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Riveting your audience requires style. Take a look at some style innovations that changed the game — and the films that iconically represent these movements.
This genre of documentary focuses on watching events occur without interference. Using handheld cameras and an improvisational style of filming, Gimme Shelter captures the events of the Altamont disaster as it happened without resorting to voiceover or reconstruction. The work allows viewers see what happened and come to their own conclusions about what went wrong.
- Hoop Dreams
- The Battle of Algiers
Told in song and dance against fantastic set pieces, Bollywood offers an alternate universe where musicals never went out of style. Like most Bollywood films, Lagaan is the story of impossible love, but its humor and strong characters make it universally enjoyable.
Featuring wide, sweeping landscapes, countless extras and suitably outsized stories, epic films make everything bigger, grander and better. More than three hours long even in its shortest cut, Lawrence of Arabia tells the story of a British officer during WWI with the finest form of cinematic excess.
Sometimes considered the first true noir film, The Maltese Falcon features detective Sam Spade and his beleaguered search for truth in a city gone wrong. Mixing elements from earlier expressionist films with hard-boiled fiction, noir films were America's dark response to the Great Depression — and are perhaps the most artistically successful B-movie genre ever made.
- Kiss Me Deadly
- The Big Sleep
Critic-cum-auteur Jean Luc Godard released this film in 1960 as one of the opening blasts of the French New Wave. Utilizing style-for-the-sake-of-style moves including jump cuts, long tracking shots and hand-held cameras, Breathless broke the rules of classic Hollywood cinema and ushered in an era of iconoclastic movie-making where anything is possible so long as it can be captured on film.
- Cleo from 5 to 7
- The 400 Blows
The last of Chaplin's completely voiceless films, City Lights is silent by choice rather than necessity, with effects and a musical score (also composed by Chaplin) but no need for dialogue. The story of Chaplin's tramp in romantic pursuit of a blind girl illustrates the strengths of the genre, with beautiful visual style, well-executed slapstick and an emotionally complex story.
Shot in Italy and overdubbed in English, Spaghetti Westerns emphasized the brutality of western expansion and featured characters of questionable morality. In this, the last of Sergio Leone's epic "Dollars" trilogy, Clint Eastwood's character — the Man with No Name — is nominally the good guy. But the main difference between him and his competitors is his skill level, not his sense of right and wrong.
- A Fistful of Dollars
- Once Upon a Time in the West
- Under the Wire
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- Tricks of the Trade
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- Breakaway Shorts
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Dropping a contest this good takes serious collaboration. Paste hooked us up with inspired music and genuine film savoir-faire. Take a look at Paste online to get your music and film fix. GO >
Intrigued? We asked our Frame of Reference contestants to choose a reference point from each of our Reference Palettes. See The Challenge for the full spread. GO >
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