We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. Francois Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

Not many of them are very good, however. Yes, there are the passable Friday night specials, measured by critics including myself in terms of their value in entertaining us for two hours. We buy our tickets and hope for diversion, and usually we get it, but we so rarely get anything more. Especially in these latter days of the marketing-driven Hollywood, and a world cinema dominated by the Hollywood machine, films aim coarsely at low tastes. "If you put three thoughts into a movie you've broken the law and no one will come," Sean Penn told an audience at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001. The movies in this book have three thoughts, or more. They are not "the" 100 greatest films of all time, because all lists of great movies are a foolish attempt to codify works that must stand alone. But it's fair to say:

If you want to make a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema, start here.

I began writing these essays at a time when new Hollywood product seemed at a low ebb (it has ebbed lower) and many younger filmgoers seemed to have little sense of the cinema's past. Every spring since 1968 I have attended the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and conducted a weeklong exploration of one film. We sit in the dark and use stop-action to creep through a film, sometimes at a shot-by-shot pace. At first we used 16mm; then laserdiscs and DVD made it easier. Everybody engages in the discussion. It is democracy in the dark, with an image frozen on the screen. In earlier years, I did mostly classics ("Citizen Kane," "The Third Man," "La Dolce Vita," "The General," "Notorious," "Persona," "Ikiru," "Taxi Driver"). In recent years, reflecting the death of film societies and the rise of home video, the students were less interested in the past.

One year I suggested "Vertigo'' and they begged me to do "Fight Club."

We did both. "Fight Club" was not a film I approved of, although I recognized its skill and knew from countless e-mails how strong an impression it made on its admirers. Seeing it over the course of a week, I admired its skill even more, and its thought even less. It lacks an intelligent drawing-together of its themes, but that is not held against it in a time when audiences are assaulted with sound and motion, when shots get shorter and movies get louder, when special effects replace or upstage theme and performance. The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today's audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in "The Third Man?"

At Boulder and on other campuses, talking with the students, I found that certain names were no longer recognized. Even students majoring in film had never seen one by Bunuel, Bresson, or Ozu. They'd seen one or two titles by Ford and Wilder, knew a half-dozen Hitchcock classics, genuflected at "Citizen Kane," knew the "Star Wars" pictures by heart, and sometimes uttered those words which marked them as irredeemably philistine: "I don't like black and white." Sixty of these films are in black and white, and three use b&-w and color; you cannot know the history of the movies, or love them, unless you understand why b&w can give more, not less, than color.

I came to believe that the classics of earlier years were an unexplored country for many filimgoers, even the best ones. As a film critic for a daily newspaper, I didn't want to spend my life locked in the present. In 1997 I went to Nigel Wade, then the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and proposed a biweekly series of longer articles revisiting the great movies of the past. He gave his blessing. Not many editors would have; the emphasis in American film journalism is on "celebrity news," box office results, and other forms of bottom-feeding. Every other week since then, I have revisited a great movie, and the response has been encouraging. I received letters and e-mails from movie lovers; got into debates with other critics; heard from a university trustee and a teenager in Madison who both vowed to watch every movie on the list. The Library Media Project made discounted DVDs of the movies available to public libraries.

The relative invisibility of classic movies is directly related to the death of film societies. Until the rise of home video, every campus and many public libraries and community centers had film societies which held cheap and well-programmed 16mm screenings. My early film initiation took place at two such clubs at the University of Illinois, which also inspired me to see first-run films I might otherwise have avoided. I saw "Ikiru,'' "The 400 Blows," "The Maltese Falcon" and "Swing Time'' for the first time in those campus rooms--knowing little or nothing about them except that they cost only 25 cents, and that afterward people got together in the student union and drank coffee and talked about them.

In theory home video should be a godsend for lovers of great films, and indeed most of these titles are available on video in one form' or another, and that is how most people will have to see them. But when you enter the neighborhood video chain store, display boxes near the door push the latest ("new on video" Hollywood blockbusters, and you have to prowl in the shadows to find "foreign films" and "classics," often a pitiful selection. Independent local video stores and Web-based operations like netflix.com and facets.org give access to a much larger range of films, but does the average moviegoer ever find them? In the 1960s Stanley Kauffmann coined the term "the film generation" to describe the phenomenon of younger filmgoers who were film-obsessed. I was a member of that generation, and can personally testify that I waited in line at ordinary theaters to get into soldout performances of Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad'' and Godard's "Weekend.'' Today even the most popular subtitled films are ignored by the national distribution oligarchy, mainstream movies are pitched at the teenage male demographic group and the lines outside theaters are for Hollywood's new specialty, B movies with A budgets.

I've seen some of the movies in this book dozens of times, and have been through 47 of them a shot at a time. But I made a fresh viewing before writing each essay; that was the whole idea. I was reminded of a similar selection by the British critic Derek Malcolm, who said his list simply reflected films he could not bear the thought of never seeing again. The 100 titles were selected from about 150 I had written up to publication date, and the biweekly series continues.

Revising the essays, I realized what a wonderful task Id set myself, because I remembered the circumstances under which I'd seen the films.

There was a cold London night in January when I took the tube to Hampstead and saw "Written on the Wind'' at the Everyman. I joined Donald Richie, the great expert on Japanese film, as we went through Ozu's "Floating Weeds" a shot at a time at the Hawaii Film Festival. At the Virginia Festival of American Film, I did "Raging Bull'' with its editor, Thelma Schoonmaker (nobody knows a film quite as well as its editor). The cinematographer Haskell Wexler joined me for "Casablanca'' on the Floating Film Festival. Peter Bogdanovich and I went through "Citizen Kane" together on the Telluride Film Festival's anniversary cruise on the QE2. I was at the world premiere of "2001: A Space Odyssey,'' and saw it again in 70mm on a giant screen at my own Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois. Apocalypse Now Redux was screened at Cannes 2001, in the best movie theater in the world. Battleship Potemkin I saw projected on a screen on the outside wall of the Vickers Theater in Three Oaks, Michigan, while the audience sat on folding chairs and Concrete, a group from Benton Harbor, plaved a score it had composed. At the Overlooked again, I saw "Nosferatu'' with music by the Alloy Orchestra of Cambridge, Mass. I remembered seeing the original version of The Big Sleep on 16mm in the Los Angeles living room of the late David Bradley, a curmudgeonly and beloved film collector. The best time I saw City Lights was outdoors in Piazza San Marco in Venice, and after it was over Chaplin came out on a balcony and waved. The first time I saw Gates of Heaven, Milos Stehlik of Facets Multimedia in Chicago called me up and said he had a film I had to see and he would not tell me what it was about. That mysterious masterpiece has suffered all its life because people think they don't want to see a documentary about a pet cemetery.

What happens when you see a lot of good movies is that directorial voices and styles begin to emerge. You see that some movies are made by individuals, and others by committees. Some movies are simply about the personalities they capture (the Marx Brothers and Astaire and Rogers). Others are about the mastery of genre, from "Star Wars,'' which attempts to transcend swashbuckling, to Detour, which attempts to hide in the shadows of noir.

Most good movies are about the style, tone, and vision of their makers. A director will strike a chord in your imagination, and you will be compelled to seek out the other works. Directors become like friends. Bunuel is delighted by the shamelessness of human nature. Scorsese is charged by the lurid possibilities of Catholic guilt. Kurosawa celebrates individuals in a country that suspects them. Wilder is astonished by the things some people will do to be happy. Keaton is about the struggle of man's spirit against the physical facts of the world. Hitchcock creates images that have the quality of guilty dreams. Sooner or later every lover of the film arrives at Ozu, and understands that the movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.

- Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

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