Two approaches to best films lists.

Last week or so the American Film Institute came out with the same old list of Top 100 movies by US film-makers and as always it's populated with the usual candidates.  Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Apocolypse Now, the Godfather.  A few years back the film critic for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, wrote a famous critique of the AFI's list and suggested an alternative one of his own.  His column burned up critic's circles and is now an oft-cited list for those who felt the AFI's list was uninspired.

I think the question that divides the two camps, traditionalists like the AFI versus non-traditionalists like Rosenbaum, is this: what do you want from a top 100 list?  Do you want an historical approach that will teach you about the movies that got American cinema to its current state?  Or do you want a list of movies that are challenging and innovative for a contemporary audience today? 

If you want the former, go with the AFI's list.  Citizen Kane is number one because of what it did to send movies off in an entirely new direction back then.  The movies on the AFI list were all innovative for their time.  That's the key.  It's hard for us now to really see that sometimes because they've been so copied and influential that it seems conventional to us. 

This is a pretty good rule for watching and appreciating old movies generally. You have to place them in their context as much as possible.  What was going on in the world back then?  What was the director responding to?  I was reminded of this when some friends and I watched Romero's Night of the Living Dead recently. There's a lot in that movie that it's easy for a modern audience to miss because we're in such a different social context then were audiences in the late 60s. People watching back then, for example, would have picked up more on the parallels between some of the fake news footage about the zombies and the real news footage they were watching every night on the evening news about the war in Vietnam.

Also, an audience nowadays wouldn't think twice about having a black man be the hero in a movie of and by white people but when Romero made Night of the Living Dead, black people were facing police dogs and fire hoses and trying to win the right just to eat in the same restaurants as white people.  Ben, a black man, is the most sympathetic character in the film and when he shoots a white man, the audience is positioned to view the action sympathetically.  In real life, such actions might've gotten him lynched in certain parts of the country.  So in a sense, a really good movie is a victim of its own success in breaking down barriers that then become commonplace.

On the other hand, maybe you're not looking for a lesson on film history.  Maybe you just want to see really good films that have really profound things to say about the world around us.  Then you want a different kind of Top 100 list.  That's what Jonathan Rosenbaum's list is and that's what my own still-in-progress list is.  These are movies that shake us up and challenge us to see the world in new ways.  They have something important and profound to say about the human condition, sometimes that's dark and heavy and sometimes that's light and funny but it's always moving and insightful.  Obviously there will be some overlap with a historically oriented evolutionary list, but generally the films on a list that takes such an approach would, by necessity, be somewhat (though not exclusively) more contemporary. 

I'm not saying that either of these approaches is better than the other; it all depends on what you want to get out of a good movie.  I do suspect though that unless you are a film history buff, sometimes those old classics like Citizen Kane isn't what you're looking for at all.  Better in that case to see something that really turns your world upside down.  After all, isn't that what art is supposed to do?

Comments

[Vergingwriter]

Ah, the arguments and rationales go on and on when confronting the canonical. I like what you said. I would only add that another wrinkle to the issue of canonical lists - literature, films, plays - is that the lists have been in development going back generations, i.e. back to generations when the lists were made up by white men. In other words, there is a certain inherent bias reflective of the bias of the times. I think this is where caution needs to be exercised. This is not to say that works deemed canonical for generations are not worthy of the status - certainly many are - but perhaps there are gaps in the list, too heavy a leaning towards certain works, etc. Another issue is the teaching and performing /viewing of canonical works to students of a different historical moment. How to properly contextualize the work so as not to inadvertently offend or reinscribe patriarchal, racist, etc views of days gone by. The controversy over the teaching of Birth of a Nation, for example.

OK - so I should have done my own post in response rather than tying up space on your blog!!

Great conversation!

[barbh]

Absolutely true! Huge oversight on my part to not mention that! Thanks for filling it in!