Yale’s Film Studies program is old-school in certain ways, and one of those ways is that we have an exam at the end of our Ph.D. program to test our knowledge of various essential films and film scholarship. We students have nicknamed it the “canon exam,” although it seems as though the professors avoid calling it that.

I was remembering how, the summer before I started grad school, I wondered what films I should watch to make myself conversant with other film students. I think I just ended up checking out every Criterion Collection movie I could find.

I thought you might be interested to see what we’re drilled on, and I don’t think the canon exam is a private affair (quite the opposite, actually, since it exists in part to assure prospective employers that we’ll be up to speed on the canon). So I’m posting the film list below. I’ll post the reading list later. [Update: here’s the reading list.]

As to the politics of a “canon,” or the wisdom of these particular choices … well, I’ll save that for another post. Suffice it to say that I don’t think this is a bad list, though it’s missing a lot of my favorite movies. (And the movies it does contain are so somber!)

Silent Shorts

All films on Before the Nickelodeon (Musser, 1982)

Early Edison films in The Movies Begin

Lumière films in The Movies Begin

The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903)

A Trip to the Moon (Melies, 1902)

Rescued by Rover Hepworth, 1905)

The Runaway Horse (Pathé, 1907)

The Lonely Villa (Griffith, 1909)

Fantômas (“Juve contre Fantomas” Feuillade, 1913)

The Tramp (Chaplin, 1915)

Silent Features

USA

The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)

Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)

Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)

Within Our Gates (Micheaux, 1920)

Greed (Von Stroheim, 1924)

Sherlock Junior (Keaton, 1924)

Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)

The Lodger (Hitchcock, 1927)

Silent Features, non USA

Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)

Mute Witnesses (Bauer, Russia, 1914)

Sir Arne’s Treasure (Stiller, 1919)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Weine, 1920)

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1921)

Metropolis (Lang, 1925)

Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)

Napoleon (Gance, 1927)

Storm over Asia (Pudovkin 1928)

Earth (Dovzhenko, 1928)

Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein, 1928)

Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)

Pandora’s Box (Pabst, 1929)

Sound Features

U.S.A.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Hallelujah (Vidor, 1929)

The Public Enemy (1931)

Blonde Venus (von Sternberg, 1932)

42nd Street (Bacon, 1933)

It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934)

Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)

Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)

Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford, 1939)

His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)

Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)

Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944)

The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946)

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948)

Singing in the Rain (Donnen, 1952)

Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)

Rebel Without a Cause (Ray 1955)

The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)

Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959)

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)

Nothing but a Man (Roemer, 1965)

2001:A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1969)

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1969)

Sweet, Sweetback’s Baaaad Ass Song (Van Pebbles, 1971)

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)

Nashville (Altman, 1975)

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)

Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)

Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1988)

French

A Nous la liberté Clair, 1931)

L’Atalante Vigo, 1934)

Le Jour se lève (Carné, 1939)

Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)

Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1950)

Pickpocket (Besson, 1960)

Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1960)

Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1961)

Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962)

La Jetée (Marker, 1963)

Playtime (Tati, 1966)

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974)

Italian

Paisà (Rossellini, 1946)

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1947)

Voyage In Italy (Rossellini, 1953)

Senso (Visconti, 1954)

La dolce vita (Fellini, 1959)

L’avventura Antonioni, 1959)

Gospel According to Matthew Pasolini, (1964)

Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1967)

Once Upon a Time in the West Leone, 1968)

German

M (Lang, 1930)

Kuhle Wampe (Dudow, 1932)

The Kaiser’s Lackey (Staudte, 1951)

Abshied von Gestern [Yesterday’s Girl] (Kluge, 1966)

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Herzog, 1973)

Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)

Kings of the Road (Wenders, 1976)

Germany Pale Mother (Sanders-Brahm, 1979)

Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979)

Spanish

La Caza [The Hunt] (Saura, 1966)

Belle de jour (Bunuel, 1967)

Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1974)

Law of Desire (Almodovar, 1987)

USSR

Ivan the Terrible part 1 (Eisenstein, 1947)

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1970)

British

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960)

Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1966)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1988)

Latin American

María Candelaria (Fernández, México, 1943)

Los Olvidados (Buñuel, México, 1950)

Antonio Das Mortes (Rocha, Brazil,1967)

Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968)

Bye Bye Brasil (Diegues, Brazil, 1979)

Japanese

I was Born but… (Ozu,1932)

Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936)

Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi. 1953)

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa,1954)

Cruel Story of Youth (Oshima, 1960)

Branded to Kill (Suzuki, 1967)

Double Suicide (Shinoda,1969)

In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1975)

Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)

Chinese

Goddess (Wu Young Gang, 1934)

Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1983)

Rouge (Kwan, 1986)

City of Sadness (Hou, 1989)

Indian

Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955)

Mother India (Mehboob, 1957)

Sholay (Sippy, 1975)

African

Black Girl (Sembene, 1966)

Yeelen (Cissé, 1978)

Various Sound Features

Persona (Bergman, Sweden 1966)

Daisies (Chytlova, Czechoslovakia, 1966)

The Red and the White (Jansco, Hungary, 1967)

Traveling Players (Angelopoulos, Greece 1974)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce (Ackerman, Belgium 1976)

Man of Marble (Wajda, Poland, 1977)

Time of the Gypsies (Kusturica, Yugoslavia 1988)

And Life Goes On (Kiarostami, Iran, 1991)

Documentary

Manhatta (Strand, 1921)

Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)

Land without Bread (Bunuel, 1932)

Triumph of the Will (1935)

The River (Lorentz, 1937)

Nightmail (Grierson, 1936)

Les Maitres Fou (Rouch, 1956)

Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956)

Primary (Leacock, 1960)

Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1961)

Culloden (Watkins, 1964)

High School (Wiseman, 1968)

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1981)

Experimental

Entr’acte (Clair/Picabia, 1924 )

Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy, Ferdinand Léger, 1924)

The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1924)

Page of Madness (Kinugasa, 1926)

Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel/Dali, 1928)

Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935)

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1944)

A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958)

Dog Star Man (Prelude), Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1961)

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)

Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, 1971)