermingle.”

“La notte by Antonioni. So, Antonioni is, in fact, the filmmaker that brought me to cinema, the director that captured the best the senselessness of society, of the industrial society and, at the same time, the loss of identity that ensued, you know, after that. And La notte has the seeds of what was going to be later Blow-Up and The Passenger. The pillars of an extraordinary director.”

“Time by Garrett Bradley. That’s more of a recent find, thanks to the New York Film Festival, actually. Both the narrative and the filmic quality of Time are completely outstanding. It’s about love as a form of resistance. It’s about memory as a form of resistance as well. It’s a film that I’m sharing with a lot of friends, because I think it is really unique.”

“And we left Mr. Scorsese for last. Raging Bull. I saw it maybe 50 times. Scorsese’s talent, unique sensibility. His understanding of this character who is in between cultures, coming from Italy and yet having to redefine itself in another landscape. Everything about this film is unique; every single image contains the film as a whole, and that is so difficult to achieve in cinema. I have a hard time analyzing it because I’m completely taken by it. This is cinema at its highest point.”