No, really, these are definitely THE GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME.
In the past two months, I watched about 50 classic movies, most of them from the Sight & Sound list of the Greatest Films of All Time. If you're not familiar with that list, since 1952 every decade the British Film Institute asks critics from all over the world to submit a list of what they think are the ten greatest films of all time. In 2012, 846 critics participated so this is probably as close as we can get to an official list of the greatest films ever (unless you trust those millions of IMDb users more who say that actually nothing beats The Shawshank Redemption).
I've got some issues with that list. For one, the wording is intentionally open to interpretation: “You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.” Thus we got a list of over 800 films ranging from Vertigo and Citizen Kane to questionable choices like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Thomas Edison's Electrocuting An Elephant, and only 29 votes (a percentage of 3.4) were necessary to land in the Top 50.
And that's because there's no possible way to make a definite Top Ten list. Film is too vast a field to break it down into ten examples. You can try top represent all the genres or countries or important directors, but you'd need more than ten slots. Even choosing only one film per decade (an impossible task in itself) means you'd have to dismiss either the 1910s or the 2010s (good luck with that in 2022). That's why most critics write down a list of titles that are considered to be important for the history of film mixed with a few personal favorites.
So yeah, the list can be considered as the most respected and definite list of the greatest films, but it's still flawed. But that's okay! Going through that list, seeing a lot of those movies for the first time, I learned that most of them are great. Would I put, for example, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet or Roberto Rossellini's Journey To Italy on my personal list if I only have ten slots, like 42/32 critics did? No, definitely not. But I still enjoyed them and am happy to have watched them. I'd call most of these films great, and even those that I didn't particularly cared for at least had interesting elements that helped me understand why other people love them. I've always loved classic movies and have seen a lot of them, but about 95% of those came from Hollywood, so actually diving into the classics of World Cinema opened my eyes and I learned a lot, about film history and art in general.
(I will never get the critics' love for Godard though and I'd be happy to never watch another film about film making or about the midlife crisis of a straight white male protagonist again. In other words, 8½ left me cold but at least was very pretty, and watching The Contempt was torture for me.)
So, what would I do if the BFI asked me for my contribution to the list? Thankfully, it will never happen, they do have a separate Director's List, but not one for screenwriters. I still tried to give into the thought experiment and come up with a Top Ten of Greatest Films Of All Time. The way I approached it was “If aliens landed on Earth today and asked me to explain the medium of film to them, which examples would I choose?” Of course, I can interpret the question just from a technical standpoint, show them Man With A Movie Camera and Citizen Kane and be done with it, but film is more than camerawork and editing. I tried to come up with ten titles that not only give those aliens a good understanding of the medium but also of its history and what it's for.
Anyway, this is my list (with additional favorites in bold). You definitely won't agree because it is my list, not yours. And it would probably be a completely different list if you asked me next year, next month, next week. But that's the great thing about movies - there are hundreds of them that you could name as one of the ten greatest, and you'd be right. In the end, those lists can approach a consensus, but they can never be definitive. But at least they will give us all some new suggestions of great stuff to watch.
So this is how my ideal list looks like right now:
One Silent Film
That's a given right? My head says that Sunrise is technically the most accomplished one, my heart wants to go with Buster Keaton's The General. So in the end I went with Option C: King Vidor's THE CROWD, the story of an everyman trying to find his place and personal happiness in modern society. It's heartbreaking and even funny, features some innovative camerawork and is still relevant and relatable today.
One Animated Film
That should be a given, but somehow the Sight & Sound-list has not a single animated film in its Top 100. So, do I choose a modern CGI blockbuster like How To Train Your Dragon, or Anime like Princess Mononoke? Maybe classic experimental like The Adventures of Prince Achmed or modern experimental like Sita Sings The Blues? But how can I not go with the Golden Age of Disney for this slot? Most critics would probably choose Disney's most accomplished early feature, Pinocchio, but I throw my hat in the ring for BAMBI. In roughly 65 minutes it shows us the life of a young deer from birth to adulthood, with gentle comedy, tragedy, action and musical interludes, and combines half-realistic-half-cartoony animals with impressionistic backgrounds. Simple, complex and simply beautiful.
One Film From The Hollywood Studio System
From Universal monsters to Film Noir, from The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz or Stagecoach to Psycho, The Apartment or To Kill A Mockingbird, these are some of the most iconic and entertaining movies ever made. So, let's talk about the Orson Welles-sized elephant in the room: Yes, the most important and probably best film from that era is Citizen Kane. It is a film that I can not help but admire, it is a masterpiece of camerawork and storytelling. But I've never connected to it emotionally. So, my pick instead is Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW which works on so many different levels. You can watch it as an examination of voyeurism or relationships, you can marvel at one of the most impressive sets ever created (second only to Jacques Tati's Playtime), you can join James Stewart in observing the various side stories. Or you can just enjoy a highly entertaining mystery thriller.
One Classic Slice-of-Life Film
I love movies as pure escapism, but I also love films that just depict the lives of regular people and still make that entertaining and captivating. Italian Neorealism gave us Bicycle Thieves, the French New Wave gave us The 400 Blows and Japan gave us Tokyo Story. My favorite is Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali about a poor rural family living in the 1920s, but I go with his later urban film about social changes, THE BIG CITY, which tells the progressive story of a house wife upsetting the family dynamics by starting to work as a saleswoman and earning her own money.
One Musical Film
“Musical” is not a genre, it's a format, so there needs to be one on my list. Critics love Singing In The Rain, but I prefer Meet Me In St. Louis and West Side Story, or even the scrappy charm of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As for non-American musicals, France has the endearing Young Girls of Rochefort singing Les Chansons d'Amour, and then of course there are great Bollywood films like Lagaan. My pick however isn't exactly a musical, and not that joyful: Jacques Demy's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is a bittersweet opera about young love and probably one of the most artificial movies ever made - every single line of dialogue is sung and the colors of the sets and costumes are eye-popping.
One Documentary Film
Just like animation or musical, a documentary can be an interesting way to tell diverse stories. Dear Zachary is the saddest film I've ever seen, Jesus Camp is the scariest. Man On Wire is exciting and uplifting, Microcosmos is calming and beautiful. My pick is Errol Morris' true-crime-doc THE THIN BLUE LINE which saved an innocent man's life and revolutionized the format by using re-enactments. Its influence can be seen in modern documentaries ranging from Capturing The Friedmans to Catfish or The Imposter, and in practically every reality TV show.
One Political Film
Film can be entertainment or a document, but it can also be used to deliver a message. That doesn't mean it has to be pure propaganda like Battleship Potemkin or, well, y'know the usual suspects; it can also be a highly entertaining examination of racism like Do The Right Thing or a stylish chronicle of organized crime in Rio like City of God or something funny like The Great Dictator or basically every New Hollywood-film from the 1970s. Or they can be THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, a docu-style thriller about guerrilla warfare based on true events that paved the way for films like Zodiac or Zero Dark Thirty.
One Blockbuster Film
Blockbusters are not a new invention - think Gone With The Wind - but ever since Jaws and Star Wars, “Blockbusters” have mainly been huge spectacles with stunts, action or at least lots of special effects, and they have been dominating the box office in almost every country. And that is okay! Film can show us the world, yes, but it also can show us worlds that only exist in our imagination. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Gravity and Mad Max: Fury Road are three of my favorites, but this spot on my list belongs to Steven Spielberg. E.T. and A.I. are both brilliant, but JURASSIC PARK is a basically perfect roller coaster ride. It's a shame that it didn't get even one single vote in the latest Sight & Sound poll.
One Modern Genre-Defying Film
Film has always been experimental. The French New Wave, Dogme 95, everything that Norman McLaren did, it's constantly reinventing itself. I want to show the aliens that a film doesn't have to be one thing, it can be several things all at once, and you can experiment with plotting, style or genre - see Elephant, The Host, Reprise, Ben X or Cloud Atlas. One of my favorite recent examples is Kwak Jae-yong's MY SASSY GIRL which mixes comedy, romance and drama, adds parodies of action movies, becomes a hostage thriller for ten minutes and even has a stealth time travel plot. It sounds like it would have limited commercial appeal, but the South Korean film was actually a massive hit all over Asia which led to a sequel and several remakes (including a Hollywood and a Bollywood version and a Japanese TV series).
One Personal Favorite Film
Sometimes you just love a film and want to share it no matter if it is representative of anything. So my last spot is reserved for Magnolia or Elevator To The Gallows or Fucking Amal or Night of the Hunter - or the one I chose, Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI. I could give you dozens of reasons why this is a masterpiece, but the point of this spot is that I don't need any.
Bonus: One Future Classic
Some people complained that In The Mood For Love and Mulholland Dr. both ended up in the Top 30 on the Sight & Sound poll. The films were only twelve years old, how can we already assign them the status of “classic”, as two of the Greatest Films Of All Time? Well, who cares? Louisiana Story, voted #5 in 1952 when it was merely four years old, got only two votes in 2012. L'Avventura came in second (!) in 1962, only two years after its release, and still holds on to a respectable 21st place today. A list of “The Greatest Films Of All Time” should not end sometime in the last century, we need to be brave and hail recent films as well, even if we risk to be proven wrong about them in a few decades. So since I don't have to play by the BFI's rules anyway, I'm adding an eleventh spot to my list, reserved for a film no older than the last poll, which I feel should end up on the next list in 2022. I'm pretty sure Boyhood is a given to show up there, and I hope they won't overlook MOMMY, Xavier Dolan's deceptively simple story about mental illness with its beautiful music montages and innovative use of the unusual aspect ratio.
I've got some issues with that list. For one, the wording is intentionally open to interpretation: “You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.” Thus we got a list of over 800 films ranging from Vertigo and Citizen Kane to questionable choices like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Thomas Edison's Electrocuting An Elephant, and only 29 votes (a percentage of 3.4) were necessary to land in the Top 50.
And that's because there's no possible way to make a definite Top Ten list. Film is too vast a field to break it down into ten examples. You can try top represent all the genres or countries or important directors, but you'd need more than ten slots. Even choosing only one film per decade (an impossible task in itself) means you'd have to dismiss either the 1910s or the 2010s (good luck with that in 2022). That's why most critics write down a list of titles that are considered to be important for the history of film mixed with a few personal favorites.
So yeah, the list can be considered as the most respected and definite list of the greatest films, but it's still flawed. But that's okay! Going through that list, seeing a lot of those movies for the first time, I learned that most of them are great. Would I put, for example, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet or Roberto Rossellini's Journey To Italy on my personal list if I only have ten slots, like 42/32 critics did? No, definitely not. But I still enjoyed them and am happy to have watched them. I'd call most of these films great, and even those that I didn't particularly cared for at least had interesting elements that helped me understand why other people love them. I've always loved classic movies and have seen a lot of them, but about 95% of those came from Hollywood, so actually diving into the classics of World Cinema opened my eyes and I learned a lot, about film history and art in general.
(I will never get the critics' love for Godard though and I'd be happy to never watch another film about film making or about the midlife crisis of a straight white male protagonist again. In other words, 8½ left me cold but at least was very pretty, and watching The Contempt was torture for me.)
So, what would I do if the BFI asked me for my contribution to the list? Thankfully, it will never happen, they do have a separate Director's List, but not one for screenwriters. I still tried to give into the thought experiment and come up with a Top Ten of Greatest Films Of All Time. The way I approached it was “If aliens landed on Earth today and asked me to explain the medium of film to them, which examples would I choose?” Of course, I can interpret the question just from a technical standpoint, show them Man With A Movie Camera and Citizen Kane and be done with it, but film is more than camerawork and editing. I tried to come up with ten titles that not only give those aliens a good understanding of the medium but also of its history and what it's for.
Anyway, this is my list (with additional favorites in bold). You definitely won't agree because it is my list, not yours. And it would probably be a completely different list if you asked me next year, next month, next week. But that's the great thing about movies - there are hundreds of them that you could name as one of the ten greatest, and you'd be right. In the end, those lists can approach a consensus, but they can never be definitive. But at least they will give us all some new suggestions of great stuff to watch.
So this is how my ideal list looks like right now:
One Silent Film
That's a given right? My head says that Sunrise is technically the most accomplished one, my heart wants to go with Buster Keaton's The General. So in the end I went with Option C: King Vidor's THE CROWD, the story of an everyman trying to find his place and personal happiness in modern society. It's heartbreaking and even funny, features some innovative camerawork and is still relevant and relatable today.
One Animated Film
That should be a given, but somehow the Sight & Sound-list has not a single animated film in its Top 100. So, do I choose a modern CGI blockbuster like How To Train Your Dragon, or Anime like Princess Mononoke? Maybe classic experimental like The Adventures of Prince Achmed or modern experimental like Sita Sings The Blues? But how can I not go with the Golden Age of Disney for this slot? Most critics would probably choose Disney's most accomplished early feature, Pinocchio, but I throw my hat in the ring for BAMBI. In roughly 65 minutes it shows us the life of a young deer from birth to adulthood, with gentle comedy, tragedy, action and musical interludes, and combines half-realistic-half-cartoony animals with impressionistic backgrounds. Simple, complex and simply beautiful.
One Film From The Hollywood Studio System
From Universal monsters to Film Noir, from The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz or Stagecoach to Psycho, The Apartment or To Kill A Mockingbird, these are some of the most iconic and entertaining movies ever made. So, let's talk about the Orson Welles-sized elephant in the room: Yes, the most important and probably best film from that era is Citizen Kane. It is a film that I can not help but admire, it is a masterpiece of camerawork and storytelling. But I've never connected to it emotionally. So, my pick instead is Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW which works on so many different levels. You can watch it as an examination of voyeurism or relationships, you can marvel at one of the most impressive sets ever created (second only to Jacques Tati's Playtime), you can join James Stewart in observing the various side stories. Or you can just enjoy a highly entertaining mystery thriller.
One Classic Slice-of-Life Film
I love movies as pure escapism, but I also love films that just depict the lives of regular people and still make that entertaining and captivating. Italian Neorealism gave us Bicycle Thieves, the French New Wave gave us The 400 Blows and Japan gave us Tokyo Story. My favorite is Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali about a poor rural family living in the 1920s, but I go with his later urban film about social changes, THE BIG CITY, which tells the progressive story of a house wife upsetting the family dynamics by starting to work as a saleswoman and earning her own money.
One Musical Film
“Musical” is not a genre, it's a format, so there needs to be one on my list. Critics love Singing In The Rain, but I prefer Meet Me In St. Louis and West Side Story, or even the scrappy charm of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As for non-American musicals, France has the endearing Young Girls of Rochefort singing Les Chansons d'Amour, and then of course there are great Bollywood films like Lagaan. My pick however isn't exactly a musical, and not that joyful: Jacques Demy's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is a bittersweet opera about young love and probably one of the most artificial movies ever made - every single line of dialogue is sung and the colors of the sets and costumes are eye-popping.
One Documentary Film
Just like animation or musical, a documentary can be an interesting way to tell diverse stories. Dear Zachary is the saddest film I've ever seen, Jesus Camp is the scariest. Man On Wire is exciting and uplifting, Microcosmos is calming and beautiful. My pick is Errol Morris' true-crime-doc THE THIN BLUE LINE which saved an innocent man's life and revolutionized the format by using re-enactments. Its influence can be seen in modern documentaries ranging from Capturing The Friedmans to Catfish or The Imposter, and in practically every reality TV show.
One Political Film
Film can be entertainment or a document, but it can also be used to deliver a message. That doesn't mean it has to be pure propaganda like Battleship Potemkin or, well, y'know the usual suspects; it can also be a highly entertaining examination of racism like Do The Right Thing or a stylish chronicle of organized crime in Rio like City of God or something funny like The Great Dictator or basically every New Hollywood-film from the 1970s. Or they can be THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, a docu-style thriller about guerrilla warfare based on true events that paved the way for films like Zodiac or Zero Dark Thirty.
One Blockbuster Film
Blockbusters are not a new invention - think Gone With The Wind - but ever since Jaws and Star Wars, “Blockbusters” have mainly been huge spectacles with stunts, action or at least lots of special effects, and they have been dominating the box office in almost every country. And that is okay! Film can show us the world, yes, but it also can show us worlds that only exist in our imagination. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Gravity and Mad Max: Fury Road are three of my favorites, but this spot on my list belongs to Steven Spielberg. E.T. and A.I. are both brilliant, but JURASSIC PARK is a basically perfect roller coaster ride. It's a shame that it didn't get even one single vote in the latest Sight & Sound poll.
One Modern Genre-Defying Film
Film has always been experimental. The French New Wave, Dogme 95, everything that Norman McLaren did, it's constantly reinventing itself. I want to show the aliens that a film doesn't have to be one thing, it can be several things all at once, and you can experiment with plotting, style or genre - see Elephant, The Host, Reprise, Ben X or Cloud Atlas. One of my favorite recent examples is Kwak Jae-yong's MY SASSY GIRL which mixes comedy, romance and drama, adds parodies of action movies, becomes a hostage thriller for ten minutes and even has a stealth time travel plot. It sounds like it would have limited commercial appeal, but the South Korean film was actually a massive hit all over Asia which led to a sequel and several remakes (including a Hollywood and a Bollywood version and a Japanese TV series).
One Personal Favorite Film
Sometimes you just love a film and want to share it no matter if it is representative of anything. So my last spot is reserved for Magnolia or Elevator To The Gallows or Fucking Amal or Night of the Hunter - or the one I chose, Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI. I could give you dozens of reasons why this is a masterpiece, but the point of this spot is that I don't need any.
Bonus: One Future Classic
Some people complained that In The Mood For Love and Mulholland Dr. both ended up in the Top 30 on the Sight & Sound poll. The films were only twelve years old, how can we already assign them the status of “classic”, as two of the Greatest Films Of All Time? Well, who cares? Louisiana Story, voted #5 in 1952 when it was merely four years old, got only two votes in 2012. L'Avventura came in second (!) in 1962, only two years after its release, and still holds on to a respectable 21st place today. A list of “The Greatest Films Of All Time” should not end sometime in the last century, we need to be brave and hail recent films as well, even if we risk to be proven wrong about them in a few decades. So since I don't have to play by the BFI's rules anyway, I'm adding an eleventh spot to my list, reserved for a film no older than the last poll, which I feel should end up on the next list in 2022. I'm pretty sure Boyhood is a given to show up there, and I hope they won't overlook MOMMY, Xavier Dolan's deceptively simple story about mental illness with its beautiful music montages and innovative use of the unusual aspect ratio.