Film Is For Old People

Now you just have to go through the individual lists so we can know how much of the age bias is due to how long it takes for consensus to form*.

*I’d argue Vertigo is only there because it’s the one Hitchcock masterpiece with the right flaws to distinguish it, but not hinder it. Instead it’s an outsider film made by a consumate insider. Without Vertigo Hitchcock would probably have been Bressoned.

And I think it’s worth noting in regards to the “elite appreciators” theory is that if critics wanted their own elite fiefdom picking lauded contemporary filmmakers would have helped them even more. Art/slow/film festival cinema and popular cinema have diverged strongly since the rise of the blockbuster. Godard, Marker and Tarkovsky have nothing on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Laz Diaz or Bela Tarr in terms of difficulty. Picking old films could be considered a form of politeness or solidarity with populist filmmaking, “look at our common ancestor, eeek eeek, eeek eeek!”

And then the critics would have looked more in touch (at least in regards to contemporary film festivals).

JH – you can’t calculate a mean of calendar years. Please don’t.

I think John Edmond has it right – the later stretches of this list suggest that there is such a thing as “critics’ cinema”, not to be confused with what goes on at The Multiplex (boo!). Here are the directors who make the top 50, by decade since the 1950s:

1950s: Donen, Dreyer, Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Ray, Rossellini, Truffaut, Wilder
1960s: Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Fellini, Godard, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Marker, Pontecorvo, Tarkovsky, Tati
1970s: Akerman, Coppola, Scorsese, Tarkovsky
1980s: Lanzmann
1990s: Godard, Kiarostami, Tarr
2000s: Lynch, Wong

The first thing that leaps out is that there’s a fair amount of “art-house” stuff in the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s. These aren’t Godardian levels of art-housery, but still; I’m sure Pather Panchali is an enjoyable film, but few people reading this will find it enjoyable in the same way as Some Like It Hot (with which it’s tied for 42nd place).

But as the historical pool drains, the art-housery clearly predominates; with the *possible* exception of Mulholland Dr., the latest film anyone who isn’t specifically into Film is likely to have seen is 1979’s Apocalypse Now.

JE @1 Рat least Bresson is *there* (at 16). Whatever happened to Bu̱uel?

I think aepxc hits it perfectly. You damn kids get out of my film archive!

It’s also the reason why all the bubble-gum pop songs of the mid-60s were (and are) indelibly engraved on my 13-year-old brain, even though I hated them.

@aepx: I don’t even remember what I used to like from 15- 25! And most of the movies I watched in the past three years certainly weren’t what I watched from 15-25.

Even the new James Bond film looks disappointing: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/james-bond-skyfall-trailer/ :-(

Apropos of not-very-much, that LA Times article is rubbish. Full of “young people don’t do what people used to do, therefore [insert insulting generalisation about mental degeneration here]”. Also, a couple of college professors said students reacted coldly to Citizen Kane and found The Godfather boring. That’s new! Also, representative!

And at least 7 of the top 10 were either hits (2001, Tokyo Story) or designed to be hits (The Rules of the Game, which, if we could pretend vibes count more than actual success, is the most populist on the list).

@John Holbo S&S are usually good at presenting a representative sample of the votes used to determine their annual best films of the year list, hopefully they’ll at least match that with this. We already have some individual lists bouncing around, to use say….Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an example we get this:

Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai 2003)
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang 1991)
Ran (Kurosawa 1985)
Empire (Warhol 1964)
Valentin De Las Sierras (Baillie 1971)
The Conversation (Coppola 1974)
Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1987) Amusing if you know Weer’s taste for diptychs.
The Eighties (Akerman 1986)
The General (Keaton 1926)
Satantango (Tarr 1994)

I doubt most voters would have been as considerate/obtuse as this, but telling in quantity of nodders that appear.

It appears the film critics deliberately chose the least entertaining Kubrick film for the list (Eyes Wide Shut aside). 2001 is ok – better with Pink Floyd – but Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange are far superior and entertaining as well.

I think it is perfectly plausible that Hollywood, at least, simply doesn’t make movies which are that good anymore. You’ve got the blockbuster mentality, catering to a younger and younger audience of teenagers, catering to an international audience (so no cultural nuance and simpler english), the huge marketing budgets required for world-wide release, the power of philistine 0,01% studio exec’s, use of The Formula replacing pioneering exploration, thus making every single event in every single movie utterly predictable, etc.etc.

World cinema/Art House might still produce masterpieces, but going to see a slow-moving Dardenne brothers’ downer is like eating your spinach. Perhaps even the critics have a hard time with them. And if English language cinema is in decline, perhaps the linguistic barrier makes it universally harder for everybody to appreciate the next masterpiece, which is in a non-global language.

I am happy that Mulholland Dr. scored well, it really was one of the most memorable movies I saw in the theater between ages 15 and 25. That said, I have a hard time thinking of another movie which I saw from that time which belongs on above list. The movie buffs I knew between ages 15 and 25 were pretty much in agreement that mainstream movies really were getting dumber and dumber and that art movies with popular appeal were a dying breed. So it’s not just boomer curmudgeonliness. The young are in agreement: sometimes things do get worse. Hell, sometime between when I was 15 and 25, GW Bush got “elected” and the world has gotten suckier ever since.

Ockham’s razor is an arbitrary superstition, but in this case, he–and the film critics–are inarguably right: “On the other hand, maybe film was just better before Star Wars.”

The “you’re just telling the kids to get off the lawn, you’re a secret conservative” response is so effective while deeply misleading because it’s both true and false. Everyone makes evaluative judgments in part on the basis of personal prejudices that have nothing to do with quality, and most have a bias toward their own time, age, and circle of familiarity.

But the charge is almost always false for two reasons. First, the bias cancels out in these disagreements. The purists assume that if new is bad, older is better, idealizing the past. The average person assumes that if not my time is bad, everything now is good, idealizing the present. Second, these unreasonable motives tell us nothing, positive or negative, about the truth of the judgments. Every film critic in the world may make every judgment for pathological reasons and be absolutely right in their assessments. Indeed, the tendency among the “you’re telling the kids to get off your lawn” folks to assume that pathology proves falseness of judgment suggests the opposite pathology: the belief that newer is better.

In the end, is there anything more tiresome than the charge, as has appeared a couple time in these comments and other threads that “you don’t really enjoy what you say you enjoy!” People who really love movies enjoy things the average consumer doesn’t. Just like people who really like literature, or food, wine, sci-fi or comic books really enjoy things that the average person doesn’t. Would this blog be so cynical about a list of the top 50 novels or the top fifty paintings or the top fifty boring academic treatises about economics or something? Would you demand a more representative historical spread?

Incidentally, do people who repeat the old line about the difficulty of Godard really know his work very well at all? I really have a hard time believing anyone cannot “enjoy” a movie like Breathless, Band of Outsiders, Masculine/Feminine, Weekend, or Contempt. But, go figure, I’m capable of imagining that enjoyment is not dictated by me!

The average person assumes that if not my time is bad, everything now is good, idealizing the present.

“No one ever lost money betting against the intelligence of the average American” & etc. & etc., but I don’t think the above really describes the attitude of the average (if by average you mean “not an art house film snob”) person to film.

If you polled random people on the street about the 20 greatest films of all time, I’m guessing that most people’s lists would include a healthy number of older films because most people have internalized the idea that they’re “classics” (even if they’ve never actually seen the film in question).

My top 10, straight off the top of my head.

O Lucky Man! [because… Malcolm McDowell! Lindsay Anderson! Look, have you seen it? See it, you’ll thank me.]
Sunless [here’s a review]
And La jetée [I mean, come *on*]
The Phantom of Liberty [Wonderful film. Wonderful film. ¡Vivan las caenas!]
It happened one night [Because.]

The Godfather Part Two [Because of the closing shot.]
Dr Strangelove [Possibly the best mismatch of director and script ever. Kubrick couldn’t pace a gag to save his life – but imagine if it had been a funny film.]
The Milky Way [Possibly the best picaresque adventure consisting mainly of theological debate ever made]
Toto le Héros [My favourite film about death. Better than American Beauty.]
Kind hearts and coronets [Because of the man-trap scene, among others.]

Top 10:

1. Les 400 coups
2. All About Eve
3. If …
4. The Maltese Falcon
5. The Third Man
6. Casablanca
7. Battle of Algiers
8. 2001
9. Wings of Desire
10. The Marriage of Maria Braun

Either that or “The President’s Analyst”, which I turned on one night at 1 am and couldn’t figure out what the hell I was watching.

The President’s Analyst is my long-time all-time favorite movie. You are forgiven your previous inexplicable lack of judgement in liking the abomination that is The Lorax.

Possibly, the amazing thing about movies before 1929 is not that they were well made, but that they were made at all.

If you are a highbrow critic, how much is your appreciation of a film affected by your knowledge of its budget and the circumstances of its production?

Hmm, I didn’t realize putting dashes around a word for emphasis would strike it through.

Wow, that LA Times article is garbage.

“As taste goes, millennials seem to have a hard time relating to movies that are only a few years old.”

And yet I suspect most of these same millennials have seen Star Wars (a film released before they were born) multiple times, and a sizable number of them probably think the original trilogy is better than the prequels.

“They find old movies hopelessly passé — technically primitive, politically incorrect, narratively dull, slowly paced.”

This is said with an implied “tut-tut”: those stupid, shortsighted kids! But are they really wrong? Most old movies, even those officially considered “classics”, are technically primitive, narratively dull, and slowly paced. (Political correctness I shall leave to others.) My feeling is that if you’re not going to have good action sequences or some other kind of neat visual, you’re wasting the medium of film. Without that stuff, why not just write a book instead?

“unlike classic literature, around which a whole apparatus has been built so that J.K. Rowling can’t supplant Shakespeare”

Well, why can’t J.K. Rowling supplant Shakespeare? Is that supposed to be a good thing? Why do we believe that today’s best authors are not equal to the giants of the past? If anything, they should be better, since they are selected from a far, far larger pool in a much more fiercely competitive market. The worship of long-dead authors among academia and high culture strikes me as just as absurd as the medieval belief that Aristotle and Galen had already said everything worth saying about philosophy and medicine respectively. Or the grizzled baseball fan at the end of the bar muttering about how everything has gone downhill since Sandy Koufax retired.

I’ve seen a lot of these movies, including Lav Diaz, Tarr and “Just call me Joe” There are plenty of good to great movies being made, they just can’t get distributed. The arthouse directors limit themselves to “arty” movies because that is about the only way they can get on a big screen. It’s a living.

But there are plenty of very good movies that don’t push the boundaries or advance the medium. That should in no way be a criterion. Is Koreeda on the list? Sayles?

Way too much “progress” floating around here, including in the S & S polls and the threads. Not enough 30s movies, not enough from the teens. The idea is that once an idea or technique has been discovered, it must be surpassed, you know, we keep getting better and better. Art don’t work that way. At least for me. Henry Moore is not “better” than Praxitales.

Time again to put the Laocoon on tour again, I guess. We don’t suck compared to our ancestors, but I guess it is importnt that we think we do.

OF COURSE film was “better before Star Wars”….seriously, though: why do people constantly confuse the argument type “cultural forms rise and fall for particular reasons” with “get off my lawn argh”? few would disagree that we’re in a golden age of TV, right? and I think it’s equally plausible that we’re in a lousy time for movies (“film”). the great age of the art house film ended around 1980; the 80s had good American indie movies; the age of serious/arty TV kicks off around 1990 and gets into high gear with HBO…

I don’t see nearly as many current movies now as a did up through about 1999.

Have “art house” films really diverged from mainstream cinema to a greater degree over the last decade?

Back in the late 80s and 90s, my impression was that art house films tended to explain less, be more experimental, and often had slower more deliberate pacing, but they weren’t an entirely separate genus from the mainstream. Different species maybe, but still clearly related.

So does “art house” now designate some very rarified “the sort of thing that people who like that sort of thing tend to like” genre?

Also, it’s not exactly inexplicable that there was, umm, a burst of creative energy (tried looking for less clichéd phrase; failed) in the early to mid-60’s—esp. in Europe! Nor is it at all inexplicable that the cultural products from then continue to be quite significant.

(By way of comparison, if I were to say: I wonder why the Beatles/Stones/Velvet Underground continue to be touchstones for contemporary popular music?, Well, everyone’s a closet reactionary, is really—really—not the most obvious response.)

There are more blockbusters these days – it’s official.

The problem is that it’s difficult to disentangle an actual increase in the fraction of blockbusters (e.g., the number of movies released in a given year or decade — or the fraction thereof — which are blockbusters) from the fact that the market has gotten larger over time. The population of the US in 1940 was 132 million, while it’s now about 310 million. So unless movies were a dying artform, you’d expect a larger fraction of (inflation-adjusted) ticket sales in recent years.

I’d also want to know whether those figures in your plot are “domestic” (i.e., US) or “worldwide”, since I think the latter market has grown even faster than the US market. Modern blockbusters make most of the money outside the US (example: Avatar made $706M domestically, $2.0 billion outside the US; Inception made $290M in the US and $533M outside). But just 30 years ago, that wasn’t true: Raiders of the Lost Ark made $242M domestically vs only $142M outside the US. (Numbers from boxofficemojo.com)

Josh G. @ 50:
Meanwhile, the artistic integrity of big-budget cinema is compromised by the need to appeal to a mass international audience and to appease Chinese censors.

One could make the same sort of argument about the Hays Code and similar censorship which operated in the US film industry up until the late 1950s, and yet we’re perfectly happy arguing that great movies were made back then.

Fred Cairns @12:
They are only prepared to sink money in safe bets – increasingly that seems to be characters from the comic-book age. They are going to appeal to the kids and the oldsters with happy memories. Apart from those, inventive films are thin on the ground – and seem to come from independent funding.

I agree generally and would cite Source Code as an example.

However. Your final clause does exclude films like Inception, which was both inventive and not even remotely indie. Of course we could call it an outlier, since it was made by the guy who has made one of the top grossing movies of the last decade, and so the studios would let him light a Brinks truck full of money on fire if he wanted to (and if he filmed it, it would be moody, dark and compelling). But if film is an auteur’s medium, then the good stuff is all outliers anyway.

As to the list though, it’s boomer critics being boomers. For a film to make this list it needs to meet one of three requirements:

1. Be fondly remembered from childhood (which as we all know, ended in 1963)
2. Be fondly remembered from film school
3. Be made later than 1966 but not after 1996 and evoke nostalgia for 1 or 2

I don’t have a problem believing that the people figuring out the rules of movies and genres made some of the most interesting movies, and I don’t think there need to be modern movies on the list because they’re modern. List-making is a competitive enterprise and if you imagine each newly-released film competing with 100 years of prior cinema then not much new is ever going to get on the list. The bias just seems reasonable, regardless of my own lack of desire to track down everything on their list and see something new.

The Lorax was no Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Did you look at the top-10 list compiled from working directors? It’s got a later average, because it doesn’t include any silents – but its most recent film is Apocalypse Now (1979).

I don’t see how you can argue that these directors are conservatives who their own work as inferior that of a past Golden Age. I understand the basis for your cynical view that the critics are acting in bad faith – it’s about their prestige as keepers of the cultural flame; but what benefit would directors obtain from running down their own era in preference to the past?

An alternative explanation is that critical judgment tends to coalesce over time. For more recent years, the voters are most likely over the map, each with different favorites, and no one film attracts enough support to make the list. But for older films, only a few have become generally accepted as iconic expressions of their periods. These films get selected repeatedly, so they appear on the final list.

And you’re left with a “ten best” list that doesn’t reflect the average age of the films on the lists of the individual participants at all.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the rise of home video in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which made it dramatically easier to access (many) films from the past. Before, filmgoers had to rely on the choices made by repertory film houses and (often local) television, each of which had established their own effective canons built along quite different lines from each other, due to the rather different economic and aesthetic imperatives of the film theater and television businesses (college and university film societies and film classes provided a third, more limited, venue for seeing 0lder movies).

Once VCRs became commonplace, however, access to movies not currently in release dramatically diversified. I’m sure this change had a serious impact on the relationship of movie watchers (and filmmakers) to the cinematic past.

JK Rowling has supplanted Shakespeare and may even have supplanted Tolkien. O tempora.

Disclaimer – I am not a boomer and have not been to film school.

My film list is probably like my wine collection – not many ‘big’ names and stars, but bottles that I have tasted myself and decided are worth getting and keeping.

I never got Potemkin. I only started to tolerate Kane a year or two ago. And only watched the Antonioni trilogy and Ozu a few years ago, and loved them. And I dislike ‘Weer’.

What would I ‘sit down to watch’? Not the multiplex stuff usually, and even a lot of commercial films that want to aim higher seem to rely on well used formal/plot mechanisms and tropes. And then I sit there and get a feeling of ‘been there done that’. I guess Potemkin (and Alexander Nevsky) are good for that – showing you just how long ago these things have been done.

I did watch Satantango twice within the span of a week, don’t ask my why. But I would choose Werckmeister over it. And The Turin Horse. Out of a few dozen films at the VIFF last September, the only thing I remember is not being able to get out of my seat at the end of that film.

And why Stalker and not Solaris?
And why Persona and not the 7th Seal or Fanny & Alexander?
And why The 7 Samurai and not Ran? or, god forbid, Dreams?

To a bit more patriotic and obscure, Atanarjuat makes my top 10-15 list, and the final scene of ‘The Diaries of Knud Rasmussen’ ranks with the best of them. But only makes sense in context.

Kaos makes my list too.

Where’s Haneke in all this?
Where is Nuri Bilge Ceylan?
No one Romanian?
No one Iranian?

‘Bes Vakit’ makes my list and I have shamefully forgotten the director’s name.
‘N months, N+1 weeks, N+2 days’
How could I forget? Yi-Yi (one by one)

I have a feeling that if I really tried to think, I wouldn’t stop at ten, and maybe not at 50. But I don’t score wines either, preferring to listen to them speak, if they have anything to say.

… the older movies that are mentally available to voters being much higher in average quality than the hundreds from the past few years.

Yes, indeed. It’s easy for most of us to have some awareness of the mediocre and awful movies of the past few decades, since we saw some of them and remember people complaining about others. I suspect this plays some role in helping drag down our impressions of recent movies as a whole.

What we’re missing is the vast sea of forgettable movies (and outright crap) that was produced in, say, the 1930s and 1940s (something like 300 or 400 movies each year); only the really good stuff has any visibility now, and so it’s much easier to look on that period as somehow higher in quality than our squalid present.

Note – I didn’t go look up the per capita figures, I have them in a book somewhere, but it’s not to hand, so I may be wrong.

“Vertigo” and “Citizen Kane” jostling for 1st is like chairs on the deck of the titanic. The iceberg is the fact that nothing new is being added to the canon … It isn’t possible for an ‘art’ canon to take form; it gets broken up in the wake of these massive productions.

Art movies are icebergs and Titanic is… the icebreaker? It’s late.

David in NY – I think David Thomson said that Chinatown was the last grown-up film Hollywood ever made, which is close (it was 1974). That was certainly a ‘great'(-ish) film that also ‘mattered’ (a bit).

I think the volume of movies does make reaching consensus on more recent greats a chore. The point about weeding out over time strikes me as good. In general, if I want to defend good contemporary/ post Star Wars movies it’s much easier to think in terms of directors, rather than individual works. Jarmusch, Malick, Wong Kar-Wai. I like van Sant’s aesthetic in his arty movies. Guy Ritchie films are very fun to watch (I’ve probably seen Snatch more than any other movie).

Surely some of the works of the first three belong with the classics, even if the process of consensus formation makes selecting which specific ones a chore.

John, to an extent I agree that the past thirty years have been underrepresented. There is a simple solution: conduct a similar poll restricted to the past thirty years. But having gone through all the individual lists featured in the print edition, I doubt you would be pleased with the results.

This brings me to your larger point (which somewhat reminds me of the recent debate about “slow cinema”, ironically kicked off by the editor of S&S, see here). When you talk about “films that [don’t] matter”, are “culturally marginal” and list that “feels right” I wonder who is supposed to be the arbiter and according to what criteria – and, above all, who cares? People talk about jazz, classical music, philosophy or literature, while the general public is largely and happily ignorant of these matters. I can understand a certain amount of defensiveness being created by the hyperbolic title of the list, but as I said above it is the result of very personal choices by people who clearly love and know a lot about film. How many of the films listed have you actually seen (in my case 50%) and why the urge to discredit them instead of being open for new discoveries? The mighty Wurlitzer of mainstream Hollywood cinema, the Dark Knight fanboys and IMDb top list obsessives already drown out most of the talk about film, so why can’t the cinephiles have their day as well?

I don’t have the 2002 or 2012 data, but long ago collected all of the individual critics’ and directors’ lists from the 1952-1992 polls here (well, all that were published in Sight and Sound, so not all of them, but a good sample).

I’ve only skimmed the comments here, so perhaps I’m repeating somebody else, but on the fact that the past few decades are underrepresented: I don’t think it has less to do with a lack of consensus and more to do with a lack of conviction. For example, the two 21st century films on the S&S list are #1 and #2 here: http://www.theyshootpictures.com/21stcentury_films1-50.htm. I think there are many recent films which have high critical consensus; yet, when compared to older established masterpieces, they seem to lack intellectual sophistication and artistic boldness. (“Can I in good conscience list this Hollywood blockbuster beside Fellini?”)
I would say this is because modern films which do have sufficient sophistication and boldness are incredibly difficult and very divisive. That films like Satantango or Histoire(s) du cinema made the list, in spite of their strong supporters, is somewhat surprising considering how difficult they are. In the Mood for Love, which strikes a good balance between intellectualism and easy viewing, is much less surprising.

In short, modern films with any sort of consensus are typically artistically weak compared to the older canonical films.

To say something of my own opinion, I find that with almost new high-profile film list like this, there are always complaints about the lack of recent cinema; but I never think this is a problem. The problem with the S&S list is how conservative it is. In spite of the fact that the internet has unearthed so many long-forgotten masterpieces, in spite of the fact that the vibrant online film community is pushing our views of cinema art to new places, we still list the same movies we’ve been listing for decades. Not at all in the spirit of our era!

The Wikipedia article on “blockbusters” notes that the term (which originally referred to massive conventional bombs in WW2) really did mean “massive hit” up through the 1970s, and was applied to plays and novels as well as films.

The more modern, “genre” term (in John Holbo’s sense) has its origins in the 1970s, when the spectacular success of Jaws, reinforced by Star Wars, set the trend for action-adventure spectacles with large budgets, massive coordinated advertising campaigns, and wide summer releases (it really was Jaws that set the pattern for this[*], even though all anyone seems to remember now is Star Wars…).

[*] As John notes, Star Wars had a relatively small opening (43 theaters), in contrast to Jaws’ 409 theaters.

96: something’s gone wrong with the film industries of France, Italy, and Japan

Can’t speak to France or Italy, but:

Cinema of Japan

“The 1970s saw the cinema audience drop due to the spread of television. Total audience declined from 1.2 billion in 1960 to 0.2 billion in 1980”

(Whether the cause is really, or completely, television or also demographics can be argued.)

A lot of art films, or just domestic dramas and melodramas, are now financed by gov’t and television, or some combination or consortium of same. Check carefully the production credits for a Kitano, Haneke, or Kiarostami.

David Bordwell is good on the history and economics of Int’l Cinema.

I thought about Wall-E, and then I was reminded of the bit in A portrait of the artist when Stephen’s friend talks about appreciating Praxiteles’s Venus and especially the arse on her.

Hypothesis: the Critics are consciously or otherwise disqualifying all films that make you go “phwoar” or “aargh!” or “aw, cute!” at any point. Second hypothesis: all contemporary blockbusters are designed to make at least part of their audience go “phwoar” and “aargh!” and “aw, cute!” at least once. And that’s what’s different about films since Jaws, and that’s why there are so few of them in the list, and that’s how you beat Capone… no, sorry.

I count three masterpieces in the last decade: Pan’s Labyrinth, 2046, and Inception.

But the dominance of international films in the list would (naively) suggest that something has gone wrong globally in the last few decades. More specifically, something’s gone wrong with the film industries of France, Italy, and Japan, which together accounted for about half the movies in the list.

I don’t think this list is in any way indicative of the state of the film industry in the past decades.

The French for instance are doing really well, due to a strong domestic market, some amazing talent and a unique system of film funding. And the film output ranges from blockbusters and genre films to art-house with a very large middle ground. The Scandinavian countries have also been very strong (relative to their size) in recent years. And while the German film industry seems to be in a constant state of malaise, there are nevertheless some interesting films being produced on a regular basis.

That said, the golden days when people queued around the block in New York to watch the new Fellini are definitely over and the language barrier seems to be ever more insurmountable – but on the up side you can get almost anything on Amazon.

Just out of interest, has anyone here based in the US heard of these recent films/directors:

Paolo Sorrentino (Consequences of Love, Il Divo) Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool), Jacques Audiard (The Beat that my Heart Skipped, A Prophet) Fatih Akin (Head On, Edge of Heaven) Olivier Assayas (Carlos) Susanne Bier (Brothers, In a Better World) Christian Petzold (The State I Am In, Yella) Ole Bornedal (Just Another Love Story) Joachim Trier (Oslo 31 August) Per Fly (Inheritance) Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem) Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children) Guillaume Canet (Tell No One) Cédric Klapisch (Paris), Fred Cavayé (Anything for Her)

maybe film was just better before Star Wars; George Lucas (and Spielberg) ruined everything forever.

Maybe there actually were more great films made in some decades than in others? or maybe, at least, that’s what the polled critics honestly believe? Holbo seems to be ruling this possibility out a priori, but I’m not sure on what grounds.

Also, since the way the thing works is each person submits an unweighted list of ten movies, the list is necessarily going to be based on breadth rather than intensity of support. It’s not surprising that it takes a while for a consensus to form. It’s quite possible that the lists of the individual participants include just as many movies from the 2000s as from the 1940s, and that the overweighting of the older vintages just reflects the fact that there is more of a consensus about which movies among them are the best. Is that so strange?

There’s really no reason to think that critics have an arbitrary or snobbish preference for older movies.

And of course arthouse movies are, on balance, better. Otherwise what would be the point of them?

On animation: Snow White should at least be in there on the “historical importance” criterion, but apparently too few people put it on their top ten list. The main problem I see is that the obvious critical consensus works of genius to nominate are short form films by Yuri Norshteyn, like Tale of Tales, and Hedgehog in the fog. This stuff is poetic, it’s hypnotic, it’s intense man! But I guess it’s too short to count as a full movie. I hope against hope he will succeed in completing The Overcoat before his death, and they’ll nominate it and/or his collected works on the list. But anyway, when your genre’s official genius is too perfectionist and too poor to make long movies, you’re left with a dilemma.

But even for Disney: I’ll wager Dumbo is the most critically acclaimed of his works, and it’s pretty short. So what long-form works can you put up there? Grave of the Fireflies might be the Japanese entry, but I haven’t seen it yet. Need to stock up on tissues first.

For recent animation, I was most impressed by Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a transporting movie, and Nina Paley’s one-woman-produced ultra-low-budget epic Sita Sings The Blues.

Well, if we’re going to include animation then yes, the Toy Story trilogy and My Neighbor Totoro will push a few titles into the 11-20 bracket. Though I tend to have a separate best of animation list, not because I think they should be segregated, but because Studio Ghibli and Pixar have at least 10 movies between them that could fill all ten slots. And sometimes I’m in the mood for animation and sometimes I’m not. There’s a categorical difference between the two types of movies, even if they are attempting to perform the same function.

112: Pinocchio is now considered the peak of early Disney, both artistically and thematically.

novakant @105

FWIW I’ve seen a good 80 % of the movies on that list. Some were interesting (The Beat that my Heart Skipped), some were dreadful (Just Another Love Story) and some were uniquely euro-dreadful (Inheritance); most were about so-so. I’d say there’s more interesting work coming out of East Asia – China, S. Korea, HK, Thailand (yes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) etc. It may just be that, at this point, European cinema has a deeper tradition to live up to than most others.

@114

The Readers’ choice list that’s next to the ML list is fantastic.

Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard for the win!

(I’m sorry to see that Josh G. disagrees on this. Altho maybe not, it’s boring to agree with someone on everything.)

@117 Yes! I am sorry: I had meant to leave a warning about that readers’ list. CT-ers of a sensitive disposition may find it distressing.

novakant @105:

I’ve probably seen films by about 50% of the directors on that list, and generally my response would mirror Nine’s (@115), but more importantly: Carlos! I like Assayas a lot generally, but Carlos was immense. If I were picking recent masterpieces, that would be damn near top of the list.

Josh G @116: what js said @122. There is every reason to think that people who spend their lives watching and thinking about films will know more about them than the rest of us do.

And as a point of fact, most film critics are not “self-appointed”. The professional ones certainly aren’t. Harry Knowles and his ilk are, I suppose, and S&S’s widening of the franchise for its poll may mean that a few amateur bloggers etc are included, but I would guess they are in a minority. As S&S puts it, it used “simple chains of recommendation” to choose its electorate, so charges of cultural homogeneity and group-think could possibly be made to stick. The idea that critics are being deliberately “obscurantist” in order to gratify their lust for fame lacks any evidence to support it.

If anything, the incentives go the other way. As in academia, the way to make a name for yourself as a critic is to challenge conventional wisdom, as Godard and Chabrol did when they championed Hitchcock in the 1950s.

Look at Zizek’s top ten, for example, which he boasts makes “no compromises with high quality or good taste”. That’s not entirely true, but he does include ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Dune’ and ‘The Fountainhead’!

On which subject, if you ever wanted proof that vox populi /= vox dei, that Modern Library list of readers’ favourite books of the 20th century should settle it forever.

‘The idea that critics are being deliberately “obscurantist” in order to gratify their lust for fame lacks any evidence to support it.’

I’d go beyond that, and say it fails the laugh test. There are some magazines for people who take film deeply seriously as an art-form – Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinema, Senses of Cinema etc – but the %age of critics working at these publications isn’t that large. The vast majority of film critics work in publications where, how to put this, they are not paid to insult their readership’s intelligence.

In what dark time line is Dumbo more critically acclaimed than Cinderella, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty? Sure, the gender politics of the Big 3 aren’t exactly progressive (or even very modern) but it beats the hell out of 75 minutes of racist jokes and DT flashbacks.

I couldn’t speak to general critical acclaim, but I will note that, while Snow White is unimpeachable, Cinderella is flippin’ terrible, and Sleeping Beauty gets by to the extent that it does solely based on animation quality. Dumbo is a lovely little film, racist elements notwithstanding.

‘Course, my favorite early Disney movie is The Three Caballeros, so I might just be weird that way.

But the title character in Sleeping Beauty is too asleep most of the time to make much impression (I like Merryweather, but that’s about all). And Cinderella has those horrible talking vermin, as well as a love story that, even by Disney standards, is awfully damned limp. And if I were talking about the Disney renaissance, I wouldn’t say The Little Mermaid; I would say Beauty and the Beast, which may well be the best overall.

For Greg and Uncle Kvetch way up yonder, here are my Top Ten Brian Eno Party Songs.

1. Here He Comes
2. Burning Airlines Give You So Much More
3. On Some Faraway Beach
4. I’ll Come Running
5. Needles in the Camel’s Eye
6. Baby’s On Fire
7. The True Wheel
8. Driving Me Backwards
9. Mother Whale Eyeless
10. Help Me Somebody

Chillout after-party track: The Belldog

Further chillout: something, you know, ambient.

So, here’s a thought about the movie list. Why not another post (it’ll need a fresh one) rating movies from the last 30 years. Say, best films since 1970. And then you can argue about which ones might make it into a longer-run, larger canon.

I really like films where the director extends the intellect to using the surface of the screen image, i.e. the succession and the plasticity of shapes, for a new audience effect. Such as widening the connotation, or finding a new style of story structure. Consequently my gods are Ozu, Bresson, and Fellini. I don’t find it among many current filmmakers. It is not just emotional ability, these people had an intellectual development and curiosity that extended into changing how to tell a story or changing how the moving image gives emotion. There is analogy to music. That explains how I get to some of my Top 25, with the proviso that I haven’t seen much new stuff (such as by Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul):

Chaplin-The Gold Rush (1925) & City Lights (1931), Keaton-The General (1926), Lubitsch-Trouble in Paradise (1932) & To Be or Not to Be (1942), Renoir-The Rules of the Game (1939), Frank Capra-Meet John Doe (1941), Cocteau-Orpheus (1950), Donen-Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Ozu-Tokyo Story (1953) & Good Morning (1959), Ray-Pather Panchali (1955), Ford-The Searchers (1956), Fellini-8 1/2 (1963) & Amarcord (1973), Welles-Chimes at Midnight [Falstaff] (1965), Bresson-Au hasard Balthazar (1966) & Mouchette (1967), Kubrick-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Tarkovsky-Stalker (1979), Morris-The Thin Blue Line (1988), Malick-The Thin Red Line (1998), Koreeda-After Life (1998), Lynch-Inland Empire (2006).

Perhaps it will become harder to find new ideas, as time goes by. The middle section of Malick’s Tree of Life is good. Scorsese’s King of Comedy (1983) found a new kind of character in the world, which I think must be very hard to do, like inventing Sherlock Homes. I have a sweet spot for stylish, “meaningful” 1970’s entertainments–I suppose this is related to my own coming of age: I really admire Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), Chinatown (1974), and especially Altman’s Long Goodbye (1973) and California Split (1974), which I still think are Altman’s most interesting films, the remarkable capture of an evanescent mood.

California Split is out of print, and used DVD’s are selling at Amoeba in Hollywood for $35-$40.

I love the actors and craftsmanship in stuff like Casablanca and The Godfather, but I don’t think the films are interesting as inventions. So maybe there ought to be a list of the 50 greatest melodramas.

Dune’s been done as a mini-series. My son and I liked it, and we both adore the book. It had William Hurt and a really low budget, as I recall. A & E?

But what the hell, let’s do fake science!

Now you’re thinking like a mathematician! :)

Even disregarding precisely how ‘good’ and ‘best’ are evaluated, and just assuming that an ordering is possible, a “best of” list will always skew old. All you need is a long enough time horizon; the minimum quantity necessary to qualify as Top 10 is a monotonically increasing function of time. So long as your measure of quality is meaningful enough to ensure the distribution of quality is not close to uniform, it doesn’t even matter much whether the distribution of quality is normal or exponential or what have you; surpassing the maximum (or “tenth beneath maximum” or “fiftieth beneath maximum” or whatever) will become increasingly difficult as time passes. And since you can scale time, it doesn’t matter whether you look at movies over 50 years’ time or literature over 400 years’ time, so long as lots and lots of things were produced in the time span you’re considering.

The only real requirement is that the timespan you consider “new” is significantly smaller than half the entire timespan under consideration (so, taking 1982-2012 as new relative to 1922-2012 works, as does 1960-2000 relative to 1600-2000).

And that’s not to mention less abstract stuff like thematic capture, with early works acknowledged as untouchably canonical exemplars of a wide variety of general themes (you could play South Park’s “the Simpsons did it” with literature/theatre — “Shakespeare did it!” — but actually “the Simpsons did it” is a good example for animated TV). If you already have a perfectly good movie that is your stand-in for Movie About X, Y, Z; then other movies about X are less valuable, because you already have that. Old films get all the really general thematic slots (which newer films might get if you constructed a canon by running time backwards). If you’re not lucky enough to get in early, you have to narrow your focus in order to achieve as high a quality rating as the early works; you can’t hope to make the classic about forlorn unrequited love, because we already have that.

And also asymmetrical noise; as more and more old works get forgotten, the really good ones are remembered as better, because of how they stand out relative to all the current movies, utter schlock included, and because of how different they seem, relative to all the current movies. And also 3D CGI.

Dune’s been done as a mini-series. My son and I liked it, and we both adore the book. It had William Hurt and a really low budget, as I recall. A & E?

Good lord. I actually bought the DVD of that mini-series on a friend’s recommendation (not being able to watch it on TV, since I was out of the US), and I thought that was rather awful. The director (or possibly the cinematographer) had a fetish for red and/or blue mood lighting of scenes (which destroyed any attempt to suggest that a scene might be outdoors on a planet, as opposed to something shot on a set), the fight scenes were done with unusual incompetence, and the costume designer was really keen on Bizarre Hats.

(Yes, it had William Hurt — in full sleepwalking mode, alas. Looking at imdb, I notice that Matt Keesler of “Middleman” was in it, but otherwise no one terribly interesting.)

Sometimes, as soon as the plot engine revs up, these things go downhill for me.

Sorry, now that link won’t work. Google “clockwork orange alex parents” and hit the images button. It is metallic blue and red, almost at the precise middle of the film.

Kubrick was a slow, methodical director obsessed with the look of things, who made slow, methodical films that dwell obsessively on the look of things. Sometimes – actually, quite a lot of times – the subject matter he chose is at such a sharp angle to this approach that the result is brilliant. Perhaps that was what he kept looking for – not so much stories that he could tell his way as stories that would be interestingly wrong to tell his way.

My fave recent directors are:

Edward Yang (best known for Yi Yi, because it was actually released (!) stateside, but my favorite was A Brighter Summer Day)
Jia Zhangke (dating back to Platform, but Still Life was a kick in the head too)
Hong Sangsoo
the Dardenne brothers (The Son is my favorite by a hair)
Philippe Garrel
Marco Bellocchio
Lucrecia Martel
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Shinya Tsukamoto (an insane person, but he makes wild films)
Alexandr Sokurov
Claire Denis
Lynne Ramsay
Carlos Reygadas
plus Akin and Audiard as someone mentioned.

German films, don’t remember the directors: Revanche, Everyone Else, Summer ’04, Yella (this one’s Peitzold, I do remember that), Free Radicals.

Also, seen recently: Bab’ Aziz, City of Life and Death, United Red Army, Gilles’ Wife, Beeswax, Times and Winds (this is “Bes Vakit” as mentioned above; dir. Reha Erdem), Turn Me On Dammit!

So I have no complaints about the present.

I saw “I am Love” just last week! Tilda Swinton is amazing – check her out in “We Have to Talk About Kevin”.

And nvalvo, apologies for getting your name wrong

“unable to perceive a diamond in the low-brow rough (to mix minerology with physiognomy).”

Speaking of low-brow roughage, John Cusac and Kevin Spacey are (together and separately) building a rather impressive collection of enjoyable low and middle-brow roughage. I doubt any of it’s top-100 material, though. The problem is that it’s tough to do romantic comedy better than Katherine Hepburn and film noir better than the real thing.

Top 100 is hard. There’s a ton of older Japanese stuff that deserves to be in the top 100: just about everything Kurosawa did through Dodeskaden is top-100 material (Stray Dog, Record of a Living Being, The Hidden Fortress, The Bad Sleep Well are all amazing), and there’s gobs of other great stuff as well, although I’m not aware of anything post-Dodeskaden by anyone else that’s up there. (Non-Kurosawa favorites here include “The Profound Desire of the Gods” and the original 1958 version of “The Ballad of Narayama”, although the key scene at the end wasn’t subtitled in the print I saw, and requires being able to read Japanese to get what he was saying: oops.)
There has been a recent series here, “ALWAYS San-Chome no Yuhi”, the first one of which at least was diamond-in-the-roughage class. An amazing CG recreation of early post-war Japan just as things were getting going again, featuring the best performances of their carreers from some otherwise uninspired actors. (Momoe Yamaguchi’s hubby as the spitting image of my father in-law (a rural primary-care physician who passed away this year at 97) down to the motorbike physicians used in those days to make house calls). And a bunch of subplots that had almost identical real-life counterpoints in my wife’s family, e.g. as a 12-year old, my brother in-law ran away from home (briefly) to help one of his classmates search for his mother, who had run off from their family.

In another digression, Tokyo Story is being remade with the island my in-laws live on (and their Buddhist (Jodoshinshu) temple, which is seriously gorgeous**) as the rural location. Remakes are usually horrifically horrible*, so about the only good news is that it might give a boost to the island’s fizzling economy. (The island is “Osaki Kamijima”, a very pretty place.)

**: http://www.pbase.com/davidjl/image/26074520/large

*: About the only counterexample I’ve ever run across was H.Ford’s Sabrina remake. The original struck me as hokey and unbelievable with Bogey seeming like an unattractive lout, whereas Ford’s version is within the range where suspension of belief works and one can enjoy it.

Speaking of H.Ford, Regarding Henry and Random Hearts are definately diamond-in-the-roughage class, although the vast majority of his work isn’t. But I’m a sucker for maudlin sentimentality (a prerequisite for living in Japan).