1968 was a year of great upheaval, and this is reflected in its films. Movies were bold and wild. The shocking and the new jostled each other on the screen. Today, the best films of 1968 are somehow more remote than their counterparts from 1946 and 1953. This is because cinematically and culturally, they were way ahead of us in 1968. The subsequent thirty years have been a retrenchment.

It's inconceivable that films like these would be made today, much less exhibited in mainstream theaters. It's not just that the subject matter of Weekend or Teorema, Death by Hanging or Faces, is radical; it's the level of thinking about the medium and its relation to reality that's been banished and erased.

High art and low art smashed into each other in the cinema of 1968. The very idea of popular culture was transformed. Night of the Living Dead is a low-budget gore fest that branches out into sociology; Once upon a Time in the West is a horse opera with more emphasis on opera than horses. Mainstream offerings like Rosemary's Baby, Petulia, and The Thomas Crown Affair showed an unprecedented awareness of art-cinema photographic, editing, and storytelling techniques.

Films looked different. Some, like Teorema and Indecent Desires, embraced shoddiness and rejected normal production values. On the other hand, films like Succubus and Les Biches went for superstylization, while Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and Death by Hanging foregrounded formal elements.

Politics, the generation gap, class conflict, racism, the reflection of an exploitative system in people's sex lives, Satanism, cannibalism: these point to the utter breakdown of society as the underlying theme of all 1968's most interesting films. At its most extreme, this tendency takes the form of a struggle between the living and the dead.

Hollywood was conceptually dead. The fact that Columbia (a studio once specializing in black-and-white crime drama, screwball comedy, and juvenile fare like the Jungle Jim and Blondie series) produced Funny Girl is a sign that Hollywood studios had lost their distinctive characteristics and from now on would exist only as money launderers. The proliferation of international co-productions proved the same thing about national cinemas. Films high and low emerged outside normal production systems: at one end, 2001: A Space Odyssey; at the other, Indecent Desires.

Everyone was confused. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences couldn't make up its mind who deserved the Best Actress Oscar, so it gave one to Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter and one to Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl. We applaud this generosity; we just wish the Academy had awarded the right actresses: Lynn Carlin in Faces and Carol Channing in Skidoo. Their on-stage embrace, Oscars in hand, would've perfectly symbolized the destructive oppositions of 1968.

The ten best

1. Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

Is the couple-in-a-car the building block of a cinema that exposes and destroys all social relations? Godard sets two haute bourgeois marrieds (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) out on a weekend trip to the country to kill the wife's father, and proves that a savage indictment of all that exists can be uncompromisingly political and still jump. With this angry, color tableau of burning cars in pools of blood, Godard made a decisive break with traditional cinema. Self-described as both "a film adrift in the cosmos" and "a film found in a junkyard," Weekend takes prisoners and then eats them.

2. Faces (John Cassavetes, USA)

This intense drama of marital breakdown plays like a horror film of American suburban life. Cassavetes's camera follows its hard-drinking protagonists on a journey to the end of night and stays right on top of their dizzying transitions between braggadoccio, anguish, and exhaustion. John Marley is excellent as the swaggering husband, bemused by his own flickering sensitivity; Lynn Carlin is particularly brilliant at showing how the good-natured, pampered, passive wife turns out to be running a race with despair; Gena Rowlands as a maternal call girl and Seymour Cassel as a hipster gigolo are ideal. Many films use an "improvised" acting style, but Faces remains unequaled in conveying a sense of characters finding and losing themselves before our eyes.

3. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, USA)

Romero's bleak, depressing, clumsy, and very original gut-muncher is a rarity today's filmmakers no longer understand: a horror movie without a happy ending. Like Weekend, this zombie movie, which also uses the couple-in-a-car, is an accusation that's lost no relevancy. Its boarded-up, black-and-white farmhouse world offers even less hope than Godard's French countryside. Night of the Living Dead presents contemporary reality as a shocking chamber drama where the only thing to do is barricade yourself in the house, sit there and smoke and watch TV and hope they don't get in.

4. Skidoo (Otto Preminger, USA)

It's clear that the Hollywood of 1968 was in a crisis state, unable to deal with the challenge posed by a youth culture of turned-on, free-loving hippies. But one director took that challenge. He also took LSD. Skidoo is the polychrome, widescreen flower of Otto Preminger's trip. In this preposterous, scattershot gangster comedy, the director of Laura bullies the square entertainment industry, represented by Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing, into an orgy of hippie-speak and style, all set to the music of Harry ("Lime in the Coconut") Nilsson. During 1968's best trip sequence, the former Ralph Kramden journeys into a world where Austin Pendleton shrinks, a screw topped with the head of Groucho Marx spins down a drain, Mickey Rooney sings and dances with bags of money, and Arnold Stang taunts him from beyond the grave. Preminger made his own break from traditional cinema in Skidoo. Fred Clark, playing a dosed guard, explains: "It's a big, beautiful blob of nothing. It wants me. It loves me. Why is it going away?" As countercultural Us vs. Them musicals from 1968 go, Skidoo beats Head hands-down and obliterates the wretched Wild in the Streets.

5. Death by Hanging (Koshikei; Nagisa Oshima, Japan)

The most overtly political of the great visual stylists of 1960s CinemaScope Japan, Oshima made hard-hitting and excessive melodramas about tortured, corrupt youth. In this formally elegant black-and-white study of capital punishment and racism, an underage Korean, known only as R (Yun-do Yun), rapes and kills a Japanese girl and gets sentenced to death. He's hanged, but doesn't die, and can't acknowledge who he is. The prison officials recreate his past, using the prison itself as the set in a highly theatricalized attempt to jog R's memory so they can hang him again. Oshima ends the film by thanking the audience for being anti-Korean enough to make the death sentence possible.

6. Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach; Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet, West Germany)

Events from the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, as recounted by his widow, juxtaposed with performances of his works. Harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt plays Bach (in both senses). Straub and Huillet are responsible for some of the most intensely formal films ever made, films in which sound, image, and performance are scrupulously considered, limpid, and dedramatized. They see Bach as an artist in conflict with society: the discreet passion with which they portray his revolt is 180 degrees from the sensationalism and sentimentality of most films about rebel artists. A beautiful, complex film that should be seen many times; unfortunately, in the current state of film exhibition, you'll be lucky if you can catch it once (and it's not on video).

7. Les Biches (The Does; Claude Chabrol, France)

Wealthy Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) picks up sidewalk artist Why (Jacqueline Sassard) in Paris and takes her to her house in Saint-Tropez, where the atmosphere becomes increasingly dense with obsession as both women fall in love with the same man (Jean-Louis Trintignant). This crisply ironic film is an adroit game of shimmering mirror images and seductive poses; Chabrol knows how to keep us waiting for the moment when the game turns serious, and how to bring out the full value of the moment when it comes. Key to the film's success is Audran's hilarious portrayal of a sophisticate so bored it sometimes seems the only thing keeping her awake is her amusement at her own fakeness.

8. Madigan (Don Siegel, USA)

In this near-perfect cop film, New York detective Richard Widmark urgently tracks down the killer (Steve Inhat) who stole his gun. The film cuts back and forth between Widmark's ordeal and that of commissioner Henry Fonda, who reluctantly takes lessons in moral relativity from his married mistress (Susan Clark) and his bribe-taking best friend (James Whitmore). Director Siegel was the undisputed master of the American action film during the last years when it still made a virtue of economy and still spoke to a mass audience without condescension or self-mockery. One of Siegel's most satisfying movies, Madigan works both as character study and as thriller (on a higher level, incidentally, than 1968's other seven-letter cop-name film, Peter Yates's Bullitt).

9. Once upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West; Sergio Leone, Italy)

A baroque dream of a western in which hired killer Henry Fonda, outlaw Jason Robards, and mystery man Charles Bronson converge on a barely existing town and compete for the magnificent prize of Claudia Cardinale, a newly widowed ex-prostitute. The film's visual grandeur can only be appreciated if it's seen in a theater in its proper Techniscope (widescreen) dimensions. Yet at least half the film's power comes from its devastating score by Ennio Morricone. As for the story, it doesn't add up to much, but that's the point: if Leone takes an hour to establish who the characters are and what they're doing, it's because he's interested less in causes and effects than in the finality of gestures, less in psychology than in the abstract expressiveness of faces.

10. The Devil Rides Out (The Devil's Bride; Terence Fisher, UK)

Christopher Lee, as the intense, natty Nicholas, Duc de Richleau, an anti-Satanist in 1920's Britain, delivers a performance exactly like the film it's in: authoritative without being mannered, kooky but very convincing. Fisher, the seriously underrated director of many Hammer horror films, imbrues The Devil Rides Out in deep reds and burgundies, rich browns and cold greys. The movie achieves an autumnal grace and evinces a huge desire to protect the young from evil and, ultimately, from time itself. The controlling gazes and wills of the Satanists in this movie can only be defeated through elaborately staged rituals that appear ridiculous at first, but become dignified and meaningful as they stave off annihilation. Soon, though, the wind comes, and then it's winter, and the light grows dim. We prefer the acceptance of genre, the longing, and the strange maturity of The Devil Rides Out to the notable ickiness of 1968's other coven movie, Rosemary's Baby.

Honorable Mention

1. Teorema (Theorem; Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy)

Pasolini's ingenious Teorema poses a question at its beginning that the film tries to explain before daring the audience to make its own decision at the end. However, it's not a trick, multiple-point-of-view movie, nor a simple analysis. It's a weird, painful investigation into the spiritual crisis at the center of middle-class life, a crisis the director of The Gospel According to St. Matthew admits can't be resolved from within. The film's studied, crappy look is often chilling and its dialogue is sparse. Terence Stamp is in it. He moves in with a wealthy Italian family, but just because the film is funny and dazed does not mean it's a comedy.

2. The Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo; Shohei Imamura, Japan)

A bizarre epic of incest and irrigation, this film is impossible to describe in a short space. A Tokyo engineer comes to a primitive island south of Japan and gets distracted from his work by a hot-to-trot girl native. She is the product of an obsessive affair between the island shamaness and her brother, who has been condemned (for the sin of fishing with dynamite) to the seemingly endless task of digging a hole big enough to sink the island's huge boulder into. Perhaps the best film by the intransigent Imamura, The Profound Desire of the Gods is a splashy, funny, out-of-control film of elements, passions, and violent contrasts, leading to a memorably tragic final section.

3. Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés; Francois Truffaut, France)

The third film in Truffaut's series about the coming-of-age of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is easily the best. Here, Antoine gets discharged from the army and goes through a series of loser jobs, including one as a private detective where he's hired by the owner of a shoe store (Michel Lonsdale) to find out why no one likes him. This puts Antoine in the position of not actually being a shoe-store clerk, but simply posing as one, perhaps the least glamorous evocation of the life of a detective ever committed to film. Influenced by the movies Frank Tashlin made with Jerry Lewis, such as Rock-a-Bye Baby and It's Only Money, Stolen Kisses comes together seamlessly. The whole thing feels improvised and airy, awaiting the moment when the viewer's own forgotten feelings about young love fill it up.

4. The Immortal Story (Une histoire immortelle; Orson Welles, France)

In this low-budget, 58-minute film, his first in color, Welles stars as a rich merchant who hires two strangers to help him act out a legend about an old man who pays a sailor to have sex with his young wife. Too somber and hermetic to appeal to anyone not fascinated by Welles, The Immortal Story is an eerily static compendium of his key preoccupations: crisscrossing rhythms, interrupted movements, vertical bars, mirrors, corridors, whispered monologues, aging, corruption, and death.

5. Witchfinder General (The Conqueror Worm; Michael Reeves, UK)

Vincent Price turns in a chilling performance as Matthew Hopkins, a witch hunter pricking and burning his way through the chaos of the English Civil War, preying on people's ignorance and fear. The last completed film of Reeves, who died of a barbiturate overdose in 1969 at the age of 25, Witchfinder General pins down like no other film the horror of sadistic violence, made more depressing and shocking by the contrast of the pastoral backgrounds against which it's performed. Warning: never rent or buy the Orion videotape, which destroys the film by substituting flavorless electronic music for Paul Ferris's original lyrical orchestral score.

6. Succubus (Necronomicon—geträumte Sunden; Jess Franco, West Germany)

Among the ingredients of this rich, somewhat queasy stew are acid, murder, a sex scene filmed through a fish tank, a word-association game linking Jean-Luc Godard and Charles Mingus, a block-long poster for Doctor Zhivago, a psychiatrist who tests his patient's reactions to plastic monster models, and a sadistic nightclub routine that looks like something staged for a grade-B German sex thriller. Perverse and marginal, yet so much of its time that it seems to sum up 1968 cinema, Succubus is certainly one of the best-crafted and most imaginative movies of its director, who has made more than 160 films. Watch one every week and soon you may feel that you need to see them all.

7. Indecent Desires (Doris Wishman, USA)

A dirt-caked doll found in a New York trash can, the plot contrivance at the center of Wishman's film, is the perfect emblem for the film itself, an unscripted Freudian amateur-hour nightmare. Doris Wishman is one of the most radical stylists known to cinema, perhaps more destructive to film form, in her own way, than Godard or Straub and Huillet. Made up of mismatched shots of ashtrays and feet; camera angles that are too low or too high, or too close or too far away; dubbed, empty dialogue and threatening, knock-off jazz music, this black-and-white sexploitation cheapie presents its heroine (Sharon Kent) as a lonely, isolated object who tries to channel her feelings into a normal relationship, but can't.

8. Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba)

A bourgeois Cuban intellectual (Sergio Corrieri), listlessly inhabiting the early-postrevolutionary scene, seduces a lower-class girl who wants to be an actress, but he remains obsessed with his wife, who has left him to flee to the US. This absorbing film cleverly mixes politics, sex, social-historical document, and self-reflexive doubt in a way that's clearly influenced by Godard and Alain Resnais, but with a special astringency that comes from the director's concern with the problems and possibilities then facing his country.

9. Death Laid an Egg (La morte ha fatto l'uovo; Giulio Questi, Italy)

A pop art Italian sex-and-murder thriller that takes as its subject modern scientific poultry farming, Death Laid an Egg elicits creeping feelings of red spots in the yolk and possible salmonella. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a deviant businessman who's married Gina Lollobrigida for her chicken fortune. He's also having an affair with her secretary, Ewa Aulin. Questi plunks this on the screen in short shots filled with loud, primary colors. The driving scenes rival Weekend's, and are more disorienting. The scenes of upper-class Italian society are as poisonous as they are perplexing. The avant-garde Bruno Maderna score is violent and nerve-wracking. In other words, a good night out.

Most Wanted

1. Silence and Cry (Csend és kiáltas; Miklós Janscó, Hungary)

Silence and Cry, a widescreen effort which has been called Janscó's best film, is set in 1919 Hungary. It's just after the Communist revolution, evidently a time of utter chaos on the Hungarian plains, where this film's action unfolds at an isolated farm. Janscó's style is unlike anyone else's: he films scenes in long, unbroken takes where the camera never stops moving, describing impossible arabesques that leave viewers wide-eyed in disbelief. His films of the Sixties and Seventies, like The Round-Up and Red Psalm, received widespread critical attention then, but seem to be diappearing from public memory, just as the Communist soldiers and hapless villagers of his sweeping, formally daring anti-epics often disappear from the films they're in, and hence from history.

2. The Unforgettable (Nezabyvaemoe; Julia Solntseva, USSR)

Solntseva, the widow of the great director Alexander Dovzhenko, devoted herself to a series of color and widescreen adaptations of his unrealized screenplays and story ideas. The Unforgettable is based on his accounts of the devastation Ukraine suffered during World War II. Although official film history pays lip service to Dovzhenko, one or two of whose films are often screened, Solntseva's work remains completely ignored and unavailable. Yet her Poem of the Sea has a very special emotional quality, and according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, her Enchanted Desna is "as enchanted a dream as the cinema has to offer." How long must The Unforgettable remain forgotten?

3. Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, France)

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, an editor becomes an experimental subject in a time-machine test and finds himself reliving episodes from his past. With this science-fiction film, the director of Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Providence returns to his career-long theme of memory. Whether the result is a provocative masterpiece or an embarrassing self-parody (both views have been held) is something we hope to be able to judge for ourselves someday.

4. Les Contrebandières (The Smugglers; Luc Moullet, France)

Probably the least known of the filmmakers who started as writers for Cahiers du cinéma in the Fifties, Luc Moullet has made a lot of shorts and several features; how many exactly we don't know. Not a one is available in this country. Described as works of inspired comic invention, any of them would be worth seeing, but Les Contrebandières sounds especially promising, as there just aren't many lovers' triangle intrigues set in the world of illegal import-export. According to Straub and Huillet, "Maybe the best film not made by Godard is Les Contrebandières by Luc Moullet."

Overrated

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK)

A deeply thoughtful, powerfully visionary movie about Man and something-or-other. Kubrick seems more comfortable directing props, sets, and ape suits than actors. This may be why he's forced to become the first director in history to use loud breathing on the soundtrack to show that his characters are alive. The film's celebrated visual grandeur consists mostly of the kind of images appropriately viewed in science museums. In its somnolent pace and tone, 2001 suggests, as J. G. Ballard noted, a training film for flight attendants.

2. If. . . . (Lindsay Anderson, UK)

Film-critic-turned-director Lindsay Anderson really had something to get off his chest about the British boarding school system in If. . . ., a film that confuses surrealism with nastiness and revolution with just being pissy. The film's purposeful conflation of fantasy and reality only sets up a convenient out for a movie that doesn't really want to say some hate-filled boys would actually massacre their entire graduating class with machine guns. If. . . . is the opposite of Jean Vigo's 1933 Zero for Conduct, a film it mistakenly perceives as its spiritual predecessor. Malcolm McDowell, in his debut, sadly prepares for his role in A Clockwork Orange.

3. Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, Italy)

World Literature's talkiest teenage couple becomes cinema's in Zeffirelli's drab Romeo and Juliet, a catalog of all the things that make up the Shakespeare adaptation genre: the grafted-on, vaguely period music; the expensive, overdone costumes; the outdoor scenes made in and around crumbling European castles; the befuddled, serious acting; staging that tries to jazz things up and fails; the use of a Shakespeare play for dialogue. Trying to sell Shakespeare to teenyboppers using young, beautiful actors and zoom lenses guarantees artisitic failure, doesn't it? We learned that thirty years ago, right?

4. Barbarella (Roger Vadim, Italy/France)

Sometimes called a comic strip for adults, Vadim's Barbarella is more like pornography for eight-year-olds. For a film that shows Jane Fonda's nipples before the credits have ended, it's resolutely unerotic. It's also extremely annoying in its put-on naivete and grab-bag sense of style.

5. The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, UK)

Joseph E. Levine, who brought the Italian Hercules movies to America, produced this boring costume drama that plays like a TV soap opera with chalices, but without the innocuousness. Set in England in 1183, it very slowly tells the story of Henry II (Peter O'Toole) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), and their struggle over a successor to Henry's throne. O'Toole appears to be imitating John Huston's acting style, and Hepburn, with everything covered but her face, comes off like a snippy hand-puppet. Like Romeo and Juliet, maybe it worked as a stage play.

6. The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, USA)

The geometric, cut-up credit sequence in The Thomas Crown Affair, along with the then-novel multi-split-screen action scenes, have made this Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway heist film better-remembered than a film so pointless and poorly worked-out has any right to be. On the surface it has little in common with the stodginess of The Lion in Winter. They share this, though: both seem like they had no director.

7. Funny Girl (William Wyler, USA)

The smash hit with Barbra Streisand as Twenties stage star Fanny Brice. For a while, old-guard director Wyler sets up an interesting tension between Barbra's hyperkinesis and his own mummified restraint, giving a tantalizing twilight-of-Hollywood mood to the desperate gaudiness. However, it's not enough to sustain a dull, nonmusical second half, and the film ends up feeling hollow. Even while singing about people who need people, Streisand seems less a real person than a show-business machine. As far as bloated, Oscar-laden musicals from 1968 go, we prefer Carol Reed's Oliver!, which is at least acceptable entertainment for the very young.

Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:

Introduction;

1939;

1946;

1953;

1976;

1983; and

1994

Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.