City Lights
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1931
Chaplin's own favorite of his films, and the one people cry at: he refused to make it a talkie, then built ninety minutes toward a final thirty seconds.
★ 9.3
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1931
Showing 29 works across all media from 1931
M
Directed by Fritz Lang
1931 · Germany
Serial killer films begin here: Lang used sound as a weapon in his first talkie, gave the murderer a whistled tune, and turned a whole city into a trap.
★ 8.9
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
Minnie the Moocher
1931
Calloway forgot the words on a Cotton Club broadcast, by his account, and the hi-de-ho call and response was born.
★ 7.6
Frankenstein
Directed by James Whale
1931
Karloff's monster became the face everyone pictures, which is not what Mary Shelley wrote: Whale made a horror film that keeps asking who the actual monster is.
★ 7.1
Cartesian Meditations
1931 · 157 pages
Phenomenology's mature statement: Husserl brackets the world's existence to study consciousness on its own terms, then asks how one mind recognizes another as a mind rather than an object among objects.
★ 6.3
Woman with Yellow Hair
1931 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marie-Thérèse asleep with her head on her arms, the angular violence of Cubism gone soft and curved for a few years.
★ 6.1
Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret)
1931 · 176 pages
Inspector Maigret arrives fully formed in his first case, following a con man off the Paris express to a Normandy fishing port. He solves people rather than puzzles, and Simenon wrote seventy-four more.
★ 4.6
The Great Wall of China · 1931
La Chienne
Directed by Jean Renoir
1931 · France
Jean Renoir was recording live street sound in 1931 when almost nobody could: a meek bank cashier who paints on Sundays falls for a woman he meets one night in Montmartre.
★ 2.0