Pantheon is a monthly series showcasing a selection of the “greatest movies of all time”, inspired by the mother of all film lists, the critics’ poll that has run once a decade in the UK’s Sight & Sound magazine since 1952. (The results of the 2022 poll were announced in December, 2022.)
Of course there can be no definitive ten (or 12, or 100) best list. But the poll does serve as a ready-made canon, and at the very least it’s a starting point for anyone curious about exploring the art of cinema (and arguing about it afterwards).
Pantheon screenings will take place on the third Sunday of each month at 11am*, and will comprise an introductory lecture from a roster of respected film educators, reading notes, and a discussion after the show. (There will also be a repeat screening on Tuesday evenings, without the talk.) Complimentary tea and coffee will be provided.
The focus of our series will naturally fall on the merits and qualities of the films under review, but also on wider cultural considerations on the subjectivities of taste, changing notions of excellence, diversity, representation, and what curatorship looks like at this moment in time.
Individual Tickets $18
*Please note that in 2024, there will be no Pantheon screenings in July & August
Presented by
Guest Speakers
Films
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
In December 2022, Chantal Akerman's 1975 masterpiece was voted the Greatest Film of All Time by 1600+ critics, academics and curators in Sight & Sound's prestigious once-a-decade poll. It's a rigorous feminist work and a stunning temporal experience.
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Vertigo
Runner up in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time (and #1 in 2012) this is Hitchcock's most personal and revealing film, a movie about male neurosis, fetishism and power, with James Stewart and Kim Novak.
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Beau Travail
Inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claire Denis' transfixing Beau Travail is set in East Africa. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin).
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Singin' in the Rain
The greatest movie musical ever made, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's sublime Hollywood on Hollywood satire is dynamic, romantic, and very funny, with some of the most memorable dance numbers ever shot - including, of course, the legendary title number.
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Man with a Movie Camera
Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.
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Tokyo Story
Ozu's most celebrated film follows an aging couple as they come to the city and make the rounds of their now grown children. Busy with their own lives, the children have little time for their parents, who are quickly packed off to hot springs in Osaka.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
Based on Arthur C Clarke's short story The Sentinel, 2001 redefined the sci-fi genre. With its radical structure, scant dialogue and oblique narrative this was the first film to emulate the philosophical seriousness of writers like Clarke and Dick.
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Mulholland Dr.
Brunette Rita (Laura Elena Harring) wanders Mulholland Drive, dazed and confused after an auto accident. She finds refuge with Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring blonde actress who has arrived from Deep River, Ontario, with her innocence intact.
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In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses.
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Citizen Kane
Orson Welles's debut was the most sophisticated movie to come out of the Hollywood studio system to that time, and opened up the creative possibilities of the narrative feature film for generations. For nearly 50 years it was "the best ever made".
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Ran
Tackling King Lear in his seventies with the same gusto he brought to Macbeth 25 years earlier, Akira Kurosawa has a great warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai) blindly plunging the country into civil war when he divides his kingdom between his three sons.
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Persona
Liv Ullmann plays a famous actress, Elisabeth. Withdrawing from the world by refusing to speak, Elisabeth is placed under the care of a chatty nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) in a remote seaside cottage. Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece.
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Cléo from 5 to 7
Agnes Varda's second feature, Cléo from 5 to 7, is a marvelously charming real-time portrait of a young singer, Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) one evening in Paris as she nervously awaits the results from a biopsy.
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A Matter of Life and Death
In this splendid WWII fantasy, RAF pilot Peter (David Niven) cheats death when his plane is downed over the Channel. Washing up on an English beach, he must plead his case for a life extension in the highest court of them all...
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Daisies + Meshes of the Afternoon
This program highlights two landmarks in feminist film: Maya Deren's surrealist short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and Vera Chytilova's subversive new wave farce, Daisies (1966), perhaps the most radical, confrontational film of the era.
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Sunrise
The consummate director of the silent era, Murnau was schooled in German Expressionism and embraced the fluidity and dynamism of the moving camera. Invited to Hollywood he prefigured film noir with this tale of a married villager seduced by a city vamp.
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Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray's first film opened eyes in the West. It's a naturalistic portrait of the childhood of a Brahman child, Apu, growing up in a village far from twentieth century technology in West Bengal.
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The Night of the Hunter
One of the strangest and most beguiling movies you'll ever see, from a poetic, nightmarish novel by Davis Grubb, a fable about two children fleeing from a psychotic evangelical preacher (Robert Mitchum). Charles Laughton's only film as director.
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The Battle of Algiers
French Colonel Mathieu hunts for Algerian resistance leader Ali la Pointe in Pontecorvo's classic, which draws the battle lines between colonialists and Arab insurrectionists in a pulsating, "fly-on-the-wall" documentary style.
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