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4. Manhattan by Woody Allen

We must’ve been 10 or 11 when we saw a Woody Allen movie for the first time, on the old Channel 9. It was the crime mockumentary Take the Money and Run, in which he plays an incompetent bank robber. He goes to the bank teller and hands her a note saying “I have a gun”, but his handwriting is so bad, she reads “I have a gub”. For some reason we thought this was hilarious so we watched Take the Money and Run every time it was on and memorized many of the lines (like the one about his father having a brilliant 30-year career in the military which catapulted him to the rank of corporal).

We saw it again a few years ago, and it’s not that funny, but we decided as a child that we wanted to sound just like the typical Woody Allen character: a neurotic Jew from New York. Who the hell knows how kids make these decisions? Our 6-year-old niece loves pink glitter and wants to be a Disney princess, and we’re absolutely certain she didn’t get the idea from us or her mother. Couldn’t we choose to model ourself on a happy, well-adjusted, socially-skilled character, or at least someone closer to our culture? We didn’t even know any neurotic Jewish man from New York, but when we met some they said, “You sound like a neurotic Jewish man from New York.”

Our favorite Woody Allen movies are Manhattan, Annie Hall, Love and Death, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. In Manhattan Woody plays Isaac, a TV comedy writer who quits his lucrative job because he wants to be a serious writer. He’s dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) who is waaay too young for him (This would come back to haunt him in his real-life scandal). In this scene at the Metropolitan Museum they run into his best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) and Yale’s mistress Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary proceeds to tear down the artists Isaac loves. Later he sees her at the MoMA and she rips apart his other idols, and by the time they dash into the Museum of Natural History to get out of the rain, he’s in love with her. That’s a lot of museums.

We were maybe 14 when we saw this movie and it completely screwed us up because we thought the point of falling in love was to have someone to argue about Scott Fitzgerald and Fellini with.

5. Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawks

Cary Grant is the absent-minded paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn is the ditzy heiress who nearly ruins his life in this screwball comedy co-starring a leopard. We love Cary Grant, and he made some of his best movies with Katharine Hepburn, but she always played characters we wanted to punch in the face.

6. Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock

Here’s a column we wrote last year when Vertigo topped the BFI list of greatest movies: Love Makes Suckers Of Us All.

Whenever I watch Vertigo I come away disturbed and disoriented, as if I’d expected a different ending from the one I’d seen before. This is of course the definition of insanity. (I don’t see why we should put spoiler alerts for 64-year-old movies, but here it is.)

John Ferguson, “Scottie”, is a retired San Francisco police detective with a debilitating fear of heights. He was briefly engaged to Midge, a very nice girl; they remain close friends. A businessman named Gavin Elster asks Scottie to follow his wife, Madeleine Elster. He claims that Madeleine is possessed by the spirit of a woman long dead; he’s afraid she will kill herself. Scottie declines, but then he sees Madeleine and is smitten. He follows her and prevents an apparent suicide attempt. They fall in love, but she commits suicide anyway, and Scottie’s fear of heights prevents him from saving her. Scottie is hospitalized after a nervous breakdown.

A year later Scottie meets Judy Barton, a woman who looks amazingly like Madeleine. The audience knows that it is the same woman, but Scottie doesn’t. We learn that Elster had hired Judy to play Madeleine so that they could fake Madeleine’s suicide and get Scottie to witness it. In fact Elster had killed his wife for her money and Scottie was the convenient dupe.

One of the pleasures of watching Vertigo is spotting the doubles and mirrors. Madeleine was supposed to be haunted by a dead woman, now Scottie himself is haunted by the dead Madeleine. Scottie proceeds to make Judy over in the image of the dead Madeleine. Judy is in love with him for real, but all he wants is to recreate the dead Madeleine so he can save her this time.

Scottie is in love with a false memory—an image of a dead woman who never really existed. But what is a movie if not a false memory? It never happened, but it lingers in our minds like an actual event. There are movies we remember more clearly, in closer detail, than we do episodes from our own lives. Or else we mix them up in our minds until we can’t tell where true life ends and the movie begins. The collision of life and cinema produces a kind of vertigo.

Alfred Hitchcock strings us along: we think we’re seeing the truth, and halfway through the movie we learn that it was all a set-up. The lush imagery and the fabulous San Francisco travelogue was all part of Scottie’s romantic fantasy. Even after we know it’s a lie, Scottie clings to it. He wants to reenact the lie, down to the dead woman’s wardrobe and hair color. Scottie is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. He’s mad.

The filmmaker and critic Chris Marker was probably Vertigo’s biggest fan: his obsession with the movie was not unlike Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine. In his essay “A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo)”, he notes that the second half of the movie is a mirror of the first, and then he proposes that the second half is a dream.

Halfway through the movie Scottie has a breakdown, rendered in weird and rather quaint animation. Midge visits him in the hospital and finds him a virtual catatonic. “You don’t even know I’m here,” she says, then she tells the doctor that Scottie is still in love with the dead Madeleine. And then we never see Midge again. Why would a major character disappear without explanation?

Because, Marker suggests, the second half of Vertigo happens in Scottie’s mind. It is the dream of a madman. He points to that famous scene in the hotel after Scottie completes Judy’s makeover and “brings back” Madeleine. Scottie and Judy embrace, the camera moves around them, and the scene changes to the stable where Scottie kissed Madeleine. We’re seeing through the obsessed Scottie’s eyes; how can we trust what we see? Scottie has been duped, and now we are duped, duped so completely we don’t even notice.

A few years after Vertigo was released, Marker made his best-known film, La jetée. Its hero, like Scottie, is obsessed with the image of a woman seen in a dream. He goes back into the past to recover her. The week before Vertigo was named the greatest film of all time in the Sight and Sound poll, Chris Marker died. He was exactly 91 years old—he was born and he died on the same day, July 29.