Samuel Fuller
1957

"Can I touch it?" (She means his gun.)
"Careful, it might go off in your face."
Wait, so you mean guns are phallic?

It's a Western. Featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a cattle baronness who runs the county and is a "high ridin' lady with a whip."
The opening is just wide open prairie, in silence, then this great sequence where Jessica Drummond leads her forty gunmen past the heroes' little carriage. Then the music kicks in. AWESOME.

I've seen four of his movies; officially my new favourite director.

Jean Vigo
1931

You can tell he's trying to shoehorn bits of experimentation into a film about something he didn't actually care about. Which is cool.
I think it's kind of a predecessor for the diving sequence in Olympia.

Jean Vigo
1930

Pretty cool. Showing the grotesquery of the extremely wealthy is always okay by me.

Joris Ivens
1929

It's a cine-poem!
It was lovely, it probably would have been better if an actual good print was available to us.
Bah.

Walter Ruttman
1927

It's a "city symphony" film. There's a lot here, in terms of technique and prettiness and such.
The moving shots made me dizzy.

Sherman Alexie
2002

It's about a gay Native American poet and issues surrounding his leaving the reservation.
I think it was pretty brilliant.
Also, I almost cried, which I almost never do at movies anymore.
The story jumps around in time, there are lots of scenes that are clearly subjective, and intertitles, and scenes where characters directly address the camera, etc. You get the sense of a fairly loose structure, and he apparently allowed his actors and crew a lot of leeway, but there's still a clear sense of purpose.

Sergei Eisentstein
1925

"See? If you show the workers with kittens, people will sympathize. This whole cinema thing is easy."
The scene where he intercuts the close-ups of cows being slaughtered with the longer shots of the crowd being gunned down is stunning though.

Josef von Sternberg
1930

This is pretty stunning, visually. Doubly so since early sound film is so often stagey and horrible because of the technology issues. (They had to have cameras in, like, booths to mask the sound. It took awhile to make cameras quiet enough that they could get back to the point where they could shoot with a totally mobile camera.) I think it works because von Sternberg is such a mise-en-scène director. It probably would have worked better if it hadn't been such a shitty 16mm print.
That said, I've been really getting interested in melodrama lately. I used to just find it annoying, but I'm beginning to think that it has a lot more possibilities than I thought.
The prof who introduced this called it a "decadent film."

John Ford
1946

Now I see what all the fuss is about John Ford.
Probably the best studio-era Western I've seen.
(What's weird is that Open Range is practically a remake, only without that whole shootout at the OK Corral thing going for it.)
It has all the iconic cinematography and Henry Fonda and Victor Mature being all dissipated as Doc Holliday (who looks a lot like a 1940s version of Chris Noth).

(The only thing that really dates this is how it's totally racist (and sexist). Luckily, it's not a "fight the Indians" Western, so there's only the part where Wyatt Earp proves his strength and rightness for the job of Marshall by knocking out a drunk Indian and then kicking him on the butt and telling him "Get out and stay out, Indian!" And where he catches Chihuahua (seriously), the "Bad Woman," cheating at poker and throws her in a trough of water and tells her that if he catches her again, he'll send her back to the Apache reservation, where she belongs. Even though she's clearly supposed to be hispanic, seemingly Mexican. Of course, she is bad. And dies.)

The thing about Westerns of this era is that they're great filmmaking, but you sort of have to ignore the politics. But seriously. Great.

Esther Shub
1927

What she did, was she looked through thousands of metres of film. Then she picked the bits she wanted and compiled them into a Marxist historical narrative.
This was the first compilation film. Ever.
Shub was friends with and influenced both Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, who film classes are obsessed with. How had I not heard of her? Oh yeah, because practically nothing has been written about her in English.