Your SINGLE favourite film

Deus Ex Machina wrote: »

People are always keen to tell you their top 5 "in no particular order" or mumble and mention about three films when you ask them straight out what their favourite film is. It's a very difficult thing to do, but I think everyone should be able to tell you what their favourite film is at any given moment. Maybe it changes from day to day or minute to minute, but you should have an answer ready when somebody jumps out of a train and throws the question at you.

Why the need to be so definitive? I imagine the odds of a hypothetical situation occurring where your life and death depends on you immediately citing your favourite film are rather low (and why would somebody jump out of a train? Seems foolish). TBH, there are so many films I love for such vastly different reasons - from the winning charm of My Neighbour Totoro, to the subversive joys of Eternal Sunshine, through an untarnished childhood fondness for Toy Story - to pick one as a more important experience seems... unfair and simplistic.

That said, the giddy, mind-opening experience of watching Persona for the first time is probably unequaled. There are a few films that I'd cite as particularly formative in my defining overall film taste, but watching Persona one summer night was revelatory in countless ways. A film almost fifty years old, yet its insanely themes, technical wizardry and powerhouse acting has lost not an inch of its power to provoke, wow and challenge. It's pure cinema, an a perfect example of how ambition and skill in every single aspect of the prouction is key to make a truly remarkable film. It's a film one can endlessly analyse both on its own terms and within the greater context of Bergman's filmography and emerge with great insight. That you can actively track Bergman's process to this and after this masterpiece is one of the greatest joys of all. It's influence on cinema - including overt references in everything from Mullholland Drive to Woody Allen's work - is a further gift, and it's a film that can help you understand and appreciate cinema to a much greater degree than 99.9% of other films.

It's not the only film that has come to define my love of cinema (particularly doesn't describe my passion for Asian cinema), but I guess if some psychotic asshole forced me to simplify it down to one title for some vague and nonsensical reason, Persona wouldn't be the worst choice.