A New Film Canon
0June 1, 2013 by gaughin
Hey, I love Citizen Kane. I have seen it many times, I love the Roger Ebert commentary that comes with the Criterion Collection set, it’s a great great movie that I can’t imagine I will ever grow tired of.
And I can accept that it’s the greatest movie ever produced, if that’s even a valid concept, and my OCD wants it to be, so I will compulsively continue to cling to the notion that any group of items can be ranked according to specified criteria, even if that notion of ranking is fundamentally in conflict with the idea of a “pure” art, which is undermined by the requirement that one thing must be better than another. My brain, my very being, needs to list things; it does not necessarily need for you to agree with the order, or even agree that things can be ordered. But if you happen to be entertained by the lists, or the ideas behind the lists, or the jokes I try to ram into the justifications for the lists, then hey, bonus.
So, some 70ish years since Welles released his masterpiece, it is still widely held to be the best film ever produced in dozens of lists utilizing multiple metrics to accomplish the ranking.
But there is a part of me that would like to see a different kind of list, a list that highlights more recently produced great films. I am maintaining the great actor project, an ongoing attempt to recognize the film careers of currently working actors who have achieved the highest levels of lifetime achievement. There’s hundreds of blurbs related to that project on this very blog, although I am several hundred blurbs behind. I have mostly been posting updates to the list on Facebook in recent months. Those have largely consisted of notifications as to who is in the top 1000, and who they replaced, although there’s occasionally a mini-commentary attached. In retrospect, my compulsive over-sharing of this information may have done as much to drive away many of my Facebook friends as my political ravings. Is there anybody out there?
Anyway, one of my Facebook pals, umlaut Jo, asked me if I could rank directors as well as actors. I did that many years ago, and a list of the top 500 or so historical directors is available on this blog. But it’s something that doesn’t take as much work as the actors project (in which I have to determine not only the strength of the film, but also the actors’ prominence; no need to do that for directors.) So I started a new look at directors’ careers, and I am tracking two things. The first is lifetime career achievement the directors. I am using a different metric for that than for the earlier list. I am simply designating what I feel are the directors’ ten best films, and tallying those films’ ratings. The previous list looked at every film by the director, and actually attached a penalty for bad films. But Scorsese’s going to be remembered for Raging Bull and Goodfellas; no one’s likely to downgrade him because he made Kundun.
If I know the films, I use my own ratings; if not, I consider the collected wisdom of established critics from multiple sources. I run these individual assessments alphabetically, and it took about 10 days to finish the directors whose last names begin with “A”. Here’s the current top ten;
1) Woody Allen
2) Robert Altman
3) Michael Apted
4) Pedro Almodovar
5) Anthony Asquith
6) Michelangelo Antonioni
7) Robert Aldrich
8) Hal Ashby
9) James Nelson Algar
10) Jack Arnold
The second thing the list is going to try to accomplish is a little more ambitious; I am going to rank about half of all the films ever made, using a metric that favors more recent films and more recent filmmakers. It factors in the strength of the individual film, the year the film was released, the lifetime significance of the director’s films, and how “contemporary” the director is, as measured by the year AFTER WHICH half of her/his 10 best films were released. So while I would personally argue that Woody has achieved more with his body of work than AL MO DOH VAH (it must be said dramatically like that, with equal emphasis on each syllable,) Almodovar has a few films that are the equal of Woody’s, and he’s more “contemporary” than Woody, so as of today the top three films on this list are Almodovarified. Here’s a piece of the list, for which I need a good/better name, but I am thinking of it for the moment as “contemporary classics.”
| 1) Talk to Her – Almodovar |
| 2) All About My Mother – Almodovar |
| 3) Bad Education – Almodovar |
| 4) Short Cuts – Altman |
| 5) 49 Up – Apted |
| 6) Gosford Park – Altman |
| 7) Crimes and Misdemeanors – Allen |
| 8) Midnight in Paris – Allen |
| 9) 56 Up – Apted |
| 10) Volver – Almodovar |
| 11) Hannah and Her Sisters – Allen |
| 12) 42 Up – Apted |
| 13) A Prairie Home Companion – Altman |
| 14) Carlos – Assayas |
| 15) The Player – Altman |
| 16) Irma Vep – Assayas |
| 17) Husbands and Wives – Allen |
| 18) Paris, Je T’Aime – Assayas |
| 19) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – Almodovar |
| 20) Broken Embraces – Almodovar |
| 21) Manhattan – Allen |
| 22) La folie Almayer – Akerman |
| 23) 35 Up – Apted |
| 24) Rushmore – Anderson |
| 25) Live Flesh – Almodovar |
| 26) Annie Hall – Allen |
| 27) Nashville – Altman |
| 28) Radio Days – Allen |
| 29) The Purple Rose of Cairo – Allen |
| 30) McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Altman |
| 31) M*A*S*H – Altman |
| 32) 28 Up – Apted |
| 33) Boogie Nights – Anderson |
| 34) There Will Be Blood – Anderson |
| 35) Vincent and Theo – Altman |
| 36) L’Eau Froide – Assayas |
| 37) Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story – Apted |
| 38) Thunderheart – Apted |
| 39) The Caine Mutiny Court Martial – Altman |
| 40) Fantastic Mr. Fox – Anderson |
| 41) Clean – Assayas |
| 42) The Law of Desire – Almodovar |
| 43) Ulysses’ Gaze – Angelopoulos |
| 44) The Darjeeling Limited – Anderson |
| 45) The Flower of My Secret – Almodovar |
| 46) Something in the Air – Assayas |
| 47) The Edge of Heaven – Akin |
| 48) Love and Death – Allen |
| 49) Gorillas in the Mist – Apted |
| 50) The Long Goodbye – Altman |
| 51) The Wrestler – Aronofsky |
| 52) Les Destinées – Assayas |
| 53) The Singing Detective – Amiel |
| 54) Sleeper – Allen |
| 55) Magnolia – Anderson |
| 56) Late August, Early September – Assayas |
| 57) Sting: Bring on the Night – Apted |
| 58) Cinema, of Our Time: HHH – Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien – Assayas |
| 59) Mahler on the Couch – Adlon |
| 60) The Royal Tenenbaums – Anderson |
| 61) Eternity and a Day – Angelopoulos |
| 62) Rust and Bone – Audiard |
| 63) Matador – Almodovar |
| 64) Coal Miner’s Daughter – Apted |
| 65) A Prophet – Audiard |
| 66) Soul Kitchen – Akin |
| 67) Bottle Rocket – Anderson |
| 68) Shrek – Adamson |
| 69) Demonlover – Assayas |
| 70) The Weeping Meadow – Angelopoulos |
| 71) Star Trek Into Darkness – Abrams |
| 72) Punch-Drunk Love – Anderson |
| 73) The Master – Anderson |
| 74) Pelle the Conqueror – August |
| 75) Gandhi – Attenborough |
| 76) The Barbarian Invasions – Arcand |
| 77) The Beat That My Heart Skipped – Audiard |
| 78) The Bear – Annaud |
So that’s a thing that should consume my every thought until my dying day.
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