By: Sasha Linden Cohen
The scene last weekend at Metrograph, a Lower East Side shrine to serious cinema, was a bit of paradise for New York’s downtown independent filmmakers and fanatics. They had come to celebrate one of their longtime heroes and collaborators, the renowned indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who recently made his directorial feature debut with “The Sweet East” (2023). The reception marked the release not of a movie, but of his book: “1000 Movies.”
It’s the first ever book published by Metrograph Editions, the alternative movie theater’s retail wing, and the name precedes it: it really is just a list of a thousand movies. It is not a collection of favorites or must-watch films, but a personal list, an evolving list, a theme-less catalog of films that have spoken to Williams at different points in his life. He was stationed at Metrograph’s gift shop booth throughout the reception, signing copies and chatting with cinephiles.
“This whole thing is very funny,” Williams said, buttoning up a collared wool sweater just before the book launch. “I put on my writer’s look. Very authorly, right?” The buttons were misaligned.
He began compiling the list in 2005 when he was fired from the famed indie film store Kim’s Video and Music. Williams didn’t want to forget all the strange, rare selections he’d seen while working there; he wanted to commit them to memory—or at least to an excel spreadsheet.
“I was genuinely afraid that by not being in the proximity of movies, I would start to forget the ones I really loved,” he said. “That was the whole reason I started the list. To just have them down.”
Nearly 20 years later, the list—a living, breathing document which Williams tweaks very regularly as he watches and rewatches films—has been circulated sparingly among friends and colleagues. It has also become something of a white whale among budding filmmakers and cinephiles.
“I’d been told about the list by people in the industry,” said Zev Rand, who formed a friendship with Williams while working together on The Great Pretender (Silver, 2018). “And then a few years later, one of the producers that we both work with sent it to me—but he said, ‘Don’t put it online.’”
A version of the list ended up on Letterboxd in 2018, and the description reads, “Don’t ask how I got it. Let’s pretend it fell from the sky.”
“But you never knew if it was the real one,” said Oscar de la Torre, an independent filmmaker and longtime fan of Williams’ work. “I just really wanted to see it for myself, and see if it’s changed from the version I saw.”
According to Matt Folden, the director of Metrograph Editions and Williams’ co-collaborator on the book, the list was never supposed to be a secret.
“Ten years ago, if somebody walked up to Sean and said ‘Hey I hear you’ve got this list of a thousand movies, would you email it to me?’ He would have emailed it to them,” Folden said. “There was no gatekeeping. But once it came out that there was this thousand list, other people then assumed it was a secret. But it wasn’t.”
Rather, it began as a way for him to keep track of his notable influences and obscure obsessions.
“That’s why it’s not a Top 1000, or 1000 You Have to See. It’s a really personal thing for him.” Folden said.
Williams has long been a stalwart in New York’s cutting-edge movie community, shooting over a hundred features and short films and collaborating with prominent directors including the Safdie brothers and Alex Ross Perry. Beyond his distinct cinematography style, Williams is widely known for dropping deep-cut references and having uncanny recall for films of every ilk.
“I watched Croenberg’s The Dead Zone last night,” he said. “I loved it as a kid, hated it in my 20s for some reason. But I watched it last night and was like ‘What an incredible film, why is that not on the list?’ ”
The book is a low-fi departure from contemporary aggregating tools like Letterboxd, but Williams isn’t concerned about committing this version to print. He likes the idea of having a physical record of something that will inevitably evolve, a kind of collector’s item.
“I watch movies pretty voraciously, so it’s always going to be changing,” he said. “My old friends are picking on me, getting mad at me about changes from the list I sent them 6 years ago. But it changes all the time!”
The book itself, which costs $25, is about as no-frills as it could get. It’s the size of a postcard and about an inch thick, with no written introduction or acknowledgements—just an illustration of the TV at Kim’s video, an homage to where Williams watched hundreds of movies back in the early aughts.
“The drawing of the television is the introduction,” Folden said, when asked about the book’s minimalist design.
Organized chronologically, it begins with The Cameraman’s Revenge (Wladyslaw Starewicz, 1912) and closes with Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018). There are no descriptions or commentary for any of the movies—only the title, director, and year.
“My friend Miles, he had the book in his hand for about 8 minutes and he spotted the typo,” Williams was quick to say. “A misspelling of a female director—she became a man in this edition. Helma Sanders-Brahms, now she’s Helmut. So now I’m thinking in the next edition we’re gonna have to make a man, like a really famous male director, we’re gonna have to give him a woman’s name and see if anyone figures it out.”
The first edition of “1000 Movies” is now sold out, but Metrograph is issuing a second imprint which will be available in two weeks. Williams’ directorial debut, The Sweet East, which features several rising stars including Talia Ryder, Jacob Elordi, Ayo Edebiri, can be found in theaters today.
Sasha Linden Cohen is a Brooklyn-based journalist, editor and audio producer. She can be reached at: sashalindencohen@gmail.com.
