Time flies when you are having fun! Our first year of Film Club has indeed flown by.

I have mentioned Film Club before (here), and it obviously merits a birthday post.

The club was started by one of my old students who then recruited three other guys: a genius film savant in Australia, another old student and exquisitely insightful film critic, and myself. The main component I bring to the table is my old age, which brings a lot of these films to life for these guys. Keep in mind that this is a totally amateur club, so while the guys are brilliant, none of us has formal training other than maybe a college course in film. So our approach is fairly naïf, even when we might do some homework researching the films we have seen.

The mechanics of the Club are fairly straightforward: we decide on a theme or genre for the month, the films are uploaded to our Discord platform and then we have an Internet meeting and talk about the films.

We have watched a total of forty-eight films, some have blown my mind like The Proposition and La Grande Bellezza which both merited their own blog posts. Many I have already seen, but I do not mind re-visiting. Some have been hilarious like The Castle, and some I frankly did not care for like Mr. Nobody, or Upstream Color, and that is ok, there is something wrong if you like every film you watch.

Here is the list. What do you think of these films? What themes of genres do you recommend we watch? Let me know your thoughts below!

Non-Linear Narratives

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. Annie Hall (1977)
3. Mr. Nobody (2009)
4. Biutiful (2010)
5. Enemy (2013)

Light & Color

• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
• Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
• Volver (2006)
• Midsommar (2019)

Film Noir

1. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
2. Chinatown (1974)
3. LA Confidential (1997)
4. Nightcrawler (2014)

Western

1. Fort Apache (1948)
2. The Wild Bunch (1969)
3. The Proposition (2005)
4. 3:10 to Yuma (2007)

The city as protagonist

1. Wings of Desire (1987)
2. Do the Right Thing (1989)
3. City of God (2002)
4. La Grande Bellezza (2013)

Scandinavian +

• Tangerines (2013)
• The Square (2017)
• Another Round (2020)

Family

• Tokyo Story (1953)
• Belle Époque (1992)
• The Squid and the Whale (2005)
• Farewell Amor (2020)

Horror

• The Birds (1963)
• The Witch (2015)
• Under the Shadow (2016)
• Get Out (2017)

Light-Hearted

• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
• Cinema Paradiso (1988)
• The Castle (1997)
• The Dinner Game (1998)

Christmas Time

• Day of the Beast (1995)
• Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
• In Bruges (2008)
• Carol (2015)

Sound Design

• Eraserhead (1977)
• No Country for Old Men (2007)
• Upstream Color (2013)
• Sound of Metal (2021)

Is there a film canon?

• Duck Soup (1933)
• Casablanca (1942)
• 8 1/2 (1963)
• Taxi Driver (1976)

À propos, next month we are going to explore war in film…