Lists and anniversaries

It’s not easy to make a compilation of your all-time favourite movies.

It was, of all things, on a tennis website that I had one of my more intense movie-related discussions recently. This was during “off-hours”, when the matches for the day were long over and the inevitable squabbles between Federer fans and Nadal fans had quieted somewhat. Our conversation turned to must-watch films and someone asked for recommendations of “definitive classics”. So another commenter supplied a list of great films, categorised by director and genre. Fair enough. But what I found odd was that he made a firm distinction between the movies he personally loved and the movies that he classified as Essential Viewing.

 

For instance, his own favourite Kurosawa was The Seven Samurai, which he said “invigorates me like no other film”, but at the same time he proclaimed that “the best” Kurosawa was unquestionably Ran (because it was a more “formally perfect” work that belonged to the director’s mature period). Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane headed his top 10 list though he admitted that he personally found it somewhat boring. He explained the distinction by saying that some films met the “generally accepted criteria” for greatness — being internally self-consistent, perfectly merging form with content — and that therefore these belonged to the Canon of Indispensability, though they wouldn’t necessarily be to all tastes.

The immediate problem with this view is: which supreme authority gets to decide what films meet all the criteria and to what precise degree? If you take a large sample of the world’s most knowledgeable directors, students and critics, and ask each of them to list their top 10 movies, you’ll end up with hundreds of different titles. There can never be complete consensus even about seemingly quantifiable individual elements like camerawork or dialogue — much less the overall mix of tangible and intangible things that go into making a film what it is.

At any rate, the best, most interesting lists are the ones where you get a sense of the individual making the selection, and what his specific tastes, beliefs and feelings about cinema are. Not the ones that pretend that there is a scientific rating system. My benchmark for movie lists as reflectors of different sensibilities are the fabulous top 10 lists that are listed on the Senses of Cinema website (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/top_tens/). What you have here is a range of selections from movie writers, scholars and buffs from around the world. All these people are deeply passionate about films; many of them explain their choices in a few sentences, or just a few words (“a heart-stirring ending”, “combines horror with great beauty”). The variety of movies — including many you’d never think of as textbook classics — is astonishing; it would take the most dedicated viewer a lifetime to get through them. In the more eclectic lists, animated films from the 1930s share space with violent horror movies and gentle human dramas.

Incidentally, a recent visit to the Senses website also reminded me that this year marks the 50th birthday of some outstanding films (one of the list contributors had included only 1959 releases!). I have a childhood memory of an international videocassette of Ben-Hur labeled “25th anniversary edition”. Well, it’s the golden jubilee year of that film now and the benefit of living in the DVD era is that anniversary editions are truly grand — in this case, with bonus discs that contain over 10 hours of extra material.

That said, if you were to ask me for my list of best 1959 movies, Ben Hur wouldn’t be on it; I prefer the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, Truffaut’s great coming-of-age film The 400 Blows, Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing comedy Some Like it Hot, Ray’s beautiful trilogy-closer Apur Sansar and Hitchcock’s stirring thriller North by Northwest. Special-edition DVDs of most of these are out; look out for them, and start making your own — personal — lists.