All right, French guys, you win. You win. Your taste in cinema is superior to mine. Forgive me for harboring secret affection for "overexposed Hollywood pseudo-classics" such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Casablanca, and - gasp - The Third Man. Forgive me for never having bothered to watch Ugetsu, Sunrise, Johnny Guitar, and Pierrot le Fou more than once.Honestly. All I get from this list is, "Yeah. Oh yeah. Check out all these foreign/silent films we can name. Yeah. The Mother and the Whore. Tabu. Gertrud. Mmm yeah. Lick it. Lick it, bitch." I mean, a list is a list, but gimme a break. You just know there's a guy on this staff who goes home and watches The Sound of Music every night, but when it comes time to make the 100 Greatest Movies list, he chickens out and names Ivan the Terrible and Night of the Hunter just so he doesn't look like a total loser to his buddies.
That's the problem with this thing. It's like the Taste Police. "Well, let's just name a bunch of movies that are about eighty years old so nobody can really argue with us." This list just isn't any fun. Sure, I'm as frustrated with the Internet Movie Database "Shawshank Redemption/Lord of the Rings" style of listmaking as anybody, but I'm afraid Cahiers du Cinema may have swung the pendulum just a wee bit too far in the opposite direction. For a better list of this kind, I would recommend They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? or Sight and Sound's Top Ten Poll. The Sight and Sound Director's Poll is probably the most reasonable list I've ever seen, presumably because actual filmmakers, unlike snooty French film critics, may not feel like they have quite as much to prove.
Cahiers du Cinema's 100 Greatest Films:
- Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
- The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
- The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
- Sunrise - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
- L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
- M - Fritz Lang
- Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
- Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
- Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
- The Searchers - John Ford
- Greed - Erich von Stroheim
- Rio Bravo - Howard Hawkes
- To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
- Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
- Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
- Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
- City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
- The General - Buster Keaton
- Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
- The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
- Freaks - Tod Browning
- Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
- The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
- The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
- The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
- Hiroshima, My Love - Alain Resnais
- The Box of Pandora (Loulou) - Georg Wilhelm Pabst
- North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
- Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
- Golden Helmet (Casque d’or) - Jacques Becker
- The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
- Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
- Diamond Earrings (Madame de…) - Max Ophüls
- Pleasure - Max Ophüls
- The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
- The Adventure - Michelangelo Antonioni
- Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
- Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
- Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
- The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
- Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
- The Wind - Victor Sjöström
- 2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
- Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
- The Crowd - King Vidor
- 8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
- La Jetée - Chris Marker
- Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
- Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d’un tricheur) - Sacha Guitry
- Amarcord - Federico Fellini
- Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) - Jean Cocteau
- Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
- Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
- Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
- King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
- Laura - Otto Preminger
- The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
- The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
- La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
- The Dead - John Huston
- Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
- It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
- Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
- The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
- À bout de souffle - Jean-Luc Godard
- Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
- Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
- La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
- Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
- A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) - Jean Renoir
- Playtime - Jacques Tati
- Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
- Livia (Senso) - Luchino Visconti
- Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
- Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
- An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
- Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
- The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
- Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
- Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
- The Party - Blake Edwards
- Tabu - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
- The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
- A Star Is Born - George Cukor
- Mr. Hulot’s Holiday - Jacques Tati
- America, America - Elia Kazan
- El - Luis Buñuel
- Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
- Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
- Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) - Marcel Carné
- Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
- Lola - Jacques Demy
- Manhattan - Woody Allen
- Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
- My Night at Maud’s (Ma nuit chez Maud) - Eric Rohmer
- Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) - Alain Resnais
- The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
- Scarface - Howard Hawks
- Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
- Napoléon - Abel Gance
How did you get Jake to dress up like that?
ReplyDeleteWow, I haven't seen more than a handful of those films. After #1, Citizen Kane, I have to go all the way down to #40 to the Godfather. At least I've seen #1, eh?
ReplyDeleteBtw LE, I think your link should read "They shoot pictures, don't they?"
You've never seen Singin' In The Rain or Vertigo? Or Nosferatu? (hey, you're a goth kind of guy.) The rest I can understand. If it makes you feel any better, there are 42 movies on this list that I haven't seen either.
ReplyDeleteAnd who is this "Jake" you speak of, Peter?
I've seen parts of some of those films (like Nosferatu or the Great Dictator), but can't say I've sat through the whole shebang.
ReplyDeleteHe's one of my friends from off-the-Internet. Kinda looks like Yoggoth, now I come to think of it. I think Singin' In The Rain is my highest one on that list actually.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I wouldn't worry too much about it. In fact, I think the most obvious sign of the listmakers' less-than-pure agenda would be the failure to include even a single British film. From the article on FILMdetail:
ReplyDeleteThe reaction from some outlets in this country is surprise that there are no British films on the list.
The Telegraph say:
The list in the publication Les Cahiers du Cinema features films from the USA, Germany, Russia, Italy and Sweden but there is no place for some of the biggest British directors including David Lean, Ken Loach and Peter Greenaway.
British-born Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin are both mentioned but only for the movies that they made in Hollywood.
The nearest the British cinema industry comes to a mention is the 17th (equal) place given to 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1968, by the American director, Stanley Kubrick, partly with British money and with British technicians.
The 1962 classic Lawrence of Arabia came seventh in a recent list of the best 100 movies drawn up by the American Film Institute in Hollywood but is perhaps the highest profile omission.
Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor of Les Cahiers du Cinema, has pointed out that the lack of British-made films was “striking” but not part of any Gallic conspiracy:
“It does not reflect an anti-British bias. It is simply the result of the individual choices of 76 people in the French industry. Each was asked to name their 100 best films and this was the result.
Yes, it is surprising, maybe, that there is no Lawrence of Arabia, or no film by Ken Loach or Stephen Frears (The Queen).
But there are many other national film industries which are also missing. There are no Brazilian films, for instance.”
Oh gimme a break, buddy! How many Brazilian films can you name? City of God and that's about it. That's like saying, "Yeah, but there weren't any Icelandic films either."
I've only seen about 32 of the movies listed here which means that I apparently have to start catching up on my old, foreign films. I was kind of surprised at some of the films chosen or not chosen, but other films just seemed like they were mentioned because they were "suppose" to be mentioned. I doubt very much that the FROGs watch any of these films on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteExactly! That's the basic problem I have with this list. I couldn't hand this list to someone who didn't know anything about cinema and say with confidence, "These are the movies you will enjoy the most." A person who did not take the time to watch all these old silent and foreign films will not, I feel, be missing much.
ReplyDeleteIf I were to make my own list of the 100 greatest movies, I would not include a single silent film on it. Call that blasphemy if you wish; they just don't hold up for me the way that even really old sound films do. And I might include about eight foreign language films on there. The rest would be in English. And I don't really think this is an American/European thing. No French person I've ever talked to has actually seen a Godard, Resnais, Rohmer, or Renoir movie. I take that as a sign.
So no, Ninquelote, you don't really need to start catching up on your old, foreign films, unless you care what French film critics think of you (and I'm sure you do).