What are some great existential movies?
Sam Peckinpah’s work comes to mind immediately of course, most notably his greatest masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (I believe the best movie ever made).
It also occured to me recently that Alien 3 brought a bit of an existential twist to the series.
What are some others?
“Being John Malkovich.”
And (don’t laugh) “Toy Story 2.”
The Devil in Miss Jones.
Well, the ending was a nod to Sartre, anyway.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (The Samurai) is one of the most commonly cited, about a lone hitman. It was remade by Walter Hill as The Driver, which is moderately existential, but has the disadvantage of not being French.
What is an existential movie? I would say it conveys the sense that the hero is alone in the world, that he has to construct his own value system, that the world at large is amoral (not evil, but altogether lacking in a moral system), that life is meaningless unless you give it meaning. A general sense of bleak absurdism about life, deriving humour from its pointlessness, is also common in existential literature (see Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels).
Movies about hitmen and other criminals in general often seem to have existentialist qualities. I’d suggest Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (and other of his movies). Also French cinema of the 1930s has a similar cultural background to that which produced Sartre and French existentialism, so films like Le Jour Se Leve (Daybreak) and Le Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows), together with the 1940s/early 1950s American noir which they influenced: Detour, They Live By Night.
I’d agree about Peckinpah: Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia is about as absurdist as feature films get. Also Leone’s films and many other westerns about amoral gunfighters, particularly The Good the Bad and the Ugly, where the sequence about the soldiers fighting over the bridge is incredibly sardonic about human vanity.
Two words: FIGHT CLUB
Runaway Train (1985)
Well, existentialism in American literature pretty much begins with tough-guy detective stories. So, you have to have “The Maltese Falcon” on there.
Okey doke, here’s a few more that I believe fit the profile:
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
La Salaire de la Peur (the Wages of Fear), and its remake Sorcerer
Get Carter (the original version, haven’t seen the Stallone remake)
Leon (the Professional)
Uh, maybe Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie