To a great extent I agree with the many who claim that film lists are meaningless. Forced to work in hierarchy, how does one rank Kubrick’s tale of droogs and state oppression higher or lower than Kiarostami’s intimate, playful take on the nature of film in the 1990s? Of course it comes down to personal preference, and those who shout that “these lists are subjective!”, as if it’s a somehow twisted practice, should not be congratulated for stating the obvious.
The Sights and Sound critics and director poll, which happens once a decade, enjoys a particularly exalted status among cinephiles. Critics and filmmakers from around the globe are invited to submit their top ten lists of the best films ever made (some worked their lists out on napkins in restaurants, while others used software that auto-picked ten titles out of a hundred possibilities). The Sight and Sound list, I would say, is not meaningless, even though I see sense in David Poland’s statement that, to paraphrase, the list is a series of navel gazings between others' and one's own.
The Sight and Sound critics list is meaningful because it shows interesting developments in cinephilia over the past years, such as the rise in prominence of silent movies. Someone suggested that the success of The Artist reminded critics that there are silent movies and that’s why silent cinema has reclaimed such strong positions on the list. Not to be bullish, but any critic worth her/his salt doesn’t need a contemporary French film to be reminded of the wealth of silent cinema.
Of additional interest is the lack of recent films on the list. The most recent film in the top ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. Broadly, the suggestion is that in the past 45 years, no films deserving of a top ten position had been produced. It could of course more plausibly be that the exclusion of certain great names and films reflects the general age of the critics who voted, specifically their own familiarity with films from their formative years (I see the formative years of cinema as mostly located between adolescence and the late twenties).
Finally, and this is the big one judging by internet response to the list, there is the dethroning of Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Kane is about an obsessive politician whose pursuit of power tragically shapes his eventually empty life, while Vertigo is about an obsessive detective who colours his empty life by clinging to an illusion of an-other. The triumph of Vertigo over Kane reflects the recent evaluation of Hitchcock as the greatest filmmaker ever, rather than the cultural decline of Kane. Personally I’d take Kane over Vertigo any day; for that matter, I’d take Rear Window over Vertigo just as easily. No self-respecting cinephile would doubt the merit of any of the below films; it is their ranking and inclusion at the inevitable cost of other worthy titles that arouses much animated discussion.
The Sights and Sound critics and director poll, which happens once a decade, enjoys a particularly exalted status among cinephiles. Critics and filmmakers from around the globe are invited to submit their top ten lists of the best films ever made (some worked their lists out on napkins in restaurants, while others used software that auto-picked ten titles out of a hundred possibilities). The Sight and Sound list, I would say, is not meaningless, even though I see sense in David Poland’s statement that, to paraphrase, the list is a series of navel gazings between others' and one's own.
The Sight and Sound critics list is meaningful because it shows interesting developments in cinephilia over the past years, such as the rise in prominence of silent movies. Someone suggested that the success of The Artist reminded critics that there are silent movies and that’s why silent cinema has reclaimed such strong positions on the list. Not to be bullish, but any critic worth her/his salt doesn’t need a contemporary French film to be reminded of the wealth of silent cinema.
Of additional interest is the lack of recent films on the list. The most recent film in the top ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. Broadly, the suggestion is that in the past 45 years, no films deserving of a top ten position had been produced. It could of course more plausibly be that the exclusion of certain great names and films reflects the general age of the critics who voted, specifically their own familiarity with films from their formative years (I see the formative years of cinema as mostly located between adolescence and the late twenties).
Finally, and this is the big one judging by internet response to the list, there is the dethroning of Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Kane is about an obsessive politician whose pursuit of power tragically shapes his eventually empty life, while Vertigo is about an obsessive detective who colours his empty life by clinging to an illusion of an-other. The triumph of Vertigo over Kane reflects the recent evaluation of Hitchcock as the greatest filmmaker ever, rather than the cultural decline of Kane. Personally I’d take Kane over Vertigo any day; for that matter, I’d take Rear Window over Vertigo just as easily. No self-respecting cinephile would doubt the merit of any of the below films; it is their ranking and inclusion at the inevitable cost of other worthy titles that arouses much animated discussion.
The Critics’ Top 10
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963
(The directors’ list at least includes four films from the 1970s, but my focus here remains on the critics' list.)
Now for some navel-gazing of my own. Below is a list of films I consider to be (possibly, impossibly) the ten (or at least "ten of the") best films ever made. Asked tomorrow, the list might very well look very different. So it goes.I had one guiding rule (that, too, is changeable): I can include only one film per director. In addition, the titles listed below had to be films that leapt to mind with considerable ease. I am confident that a more prolonged selection process would result in a different list.
In alphabetical order:
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Come and See (Klimov, 1985)
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982)
The Piano (Campion, 1993)
Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000)
Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1994)
Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)
The above list consists of titles that leap to mind when I am asked, as first year students often do “what are, like, the best films ever?” And yes, I cheated; there are eleven films listed above. I have seen each of these films at least three times; Blade Runner viewings stand at nine. (The film I've seen most times is Terminator II: Judgment Day, standing at 15 viewings. 1994 was a slow year with long school holidays).
The critics list seems to reflect an unfamiliarity with films from certain eras as well as the work of certain major directors. I have not seen near enough of world cinema to make a list that draws on the riches of the filmmaking globe. At the same time, I have met many (but not all!) of the greats, such as Kurosawa, and then the challenge becomes: which Kurosawa to include? Rashomon? Ran? Throne of Blood? The eponymous Seven Samurai? The gentle passage that is Ikiru? Those whose TV habits are restricted to CSI have no idea how gratifying mental revisitations and explorations in great art can be.
Finally, I suppose, I'm grateful for a list like Sight and Sound's because, if only for a few days, film takes center stage in current affairs (unrelated to any festival), and, at least from what I can anecdotally tell, encourages discussion about what constitutes a great film in many of those who have never heard of Kurosawa before. They'll get there, of course, if they take film seriously enough. They'll get there.
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