Jean-Jacques Beineix, Diva (1981), 35mm

A single misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising motorcycle-and-moped chase through the Métro—hotly pursued by a drug dealer’s hit team, ruthless Taiwanese music pirates, and the obviously outmanned flics: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the never-recorded opera superstar Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, singing an aria from obscure 19th-century composer Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally. Beineix’s debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best First Film, Best Music, Best Sound, and Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography), and single-handedly launching the cinéma du look, an explosion of visually stunning, punk-inspired, super-cool French movies in the early 80s, soon followed by the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax. Inspired Fredric Jameson’s essay “Diva and French Socialism.”