This is going to be what - 4 posts in a week? man! it's sad that it's taken the icy hand of death snagging too cinematic giants to do it.... that and Danny Ainge having one of his infrequent genius flashes....
But enough of that, right now, I want to note the dissemination of the Online Film Community's Top 100 Movies list, hosted by CinemaFusion. This is a project hatched in response to the AFI's updated 100 greatest American films, polling miscellaneous bloggers to compile a list, meant to - what? "convey the average movie enthusiast’s thoughts"? Well, it's up: I looked at it at a couple places, saw The Godfather and Citizen Kane at 1-2 and figured it was a rehash of the AFI list and thus less interesting than any of the contributing blogger's lists.... But now, reactions are appearing - I read Ted Pigeon's post on the list, and took a closer look.
It's tempting to just light into it - it's got some problems. Pigeon says it is as "arbitrary and homogeneous" as the AFI list - I'd say, it's a good deal more homogeneous (and probably arbitrary) than the AFI list. It lacks the strangeness and twists big compilation lists usually have - instead, it almost looks like one guy could have made it. And I certainly mean "guy" - it's a young man's list (a point noted by commenters everywhere, notably at Edward Copeland's site.) The comments there zero in on it - 51 male contributors, 4 female, notes one; - "anything that can read feminine did poorly: musicals, melodramas, almodovar" (quote Nathaniel R of Film Experience.) The films added to the list are mostly science fiction films, action films, horror films, recent comedies - plus a particularly anemic crop of foreign films (the anointed classics, plus some goo, like Cinema Paradiso.) The films taken off....
I have seen a couple remarks about the emphasis on genre films - but what's more interesting is the balance of genre films: the AFI list, for example, has plenty of genre films - but quite a few different types of genres. This one strips off everything but the anointed classics and the action/sf/fantasy/horror films. Compared to the AFI list - quite a few of the westerns were cut; a great many noir and older crime/adventure films are gone - Bogie's contributions have been pared back to the essentials. Almost all of the musicals are gone. The melodramas and romances are gone - Gone With the Wind is gone with the wind! There are plenty of comedies (some very good ones), but the focus is changed: most of the old comedies are gone - the fucking Marx Brothers are gone! (An unpardonable sin.) The social problem films have been cut back - a couple are hanging around, but just as many are gone.
In place of those films? more science fiction, action films, fantasy... some foreign films - 10, actually - a miserable number indeed. Very few art films, and those films that, usually, fit just as well as action films - Aguirre Wrath of God, say. No Godard, Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Sternberg - nothing with women in it, except The Passion of Joan of Arc, which presumably the contributors read about somewhere...
Okay... tempting as it is to slag on it - it's also tempting to try to parse it a bit. For example - it probably is a good snapshot of film culture today, what's in fashion, how people look at films, at the aesthetics and history of films. Though one of the most depressing aspects of the thing is that it shows that history and aesthetics are right out. However this list got generated, the result shows very little interest in film history - the films on the list are heavily skewed toward the present, what people watch and talk about now, and films that led directly to what they watch now. It shows no interest in going back looking for things that are out of fashion - which is one of the points of this kind of exercise, I would think. It's one of the themes that has come up in the comments on Bergman and Antonioni this week - people like me, who took them for granted or relegated them to the sidelines, so to speak, have to think about them - think about their place in history and their value, their relationship to the rest of film history. YOu want that from lists - it is a major reason to monkey around with lists: to confront what you haven't thought about in 5 years; to reassess Eisenstein or Blade Runner after not thinking about them for a while....
The other sticking point is the lack of interest in aesthetics: in art films. In anything challenging. This online list, oddly, came out every bit as middlebrow and safe as the AFI list - maybe more, since there's less sign of different constituencies pushing different films. (That is actually a very strange feature that I don't know how they managed: most compiled lists will tend to be predictable toward the top, where everyone votes for Citizen Kane and The Searchers and The Wizard of Oz, but gets weird further down, where the individuals and partisans of types of films start to have an impact. You can probably see that in the AFI list - you can imagine films supported by generation, maybe by gender, actors vs. critics vs. technicians... that probably accounts for some of the "arbitrariness" of the list. That's mostly missing from the online list, which surprises me - usually, you find some bloc of voters pushing something - some auteur, some national cinema (people like me pushing Japanese films), genres - that make some impact ont he list. I don't see it here.) It's odd - it's very hard to imagine making a list of 100 films without Godard, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Antonioni turning up - even back when I was on AOL, and getting involved in list making projects, often involving quite a few real live high school boys - there were always blocs of Tarkovsky and Malick fans around - and all of that, all those directors, are missing here.
So - does all this mean anything? I suppose if this is representative of the online film community - especially if it's an online film community that considers itself better than the general public - it's kind of depressing. Comparing it to those high school kids I used to know on AOL - it's depressing - they managed a good deal more ambition and adventurousness than this poll did. It's depressing that a survey of world cinema could only come up with 10 foreign language films, including Run Lola Run. It's depressing how easy this group seems to be with their ahistoricity. I might also suggest that when people vote for subjective reasons, they usually end up more conventional and like everyone else than when they vote like eggheads: probably because "subjective taste" is mostly a social value, much more about belonging to a community than about interacting with an object (a film, say). But for all that - it's also harmless. It's also not really representative of the online film community I read. It's not really representative of the individual contributions to the list that I read. Individual lists are always more interesting than the finished product, and this project generated a lot of them, which is good. And it's probably normal that a social project like this film poll should end up emphasizing social values - it did what it's really supposed to. So bitch though I may, I'd as soon see more of these things, rather than less. It's fun.
Though any list without Duck Soup doesn't count.
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2 comments:
The problem with list of this sort is that there are (at least) a couple thousand films made over the past 100 years (around the world) that amount to genuine masterpieces. And each one of these is uniquely valuable. Moreover, the vast majority of these master works are unknown to most list makers (no matter how diligent they may as to film viewing).
How many Americans have any capacity to reasonably assess Japanese cinema? I've seen several hundred films -- but there are still huge gaps in my knowledge -- and many of these gaps are virtually unfillable (not even unsubbed copies being available).
How many people can assess Filipino cinema? Answer -- almost no one -- even in the Philippines -- as most of the important works of major directors (Brocka, Bernal, de Leon) are totally unavailable (and, even worse, often in unrestrably execrable condition).
The same questions can be asked about the cinematic output of most of the world. And while Hollywood films (old and new) are more accessible. Many of the most important films of the past still remain virtually unseeable. (viz. "Dock of New York"). Anf -- if almost everything WERE available -- how many people (especially younger people) would have time to see everything that NEEDS to be seen?
That said -- no list I'd make these days would ever have "Duck Soup" on it. Fifteen years ago, maybe -- but not anymore. Despite classic (and priceless) comic bits, I now find the film so shapeless and visually ugly, taken as a whole, that I can't include it as a favorite. The only Marx Bros. film that remains quite high in my esteem is "Monkey Business" -- and it probably would never make it onto any top 100 list I might make. (Field's "It's a Gift" and Lubitsch's "Marriage Circle" likely would, however).
No question - you are right. Though the sheer number of worthwhile films is one of the reasons that, while compilation lists like this aren't much good, the lists that go into them, and the reactions to them, can be quite interesting. No one can see everything, or even really know what they ought to see - but if enough people around them see things, write about them - you can start to get an idea. You cover what moves you, and try to pay attention to what moves other people, and hopefully, between everyone, you can form an idea of just what there is in the world to know. Lists aren't the ideal vehicle for this, obviously - but they make a nice shorthand, a guide to what people are thinking about... Individual lists, I mean - compilations don't do as much. They might have some sociological value, but they don't do much for the films.
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