World Cinema

The standard text, and deservedly. Form, narrative, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound, each with the vocabulary you will use for the rest of the pathway.

Monaco on the image as a language: signs, technology, and how the medium's constraints shape what it can say.

The essays that argued for the long take, deep focus and the ambiguity of the real against montage. Half of film theory is a reply to Bazin.

Camera angles, continuity, cutting, close-ups and composition. Written for practitioners in 1965 and still the clearest statement of the rules.

Deep focus, ceilings, extreme low angles and a structure that tells you the ending first. Watch it for the camera rather than for the reputation.

Christopher Doyle shooting through doorways, mirrors and corridors so that you are always slightly excluded from the scene. Colour and framing doing the emotional work.

The editor of Apocalypse Now on why a cut works, with his rule of six and the observation that people blink when they finish a thought.

The Odessa steps sequence invented a way of building meaning out of collision rather than continuity. Eisenstein wanted montage to do to an audience what an argument does.

Shot to look like newsreel with not a frame of documentary footage in it. The cutting is what makes you believe you are watching something recorded rather than staged.

Chion's argument is that sound changes what the image means without the audience noticing, and he gives you the terms for what is happening.

A film about a man listening, in which the same recording means something different each time you hear it. Walter Murch did the sound and the picture edit.

Morricone wrote the score first and Leone played it on set. Each character arrives with their own music, and the opening is nine minutes of a dripping tap.

The most influential screenwriting book ever written, and worth reading critically. McKee is describing what Hollywood structure does, whether or not you want to do it.

Noir with the ending given away in the first scene, so the whole film is a man explaining how he got there. Wilder and Chandler wrote it while hating each other.

Four accounts of the same event, none of them reconcilable. The film that put unreliable narration into cinema and gave a name to the problem.

Non-professional actors, real streets, and a plot that could be summarised in a sentence. Neorealism was partly a choice and partly what postwar Italy could afford.

Jump cuts, handheld camera, and a hero who has seen too many American films. Godard broke continuity editing on purpose and got away with it.

Ninety minutes in something close to real time, following a woman waiting for a medical result. Varda was making New Wave films before the New Wave was named.

Two girls decide that since the world is spoiled they will be spoiled too. Banned in Czechoslovakia for depicting food waste, which was not the real reason.

Three hours of a woman doing housework, in fixed frames, in real time, until something breaks. Voted the greatest film ever made in 2022, which surprised everyone including its admirers.

Three and a half hours, and the template for every team-assembly film since. Watch how Kurosawa stages action so you always know where everyone is.

An elderly couple visit their children, who are too busy. The camera sits at the height of someone kneeling and almost never moves.

A woman's descent through every rung of Tokugawa society, told in long unbroken takes that refuse to let you look away or move closer.

Ray made it at weekends with an amateur crew and no money, and it changed what the world thought Indian cinema was. The first of the Apu trilogy.

Partition, a refugee family, and a daughter consumed by them. Ghatak uses sound expressionistically where Ray uses it naturally, and the difference is the argument.

A man impersonates a famous director; Kiarostami films the real trial and then has everyone play themselves in reconstructions. Nobody has ever blurred documentary and fiction better.

Two young Senegalese dream of Paris. Mambety cuts like the New Wave and shoots Dakar like nobody had before, and the film was ignored for thirty years.

Thirty years in a Rio favela, told at speed with a mostly non-professional cast recruited from the neighbourhoods it depicts. Also argued about, for good reasons.

A mute woman, a piano on a beach, and colonial New Zealand. Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or for it, and the second was twenty-eight years later.

Two families, one staircase, and a genre that changes three times. Watch what the vertical staging is doing before the plot takes over.

A global history that treats African, Asian and Latin American cinema as central rather than as extras. Read it last and the pathway turns into a map.