Returning to the ABC Studios in Sydney for the first time in a while, Richard Gray joined ABC Overnights host Rod Quinn for a chat about bad movies. This time out, we latch onto the recent release of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (and the home release of the Oscar-winning Spotlight) to talk about journalists and reporters on film.
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From Superman and Crocodile Dundee to All the President’s Men and Citizen Kane, there are plenty to draw from. Listen as Richard attempts to remember the movie Absence of Malice, and then gives up and moves onto something else.
Once again we need to thank Rod for the invite on the show, and producer Mawunyo Gbogbo of course! We’ve been appearing on ABC Overnights semi-regularly, and you can find most of our previous appearances here.
Of the countless lists that line newsstands every year, the BFI Sight & Sound magazine’s decennial list is one of the most prestigious and canon-forming of the breed. For the first time since 1962, the list has changed radically, or at least as radical as this 80-year-old list gets.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has supplanted Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), which has held the top spot unchallenged since it knocked Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves (1948) from the list fifty years ago. Indicative of a new-found respect for the works of Hitchcock in the last few decades, who was largely seen as a maker of popular thrillers at the time, the list doesn’t acknowledge younger generations of outstanding filmmakers. Gone too are Singin’ in the Rain (1954), along with The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), pushing the canon even further back behind the New Hollywood siege of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latter is perhaps a victim of a new rule that saw related films that are considered part of a larger whole to be treated as separate for voting purposes.
01. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchock, 1958)
02. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
03. Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
04. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
05. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
06. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
07. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
08. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
09. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1928)
10. 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
With the most recent film in the top 10 from 1968, are we to believe that . Last year, when musing on the validity of lists in the 21st century in our piece Polishing the Canon: The Importance of Lists, we address the holding pattern that many lists have been in for decades, seemingly not acknowledging the power of cinema of the last four decades.
The idea of a film canon, a set of films by which all other films should be benchmarked, is the underlying ideology behind the plethora of lists that emerge from various film societies, critics and publishing houses. Attacked as elitist…[t]his debate is nothing new. Back in 2002, Dan Sallitt wrote (on Slate) about the prestigious Sight & Sound list, The Greatest Ten Films of All Time, that appears once a decade. Sallitt argued that while the list purports to be “a snapshot of the evolving film canon” that even with “a few shifts and substitutions” very little had changed in the ten years since the last poll. Indeed, Citizen Kane had been the top film in 1962, and remained that way forty years later. “Unfortunately”, he added “for the foreseeable future…major directors of today’s cinema are likely to appear in the Sight & Sound polls only as commentators”.
In the Mood for Love (2001)
Very little has changed in the last decade in this regard. The list is undoubtedly an impressive one, and there are few who would question the inclusion of any of those films in an essential compilation of last century’s greatest pieces of cinema. Yet it is absolutely of the last century, sidelining much of the last 44 years of motion pictures, technological developments, groundbreaking cinematography and entire careers of seminal filmmakers from the likes of Martin Scorsese to David Lynch and beyond. The BFI actually remark on this, but offer little else in the way of commentary: “In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet…”. One time Sight & Sound writer Raymond Durgnat, who later fell out with the publication, referred to the list as being filled with elitism, puritanism and “upper-middle-class snobbery”, especially in his 1963 essay “Standing Up For Jesus” for Motion. If the tome aimed to solidify their reputation as elitist, then the shuffling of the cards this year has ensured this.
By contrast, when the list began in 1952, cinema was less than half-a-century old, with the four-year-old The Bicycle Thieves topping the list. Similarly, the 1972 list included what would now be a radical departure with Igmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), less than a decade old at the time of publication. The backwards looking lists seem at stark contrast with the publication, which can be otherwise be applauded for a thorough coverage of contemporary world cinema, including those films that do not get a wide release in its native UK.
All lists will engender debate, such is the subjective nature of film criticism. Similarly, to compare Citizen Kane and Vertigo, made some 17 years apart and under very different circumstances, is folly. What Sight & Sound‘s once-a-decade list reminds us of is the importance of lists in sparking conversation on film, and it is through the commentary of others that critics and audiences find themselves discovering corners of the film world that were otherwise darkened. If these lists are to remain relevant, a major shift must take place in the value of contemporary cinema, and it is right here on the Internet that the changes will take place as more people create their own lists, giving birth to a constantly shifting digital canon.
The history of film can be told in lists. At least, that is what you’d be forgiven for thinking if you were a regular buyer of popular film magazines or were to wander the aisles of any book store’s collection of tomes on film. The American Film Institute has an entire section dedicated to lists on their website, following their 100 Years…100 Movies series. If lists ever had significance, much of this has been diminished by the promotional nature of the device, largely used to sell magazines or promote campaigns. Regular readers of popular film magazines may have seen The 500 Greatest Films of All Time on several passes now, or wonder if there are any genres left to tackle. Indeed, every month Empire lists a new Top 10 of something, with the most recent Australian edition barrel-scraping by listing the Top 10 Most Superficial Characters. We too are guilty of this, devoting a section of The Reel Bits’ articles to Lists as well. Perhaps a Top Ten Lists of All Time is in order?
A steady canon
The idea of a film canon, a set of films by which all other films should be benchmarked, is the underlying ideology behind the plethora of lists that emerge from various film societies, critics and publishing houses. Attacked as elitist by some, writers/filmmakers such as Paul Schrader (perhaps best known for his Taxi Driver script) defends the need for a canon in his musing on the state of film writing in 2006 article for Film Comment entitled Canon Fodder. Excluding documentaries, non-narrative films and repeat entries from the same director, Schrader lists 20 films in his canon, with an additional forty runners-up. His idea was to “counter the proliferation of popularity-driven lists”. This argument, however, tends to be based on film as a singular kind of medium. So how important is a film canon in 2011, when the world of film is constantly evolving with new production and delivery methods, with major directors shooting films on iPhones or delivering them via online platforms such as MUBI?
This debate is nothing new. Back in 2002, Dan Sallitt wrote (on Slate) about the prestigious Sight & Sound list, The Greatest Ten Films of All Time, that appears once a decade. Sallitt argued that while the list purports to be “a snapshot of the evolving film canon” that even with “a few shifts and substitutions” very little had changed in the ten years since the last poll. Indeed, Citizen Kane had been the top film in 1962, and remained that way forty years later. “Unfortunately”, he added “for the foreseeable future…major directors of today’s cinema are likely to appear in the Sight & Sound polls only as commentators”.
‘Citizen Kane’ – still the greatest?
Indeed, this is true of so many lists. On the AFI’s 2007 edition of 100 Years…100 Movies, the two most recent films in the Top 10 were from 1972 (The Godfather) and 1980 (Raging Bull). All other film in the Top 10 had been released prior to 1965. Of the 23 “new” films added to the list, only two had been released since the creation of the previous list in 1997. One of the new entries, coming in like a rocket at #18, was 1927’s The General, a cracker of a film to be sure: but did it really need a 2007 list to remind us of that? Surely there had been some seminal pieces of cinema in the previous decade that demanded more widespread attention? Is it not the duty of organisations such as the AFI to promote all cinema to the world, especially those that don’t make the mainstream, rather than dust off the same Citizen Kane-centric lists once a decade?
New ammunition
Yet currency doesn’t seem to be the only solution either, with recent editions of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die controversially dropping classics in favour of the occasional flash-in-the-pan hit. The latest edition has added Todd Phillip’s The Hangover and James Cameron’s Avatar, yet dropped Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie. Why? Film is a constantly evolving medium, in a state of flux because it is one of the newest in the overall history of art. Yet to use Schrader again, his definition of a canon is that a film must be “by definition, based on criteria that transcend taste, personal and popular”. (For the record, his own Taxi Driver comes in at 36). Some of the more recent entries on the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list certainly fail on that last count. If a film does not stand the test of time, as some would argue is the case with Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind or more recently The Return of the King or Avatar, should it be stricken from the record? Is it no longer “good film”, or is it simply a case of pandering to changes in taste? Both are perfectly valid responses, and there is no reason they need to be mutually exclusive.
So lists are full of problems, and often represent the subjective interests of a handful of (possibly) elitist critics? Yes, and no. As mentioned, Schrader’s own list contains a film he penned, but does this mean it is not objectively an ‘essential’ film? Of course not, and countless other critics will testify to the power of Martin Scorsese’s urban nightmare, while others may dismiss it as mindless violence. The point is that film criticism is necessarily a subjective pursuit, often as much about crafting one’s own clever language around someone else’s work. Yet it is through this critical engagement that a deeper appreciation of film is achieved, with personal canons created almost every day. The act of watching is reviewing: it is comparing with what has come before and what will potentially come. To restrict the canon to an agreed upon set of films – to set the bar too highly as it were – even if those films have been selected by a society (or group of societies), is to narrow the view too much. In this light, a canon restricts the effervescent imaginations of critics around the world, but it is the same ‘old school’ thinking that causes filmmakers to rebel and create something entirely new every generation or so.
You may fire when ready
No matter what it is called – a film canon, a ‘best of’ list or the ‘Top Films of All Time’ – they all serve a similar function as a starting point. To think of them as the base by which other films are measured has its uses, but with hundreds of worthy titles released around the world every decade, it is far too limiting to tie ourselves to old-guard notions of what constitutes good film. Rather, we (both critics and audiences alike) should use each and every list as a place to discover new and exciting films from around the world, in the hope that we will one day have a personal list of films that defines each of us and our personal journey through cinema.
