The power of cinema lies in the force of images. If one of them is enough to sum up a film, a simple look alone can capture what surrounds us. Cinema has always made us dream, travel, desire, fantasize, laugh, cry. But how many films have been able to shake up our certainties, question our beliefs, question our prejudices and put our own views into perspective? From the invention of the Lumière brothers to the present day, we can no longer count the images that have succeeded, reflecting history and its evolution, that of cinema and our societies.
For its 50th anniversary, the Deauville American Film Festival wanted to highlight a selection of 50 films that have changed the way we look at the world. 50 American films, from D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) to Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN… HOLLYWOOD (2019), selected subjectively for their way of having profoundly shaped the seventh art during its first century of existence, both through their technique, their staging, their inventiveness, their audacity, their content and all the diverse ideas that they were able to project.
On this occasion, the Deauville American Film Festival is extending its collaboration with the Morny cinema to offer festivalgoers a second screening room, where films will be presented by talents or industry professionals. Specially dedicated to this exceptional retrospective, this new theater will embody a vast panorama of American cinema, where eyes meet in a mirror which refers to our past, accompanies our present and predicts our future.
1916 INTOLERANCE by D. W. Griffith
1927 SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
1932 FREAKS by Tod Browning
1939 GONE WITH THE WIND by Victor Fleming
1940 THE GREAT DICTATOR by Charlie Chaplin
1941 CITIZEN KANE by Orson Welles
1942 CASABLANCA by Michael Curtiz
1942 TO BE OR NOT TO BE by Ernst Lubitsch
1946 IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE by Frank Capra
1950 OUTRAGE by Ida Lupino
1950 ALL ABOUT EVE by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1955 THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER by Charles Laughton
1956 THE SEARCHERS by John Ford
1959 ANATOMY OF A MURDER by Otto Preminger
1959 RIO BRAVO by Howard Hawks
1959 IMITATION OF LIFE by Douglas Sirk
1959 SOME LIKE IT HOT by Billy Wilder
1960 PSYCHO by Alfred Hitchcock
1961 WEST SIDE STORY by Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins
1967 BONNIE AND CLYDE by Arthur Penn
1968 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Stanley Kubrick
1969 EASY RIDER by Dennis Hopper
1969 THE WILD BUNCH by Sam Peckinpah
1970 WANDA by Barbara Loden
1972 THE GODFATHER by Francis Ford Coppola
1972 CABARET by Bob Fosse
1973 THE EXORCIST by William Friedkin
1974 A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE by John Cassavetes
1975 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST by Milos Forman
1976 NETWORK by Sidney Lumet
1976 CARRIE by Brian de Palma
1976 TAXI DRIVER by Martin Scorsese
1977 STAR WARS by Georges Lucas
1978 THE DEERHUNTER by Michael Cimino
1982 E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL by Steven Spielberg
1982 FIRST BLOOD by Ted Kotcheff
1984 TERMINATOR by James Cameron
1989 DO THE RIGHT THING by Spike Lee
1990 EDWARD SCISSORHANDS by Tim Burton
1992 UNFORGIVEN by Clint Eastwood
1997 BOOGIE NIGHTS by Paul Thomas Anderson
1999 THE MATRIX by Lana & Lily Wachowski
1999 THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by Sofia Coppola
2001 MULHOLLAND DRIVE by David Lynch
2003 ELEPHANT by Gus Van Sant
2007 ZODIAC by David Fincher
2010 INCEPTION by Christopher Nolan
2012 ZERO DARK THIRTY by Kathryn Bigelow
2015 SPOTLIGHT by Tom McCarthy
2019 ONCE UPON A TIME IN… HOLLYWOOD by Quentin Tarantino