Allures (1961)
This trippy combination of sounds and images by Jordan Belson was preserved in the National Film Registry in 2011. Most people will never see it, and their lives will be no less fulfilling.
Sans Soleil (1983)
This avante garde documentary by Chris Marker explores the creation and maintenance of cultural memory with an essay about time and memory set against such diverse footage as a volcano in Iceland, scenes from Vertigo (1958), and the slaughtering of a cow in Guineau-Bissau.
It’s an interesting experiment, but I don’t think it was successful, and I won’t watch it again.
From the Manger to the Cross (1912)
One of the earliest feature films to deal with Christ was enshrined in the National Film Registry in 1998. It’s important from a historical standpoint, but there are a number of better films covering the same material.
A King in New York (1957)
Deposed by a revolution, King Igor Shadhov (Charlie Chaplin) discovers he’s bankrupt and comes to America to make money. He attends what he thinks is a private dinner party, and his televised antics make him a popular commercial pitchman.
The King befriends a young anarchist student Rupert (Chaplin’s son Michael) which causes everyone to assume he’s a communist as well. The king is called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee then flees to Paris while Rupert is forced to identify other communists in exchange for his parent’s freedom.
The film ends with the king presciently reassuring Rupert anti-communist fervor will pass and inviting the child to stay with him in Europe until it does.
Typical of Chaplin’s later films, it rambles a little, but I enjoyed this deeply personal satire of consumerism, commercialism, and American tolerance for different political opinions. Chaplin’s left-leaning political views led to his exile from America in 1952. This film was an attempt to do to HUAC and communist witch hunts what he had previously done to Hitler and Nazism with The Great Dictator (1940). Like the earlier film, history has proven him right. By the time the film received an American release in 1973, McCarthyism was widely ridiculed as an embarrassing episode in American history.