Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Are you cinematically literate? Salon's A&E editor picks the best and most influential movies of all time.
Oct 30, 2002 | One of the great truisms of our time is that we live in an age of rapid technological and conceptual change. Like most such clichés, it's both true and not so true. As Salon reporter Damien Cave will document in an excellent upcoming piece about the apparent mutation of the Great Film canon, the tastes of even the most adventurous movie-watchers appear to have changed in the last couple of decades, although exactly how drastically is up for debate. So we began to think about a thorny question that recent history has made even thornier: What films are essential viewing for anybody who wants to understand, and discuss, the art of movies?
Even speaking as someone brought up in a '60s intelligentsia household, raised to worship a well-defined pantheon of European and Japanese art-film deities -- Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Buñuel, Kurosawa -- some of the changes in the cinematic canon look pretty healthy. For one thing, Visconti's movies are tedious crap (and always were). For another, since those days we've lived through almost 30 years of Hollywood mega-blockbusters, five "Star Wars" movies, two or three indie-film rebellions, the sadly truncated acting careers of Andrew Dice Clay and Vanilla Ice, the Hong Kong invasion, Jim Carrey talking through his ass, Quentin Tarantino and Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas as an action star in "Gymkata."
Add to that the fact that we are experiencing a new golden age of art movies that's qualitatively different from any that has gone before (or so I believe). Bergman and Buñuel and Antonioni looked like revolutionaries in the aesthetic context of the '60s, but their films unmistakably derived from the heritage of the 20th-century avant-garde, with its roots in the classic traditions of drama, literature and the visual arts. Movies today are fundamentally rooted in pop culture: pop movies, pop music, pop spirituality, pop politics, pop philosophy and pop art. (As perhaps the first filmmaker to build his universe around pop, Jean-Luc Godard is the clearest ancestor figure for this new new wave.) Of course connections still exist to the Great Art of the past, but they have become attenuated and increasingly complicated.
All this is to begin to explain how I approached the impossible task of compiling a list of some finite number of movies that would establish film literacy. These aren't necessarily all movies I love: "Taxi Driver" probably isn't Martin Scorsese's best work, and I'm not sure "Blade Runner" is a good movie at all. I'm trying, rather, to guess at importance, influence, the cultural ripples a certain pebble created after hitting the pond.
My guiding principle was that movies that made the list had to simultaneously throw light on the past, present and future. The vast majority of these movies are well-established classics, but in every case they either illuminate some dark corner of the filmic past that I believe needs rediscovering, or they provide a crucial key to understanding the traditions and genres we find in movies today and where they may be going. (On the other hand, I've also got four movies made since 1980 on this list. That doesn't sound like a lot, but Sight and Sound magazine, published by the British Film Institute, recently ran its once-per-decade Top Ten polls of leading critics and directors -- and wound up with nothing more recent than "Raging Bull" on either list.)
I'm aware of how objectively horrifying this list is. Forty so-called important movies, and I've got nothing by Robert Bresson, Kenji Mizoguchi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Frank Capra, John Huston, Eric Rohmer, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang or Ernst Lubitsch. Starting out, I was positive that Bresson, Mizoguchi and Rohmer would make the cut. Can I really justify two Stanley Kubricks, two John Fords and two Ingmar Bergmans, when those other guys don't even get one between them? Where are Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton? Where are Garbo and Dietrich? Marilyn Monroe and James Dean? Where in God's name is D.W. Griffith? (Good questions. I'm dismayed by them myself.)
You wind up having to make ludicrous choices, which aren't even comparisons between apples and oranges, but something more like apples and hyenas, or apples and aircraft carriers. I decided to do 20 films in each of two categories: movies you'd darn well better have seen already, and movies that I suspect you might not get around to without my benevolent interference. On the first list, I ended up somehow trying to decide between "Singin' in the Rain" and "Night of the Living Dead." (They, um, must have some similarities -- in both of them the dialogue pretty much sucks!)
On my second list, amid the faded glories and historical obscurities -- many of them unavailable on DVD, a factor I've tried to include -- I just kept bouncing around unpredictably. Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" or Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"? (It's the Winsome Fantasy category.) Godard's "Breathless" or G.W. Pabst's great silent "Pandora's Box," which made Louise Brooks a star? (Hot Young Thing category.) "Triumph of the Will" or "The Birth of a Nation"? (Grandiose Racist Spectacle category.) Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" or Sergei Paradjanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"? (I guess that's the Big-Ass Artistic Testament category.)
Anyway, I give up. Here it is. Whatever you have to say about it is probably right. Still, these are some doggone great movies; watch any of them and you won't be sorry. (Well, we'll get to the case of "Andrei Rublev" later.)
I've cheated in a few distinct ways. I'm including Francis Ford Coppola's first two "Godfather" films and Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy as one entry apiece, even though in both cases we're really talking about distinct and arguably quite different pictures. There are a few movies that I'm assuming you've absolutely, positively seen: "Gone With the Wind," "It's a Wonderful Life" (sneaking Capra in there after all) and "The Wizard of Oz." (If you haven't, I commend you. But you're much better off at this point spending the rest of your life climbing every peak in the eastern Sierras or rereading the novels of Trollope or something. Seriously, movies aren't that important.)
I will also confess that there's one ringer on this list, a movie I myself have not seen, where I'm relying heavily on the surrounding evidence and the opinions of friends. So sue me. (I'm not telling you what it is, though.) And if you disagree violently with something -- or everything -- on my list and wish to compile your own, rich with the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien or Nora Ephron or Herschell Gordon Lewis or whoever, I'll look forward to reading it.
(Note: In the interests of geeky thoroughness, I've included original foreign-language titles in a few cases where the standard U.S. title is anomalous.)
