Nora Fiore

Comments

I am grateful for this opportunity to leave my name in the guestbook of film history. While poring over the choices of others, I found that the idiosyncratic, intensely personal lists best captured cinema’s slippery greatness. My own list is lopsided. Nevertheless, these films changed my perspective on what counts in life and in cinema. Some of them struck me with a thunderbolt of awe. Others worked in more mysterious ways, becoming trusted comforts and wells of inspiration over time. All of them retain their power to conjure a singular sense of wonder on each rewatch.

It hurts to exclude Busby Berkeley and Ernst Lubitsch and Buster Keaton and Ida Lupino and so many others. This exercise made me strangely angry at the vast and unruly beauty of cinema, but that is a very joyful sort of anger!