If you wish to become a cinephile worthy of the title, you must first pledge never to refuse to watch a film for any of the following reasons. First, that it is in a different language and subtitled; second, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow; fourth, that it is too long; and fifth, that it has no “story.” These categories of refusal are what Lewis Bond, co-creator of the YouTube channel The House of Tabula, calls “the five cardinal sins of cinema,” and no one who commits them can ever attain an understanding of the art form, its nature, its history, and its potential. Once you’ve made your vow, you’ll be ready to watch through the 135 chronologically ordered motion pictures that constitute The House of Tabula’s “Ultimate Film Studies Watchlist,” fully explained in the video above.
While the movies first emerged in the nineteenth century, and plenty continue to be made here in the twenty-first, they stand unopposed as the defining popular art form of the twentieth. And it is from the span of that century that all the films on this list are drawn, from Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to all the way to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix.
What happened to cinema between those periods was, in a sense, a process of technological and artistic evolution, but as Bond’s commentary underscores, older films aren’t superseded by newer ones — or at least, older films of value aren’t. Indeed, the ambition and creativity of these decades, or even century-old movies, puts many a current release to shame.
By no means is the list dominated by obscurities. Gone with the Wind, Fantasia, Singin’ in the Rain, Psycho, Jaws, Alien: even the least cinematically inclined among us have seen a few of these movies, or at least they feel like they have. Maybe they’ve never got around to watching Citizen Kane, but they’ll have a sense that it belongs on any syllabus meant to cultivate an understanding of film as an art form. The presence of Star Wars may come as more of a surprise, but no less than Citizen Kane, it illustrates the benefit of watching your way through cinema history: if you do, you’ll experience just how much of a break they represented with all that came before. Ordinary moviegoers may feel like they’ve seen it all before, but cinephiles — especially those who’ve made the journey through The House of Tabula’s watchlist — know how vast an area of cinematic possibility remains unexplored.
Related content:
78 Great Directors Who Shaped the History of Cinema: An Introduction
The 30 Greatest Films Ever Made: A Video Essay
Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker
The Evolution of Cinema: Watch Nearly 140 Years of Film History Unfold in 80 Minutes
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
