Recently I was moved to think about my experience in the arts and humanities, and the result is this list. It was a focusing and clarifying process. This list is my favorites--not an impartial survey or assessment of world culture--and it represents my own aesthetic sensibility.

I am a connoisseur of international cinema. I value connoisseurship for deepening one's knowledge, contact with, and appreciation of something, and I do not equate it with elitism or snobbery. Genre movies are a dead end. Since I have seen only thousands of films and not millions, it's clear that there are more that I've not seen than that I have. At bottom, the variables of distribution, exhibition, broadcasting, tape transfer, and one's searching ability determine what one sees.

Over the years I have been most impressed, moved, and influenced by the following filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Sokurov, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hans Jurgen Syberberg.

Second tier includes Orson Welles, Friedrich Murnau, Leni Riefenstahl, Chris Marker, Jan Svankmajer, Brothers Quay, Guy Maddin, Bruno Dumont, Alain Resnais, Abel Gance, the National Film Board of Canada.

Third tier: Bernardo Bertolucci, Terrence Malick, Jordan Belson, Michael Snow, Scott Bartlett, Patrick O'Neill.

Films in my Pantheon include: "Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d'elle," "Pierrot le fou," "Week-end," "Je vous salue Marie," "JLG/JLG," "Prenom Carmen," "Persona," "Prospero's Books," "The Pillow Book," "A Zed & Two Noughts," "8 1/2," "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," "If," "The Second Circle," "Mother and Son," "Heart of Glass," "The Man with the Movie Camera," Kieslowski's "Blue," "My Own Private Idaho," "L'humanite," "Flanders," Benita Raphan's "Absence Stronger Than Presence," "Earth," "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad," "Bezhin Meadow," "There Will Be Blood," "Shanghai Express," "The Scarlet Empress," "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary," "Institute Benjamenta," "Capote," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Elvira Madigan," "Loads," "Eraserhead," "Richard III" (1995), "Trainspotting," "A Taste of Cherry," Cronenberg's "Crash," the first two-thirds of "Natural Born Killers," "Gummo," "Julien Donkey-boy," "Death in Venice." Various films of the silent era like "Sunrise," "The Birth of a Nation," "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," "Napoleon," "A Corner in Wheat."

As a connoisseur of cinematography I admire the work of Billy Bitzer, Leonce-Henri Burel, John Seitz, Karl Struss, Charles Rosher, Sternberg's lighting, Eduard Tisse, Gregg Toland, Gianni di Venanzo, Raoul Coutard, Sacha Vierny, Sven Nykvist, Nestor Almendros, Vittorio Storaro, Sergei Urusevsky, Vadim Yusov, Robby Muller, and others.

Television: "The Singing Detective," "South Bank Show," "Alive From Off Center," "Independent Eye," "Smiley's People," "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Twin Peaks," "Kids in the Hall," "Northern Exposure."

For me the most illuminating and interesting film critics are: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Susan Sontag, David Bordwell, J. Hoberman, Gilbert Adair.

I tend to approach art as the statement of an individual personality. I seem to care little what the subject matter is...little about narrative. The conventional cinema is good at making straightforward, linear story films which entertain well, but which rarely attempt much else. They are the filmic equivalent of the 19th century novel. I care little about works that only convey useful information or reflect an image of ourselves, contemporary society, or issues of the day.

Insisting on film as storytelling is hackneyed and unwarranted, and neglects other functions like graphic art, formalism, art for art's sake, developing a mood, playing with ideas, and consciousness-raising (which can be part of a militant political program). With my anti-naturalistic bias, rather than story-telling, I am interested in symbol, metaphor, style, artifice, and the frisson of the sheer upwelling of light. Film can deal with the perennial issues of mortality, consciousness of existence, ignorance, uncertainty, cruelty, longing, desire, what is a good life--in general, our human condition.

The pursuit of realism is a dead end.

Political correctness is anathema.

I am intrigued by "dangerous" art and statements that mix strangeness and beauty (a mix I find in Romantic art). If forced to choose, I prefer a technically rough work that takes risks and pushes the form--over a technically-accomplished work that remains safe within conventional categories. "Academic" art is anathema to the extent that it traffics in consecrated subjects and techniques. Imagination is the key asset. I value transforming one's materials creatively--over mimesis or documenting. I think that, often, filmmakers are so imbued with the realistic-naturalistic style that it's unconscious; hence, many "dramatic" filmmakers are actually documentarians. I want to throw off the heavy jackboot of naturalism from the pale neck of creativity and let it breathe! Film, like other mediums, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with clarity. Art need not make anything clear, or even communicate. I see my task as finding a form that accommodates the chaos without excessive taming.

In the visual arts, I love paleolithic painting (Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira), Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and other American abstract expressionists. Drawings of Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Durer. Also Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miro, James Coignard, Antoni Tapies, Alberto Burri, Jeff Koons, Tom of Finland; surrealist/anachronist realists like Wes Hempel and Graydon Parrish.

In prints: Hiroshige, Ernest Trova, Paul Wunderlich, Ulfert Wilke, Peter Milton, Rockwell Kent, Lynd Ward.

Three-dimensional work of various kinds: Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, Joseph Cornell, Michael Singer, Issey Miyake. Starn twins, Joel-Peter Witkin, Andy Goldsworthy, Eugene Atget. Wright's "Fallingwater," E. Fay Jones. Interior designers: Paul Rudolph, Robert Hutchinson, David Whitcomb. Couturiers: Vivienne Westwood, Dolce & Gabbana, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto.

What do I care about? As both a maker and an experiencer, I want to cultivate and respect the otherness of a work of art--its strangeness, negative capability, ambiguity, capacity to disturb...its refusal to console. Reassuring art comforts but lulls. Strong art is like fire: it is born in what it burns. I care about form and style. To me, strong art provides intelligent gratification of the senses, shows a bold vision and use of its medium, and evinces a style. A prescient artist can freshen one's thinking, hearing, vision, taction, rhythm. Strong art is news that stays news. In all mediums I seek the bold, the subversive, the surprising.

What is style? It is one's pattern of statement. Style is the voice within (even if inchoate or muffled--for me, a lifelong search). And style can be the strategies by which an artist disguises his/her weaknesses.

Writers/poets I love include: Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Goethe and other Romantics, Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Fernando Pessoa, Constantine Cavafy, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Michel Leiris, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Emile Cioran, N.O. Brown, William S. Burroughs, Ben Marcus, J.M. Coetzee, Charlie Smith, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Lutz, Philip Roth.

Metafiction. Simon Schama's "Landscape and Memory." Mark Rowlands' "Animals Like Us." Charles Patterson's "Eternal Treblinka." "The Story of Harold" by Terry Andrews (pseudonym of George Selden). "The Mad Man" by Samuel R. Delaney.

Critics/essayists: Herbert Read, Cyril Connolly, Hugh Kenner, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Sven Birkerts, Jeanette Winterson.

Music: My taste is catholic and I like world music and most types and periods. Music-dramas such as Patrice Chereau's production of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen." Mozart's "Die Zauberflote," Verdi's "Otello." Philip Glass, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, Toru Takemitsu, John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, Gavin Bryars, Biosphere, Peter Gabriel, Bjork, Superpitcher, Talvin Singh's "OK," Pet Shop Boys. Music videos by Zbigniew Rybzcynski.

Theatre & entertainers: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane, reconceptualizations of classics like Shakespeare. Stage directors & designers: Robert Wilson, Julie Taymor, Peter Sellars, Peter Brook, Jonathan Miller, Robert Lepage, Eiko Ishioka, George Tsypin, Frida Parmiggiani. Comedians: Robin Williams, Bill Maher, Monty Python, Jackie Mason, Bill Hicks, Jonathan Winters, Spalding Gray, Joan Rivers.