https://babuban.com/en Classic cinema, curated: a century of images, director lineages, and lists worth watching in order. en https://babuban.com/en/film/spring-in-a-small-town https://babuban.com/en/film/spring-in-a-small-town Sat, 18 Jul 2026 23:31:39 GMT Spring in a Small Town is a 1948 Chinese film directed by Fei Mu, written by Li Tianji and produced by the Wenhua Film Company, with Wei Wei, Li Wei and Shi Yu in the principal roles. It is set in a small town in the lower Yangtze region shortly after the end of the war with Japan. Dai Liyan is in poor health and estranged from his wife Zhou Yuwen; his former schoolmate Zhang Zhichen arrives for a visit and proves to be the man Yuwen had once expected to marry. The two, together with Liyan's younger sister Dai Xiu and an elderly servant, share the household for several days before Zhichen leaves. The film has five characters, uses long takes and slow camera movement, and keeps its conflicts unspoken; a recurring sequence shows Yuwen walking along the town's ruined wall. It opened during a period of political upheaval and was criticised in some quarters for avoiding social questions, after which it went largely unscreened for decades. It returned to circulation in the 1980s and has since ranked highly in polls of Chinese-language cinema. https://babuban.com/en/film/in-the-mood-for-love https://babuban.com/en/film/in-the-mood-for-love Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:31:39 GMT In the Mood for Love is a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. It is set in Hong Kong in 1962. Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen rent rooms in the same building and each come to realise that their spouses are involved with one another. In the course of their acquaintance they act out their spouses' roles in an attempt to reconstruct how the affair began. Chow later takes work in Singapore and the two do not resume contact. The spouses' affair is never shown and neither spouse is seen face-on at any point in the film. The score returns repeatedly to a theme Shigeru Umebayashi had written for Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji. Maggie Cheung's cheongsam wardrobe was designed by William Chang. Tony Leung received the award for Best Actor at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival for his performance. https://babuban.com/en/film/a-brighter-summer-day https://babuban.com/en/film/a-brighter-summer-day Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:31:39 GMT A Brighter Summer Day is a 1991 Taiwanese film directed by Edward Yang, with Chang Chen as Xiao Si'r, a secondary-school student, Lisa Yang as Ming, and Chang Kuo-chu as his father. It draws on a killing carried out by a teenager in Taipei in 1961. Xiao Si'r attends night classes and moves between two gangs while becoming involved with Ming; during the same period his father is taken in for political questioning and returns to reduced circumstances. The film carries a large cast and follows several threads at once: mainlander families, the school, the gangs, and the security apparatus. Much of it was shot at night with a torch or a single lamp as the only light source. It runs about two hundred and thirty-seven minutes, longer than the version originally released. It received the Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film. https://babuban.com/en/film/the-goddess https://babuban.com/en/film/the-goddess Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:31:39 GMT The Goddess is a 1934 Chinese silent film written and directed by Wu Yonggang and produced by the Lianhua Film Company, starring Ruan Lingyu. It was Wu's first film as director. An unnamed woman raises her young son by day and works as a prostitute at night; her earnings are taken by a gangster who attaches himself to her. She hides savings in a gap in a brick wall to pay for the boy's schooling, loses them when the hiding place is discovered, and is imprisoned after attacking the man. The camera is generally placed level with its subject, the gangster is not staged for moral condemnation, and the film uses fewer intertitles than was usual at the time. Ruan Lingyu died the year after its release, aged twenty-four. Surviving prints have been restored and screened publicly on a number of occasions, and the film is commonly listed among the principal works of Chinese silent cinema. https://babuban.com/en/film/street-angel https://babuban.com/en/film/street-angel Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:31:39 GMT Street Angel is a 1937 Chinese film written and directed by Yuan Muzhi, produced by the Mingxing Film Company, with Zhou Xuan as the singer Xiao Hong, Zhao Dan as Chen Shaoping, a trumpeter, and Zhao Huishen as her sister Xiao Yun. The sisters have fled south from the northeast and been taken in by a couple who force them to sing in a teahouse and to receive men. Xiao Hong becomes friendly with Chen, who lives across the lane, and the neighbours try to help her get away; Xiao Yun is killed in the ensuing struggle. The film sets comic scenes directly against the conditions of the people in them, and stages much of the action between facing windows. Zhou Xuan performs two songs written by He Luting and Tian Han. It was made a few months before the Japanese invasion closed the Shanghai studios. https://babuban.com/en/film/the-spring-river-flows-east https://babuban.com/en/film/the-spring-river-flows-east Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:31:39 GMT The Spring River Flows East is a 1947 Chinese film written and directed by Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, with Bai Yang as Sufen, Tao Jin as Zhang Zhongliang, and Shu Xiuwen as Wang Lizhen. It is in two parts and covers the years from 1931 to just after the war. Zhang leaves Shanghai for the interior, attaches himself to influential people in Chongqing and starts a second household there, while Sufen remains in the occupied city raising their son and supporting his mother by factory work and relief handouts. The two meet again at a reception after the war, and Sufen drowns herself. It opened in Shanghai in 1947 and ran for about three months. The complete film is roughly a hundred and ninety minutes. https://babuban.com/en/film/a-time-to-live-a-time-to-die https://babuban.com/en/film/a-time-to-live-a-time-to-die Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:31:39 GMT A Time to Live, a Time to Die is a 1985 Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, produced by Central Pictures, with You An-shun as the teenage Ah-ha, Tang Ru-yun as his grandmother and Mei Fang as his mother. It draws on Hou's own upbringing and follows a family that moved from Guangdong to Taiwan in the late 1940s and settled in Fengshan, across more than a decade: the father dies of illness, the mother later falls ill and dies, the grandmother continues to believe she can walk back to the mainland, and Ah-ha passes from childhood into adolescence. The camera is mostly fixed and distant, significant events frequently occur deep in the frame or outside it, and there is very little score. The film received the Golden Horse Award for Best Original Screenplay and the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin. https://babuban.com/en/film/a-touch-of-zen https://babuban.com/en/film/a-touch-of-zen Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:31:39 GMT A Touch of Zen is a 1971 Taiwanese and Hong Kong co-production written and directed by King Hu, produced by Union Film, with Hsu Feng as Yang Hui-zhen, Shih Chun as the scholar Gu Sheng-zhai, and Roy Chiao as the monk Hui Yuan. It is set in the Ming dynasty. Yang, the daughter of an official destroyed by the Eastern Depot, is in hiding at the derelict garrison where Gu lives, and the Depot's agents track her there. The first half turns on the ambush and the manoeuvring inside the garrison, and the second moves out to open country and a mountain temple, bringing in the monks. A fight in a bamboo grove is built from short takes and leaping movement, a treatment widely reused since. The film runs about three hours and was originally released in two parts. It received the Grand Prize of the Technical Commission at Cannes in 1975. https://babuban.com/en/film/vertigo https://babuban.com/en/film/vertigo Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:31:39 GMT Vertigo is a 1958 American film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, produced by Paramount, with James Stewart as Scottie, a detective who has left the force because of his fear of heights, and Kim Novak as both Madeleine and Judy. An old acquaintance hires Scottie to follow his wife Madeleine; the two become attached, and she falls to her death from a bell tower that Scottie cannot climb. He later encounters Judy, who resembles her, and sets about changing her hair, clothing and makeup. The film was shot on location in San Francisco. The tower scenes use a simultaneous track and zoom to produce the sensation of vertigo, a shot since named after the film. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and the screenplay is adapted from a novel by Boileau and Narcejac. https://babuban.com/en/film/ran https://babuban.com/en/film/ran Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:31:39 GMT Ran is a 1985 Japanese and French co-production directed by Akira Kurosawa, with Tatsuya Nakadai as the ageing warlord Hidetora Ichimonji and Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede. It takes the structure of Shakespeare's King Lear and moves it into the warring-states period: Hidetora divides his domain among three sons, is betrayed by the elder two, and loses his reason on scorched ground. The three armies are dressed in yellow, red and blue, and colour is used to hold the factions and their movements apart. The sequence in which the Third Castle falls and burns drops the location sound entirely and carries only Toru Takemitsu's score. Kurosawa spent about ten years preparing the film and painted several hundred storyboards in colour. It received the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. https://babuban.com/en/film/2001-a-space-odyssey https://babuban.com/en/film/2001-a-space-odyssey Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:31:39 GMT 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 American and British co-production directed by Stanley Kubrick, produced by MGM, with Keir Dullea as Bowman and Douglas Rain as the voice of the computer HAL 9000. Kubrick wrote the screenplay with the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who produced a novel of the same title alongside it. The film is in four parts: a group of hominids encounters a black monolith; another is excavated on the Moon; aboard a ship bound for Jupiter, HAL 9000 comes into conflict with the two conscious crew members; and Bowman passes through a sequence of abstract imagery into a room furnished in a classical style. There is very little dialogue, and existing classical recordings are used in place of a conventional score. The effects were built with models and front projection. It received the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. https://babuban.com/en/film/la-dolce-vita https://babuban.com/en/film/la-dolce-vita Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:31:39 GMT La Dolce Vita is a 1960 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimée. It opens with a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ over Rome, then follows Marcello, a gossip journalist, through seven days and nights of parties, film sets and encounters in the street. The episodes are not causally linked and there is no continuous plot; the film runs close to three hours. The sequence in the Trevi Fountain and the closing shot of a large fish-like creature on a beach are the most widely reproduced images from it. The name of the film's press photographer, Paparazzo, passed into general use in several languages as a term for photographers who pursue celebrities. It received the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Costume Design in black and white. https://babuban.com/en/film/an-autumn-afternoon https://babuban.com/en/film/an-autumn-afternoon Sat, 18 Jul 2026 11:31:39 GMT An Autumn Afternoon is a 1962 Japanese film directed by Yasujirō Ozu, produced by Shochiku, with Chishū Ryū as Shūhei Hirayama and Shima Iwashita as his daughter Michiko. Hirayama, long a widower, is urged by old friends to arrange his daughter's marriage, and returns to an empty house once the wedding is over. It was Ozu's last film and one of the few he made in colour, which he used compositionally rather than for realism: a red kettle or a blue shop sign serves as a fixed point in the frame. The low camera and the shots of empty space between scenes are unchanged. It closes with Hirayama humming an old song alone at home. Ozu died on 12 December the following year, his sixtieth birthday. https://babuban.com/en/film/red-desert https://babuban.com/en/film/red-desert Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:31:39 GMT Red Desert is a 1964 Italian and French co-production directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, with Monica Vitti as Giuliana and Richard Harris as Corrado, an engineer. It is set among the petrochemical works at Ravenna. Giuliana has been in an unsettled state since a car accident; her husband holds a post at one of the plants, and she and the visiting Corrado see each other briefly. It was Antonioni's first film in colour, and much of it was achieved by painting the locations themselves: grass sprayed grey, a market stall whitened, factory pipework rendered in yellow, matched to the character's condition rather than to how the place looked. There is little dramatic incident, and the film relies on distant views of the works, the fog and the mudflats. It received the Golden Lion at Venice. https://babuban.com/en/film/cries-and-whispers https://babuban.com/en/film/cries-and-whispers Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:31:39 GMT Cries and Whispers is a 1972 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman, with Harriet Andersson as Agnes, who is dying, and Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann as her sisters. It is set in a manor house at the end of the nineteenth century, where the two sisters have come to sit with Agnes and remain at a distance from her and from each other; the most direct care she receives comes from Anna, the servant. Red dominates the production design, in the walls and the drapes, and the scenes are separated from one another by transitions through a full red frame. Sven Nykvist photographed it, working largely in close-up and by candlelight. The film was nominated for Best Picture, unusually for a foreign-language production, and received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. https://babuban.com/en/film/the-mirror https://babuban.com/en/film/the-mirror Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:31:39 GMT The Mirror is a 1975 Soviet film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, produced by Mosfilm, with Margarita Terekhova playing both the narrator's mother and his wife and Ignat Daniltsev playing both his son and himself as a boy. There is no continuous plot: the film alternates between childhood recollection, wartime episodes, dreams and documentary footage, and does not mark the chronology. The material is drawn from the director's own family history, and the poems heard on the soundtrack are by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky, read aloud by the poet himself. Colour, black-and-white and desaturated passages alternate throughout, and the documentary inserts include Soviet newsreel of the Spanish Civil War and of a stratospheric balloon ascent. It runs about a hundred and seven minutes, and its distribution within the Soviet Union was restricted after release. https://babuban.com/en/film/a-man-escaped https://babuban.com/en/film/a-man-escaped Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:31:39 GMT A Man Escaped is a 1956 French film directed by Robert Bresson, with François Leterrier as Fontaine. It is based on the memoir of André Devigny, a member of the Resistance held at Montluc prison in Lyon in 1943. Awaiting execution, Fontaine grinds a spoon into a tool to work the panels of his cell door apart, plaits rope from bedding and wire, and communicates with the neighbouring cells by tapping on walls and speaking low in the exercise yard. On the eve of the attempt a young prisoner is moved in with him, and there is no way to establish whether he can be trusted. The film is built from close shots of hands and objects, carries no score, and takes its sound mostly from footsteps, keys and a distant train. The title states the outcome in advance. https://babuban.com/en/film/rome-open-city https://babuban.com/en/film/rome-open-city Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:31:39 GMT Rome, Open City is a 1945 Italian film directed by Roberto Rossellini, with Anna Magnani as Pina and Aldo Fabrizi as the priest Don Pietro; Federico Fellini was among the writers of the screenplay. It is set in Rome under German occupation: a Resistance organiser, Manfredi, hides in the building where Pina lives, Don Pietro carries messages on his behalf, and all three are pursued by the Gestapo. Shooting began not long after the German withdrawal, using film stock bought in whatever quantities could be found, and much of it was done in actual streets and apartments, with poorly lit interiors used as they were rather than relit. The sound was recorded afterwards and dubbed. The film shared the Grand Prix at Cannes. https://babuban.com/en/film/harakiri https://babuban.com/en/film/harakiri Sat, 18 Jul 2026 05:31:39 GMT Harakiri is a 1962 Japanese film directed by Masaki Kobayashi, produced by Shochiku, with Tatsuya Nakadai as the ronin Hanshirō Tsugumo and Rentarō Mikuni as the senior retainer Kageyu Saitō. It is set in the early Edo period, when the abolition of many domains had left large numbers of samurai without stipends. Tsugumo arrives at the Iyi house and asks to commit seppuku in its courtyard. Saitō, taking him for another ronin angling for money, recounts what befell an earlier petitioner, Motome Chijiiwa, who was found to have no intention of dying and was compelled to disembowel himself with a bamboo blade. Tsugumo then explains his own connection to him. The film is composed in symmetrical framings from fixed positions within the courtyard, and reserves its only action sequence for the end. It received the Jury Prize at Cannes. https://babuban.com/en/film/floating-clouds https://babuban.com/en/film/floating-clouds Sat, 18 Jul 2026 04:31:39 GMT Floating Clouds is a 1955 Japanese film directed by Mikio Naruse, produced by Toho, with Hideko Takamine as Yukiko Koda and Masayuki Mori as Kengo Tomioka, adapted from the novel by Fumiko Hayashi. The two meet during the war at a forestry station in French Indochina, where Tomioka is already married. After the defeat Yukiko seeks him out in Tokyo, and over the following years they separate and reunite repeatedly: borrowing money, quarrelling, taking up with other people. They travel together to Yakushima, where Yukiko falls ill and dies. The film is set largely in the lodging houses and depleted streets of the postwar city, and offers no reversal; the characters' circumstances decline steadily from scene to scene. It was placed first in Kinema Junpo's annual critics' poll. https://babuban.com/en/film/playtime https://babuban.com/en/film/playtime Sat, 18 Jul 2026 03:31:39 GMT Playtime is a 1967 French and Italian co-production directed by Jacques Tati, who also plays Monsieur Hulot. There is no continuous plot: a group of American tourists arrives in Paris, Hulot fails to keep an appointment at an office building, and the various characters pass through a trade exhibition, an apartment block, and a restaurant on its opening night. Tati had a set built outside Paris comprising glass-fronted buildings and streets, known as Tativille, at very high cost. The film was shot in 70mm and works largely in long shot and deep focus, with several actions running simultaneously within a single frame and dialogue that is fragmentary and often not meant to be followed. It failed commercially, Tati was made bankrupt, and the set was demolished. https://babuban.com/en/film/the-red-shoes https://babuban.com/en/film/the-red-shoes Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:31:39 GMT The Red Shoes is a 1948 British film written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Moira Shearer as the dancer Victoria Page, Anton Walbrook as the impresario Lermontov, and Marius Goring as the composer Julian Craster. It draws on Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the same name. Page joins Lermontov's company and dances the lead in a new ballet built on that story, then marries Craster, and Lermontov requires her to choose between the marriage and the company. The ballet sequence at the centre runs about seventeen minutes, with sets that change during the dance and effects including superimposition and stop-motion. Jack Cardiff photographed it in Technicolor. The film received Academy Awards for Art Direction and for its score. https://babuban.com/en/film/lawrence-of-arabia https://babuban.com/en/film/lawrence-of-arabia Sat, 18 Jul 2026 01:31:39 GMT Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 British and American co-production directed by David Lean, with Peter O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence, Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali and Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal. It draws on Lawrence's service during the First World War and on his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom: attached to the Arab Revolt as a British liaison officer, he helps bring rival tribes together to take Aqaba across the Nefud desert, and later sees the outcome of the revolt divided between Britain and France at Damascus. It was shot in 70mm on location in Jordan, Morocco and Spain, runs about two hundred and sixteen minutes, and was released with an intermission. It received seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. https://babuban.com/en/film/apocalypse-now https://babuban.com/en/film/apocalypse-now Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:31:39 GMT Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, produced by American Zoetrope, with Martin Sheen as Captain Willard, Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz and Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore. The screenplay takes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as its basis and relocates it to the Vietnam War: Willard is ordered upriver into Cambodia to find and kill Kurtz, an officer who has left the chain of command and established a base of his own. Shooting took place in the Philippines over roughly sixteen months, during which a typhoon destroyed sets, Sheen suffered a heart attack, and Coppola guaranteed the overruns against his own property. Three versions of differing length exist. The film received the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Academy Awards for cinematography and sound. https://babuban.com/en/film/otto-e-mezzo https://babuban.com/en/film/otto-e-mezzo Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:52:04 GMT 8½ is a 1963 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini, with Marcello Mastroianni as Guido, a film director. Guido has a production scheduled and cannot settle on what to make; the film alternates between his dealings with his producer, his wife and his mistress, his childhood recollections, and sequences that are explicitly dreamed, closing on a dance in a circus ring. Fellini had a start date and a budget in place before he had a subject, and wrote that situation into the screenplay. Dream, memory and present action change places within single shots without transitional cues, a treatment that was uncommon at the time and was widely adopted afterwards. The title comes from Fellini's own count of the films he had directed to that point, in which co-directed work and omnibus episodes are counted as fractions rather than whole films. At the 36th Academy Awards the film received the awards for Best Foreign Language Film and for Best Costume Design in black and white. https://babuban.com/en/film/la-strada https://babuban.com/en/film/la-strada Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:52:04 GMT La strada is a 1954 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini, starring Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn. Gelsomina, a young woman from a poor family, is sold by her mother to Zampanò, an itinerant strongman, and travels with him performing at fairs and in village squares while he treats her harshly. Years after the two part, Zampanò learns that she has died and breaks down on a beach. The film retains the location shooting and street casting of neorealism, but moves its weight from social circumstance to the relationship between two people, and Fellini's later work proceeds from that shift. Masina built the performance largely out of mime and clowning, with little reliance on dialogue. It received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 29th ceremony, the first at which the category was competitive rather than honorary. https://babuban.com/en/film/le-notti-di-cabiria https://babuban.com/en/film/le-notti-di-cabiria Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:52:04 GMT Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini, starring Giulietta Masina. Cabiria works the streets of Rome and is repeatedly deceived and robbed by the men she attaches herself to, and each time resolves to trust the next one. In the closing sequence she is swindled out of her savings by the man she has agreed to marry, and walks alone along a road until she meets a group of young people singing and dancing, at which point she looks up into the camera and smiles. The film is assembled from loosely connected episodes rather than a continuous plot. Pier Paolo Pasolini worked on the dialogue, chiefly the passages in Roman dialect. Masina received the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. https://babuban.com/en/film/the-seventh-seal https://babuban.com/en/film/the-seventh-seal Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:52:04 GMT The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman, with Max von Sydow as the knight Antonius Block and Bengt Ekerot as Death. Returning from the Crusades to a country in the grip of plague, Block plays a game of chess against Death on a beach, using the delay to press for an answer about whether God exists. Gunnar Björnstrand plays his squire Jöns, who travels with him and argues the sceptical case throughout. On the road they encounter a married pair of travelling performers, a procession of flagellants, and a girl condemned to burn as a witch. The film closes with Death leading a line of figures away along a ridge, an image quoted repeatedly since. Bergman had written the same material earlier as a one-act play, Wood Painting. https://babuban.com/en/film/wild-strawberries https://babuban.com/en/film/wild-strawberries Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:52:04 GMT Wild Strawberries is a 1957 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Victor Sjöström, a leading director of the silent period, plays Isak Borg, an elderly medical professor; Bibi Andersson plays Sara. The film covers a single day, as Borg drives to Lund to receive an honorary degree and what he passes on the way draws out dreams and recollections: the childhood summers spent at a wild strawberry patch, the fiancée who married his brother, and a long career conducted at a distance from the people in it. Dream and present action are cut directly against one another without signalling, a treatment that was uncommon at the time. It closes on a dream of his parents waving to him from across the water. The film received the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. https://babuban.com/en/film/persona https://babuban.com/en/film/persona Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:52:04 GMT Persona is a 1966 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman. Liv Ullmann plays Elisabet Vogler, a stage actress who abruptly stops speaking, and Bibi Andersson plays Alma, the nurse assigned to her. The two are sent to a house by the sea, where Alma talks continuously and Elisabet does not answer, and the boundary between them gradually dissolves. The film opens with a montage unconnected to the story, and partway through the film stock appears to burn and the image breaks, placing the act of projection in front of the audience. One shot joins half of each actress's face into a single composite, and has been quoted widely since. It runs a little over eighty minutes and has four significant characters.