The only movies to ever change cinema, according to William Friedkin
William Friedkin helped redirect Hollywood from a dream factory of lavish melodramas and musicals to an industry that churned out visceral, boundary-pushing cinema that reflected the modern world. The New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and early ‘70s might not have lasted long, but its legacy still resonates.
For someone who was known for pushing the medium beyond its limits with movies like The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Sorcerer, Friedkin would have been well within his rights to dismiss most of the filmmakers who came before him. And yet, despite being as self-confident and brash as his movies suggest, the director was not opposed to giving credit where credit was due.
In a 2011 interview with Cinemascope, the legendary filmmaker paid tribute to the three movies that he believed changed cinema, saying, “There are a handful of films that I can name that changed the rules. The first one was The Birth of a Nation…The next film was Citizen Kane…After that was Godard’s Breathless.”
Choosing The Birth of a Nation as the first cinema-shifting film was a bold, if completely justified, move. DW Griffith’s 1915 silent epic follows two families during and after the US Civil War, one pro-Union and one pro-Confederacy. Its overt racism is tough to stomach, portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and Black characters (played by actors in blackface) as intellectually inferior and sexually predatory. Even at the time, the film received pushback, and it remains one of the most controversial films in cinema history.
It also helped establish a cinematic language that is now almost universally used. Most of us don’t think twice when a movie cuts to a close-up or when a scene fades into another, but at the time, these techniques were revolutionary. It was also one of the first films to stage epic battle sequences and use a music score. According to Friedkin, Birth of a Nation was game-changing because it told an epic and controversial story and changed the style of films.
His second choice was far less controversial. Citizen Kane was Orson Welles’ masterpiece, a film that traced the rise and fall of a lightly fictionalised newspaper tycoon. With the use of tilted camera angles, deep focus cinematography, and flashbacks, it turned a character study into a poignant, psychological mystery, and, to use Friedkin’s words, “changed films completely in terms of the narrative possibilities.”
Breathless is another uncontroversial choice, though Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave manifesto is notable for paying homage to previous generations of filmmakers (which, to a lesser extent, Welles had done with Citizen Kane). Its use of jump-cuts, however, was influential in its own right, especially to Friedkin, who said he made The French Connection with Godard’s work in mind.
Few film critics or historians would argue that each of these films had a profound impact on cinema. Contrary to Friedkin’s remarks, however, they certainly weren’t the only ones. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, and George Lucas’ Star Wars undeniably changed the game, and it would even be safe to say that The Exorcist did, too.
