SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS’S 1000 MOVIES
BY
Matt Folden
1000 Movies, the first publication from Metrograph Editions, currently in its second printing, is currently available to purchase.
I met Sean sometime around 2005, not so long after he’d been booted from Kim’s Video—a job he never really stopped doing even though he stopped getting paid to do it. To be friends with Sean is to receive a consistent stream of recommendations, analysis, and enthusiasm for movies. It is that spirit which we hope to share with his new artist book, 1000 Movies, which was born out of a list of 1,000 movies that he has constantly updated and shared with friends since 2005, and that has since, maybe or maybe not surprisingly, garnered something of a cult following. We’ve been working on this publication for just under four years now and it’s our privilege to finally present it in this long deliberated format wherein everything is a choice.—Matt Folden, Metrograph Editions
Sean Price WIlliams outside of 7 Ludlow
MATT FOLDEN: I first saw the 1000 Movies list in 2020, during lockdown. We were talking on the phone a lot at that time, and I had asked for the list, because I needed some recommendations for things to watch. I’d heard about the list but had never seen it. You sent it to me, this Excel spreadsheet that was so deranged.
SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS: The genesis of the list was that it started in, like, a panic, after I got fired from Kim’s Video in 2005. I needed to have some kind of record of all these movies I’d been exposed to, that used to always just be there around me. And then I learned Excel from being the archivist for the Maysles. I made up this whole way of archiving the negatives, beautiful Excel documents. It influenced the way that we made this book, for sure. An Excel spreadsheet meant you organize items by category. So we could organize the list by director, or by year. Those were really the only two choices.
MF: And then you started sending the list around to friends, other people?
SPW: Yeah. It was always to one person at a time.
MF: Over the course of the four years to get to this 2024 version of the book, I’ve noticed that you’ve replaced a lot of titles. Do you feel terrible when you fire one of the movies from your list?
SPW: No. Every time I look at this list, I find at least one pick on every page that I wish was not there. Like, they’re just so pedestrian and normal, it’s embarrassing. Then I think, “Oh my God, I wish there was instead some film there that I’ve never seen, that I don’t know.” That’s the whole search. The journey is to replace every movie on that list with something that I don’t now know. Especially the movies from the ’70s and ’80s—these are movies I’ve been living with for so long. It’s like having a bunch of red meat in your colon that you know is there, and you would like to get rid of it.
MF: That’s the optimism of a revisionist history, right?
SPW: Yeah. The real 1,000 Movies is full of things I’ve not seen yet. I’ve been not doing my homework enough. There’s probably 200 out of the 1,000 here that I’m going to keep. But I made a Top 25 list years ago, and it’s barely changed. So to me, this list is not a definitive Top 1,000. This is not a Best Of, or a Greatest Hits.
MF: That’s why they’re not ranked. It’s chronological.
SPW: Yeah. The films I’ve primarily put in this book are films that I immediately engage with, and am inspired by. I’m not saying they are the best films—they’re not at all. And I understand that the earliest films are not engaging with many people. Also, unfortunately, there’s like 50 years of movies barely represented in this book, because it’s just not who I am.
MF: I think that led to an early design decision, to leave blank space within the book. You’re responsible for the layout. There’s the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and each listing has an explanation about how important it is. It’s important that there’s no explanation here. Instead, there are these blank spaces, and there are em-dashes at the bottom of groupings that you came up with, which make little immediate sense. It isn’t clear why Winter Wind (1969) ends a section, and on the next page, all of a sudden, we’re at Last Summer (1969). But as I read on—it’s almost like a Russian Futurist, a Mayakovsky sort of thing—the groupings become more apparent.
SPW: Obviously, all these movies are movies that are somehow in my gut, and I don’t always know how to put them together in any way that makes sense to me. Some of these connections are mystifying, and I want them to be mystifying.
1000 Movies (2024)
MF: To wrap up, I think the book is very giving. You are a generous guy, and you’ve always insisted that you wanted there to be a lot of space for people to cross titles out and write in their own.
SPW: I really encourage people to make this book their own. Like, I have the Krautrocksampler book, which now sells for hundreds of dollars. My copy of it is so fucked up with crosses, highlights, use. So maybe my copy is worth zero? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. This has to be a book that you have, and if you have the movie, you X it out. If you like it, you circle it, you highlight it. And you touch this book, you have to touch this book maximally. Put your blood on it. Engage with it, physically. Because otherwise, you just have tabs open on your computer.
MF: I’m thrilled that that’s the spirit that still remains, because that was the original discussion that we had when we first talked about turning the list into a book, in a time when we couldn’t touch people.
SPW: It’s important that everybody makes it their own version of it. That’s the best part. Like say that that’s the wrong fucking William Wellman movie, and just write the right William Wellman movie, you know?
MF: And there’s blank space to explain it to yourself.
SPW: Yeah, this book should have each user’s rants. And also, tell me!
MF: Hopefully at the end of the day, we have 1,000 copies of this, which each are—
SPW: Individual people. Yeah. That’d be so cool.
Sean Price Williams is an American cinematographer, film director, and actor. He is known for his textured, fluid camerawork (often handheld) and a heightened attention to available light. The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody described Williams as “the cinematographer for many of the best and most significant independent films of the past decade, fiction and documentary.” He was the cinematographer for the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits, and Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street. His directorial debut, The Sweet East, premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and is now in wide theatrical release.
Sean Price Williams, photo courtesy of Leia Jospé
