ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT THE STATION (L’ARRIVÉE D’UN TRAIN À LA CIOTAT)

(Louis Lumière, 1895, b/w, DVD amazon.fr, with English commentary)
This artfully composed, fixed one-minute shot of a train drawing into a station at La Ciotat is generally accepted as the first motion picture exhibited to the public (the Lumière brothers had shown some previous experiments to scientists). Legend has it the audience reacted with terror, fleeing from the locomotive as it appeared to bear down on them. “The cinematograph is an invention without a future,” Louis Lumière declared, “but at least it has a past.”

NAPOLÉON

(Abel Gance, 1927, b/w, DVD region 4 only in incomplete form)
A formidable, innovative epic in keeping with the ambitions of its subject. Gance (who also appears as Louis Saint-Just) made one of the most dynamic, kinetic films of the silent era, even if he only managed to get Bonaparte to the brink of the Italian campaign in a running time that originally stretched over six hours. The finale, in triptych “polyvision”, anticipated Cinema-Rama but remains peerless. See it “live”, with an orchestra, for the full impact.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC)

(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927, b/w, DVD region 1)
Another French icon, and another silent masterpiece, this one from the great Danish director Carl Dreyer. Joan had been canonised only seven years earlier. In contrast to Gance’s Napoléon, Dreyer focuses entirely on the last stage in the life of the maid of Orléans: her trial and execution. And he does so almost entirely in close-ups, a technique of rare and revealing intensity. “I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life,” Dreyer said. “And in [Maria] Falconetti I found what I might allow myself to call ‘the martyr’s reincarnation.’ ”

AN ANDALUSIAN DOG (UN CHIEN ANDALOU)

(Luis Buñuel, 1928, b/w, DVD)
The title means nothing, and locating meaning in the film is a mostly fruitless challenge. But that’s the point. Concocted by the young Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, it’s a surrealist provocation, a succession of bizarre, sometimes grotesque images following nothing more tangible than dream logic. This most notorious of short films kicks off with a razor slicing an eyeball — an image that is still as unwatchable today as it must have been eight decades ago. Buñuel is the man wielding the blade. He went on to elaborate in the even more explicitly subversive L’Age d’Or (1930).

THE SORROW AND THE PITY (LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIÉ)

(Marcel Ophüls, 1969, b/w, DVD)
German by birth, French by inclination, Hans Marcel Ophüls (son of Max) made the definitive documentary about France under the Occupation. Homing in on the town of Clermont-Ferrand, not far from Vichy, Ophüls interviewed British and French statesmen, German soldiers, and local people from all walks of life. What he found belied the myth of universal resistance; the truth is messier, more shameful and more human. More than just a historical milestone, this is an enriching film in its own right.

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN)

(Jean Eustache, 1973, b/w, VHS only)
Jean-Pierre Léaud is Alexandre, a compulsive womaniser and movie mad intellectual who lives with one woman (Bernadette Lafont), proposes to another (Isabelle Weingarten), and rebuffed, talks a third (Françoise Lebrun) into a wretched ménage-à-trois. Shot in Eustache’s own apartment in long, documentary-style takes, this four hour psycho-sexual marathon feels raw and unmediated. In fact every word was scripted. A harrowing dissection of sexual relations and the spiritual and political vacuum which surrounds them, The Mother and the Whore feels like a gravestone for the new wave. The revolution ends here. Eustache committed suicide in 1981.

DIVA

(Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981, DVD)
A series of Hitchcockian set-pieces intricately interlaced with Godardian post-modern jokes, ’80s designer chic (bare warehouse apartments, Athena posters), zen, opera, and iconic Paris landmarks — Diva comes on like an extended trailer for coming attractions; a lavish pastiche entirely sufficient to itself, and nothing if not modish. It inaugurated what the critic Serge Daney famously dubbed “le cinéma du look” — a lovingly art-directed, style-overscript aesthetic of which Beineix and Luc Besson were the prime movers.

TO OUR LOVES (À NOS AMOURS)

(Maurice Pialat, 1983, DVD amazon.fr, no English subtitles)
Pialat’s crucial influence on contemporary French cinema — on Cyril Collard, Catherine Breillat, Xavier Beauvois and a whole slew of actors from Depardieu on down — has not been properly understood in Britain, where different models of social realism apply. Even his admirers admit that Pialat wasn’t much of a storyteller. His raw, ragged dramas are all about capturing (or liberating) emotion. To Our Loves is a devastating film about different kinds of love, with a revelatory performance from the 17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire at its core.

HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA

(Jean-Luc Godard, 1998, CD only, or DVD amazon.co.jp)
Twenty years in conception, Godard’s eight-part, five-hour video essay is a magical mystery tour through the medium of cinema conducted by J-L. G himself. Densely allusive, with overlapping text and imagery battling for our attention, it is also an autobiographical memoir, and an epitaph for cinema from one of its most ardent believers. Critics have likened it to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, both in its scope and form, and its importance.