The complete list
Introduction
In building a list of the best movies of all time, one must acknowledge first that it is a futile endeavor: nobody who has seen fewer than all movies in history has no right to make such a list, and since a huge number - even a majority! - of all films are lost, it's impossible even from a conceptual point of view to do such a thing right. There's also the fact that our opinions change, and we all have blind spots and weaknesses, that "best" can only ever be a euphemism for some degree of "favorite", and so on, and for somebody in the midst of putting together an all-time Top 115, I have to admit that the whole thing is faintly ludicrous.
All that is well and good.
Still, I wanted to be as serious as possible in making this list, but we're all human and we all make mistakes. Herein, I confess to the most stupid errors I made.
10 Films I Totally Forgot About
This is emphatically not, "10 films that would absolutely have made the list" - it's ten films that never even crossed my mind when I was assembling the thing, any one of which might have made it on; I'm sure at least a couple would have. These are the ones that piss me off the most (chronological).
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
Eisenstein's first feature is my favorite - the freshest, the most unmediated.
Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard, 1932)
A magnificent WWI picture, pictorial and violent, and even better than the extraordinary All Quiet on the Western Front (which I also flat-out forgot).
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)
A black comedy decades ahead of its time, with the bravest performance of Chaplin's career.
Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)
Truffaut goes Godard in the creation of his most purely entertaining movie.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)
A heady mixture of religion and Marxism, one of the great political films of all time
The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
It only redefined color cinematography. It's not that important.
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Yes. I fucking forgot about Chinatown.
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1976)
A nervy, perfect depiction of the Id on film. I think I was so distraught that Lynch's Inland Empire didn't meet my qualifying criteria that I forgot he made other films.
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
A grueling endurance test even by the standards of the Holocaust documentary, but as close to definitive as any work on that subject could be.
Grave of the Fireflies (Takahata Isao, 1988)
Easily the most heartbreaking animated film I've ever seen, a depiction of childhood and war that burns into your brain and never leaves, except that apparently it does.
10 Films I Saw Too Late
Cinephilia is a process, not an end point, and I saw plenty of great films for the first time in 2010; but thanks to my allegiance to some totally arbitrary rules, none of them were eligible. The ones that most nearly drove me to fudging the rules (chronological):
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927)
Urban life as visual tone poem.
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)
The great genius's final work is a groundbreaking early example of expressive location photography.
Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)
Hard and very adult treatment of a marriage dissolving; achingly genius character study.
Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944/1958)
Visual storytelling at its most hypnotically refined; formalism and character study becoming indistinguishable.
Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)
A cunning social satire hiding its insights beneath camp. Or maybe it's the other way 'round. Ecstatic proof that the '50s weren't as stodgy as you've heard.
Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964)
Radical "historical documentary" that says as much about modern media (even if it's not so "modern" anymore) and its relationship to warfare.
Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
Gleefully warped political essay nestled inside a genre experiment that would already count as one of the finest police thrillers ever made.
The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)
Fulci's masterpiece is the most hallucinatory of all Italian horror pictures - no mean feat - and also a triumph of nightmare imagery.
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki Hayao, 1988)
A child's eye view of nature and the magic to be found there, it's among the sweetest and most sincere and least insulting family movies I've ever seen.
Léolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992)
A bleak and cruel and hilariously sick coming-of-age tale with a shockingly sentimental heart.
10 Filmmakers I Am Most Appalled to Have Left Off (alphabetically)
Mario Bava
Frank Borzage
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
David Cronenberg
Sergei Eisenstein
Imamura Shohei
Ernst Lubitsch
David Lynch
Nicholas Ray
Josef von Sternberg
10 January 2011
14 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
You know, I was going to half-jokingly berate you for putting films above Barry Lyndon, but then I said to myself, "no, I'll save that for when he puts The Conformist too low." Now I am making the mad face.
ReplyDelete... and you don't want to be on the wrong end of Marc's mad face.
ReplyDeleteI myself am withholding judgement until the full list is out, but I must say that I'm awfully glad The Double Life of Véronique is on there.
No Coens, Lynch or Cronenberg? All among my top 10. :/
ReplyDeleteI don't want to be a jerk or anything, but you forgot Chinatown? Wow...just, wow.
ReplyDeleteHoly shit, yes, I just realized that not-a-one Lynch, Coen or Cronenberg film made the list...
ReplyDeleteI am trying to refrain myself from sprouting off, alphabetically, all the movies those filmmakers have made, but I'm sure you know all this already, and are in fact making penance for your blasphemy.
These are fascinating! Just like the bottom half of almost everyone's annual 10 Best is more interesting than the top half, I think these also-rans are really intriguing to read. Pillow Talk is clearly a very different film to you than it is to me, but that's part of the fun of exercises like this. And we both came very close to putting Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion up there.
ReplyDeleteI've been watching movies seriously for 30 years and I wouldn't make a best 100 movie list yet. I say the only way to do it is have a couple other people help make the list. That said Chinatown will always be up there near the top.
ReplyDeleteChinatown is overrated anyway.
ReplyDeleteFunny that, i was about to comment yesterday that i couldn't wait to see Grave of the Fireflies' rank since it was not yet passed, and then wondered if you had seen it for the first time in 2010.
ReplyDeleteI guess neither! Too bad for Totoro too obviously; now i'm wondering if there's any Miyazaki/Ghibli at all.
And no Coen? Now that's a scoop I wasn't dreaming of :O Shame, sir, SHAME!
Kudos for making these confessions though, it gives even more insight on top of the actual list.
Anyway, a lot of intriguing choices, and many have already entered my instant queue thanks to you, not that I'm as big a fan of la Nouvelle Vague as you guys.
So glad Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre is screening The Mother and The Whore next month, because you piqued my interest in it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the omissions, your official Film Blogosphere Hair Shirt has already been mailed. We expect photographs of you wearing it upon receipt.
It gives me pause that, by far, the most comments have accrued to my post exposing all of my flaws as a thinker...
ReplyDeleteBut then, the whole point of these sorts of exercises is to provoke argument and discussion, so at least that's a good thing.
And not to let everybody down, but the films/filmmakers whose absence bothers me the most are not the Coens, Lynch, Miyazaki, The Conformist, or Chinatown or anything else; but rather Shoah followed at a distance by Wooden Crosses.
Tim, at least for this ephebe, your actual list has been either a) stellar and exciting or b) stuff I've never heard of and now want to check out, so it's much easier to say OMG WHERES BARTON FINK.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, no death threat yet! Maybe they're waiting to see if Star Trek: Reboot makes the top 10 or not...
ReplyDeleteAw, Tim, I think it's just that, as I look at your list, I'm mostly seeing a bunch of stuff I was previously unaware of/uninterested in and I'm now interested in watching them because of you.
ReplyDeleteYour list of neglected directors and films is the only post I can use to reassure my lack of cinephile cred, rather than admit that I am but a pupil at your blog's feet.
I mean, WHAT? NO BAVA!