In this triumphant culmination of a filmmaking career largely devoted to depicting the randomness and cruelty of war, director Samuel Fuller follows a rifle squad from the Allied attack on North Africa to the liberation of a concentration camp, while serving up typically potent images in which pulp meets poetry.

The godfather of Senegalese cinema, Ousmane Sembène, crafts a powerful ode to resistance in this sui generis blend of ritual, folklore, and fantasy.

Akira Kurosawa captures an endangered way of being in the world with this stately ode to wilderness, in which the encounter between a Russian military geographer and the Nanai hunter he has hired to guide his expedition across the Siberian taiga leads to an unexpected friendship.

Perhaps Bresson’s most explicitly political film, this searing send-up of post-’68 France is among the most chilling cinematic portraits of a historical moment.

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s adaptation of two seemingly disparate novels by the Italian writer Cesare Pavese juxtaposes a series of conversations between mythological figures about the relationship between gods and mortals with the story of a man who returns to his native village to discover it transformed by the war years.

Jean-Luc Godard and co-director Anne-Marie Miéville added their own voices to footage gathered over two years for an abandoned film project commissioned to document the Palestinian struggle for independence, ultimately giving rise to a fascinating analysis of the production of political images. Preceded by Jean-Marie Straub’s Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment of a Cinematic Scene.”

Banned by the French government upon its release in 1973, Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel’s landmark documentary about the struggle for abortion rights in France stands apart from the militant cinema of its era, allowing us to see its subjects not as illustrations of a trend, but as individuals with their singular problems and perspectives.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rarely screened epic masterpiece is a peerless work of mourning that explores German collective guilt through a dizzying assemblage of monologue, pastiche, and grandiose theatrical visions.

Wim Wenders launched Lightning Over Water to give his ailing mentor Nicholas Ray a last chance at making a movie—not only as a co-director, but as star and subject. The result is at once scrappy and tremendously moving, alternating between glorious 35mm shots of a vanished downtown Manhattan and all-too-raw video footage of the great auteur.

Juxtaposing documentary footage of real rodeos with elegiac black-and-white studio photography, Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men is a poignant record—at once melancholy and exhilarating—of a nomadic life of trailer camps, craps games, post-show benders, and 10 seconds of death-defying glory on the back of a wild bull.

In Robert Kramer and John Douglas’s epochal documentary, the filmmakers took stock of their generation’s hopes and struggles, constructing a kaleidoscopic epic that follows dozens of characters both willfully marginal and yearning for community as they reckon with the aftermath of the radical ’60s.

Mauritanian-French director Sidney Sokhona’s documentary account of a rent strike at the Paris hostel where he and 300 other immigrants were housed in squalid conditions is a politically astute, formally dazzling hybrid of documentary and fiction.

Godard’s first long-form experiment with video is an intimate, at times raw look at a French family of the 1970s—complete with an uncommonly frank depiction of the sexual dynamic within a married couple—in which the sound/image tension at the core of Godard’s cinematic project reaches a new complexity.

Among world cinema’s most infamous works, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film transposes the Marquis de Sade’s seminal 1785 novel about the depravity and perversity of the French ruling class to Italy in 1944, one year before Mussolini’s death and the end of World War II.

Displaying its director’s taste for offbeat casting and a rigorous eye for framing and atmosphere, post-New Wave French filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette’s first feature follows the trials and tribulations of a small theater company operating on the margins of the Parisian establishment in the late ’70s.

In his last on-screen appearance, Jacques Tati’s beloved alter ego Monsieur Hulot is a car designer trying desperately to get his latest model from the workshop in Paris to a car show in Amsterdam, contending with mechanical failure, obstinate customs agents, and terrible gridlock en route.

Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to convene a panel of critics and filmmakers to discuss the significance of Serge Daney’s thought today, with a particular emphasis on how his politically driven analysis and radical enthusiasms of the 1970s might speak to our contemporary moment.