Going into the modern chapters of film history, we will observe a rapid development of special effects and editing technologies, along with a continued evolution of the blockbuster and the merchandising empires that come with it. At this point, stories and characters continue to grow, and racial and political issues begin to take centre stage, giving us a plethora of seminal moments to pick from for a more in-depth study.

To sum things up, however, the Eighties were not just about bad hair and trashy cult flicks, and the early Nineties represent a threshold into adulthood for modern cinema, with an increasing diversity in storytelling. From 1983 until 1993, the film industry continues with its steady course upwards, further claiming its strength as an essential source of entertainment and as a soft power.

1983: The Year of Satire and Cocaine

One of the most memorable films to come out of the Eighties was Martin Scorsese’s ‘The King of Comedy’ (1983), a dark satire that culminates with a truly epic moment between Martin Scorsese’s fame-hungry Rupert Pupkin and Jerry Lewis’s comic legend Jerry Langford, as the ardent desire for celebrity becomes a blatant invasion of privacy. This scene features Rupert uninvited in Jerry’s home and accompanied by Diahnne Abbott’s Rita, with an awkward conversation that escalates into something… extraordinary.

The modern sculptures it takes place around sort of lend it an air of Greek drama and grandiosity, with Jerry in his shorts and sneakers looking stoic and regal going against Rupert, with his little moustache and two-toned shoes—a jester prancing and foretelling a dawn of shamelessness as a personality cult soon to engulf the world. ‘I’m gonna be 50 times more famous than you!’ Rupert ends up yelling at Jerry, ultimately confusing talent with fame.

‘THE KING OF COMEDY’ (1983), ©TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

With ‘Scarface’ (1983), Brian De Palma offers a melodramatic, if not even opera-like extreme approach to the classic theme of the gangster. It centres on Tony Montana’s (Al Pacino) obsession with territorial control, mercilessly followed by the loss of this power. He’s a Cuban refugee who is intent on living his version of the American Dream by gaining absolute control over everyone and everything.

However, at the end of this extravagant rise and fall, shortly after snorting a literal mountain of cocaine, Tony Montana gives us an outrageously hyperbolic finale that ends in blood and bullets. It was considered vulgar and politically insensitive shortly after its release, yet it has withstood the test of time as a masterpiece of modern cinema that gives us the subversive thrill of watching a social microcosm explode.

‘SCARFACE’ (1983), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

1985: A Dystopian Dream

Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985) gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘dark comedy’. A burning science-fiction fantasy about a future gone many kinds of wrong, the film got off on a tremorous start when Universal Pictures, its American distributor, declared it a failure and refused to release it. Mr Gilliam, ever the stubborn and enterprising spirit, arranged press screenings anyway. Once the Los Angeles film critics declared it the best movie of the year, Universal relented.

In hindsight, it’s not difficult to understand why the studio had trouble seeing its potential. ‘Brazil’ steers clear of the regular commercial categories. The hero of this story, Sam, exquisitely portrayed by Jonathan Pryce, is a bureaucrat in a future society that might be considered totalitarian, if not for its endless stream of blunders and almost-cartoonish errors. He’s branded a terrorist, eventually, and goes through a series of harrowing experiences before he is saved—only to find out that his breathless escape was nothing more than a hallucination. Sam has surrendered unto the worst torture of all—the foolishness of hope.

‘BRAZIL’ (1985), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

1986: The Cinema of Strange

‘Blue Velvet’ (1986) is one of David Lynch’s best films, its ‘In Dreams’ scene best representing the director’s mastery of bizarre juxtaposition. Dean Stockwell’s Ben, hailed by Dennis Hopper’s Frank as ‘one suave f***er’, takes down a mobile mechanic’s light and uses it as a lounge singer’s microphone, lip-syncing to Roy Orbison’s classic ‘In Dreams’. It’s a signature of Lynch’s—taking easy listening melodies and presenting them in a manner that unmasks the fetishism, the obsession, and the dreamlike delirium that lingers behind their charming golden-oldie familiarity.

Ben is effeminate but lethal, his face covered in white kabuki makeup as he assaults Orbison’s song, projecting the entirety of his putrid soul into its soft, elusive, and twisted lyrics. The song is later replayed when Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey is savagely beaten by Frank’s goons.

‘BLUE VELVET’ (1986), ©DE LAURENTIIS ENTERTAINMENT GROUP (DEG)

It was also the year of John Woo. ‘A Better Tomorrow’ (1986) is the legendary director’s breakthrough film, in which he coins an elegant cinematic language that redesigns the Hong Kong gangster genre, propelling Chow Yun-Fat to international fame. In its most famous scene, Chow’s dashing gangster Mark lights his cigarette with a fake hundred-dollar bill before he enters a restaurant and delivers an almost musical performance in fighting the traitorous gangsters, his figure as feathery as Fred Astaire’s.

1987: Of Chinese Superstars and American Soldiers

Zhang Yimou’s first film, ‘Red Sorghum’ (1987) recorded an incredible international success and created one of the most well-regarded professional couplings in cinema altogether—for there are few as wonderful as Zhang Yimou and the arresting Gong Li. Of course, there was also a personal layer to this pair, as the two developed a long-lasting relationship despite Mr Zhang’s marriage, his wife refusing to grant him a divorce.

It was in ‘Red Sorghum’ that the world became familiar with 22-year-old Gong Li as the bride with a lustful smile in a crimson palanquin, forever transforming Chinese cinema. She was reunited with Zhang for two other great films, ‘Ju Dou’ (1990) and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ (1991), contributing to the director’s global fame and helping to usher in a new ‘star system à la chinoise’ that was easily exported to the West.

‘RED SORGHUM’ (1987), ©XI’AN FILM STUDIO

An iconic film of the Eighties—one that haunts its first viewers to this day, is Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987). It’s a powerful work of silver screen art, and this power is incredibly condensed into the closeup of the dying Vietcong woman. Kubrick has no military or wartime experience whatsoever, yet he delivers a gut-wrenching scene with the wounded sniper who begs for Matthew Modine’s Joker to finish her off. The hatred in her eyes is absolute, making this particular scene impossible to forget, especially once we see ‘Gomer Pile’ grinning insanely just before he shoots Sergeant Hartman.

‘FULL METAL JACKET’ (1987), ©STANLEY KUBRICK PRODUCTIONS

In Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ (1987), the showdown at the train station is a veritable work of art. It’s also a splendidly crafted update of a legendary silent-film sequence that ultimately demonstrates the perennial life force of pure visual storytelling. Ennio Morricone’s score gives it a final dash of authenticity. Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness and his partner, played by Andy Garcia, are determined to capture Al Capone’s bookkeeper. In David Mamet’s original screenplay, this was supposed to happen as the accountant’s train was pulling out of Chicago’s Union Station. Paramount stuttered at the cost of production, asking De Palma to shoot the whole scene inside.

Regarding himself as a visual stylist who cares not for where his plots come from, De Palma thus shows us why he’s one of cinema’s greatest borrowers by taking a cue from Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925) and refurbishing the ‘Odessa Steps’ scene for Eliot Ness through montage and alternating shots that inflate tension.

‘THE UNTOUCHABLES’ (1987), ©PARAMOUNT PICTURES

1988: The Rise of Anime and the Impact of Film on Real Life

Before Katsuhiro Otomo’s ‘Akira’ (1988), most Westerners considered Japanese animation to be cartoons like ‘Speed Racer’, kids’ stuff with technical shortcuts and annoying overdubs. But the Japanese director gifted his dystopian epic animation feature with a convoluted plot, plenty of graphic violence and hallucinatory visuals, a dollop of black humour, an incredible attention to detail and a minutely synched dialogue sprinkled with meditations on evolution, enlightenment, and mass destruction. In ‘Akira’, Tokyo exploded on 16^th June 1988, and the world was never the same again. ‘Akira’ was theatrically released on 16^th June 1988, and the real world was never the same again, either, as the Japanese animated feature paved the way for illustrious works such as Studio Ghibli’s ‘Spirited Away’ (2001) and ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995).

‘AKIRA’ (1988), ©AKIRA STUDIO/TMS ENTERTAINMENT

Meanwhile, in the United States, Errol Morris’s ‘The Thin Blue Line’ (1988), presented as a non-fiction film noir, was universally applauded as a masterpiece of unconventional documentary that ultimately got an innocent man out of prison. The filmmaker and private detective began his journey with ‘The Thin Blue Line’ by making inquiries about James Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist known as a star witness in major capital murder cases. After interviewing him and some of the felons he’d put on death row, Morris became fixated on Randall Adams, in particular, who resolutely swore he was innocent.

By combining talking-head interviews, re-enactments, photographic evidence, and Philip Glass’s hypnotic score, Morris created a visual poem of slowly surfacing evil that climaxes with David Harris, the teenager whose confession put Adams in prison in the first place, as he finally reveals the truth. Because of the evidence presented in this film, Randall Adams was released from jail in 1989.

RANDALL ADAMS IN ‘THE THIN BLUE LINE’ (1988), ©AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE

1989: Of Avid and Blockbusters

The last year of the Eighties was a fruitful one. In April, Avid introduced the film industry to digital nonlinear editing with its Avid/1 Media Composer system, which revolutionized the postproduction process by ‘providing editors with a faster, more intuitive, and more creative way to work than was possible with traditional analogue linear methods’. It didn’t just change the filmmakers’ view on the editing process, it also changed the way films looked. Digital editing confirms the status of image and sound as data, freeing them from their material support, as they’re no longer dependent on strips of film and tape. This was the true birth of digital cinema.

Though cynically conceived, Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ (1989) was an absolute smash, generating five sequels, a new animated series, an animated movie, and billions of dollars’ worth of branded merchandise. It made George Lucas’s success with ‘Star Wars’ seem almost quaint by comparison. In the end, ‘Batman’ perfected the blockbuster as a product, a concept that was still new to the suits in Hollywood at the time. What Lucas’s film was to the Seventies, Burton’s was to the Eighties—an iconic distillation of its era, further named ‘the film of the decade’ by Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine.

‘BATMAN’ (1989), ©WARNER BROS.

The one moment that everyone remembers from James Cameron’s ‘The Abyss’ (1989) is the water tentacle. This set piece, organic rather than mechanic, was as revolutionary as the first sound in the moving pictures. Within months from its premiere, other ambitious movies moved to development, including Cameron’s ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991) and Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993), and they were built entirely around CGI creations. Back then, when the scene was shot, no one knew if the effect would work, so these CGI-dependent sequences were written in a way that made it easy to cut them out if the computer programmers failed to deliver the proper effect. The tentacle of ‘The Abyss’ basically kickstarted computer-generated graphics in cinema.

‘THE ABYSS’ (1989), ©TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Spike Lee made history with ‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989), a defining moment for New Black Cinema. The director wrote, directed, and led the cast onscreen, conforming to the era’s do-it-yourself model of African American cinema—previously adopted by the likes of Oscar Micheaux in the Twenties and Melvin Van Peebles in the Seventies. But no other Black American filmmaker had ever won such a public platform as Spike Lee even before he released ‘Do the Right Thing’, a simmering drama about racial tensions in America, as experienced right then in those days in Brooklyn. The film further propelled him as a master of the silver screen. It also earned a couple of Oscar nods for Best Screenplay and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Danny Aiello).

‘DO THE RIGHT THING’ (1989), ©40 ACRES & A MULE FILMWORKS

1991: Driving Off a Cliff

The unexpected conclusion of Ridley Scott’s road drama ‘Thelma and Louise’ (1991) sparked a wave of consternation and controversy from viewers and critics alike. It was a conversation piece in the early Nineties, especially since its lead characters were women—there already were ample discussions about the representation of female characters in pop culture at the time, along with Hollywood’s blatant appropriation of feminist motifs.

In ‘Thelma and Louise’, two working class women from Arkansas hit the road after they confront and kill a brutal would-be rapist. Their decision to drive off the cliff at the end of their fiery journey annoyed academic and feminist commentators, too, though the film did earn an equal amount of praise for its screenplay and manner of dealing with hot button topics such as rape and spousal abuse from a woman’s perspective.

‘THELMA AND LOUISE’ (1991), ©PATHÉ ENTERTAINMENT

‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) by Jonathan Demme made for an equally compelling start to the decade. Hailing from Roger Corman’s B-movie generation, Demme was a natural with the chilling and sensationalist source material of Thomas Harris’s second Lecter novel after ‘Red Dragon’. Few, however, expected a film of such deliberate rigour, so neatly matched to Ted Tally’s screenplay, almost word by word. The first meeting between Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter is proof, as the young FBI recruit is ‘wide-eyed with terror yet stubbornly determined not to wilt in the heat of pure evil’, as David Stratton once wrote. This sinister sequence is complex and beautifully crafted, coming across as an example of Demme’s thinking-man’s-thriller style.

‘THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS’ (1991), ©STRONG HEART/DEMME PRODUCTION

1993: Postmodernist Cinema à la Kusturica

‘Arizona Dream’ (1993) wasn’t Emir Kusturica’s greatest film—my eternal favourite will forever be ‘Black Cat, White Cat’ (1998). But it is a superb example of cinematic postmodernism, with wonderful performances from Johnny Depp, Vincent Gallo, and Faye Dunaway. The sequence where Paul (Vincent Gallo) ‘performs’ Cary Grant’s crop-duster attack from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ (1959) is magnificent. Shot by shot, albeit with only four stalks of corn as props behind him, Paul does an exact reconstruction, leaving us to imagine each buzz of aircraft flying overhead.

‘ARIZONA DREAM’ (1993), ©CANAL+

This moment requires us to see two movies at once and overlapped, offering laughter as we notice the titanic differences between Paul’s performance against Cary Grant’s. That was the point of it, in the final analysis, to take advantage of this little pocket in time to feast on a slice of absurdity.

The first half of the 20^th century got off to a slow start in terms of cinema, but as the artistic medium and its technology evolved, so did storytelling for the silver screen. The golden era opened the doors for many writers, directors and actors, their names forever inscribed in the annals of movie history.

With the development of cinema came numerous milestones—from new camera movements and plot building methods to revolutionary dramatic performances and editing breakthroughs that virtually changed how we view films today. This decade further established the industry, paving the way for the billions of dollars of box office profits that followed and later turned California into one of the world’s largest economies. Of course, the changes occurred globally, with European, Russian and Asian directors making their mark. But as we take another stroll down memory lane, it’s hard not to notice that America’s contribution to the silver screen is fundamental and impossible to deny.

1928: The Genius of Comedy in the Great Depression

Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Circus’ is one of the crown jewels of cinema. Rich in both comic invention and tender sentiment, it’s a beautifully crafted masterpiece of comedy which centres on the familiar figure of the Tramp, who inadvertently becomes the star of a circus as a clown, only to have his heart broken by Merna Kennedy’s gorgeous equestrienne. The brief final scene crystallizes all that is wonderful about Chaplin—for it is not only entirely his creation, it is also only about him.

In that moment of solitude, he is no less ‘the funny man’ the circus audience clamoured for, nor less the touching man, the resilient man, the poetic man. As Charlie Chaplin the filmmaker perceives the Tramp, he is all of the above, an eternal figure. His genius is distilled in an ending that is at once simple and sublime.

‘THE CIRCUS’ (1928), ©CHARLES CHAPLIN PRODUCTIONS

1929: From Spain and Russia with Love

Luis Buñuel’s first movie, a collaboration with Salvador Dalí titled ‘Un Chien Andalou’, is still taught in film schools today. Its ‘slice of eye’ opening scene is one of the most provocative moments in cinema. It qualifies as gore, though there’s a clear lack of realism, since the victim doesn’t move back at the sight of the blade and the special effect is obvious. The image is disturbing and voluntarily shocking, but it’s also a metaphor of the director’s desire to show us what’s really inside human beings: urges, passions, and desires. The visual assault brilliantly expresses the theoretical angle of the Surrealist revolution while simultaneously applying it.

‘UN CHIEN ANDALOU’ (1929)

While the Spanish were fiddling with shock value, the Russians were nurturing their documentary making skills through Dziga Vertov. In ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, the scene where the city comes to life is now remembered as a seminal moment, part of the greatest work of experimental documentary in cinema. In it, a camera seems to raise an entire city from the dead. Nearly eight decades after it was made, this film is an important chapter in academic studies, as the ‘20s Soviet Union was basically the cinematic think tank of the world. Soviet films themselves might seem ideologically shrill, but the sheer artistic joy that they exude is ever present.

Away from the European continent, however, a key event worth noting happened in the United States. On 16^th May, 1929, the first awards ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences concluded with the presentation of two, not one, Best Picture Oscars. Briefly making a distinction between artistic achievement and middlebrow success, the Academy gave the ‘Best Picture, Production’ statuette to William Wellman for his spectacular WWI aviation epic ‘Wings’ (1928), and the ‘Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production’ to F.W. Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’ (1928).

‘SUNRISE’ (1927), ©FOX FILM CORPORATION

1930: Eisenstein Goes to Hollywood

After the worldwide success of ‘Battleship Potemkin’ in 1925, the Soviet government sent its star director on a tour of European capitals with the purpose of studying the new sound process. He only had $25 on him. While in Paris, Sergei Eisenstein signed a six-month contract with Paramount to develop and direct films in the movie capital. At the time, Paramount Pictures were Hollywood’s most sophisticated and continental studio, having already worked with Lubitsch, Sjöström, and Murnay—who’d already achieved artistic and financial success in the capitalist mecca.

Eisenstein had his fun while he worked in Hollywood, but he confounded expectations with his disdain for professional actors and his insistent focus on indicting capitalism, smack in the middle of ‘An American Tragedy’. A right-wing campaign then sought to deport Paramount’s ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, so the studio chose to put aside their yearning for artistic respectability. They drew a stiff line between commercial concerns and progressive art by cancelling Eisenstein’s contract. In that precise moment, profitability and formalist art forever parted ways in Hollywood.

SERGEI EISENSTEIN IN NEW YORK, 1930, ©SPUTNIK

1931: City Lights and Dracula

One of the most sublime and most definitive moments in cinema came with the last scene of ‘City Lights’. Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp is just out of prison and more down and out than ever when he meets Virginia Cherrill’s Girl—a witness to his discomfiture but also one who’s been laughing at him behind his back. When she asks: ‘You can see now?’, he says ‘Yes, I can see now.’ The film fades to black on a closeup of the Tramp looking at her, smiling but still torn between joy and a state of tension and uncertainty. It’s one of those rare scenes that doesn’t need words—so exquisite that merely remembering it is enough to bring tears through its profundity.

The vampire continued his own evolution through Tod Browning’s ‘Dracula’, starring Bela Lugosi. It is the first great talking horror film, giving us a memorable scene with Mr Lugosi’s Count as he makes a grand entrance at the top of a cobweb-draped staircase, immaculately clad in evening clothes and his black cape, saying: ‘I… am… Dracula.’ At the time, the Hungarian actor’s command of English was still shaky, so he had to learn his lines phonetically, adding to the curiousness of his cadences. Others have played the role and were required to put their own spin on the line—among them, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman, to name but a few, yet Lugosi is still the definitive Dracula.

‘DRACULA’ (1931), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

1932: Of Venus and Gangsters

Two films made history in 1932. The first, in my humble opinion, was ‘Blonde Venus’, directed by Josef von Sternberg and featuring the exquisite talents of Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. The ‘Hot Voodoo’ scene is especially worth remembering, as it not only marks one of the flashiest entrances of all times, it also signals the intention to subvert conventional morality—Ms Dietrich revealing herself from beneath a gorilla costume, the beauty within the beast, hirsute virility shed for teasing female eroticism.

Unfortunately, there were many racist elements in that era’s cinema; in ‘Blonde Venus’, we have the black-faced backup dancers to look past in order to see how Ms Dietrich’s character is pushed beyond the genre conventions, reinventing herself in every variety of womanhood available in Hollywood back then: devoted mother, cabaret star, drunken harlot.

‘BLONDE VENUS’ (1932), ©PARAMOUNT PICTURES

The art of screenwriting was taken to a superior level with Ben Hecht’s penning of ‘Scarface’, directed by Howard Hawks. He was a Chicago newspaperman, a novelist and a playwright, making his entrance onto the Hollywood stage at the end of the silent era. After writing Sternberg’s ‘Underworld’, the very first gangster picture, Hecht told Howard Hughes that he could double the body count of any previous gangster film and write one twice as good. For $11,000, he finished the script in 11 days and delivered what is arguably the best of the ‘30s machinegun mafioso cycle.

‘SCARFACE’ (1932), ©THE CADDO COMPANY

1933: Nazis, Marx Brothers, King Kong

Shortly after Hitler took office, Joseph Goebbels took over the newly founded Ministry of Propaganda in March of 1933. Fritz Lang’s ‘The Testament of Dr Mabuse’, which was scheduled for its theatrical release in that same month, was banned by the Ministry’s censorship office. Not long afterwards, Goebbels allegedly summoned Lang to his office, apologized for the banning, then told him that both he and Hitler were big fans of his films, inviting him to head a new agency supervising German film production. It isn’t yet clear if Mr Lang’s account of this meeting is entirely true, but we know that a few months later, he left Germany and the Nazi regime behind.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, silent comedies continued to live on in the talkies, best exemplified by the work of the Marx Brothers. ‘Duck Soup’ gave us yet another variation of the mirror gag, which had previously been used by Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Floorwalker’ (1917) and by Max Linder in ‘Seven Years Bad Luck’ (1921)—it also inspired future productions, such as Roman Polanski’s ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’ (1966).

‘KING KONG’ (1933), ©RKO RADIO PICTURES

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack presented one of the great and truly iconic pieces of cinema with ‘King Kong’, the tale of the giant gorilla that took on the big city and developed a soft spot for the delectable Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray. The greatest moment is, of course, when he stands atop the world’s tallest man-made structure with the same fierce pride and compelling dignity as at the top of his mountain on Skull Island.

1934: Frank Capra Becomes a Legend

Ten years after Harry Cohn founded Columbia Pictures, the studio had an unexpected smash with ‘It Happened One Night’. Frank Capra’s no-frills direction meshes perfectly with Robert Riskin’s rat-a-tat screenplay, giving us the now-famous scene from this original Hollywood romantic comedy: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert must share a rural motel room; he uses a blanket he dubs ‘the walls of Jericho’ to block their views from each other, and a delightful, ageless dialogue ensues. ‘It Happened One Night’ was one of the first films to win all top-five Oscars—production, director, actor, actress, and screenplay.

‘IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT’ (1934), ©COLUMBIA PICTURES

1935: Technicolor Vanity Fair

Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Becky Sharp’ is an impudent stripping down of Thackeray’s classic panorama of social climbing. It caused quite a few monocles to drop at the time. But despite the film’s witty nuances and Miriam Hopkins’ stellar performance, its core purpose was to display the new technology of three-strip Technicolor, which was finally perfected after twenty years of experimentation. The old processes only registered variations of red and green, while the new one used with ‘Becky Sharp’ offers brilliant, distinct shades of buttercup yellow, burnt orange, and Wedgwood blue, along with a more natural skin tone—a technological landmark in film history.

‘BECKY SHARP’ (1935) RESTORED THREE-STRIP TECHNICOLOR SHOT, ©PIONEER PICTURES CORPORATION/UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE

1936: The Foundation of the Cinémathèque Française

Most of us likely remember Ernest Lindgren from the United Kingdom, Jacques Ledoux from Belgium, Henri Langlois from France, and Iris Barry in the United States as founding fathers and mother, respectively, of film archives. They all shaped the art and science of collecting, preserving, and making available the moving image heritage for posterity at a time when cinema was merely seen as a minor form of art. But it was thanks to Henri Langlois’ efforts of establishing the Cinémathèque Française that turned the endeavour into a cultural phenomenon.

It is only his name that is associated today with the venerable institution, and that is mostly because of Mr Langlois’ knack of turning his passion into a ‘cause célèbre’. His agitprop genius helped propel the Nouvelle Vague movement, and his way of amassing and concealing film prints is pretty much the stuff legends are made of.

HENRI LANGLOIS, ©STEVE MUREZ

1938: Angels with Dirty Faces

To this day, Rocky’s death scene is still shocking—James Cagney’s screams sound so real. Nevertheless, what an incredible Hollywood-schmaltz moment!

Convicted for the murder of a double-crossing, no good rat played by Humphrey Bogart, Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan is visited by Father Jerry, his boyhood friend, the night before he’s due to die on the electric chair. Rocky promises to die the way he lived, spitting in the eye of authority and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him break.

‘ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES’ (1938), ©WARNER BROS.

His demise is perhaps one of the most chilling snippets ever projected onto the big screen. Realizing that the youngsters who adore him might end up just like him, Rocky puts on a cowardly act and starts screaming as he’s dragged off the next morning to his execution, as a last attempt at pushing others away from his path. It turns him into a genuine martyr, as he proves he is man enough to recognize his fragility and to do one last good thing in this world.