Blind And Deaf
The most famous and venerable top ten film list is Sight & Sound's. They've been at it since 1952, coming out with a new list every decade, showing which way the elite critical winds are blowing.
The latest was just released and it's awful.
The Critics’ Top 10
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
The big shocker is for the first time in fifty years, Citizen Kane isn't #1. I predicted it would be kicked off the throne, but I thought it would be replaced by something good, like The Godfather (which didn't even make the list this year, though rule changes don't allow votes for I and II to be combined). The new king, Vertigo, is one of those films with a vastly inflated reputation. It's not even particularly good. It fails on the straight level of a thriller, which I guess allows critics to read more into it.
That's the way it goes. Certain films get undeserved reputations and they just won't go away. Half this list includes such titles--toss in numbers 6, 7, 8 and 10.
Through the years there have been a number of French, Japanese, Italian and Swedish titles that have been shoved off but are better that much of what's up there. There's never been much classic Hollywood, but The Godfather and Singin' In The Rain have made it, and still deserve a space.
Let's forget this ever happened and go back to an earlier year. How about 1972--the last list without Vertigo?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
5 Comments:
I don't understand trying to compare silent films to sound films. It just can't be an apples to apples comparison. The interruption of scenes to post written text, or the necessity of trying to lip read, interrupts the experience and takes one out of the movie. It's just really a different art form, imho, like trying to compare photos to books.
It's fine to compare silent films to each other, especially in the context of their era. But what is the point of suggesting that if you had to live alone on an island, among the 10 films you would take with you would be a silent?
So I finally saw the Artist (at home with the family of course). It was fine - it more or less kept our attention (though the silence led to audible audience comments here and there, mainly "what is he saying?"). But I can't see any reason for doing this story as a silent other than for the gimmick. Of course, if it wasn't a silent, it would have been a very simple story (that's been done a lot) and probably not won the Oscar.
At one point I thought the film might become more surrealistic when the main character had a dream in which he could hear effect sounds, but not his own speech. But the film didn't follow that course.
I also recently saw "Perfect Sense" with Ewan McGregor. Not a great film (not even as good as Melancholia, which shared the "end of the world" theme), but its use of utter silence was pretty effective, I thought. There it let the audience share in the character's experience and enhanced the viewer's sense of growing tragedy and isolation.
I'm imagine this comment will earn a flame - have at it :-)
A film is a film--how you respond to it, and how it gets its effects, is what matters. The essence of mivues us the "move" part--motion pictures. Sound, color, 3-D, etc are just additions that make it different, not necessarily better.
The Artist was a gimmick. It worked (if it did) because it was made in the sound era. Great silent films are different, because people were working in a medium as best they could in a natural way.
I've generally felt the greatest films (or at least as great as anything else) are the work of the masterful clowns who worked in silents, and any list of my top ten would have to include their best.
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