The five most influential movies nobody remembers
Cinema has evolved rapidly since it became a popular art form in the late 1800s. It’s hard to comprehend how fast things have changed, with silent shorts now replaced by epic blockbusters featuring special effects that are difficult to comprehend. We’ve seen various movements emerge throughout cinema history, but naturally, so many movies have been made that many have since been largely forgotten.
It’s only to be expected that this has happened. A staggeringly large number of films have been released—some to great acclaim and some to very few viewers—and as a result, certain titles have faded into obscurity. Even if a film was once hugely successful and influential, times change, and the origins of certain techniques get lost, meaning those who deserve credit fly under the radar.
Look at the countless female filmmakers in the early years of cinema who pioneered incredible techniques, only for their name and their films to be widely forgotten. Sadly, many great films that caused a real impact on the industry are no longer widely circulated and appreciated, and many of these are by talented women, like Lois Weber.
So, from epic historical dramas like Napoléon to one of the first surrealist films, The Seashell and the Clergyman, here are five incredibly influential movies that nobody seems to remember.
The five most influential movies nobody remembers:
‘Ménilmontant’ (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)
Silent filmmakers typically used intertitles to tell their stories, aiding the audience’s understanding of the film by allowing the characters’ dialogue to be spoken through text. Yet, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s largely forgotten silent film Ménilmontant proved that a story could be told without intertitles. It’s a film that has surely had a significant impact on those who have seen it; opening with a dramatic, fast-paced axe murder, the influence of its editing cannot be ignored.
The film sees two sisters recover from this traumatic incident, with the striking use of innovative editing – there are also some gorgeous close-ups and incredibly quick shots – aiding the compelling story. It is agreed to be potentially the first French movie to have refrained from using intertitles, making Kirsanoff’s 40-minute film rather groundbreaking, but it now remains nothing more than an obscure silent gem.
‘Olivia’ (Jacqueline Audry, 1951)
There was a time in France when there were hardly any female filmmakers at all. Before Agnes Varda, Jacqueline Audry made films that were often bold in terms of their approach to theme, although she used a much more classic style. She might not have been ripping up the cinematic rulebook stylistically, but with a gorgeous hand, she crafted movies like Olivia, a quintessential entry into the LGBTQ+ canon. Adapted from the book by Dorothy Strachey, the movie is one of the first to explore lesbian desire in the history of cinema.
The movie was groundbreaking, exploring a boarding school girl’s obsession with one of her female teachers, but it didn’t get the flowers it simply deserved. Lesbian representation is hard to come by on screen, especially during the mid-20th century, but Audry fearlessly approached the topic and spotlighted a story that would come to play a key role in the queer cinematic canon. Sadly, it’s a film that remains largely unseen, despite its legacy.
‘Napoléon’ (Abel Gance, 1927)
When a film is five and a half hours long (and silent), it’s likely that few people, especially those with shortened attention spans, something overwhelmingly common in our modern age, are actually going to sit down and watch it. Napoléon might have been an influential piece of epic filmmaking back in the 1920s, which inspired countless directors (including Sergei Eisenstein) to take a grand approach to crafting historical and dramatic tales, but these days, if you refer to a movie named Napoleon, people will probably assume you mean the Ridley Scott one.
Abel Gance’s lengthy biographical film was a turning point for cinema, and it still remains one of the longest movies ever made. It used a special widescreen format known as Polyvision – the only film to do so – which aided the movie’s revolutionary technical aspects, resulting in a rather visually impressive work of art. So, while it exerted a significant impact on cinema back in the silent era, it’s rare you’ll find a film fan today who has actually watched the whole thing.
‘Suspense’ (Lois Weber, 1913)
Female filmmakers have been routinely subordinated by cinema historians, with some of the most influential women to direct movies during the early years of the art form still remaining tragically obscure figures. Lois Weber was one of the first major filmmakers to work within America’s silent film industry, and her 1913 film Suspense, which she co-directed with Phillips Smalley, was hugely influential with its pioneering use of split-screen.
Not only does the movie feature early examples of a car chase, but the film was one of the first thriller movies to explore the violence experienced by women at the hands of men. Weber played a woman who finds herself trapped in her house with her baby as a man breaks in with a knife, resulting in a high-action sequence of events as her husband journeys back home to save her. It’s a fantastic short, but like many movies directed by women from this period, it is not as widely known as it should be.
‘The Seashell and the Clergyman’ (Germaine Dulac, 1928)
Most people associate early surrealist cinema with Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, but it’s Germaine Dulac’s experimental masterwork The Seashell and the Clergyman that came first. Released a year prior, Dulac’s film proved to have a huge influence on the surrealist genre, with her use of innovative editing techniques depicting a priest’s obsession with another man’s wife.
The film is a proto-feminist work, with Dulac utilising these abstract images to save her female protagonist from the lecherous male. With its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, which makes the film feel dreamlike and otherworldly, The Seashell and the Clergyman is a criminally underrated film from a queer female filmmaker who deserves to be celebrated more widely for her contributions to cinema.
