03 August 2009

Another list of "best movies"

I have to agree with this comment by Roger Ebert:
All lists of the "greatest" movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese's favorites, or Herzog's? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines.
That observation serves as the introduction to a column in which he reviews the result of another list:
The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors.
At the link above, he then goes on to provide comments on the top 10 films...
1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
...from a larger group of the top 50, listed at The Spectator in the classically annoying style of one per page so you need to click through 50 pages so they get more pageviews. You can bypass that annoyance and see #26-50 by going to the "print page" layout, or just use the list at the bottom of Ebert's column. I've seen only 22 of these, so apparently I have lots to look forward to.

Via Kottke.

2 comments:

  1. You can argue up and down what the best way to rank important films is (or whether it is worth ranking them at all for the hardcore relativistis) however it is absurd to say that the least interesting are the large scale voting lists. They are massively interesting, taking into consideration their voting demographic. A few critic elites can provide very interesting commentary but a crowdsourced rating of thousands is equally interesting especially if you consider the voting group.

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  2. I thought the same thing at first, A. Fischer. But then I read his article, and I understand what makes a list "interesting" to Mr. Ebert. He finds a list interesting if it contains films he has overlooked. This inspires him to take a closer look at those films. It's not whether the films are actually the best films ever made or not.

    The large scale lists are very unlikely to reveal a film to him he hasn't already seen multiple times. Therefore, he finds them uninteresting. I must say it makes a lot of sense to me.

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