I don't think I can learn much from watching a blockbuster mega-budget film because pigs will grow wings before anyone will give me 100 million dollars and say "here, make a film. knock yourself out." Watching masterpieces of cinema isn't necessarily the best way to learn either, in my opinion, because they're too sophisticated and complex. Well, for me, anyway, who is starting out.

I think the best way to learn is to watch low-budget films (ie indie films that are within your means to create) with only a couple of actors and a fairly simple storyline, no complicated special effects. Like this one:

I suggest looking into the work of Jean Rouch who is often overlooked because he wasn't trained as a proper "filmmaker", and hence didn't care much about the "rules" of filmmaking, but he single handedly influenced the French New Wave and launched the cinéma-vérité documentary movement. "Chronicle of a Summer" is a good place to start but the films he made in Africa in the mid-50s like "Les Maîtres Fous" and "Jaguar" are bold and intriguing even to this day.

farocki's work is incredibly challenging.....and incredibly relevant. Rouch leads us to the americans...pennebaker maysles etc. Interesting the work of Leacock at mit in collaboration with super8 sound. And it's not a coincidence that these guys...leacock and the maysles were early adopters of minidv. This brings us back to rouch and the connection with early 20th century anthropology. Leacock's early work was all anthropology based. And films like salesman and grey gardens was pure 19th century anthropology , only using 20th century technology. 20th century documentary filmmaking wouldn't have existed w/o 19th century anthropology .

I'd love to find the whole film.

Why is it whenever you get into learning film you end up with people recommending obscure Foreign documentaries and ends in a competition to post the most obscure then can think of. And the truth is if you made a doc or movie using any of the styles of these movies they would be terrible. They are art house movies, 90% of the time for the pretentious and even if they were ground breaking in some way 30 years ago they certainly aren't now. You are actually better off watching a bunch of well made aclaimed modern docs Like Exit through the giftshop 2010, Iraq in fragments 2006, Finding Vivian maier 2013.etc.

The fact is you can learn about films from watching any movie, good, mediocre and downright awful ones. You can learn from the latest Avengers movies even if your budget is zero IMO. You can learn from adverts, from photography, from painting, from books.

What I don't like about these kind of threads is they turn into oh this movie is wonderful and has a really good script or this movie has great visuals. Its about as useful as reading a review on Rotten Tomatoes. Filmmakers should highlight certain scenes or techniques that were used in a scene or movie. If you took one great movie, for example The Godfather or a Kubrick movie and analysed it to death and learned everything you could from it you probably would know more than some film schools. My point is everyone passively watches movies but to learn from movies you have to be much more analytical.

@kurth +1 for that piece of obscure shit, only known by some perverts, I mean intellectuals as La Jetée.
Sans Soleil also... though I barely know Marker's production. Didn't know Leacock at all, very curious about it, thanks =)

Last year I had the opportunity of seeing a retrospective of Michel Auder and wow, I was blown to a million pieces.

 
BILL VIOLA
 
Hatsu Hume 1981

Thanks @All for the recommendations, will check out lots of those :)

@Suresure123 The intention of this thread was for people to talk about visual material that they have learned from, and to share their experiences about that content, so that others may wish to view.

In the initial post I mentioned that it would be useful for folks to; rather than pick holes in the choices of others.. just add your own comment on the same content, this will allow other forum members to decide for themselves if they want to search out recommended material, rather than be told by a particular member that they should not watch somebody else's recommendation.

I appreciate ALL contributions to this thread, but be sure that your views on other's recommendations tell us more about you and your interests, rather than the content.

I believe that I can learn from watching a very wide range of content (I'd be interested in your thoughts on "The Goonies" and modern doc's too) so please post away..

What I am hoping for, is to build up a range of viewpoints about a wide range of content, that will be interesting to a wide range of viewers, I think it would be presumptuous to think that there is some content people shouldn't watch, to help develop their skills. But I would also like to hear other's thoughts on content in the interest of determining who's viewpoints we value on future recommendations.

I agree with what you say about being more focussed on particular aspects of filmmaking in recommendations, and I think the whole site would benefit from more posts on analytical discussion of technique/process/creativity to live alongside the more gear based discussion. Let's help ourselves, rather than wishing things were different :)

an obscure fest of movies that are nearly unwatchable and no one ever does.

...everyone wants a free lunch....at mcdonalds ! Visual literacy is like any other discipline.

...this is where it started ...

once you learn the language ...

This thread shoulda been called the "unsafe list"

@Suresure123 you're stepping into a political territory which I don't think is the point of this thread. Much of the films and filmmakers quoted here are indeed films that have inspired other filmmakers and are not being quoted for obscurity sake. For example Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys” was directly inspired by Chris Marker's “La Jetée”. Besides there are bucket loads of big budget Hollywood films that were famous for a minute before being shelved into obscurity because they failed to be anything more than an expenditure on some entertainment executive's account.

OK, let's look at "learning by watching" from a slightly different perspective using a less obscure director, say Quentin Tarantino. His film Pulp Fiction was seen as "original" and "groundbreaking" back when it came out, yet in the wider sense, wasn't that "original" at all. Much to his credit he pulled off one of the greatest mash-ups in film history, by pulling together hundreds of bits and pieces from all sorts of music/TV/film relics and weaving them into a classic caper story. All the references were so much a part of the film that people have meticulously cataloged them with the hope of shedding some light on those being referenced (the film list at the bottom has some real gems): http://wiki.tarantino.info/index.php/Pulp_Fiction_Movie_References_Guide

Honestly I'm not a big Tarantino fan because of how much he "borrows" references, but in reading into the references I have found a trove of good classic films to watch (although quite a few I've known before they appeared as a Tarantino remake such as Norifumi Suzuki's "Sex & Fury" which in my opinion is everything that Kill Bill wants to be and Jacopetti and Properi's "Goodbye Uncle Tom" because its far more controversial than Django Unchained could ever be).

@mirrorman Great find on Sex and Fury - some great stuff there. How do you find these films that I never heard of? (you too @maxr , you seem to find gems all the time, I'm curious how you find your films as well!).

I've been influenced a lot by Wong Kar Wai. I dig a lot its way to formalize a frame with strong grain, variable shutter speed and deep color grading / use of filter. It's kind of unconventional and in disrespect with what I hear around this forum (less noise, 180 shutter speed, skin tone).

My personal favorite would probably be Ashes of Time Redux. I've learned so much in that movie alone from acting, image to editing. It took me a couple of screening to understand how the grain was actually moving like it was flowing with the wind on screen. It was a great learning curve experience to watch his entire filmography.

I also do love Zhang Yimou's Hero. It made me think a lot about the use of Color.

Thank you for making me discover a lot of new name. I also have two names I follow frequently in this kind of "New Breath" of experimental Cinema: Alexandre Galmard and Isiah Medina.

This is a film called Amblin by none other than Spielberg. Out of curiosity, how many people here have heard of this film or actually seen it? If I'm not mistaken, if was Spielberg's very first film that he did while he was in film school and it was the film that got him noticed by Hollywood (but please correct me if I'm wrong).

I wanted to include this film here because it reinforces the point that I made earlier. You can probably learn a lot by watching any of Spielberg's films, but this one is special because it was his first film so you can get a sense of how he progressed as a filmmaker and also because it can be made with an iphone.

In fact, one of the comments below the video on Youtube echoes my sentiments perfectly:

Haters can hate but this helped Spielberg get his career started, this film is better than most short films I have seen and after seeing it I can honestly say Thanks Steven. I was scared to do anything with film because I grew up watching Jurassic Park, Jaws, Indiana Jones almost every Spielberg movie there is, and I kept telling myself I would never be as good as him. Watching this made me realize we are not all perfect and we all got to start somewhere. Thanks again Steven!

William Friedkin interviews Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, a Biography, Patrick McGilligan

“The propaganda minister (Goebbels) told the director (Lang) that the Fuhrer was one of his most avid fans. The Fuhrer had ‘loved’ Metropolis, which he had seen at a low point in his career, and of course Die Nibelungen, too whose majesty had apparently caused the Nazi leader to break down and weep. Lang quoted Goebbels quoting Hitler: ‘Here is a man who will give us great Nazi films.’ Hitler, in short, wanted Lang to serve as the head of a new agency supervising motion picture production in the Third Reich. He would become the Nazi’s Fuhrer of film” (McGilligan, 175).

( Lang, who was anti-Nazi fled to the U.S.)

At 6:10 you can see how Lang's staging influenced Triumph of Will. Busby Berkley geometric choreography was another influence!

==========

Lang in his Indiana Jones period:

full film w subs

https://archive.org/details/TheTigerOfEschnapur1959RoenSubbed

As a separate post I highly recommend people check out the last decade or so of Korean movies. Maybe they have not been ground breaking themselves but some of the best filmaking I have seen especially in terms of cinematography and intriguing storyline have been coming out of South Korea. Japanese used to but they have really gone downhill and much of Chinas output is huge government sponsored epics, not all but the majority.

PS There is more to Korean movies than Oldboy and The Host.