David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Directed by pacifist Jean Renoir and starring Erich Von Stroheim, this movie was being shown when the German army marched into Vienna in 1938. Not surprisingly, Nazi stormtroopers invaded the cinema and confiscated the WWI anti-war classic in mid-reel.

Produced by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin in 1940, the movie was a brilliant political satire on Nazi Germany. Hitler ordered all prints of the film banned, but when curiosity got the better of him he had one brought in through Portugal and viewed it himself in complete privacy — not once, but twice. History does not record his views on the film.

This was a raucous celebration of rock’n’roll starring Bill Haley and his Comets. In London, its young audience took the message to heart in September of 1954. After seeing the film, more than 3,000 Teddy Boys left the cinema to stage one of the biggest riots in Britain up to that time.

Starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, this film — a Universal production dealing with a dedicated mining engineer and his socialite wife — was playing in the tourist-section cinema of the Andrea Doria on the foggy night in July 1956 when the liner collided with the Stockholm . The film was in its last reel when the collision occurred. Fifty people lost their lives in the tragedy.

A 20th Century Fox production starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and Maurice Chevalier, it was just a little too lavish for the taste of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his 1959 visit to the studio where it was being filmed. The Cold War heated up briefly when Khrushchev reacted with shocked indignation at the ‘perversity’ and ‘decadence’ of dancer MacLaine’s flamboyantly raised skirts.

A double bill featuring two B-style war movies was playing at the Texas Theatre in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. War Is Hell , starring Tony Russell, had just begun when Oswald called attention to himself by ducking into the cinema without paying the 90¢ admission. He was apprehended by the police amid the sound of onscreen gunfire.

The Swedish film starring Lena Nyman as a sexually active political sociologist was a shocking sensation in 1969. On October 6, 1969, though, Jackie Onassis was the one making headlines after she allegedly gave a professional judo chop to a New York news photographer who took pictures of her leaving the cinema showing the film.

Directed by Moustapha Akkad, this picture, which purported to be an unbiased, authentic study, evoked the wrath of the Hanafi Muslim sect, which assumed that the film would depict the image of the Prophet, an act they consider blasphemous. Demanding that the film be withdrawn from the Washington, DC cinema where it was opening, small bands of Hanafi gunmen invaded the local city hall and two other buildings on March 10, 1977, killing one man and holding more than 100 hostages for two days before surrendering. Their protest turned out to be much ado about nothing. The Prophet was neither seen nor heard in the film; instead, actors addressed the camera as if it were the Prophet standing before them.

This Iranian film was being shown in the Cinema Rex cinema in Abadan, Iran, on August 19, 1977, when arsonists set fire to the building, killing at least 377 people (an additional 45 bodies were discovered later in the charred ruins, but these were not included in the official government totals). Police arrested 10 members of a Muslim extremist group that opposed the shah’s reforms and had been implicated in other cinema and restaurant fires. However, another version of this incident was sent to the authors by an eyewitness who claims that police chained shut the cinema doors and fended off the crowd outside with clubs and M16s. The fire department, only 10 minutes from the theatre, reportedly did not arrive until the fire had burned itself out. Surprisingly, this witness found most of the people had been burned to death in their seats.

Born August 29, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois, William Friedkin began his career in television and documentaries before moving to features. His early films include such diverse movies as Good Times (1967), starring Sonny and Cher, and The Birthday Party (1968), adapted from the Harold Pinter play. In 1971, Friedkin directed The French Connection , and became the youngest filmmaker in history to win the Best Director Oscar. In 1973, his adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s horror novel The Exorcist became one of the most successful and controversial films in the history of cinema. His other films include Sorcerer (1977), Cruising (1980), To Live and Die in L. A. (1985), and The Hunted (2003). Friedkin is also a passionate classical music and opera fan, and has directed productions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1998 and Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 2004. He lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, producer Sherry Lansing.

• Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

• All About Eve (Joseph C. Mankiewicz)

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston)

• Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)

• The Band Wagon (Vincent Minnelli)

• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder)

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

• The Verdict (Sidney Lumet)

• Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne)

• Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick)

Born in Glasgow in 1967, Kevin Macdonald is a documentary film-maker whose films include Channel Four’s Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened To Britain (2000) and the Oscar-winning One Day in September (1999). He also wrote and directed the biography of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (1994), and his most recent documentary is a short film, Return to Siula Grande (2004), about how climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates revisited their experience for Macdonald’s film Touching the Void (2003), inspired by Simpson’s book of the same name.

Using pirated stills and archive footage, set to a song by Lena Horne that had been banned in the United States, Cuba’s pre-eminent film-maker fashioned a six-minute masterpiece which angrily, yet stylishly, denounces rascism. It inspired me to think that serious subjects need not be handled in an obviously serious way.

A film which contains not only the solution to a real life murder mystery but also a thesis on the nature of knowledge itself.

The evolution of cheap, high-quality home video cameras has radically altered the documentary over the last decade or so. Suddenly small, personal, domestic stories became easily filmable and the result was a rash of the freshest, most unpretentious films you are ever likely to see. This particular documentary was from the second series of BBC ‘Video Diaries’ and was made by (and about) an Albanian doctor who lives and works in the most appalling circumstances and who loves to listen to English football on the World Service. He hero-worships the Tottenham Hotspur and England player Gary Lineker. It makes you cry — and wonder why you complain so much about your life.