Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/mag&info/balltime.zip/BALLTIME.TXT

Text File | 1992-05-20 | 15KB | 216 lines

        My New List of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time

 If I must make a list of the ten greatest films of all time,  my first vow is
to make the list for myself, not for anybody  else. I am sure than Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin is a great  film, but it's not going on my list simply so I
can impress  people. Nor will I avoid Casablanca simply because it's so
popular: I love it all the same.
     If I have a criteria for choosing the greatest films, it's  an emotional
one. These are films that moved me deeply in one way  or another. The cinema is
the greatest art form ever conceived  for generating emotions in its audience.
That's what it does  best. (If you argue instead for dance or music, drama or
painting, I will reply that the cinema incorporates all of these  arts.)
     Cinema is not very good, on the other hand, at intellectual,
philosophical, or political argument. That's where the Marxists  were wrong. If
a movie changes your vote or your mind, it does so  by appealing to your
emotions, not your reason. And so my  greatest films must be films that had me
sitting transfixed  before the screen, involved, committed, and feeling.
     Therefore, alphabetically:

     Casablanca. After seeing this film many times, I think I  finally
understand why I love it so much. It's not because of the  romance, or the
humor, or the intrigue, although those elements  are masterful. It's because it
makes me proud of the characters.  These are not heroes--not except for Paul
Heinreid's resistance  fighter, who in some ways is the most predictable
character in  the film. These are realists, pragmatists, survivors: Humphrey
Bogart's Rick Blaine, who sticks his neck out for nobody, and  Claude Rain's
police inspector, who follows rules and tries to  stay out of trouble. At the
end of the film, when they rise to  heroism, it is so moving because heroism is
not in their makeup.  Their better nature simply informs them what they must do.
     The sheer beauty of the film is also compelling. The black-  and-white
close-ups of Ingrid Bergman, the most bravely  vulnerable woman in movie
history. Bogart with his cigarette and  his bottle. Greenstreet and Lorre.
Dooley Wilson at the piano,  looking up with pain when he sees Bergman enter the
room. The  shadows. "As Time Goes By." If there is ever a time when they  decide
that some movies should be spelled with an upper-case M,  Casablanca should be
voted first on the list of Movies.

     Citizen Kane. I have just seen it again, a shot at a time,  analyzing it
frame-by-frame out at the University of Colorado at  Boulder. We took ten hours
and really looked at this film, which  is routinely named the best film of all
time, almost by default,  in list after list. Maybe it is. It's some movie. It
tells of all  the seasons of a man's life, shows his weaknesses and hurts,
surrounds him with witnesses who remember him but do not know how  to explain
him. It ends its search for "Rosebud," his dying word,  with a final image that
explains everything and nothing, and  although some critics say the image is
superficial, I say it is  very deep indeed, because it illustrates the way that
human  happiness and pain are not found in big ideas but in the little
victories or defeats of childhood.
     Few films are more complex, or show more breathtaking skill  at moving from
one level to another. Orson Welles, with his radio  background, was able to
segue from one scene to another using  sound as his connecting link. In one
sustained stretch, he covers  twenty years between "Merry Christmas" and "A very
happy New  Year." The piano playing of Kane's young friend Susan leads into
their relationship, his applause leads into his campaign, where  applause is the
bridge again to a political rally that leads to  his downfall, when his
relationship with Susan is unmasked. We  get a three-part miniseries in five
minutes.

     Floating Weeds. I do not expect many readers to have heard  of this film,
or of Yasujiro Ozu, who directed it, but this  Japanese master, who lived from
1903 to 1963 and whose prolific  career bridged the silent and sound eras, saw
things through his  films in a way that no one else saw. Audiences never stop to
think, when they go to the movies, how they understand what a  close-up is, or a
reaction shot. They learned that language in  childhood, and it was codified and
popularized by D.W. Griffith,  whose films were studied everywhere in the
world--except in  Japan, where for a time a distinctively different visual style
seemed to be developing. Ozu fashioned his style by himself, and  never changed
it, and to see his films is to be inside a  completely alternative cinematic
language.
     Floating Weeds, like many of his films, is deceptively  simple. It tells of
a troupe of traveling actors who return to an  isolated village where their
leader left a woman behind many  years ago--and, we discover, he also left a
son. Ozu weaves an  atmosphere of peaceful tranquility, of music and processions
and  leisurely conversations, and then explodes his emotional secrets,  which
cause people to discover their true natures. It is all done  with hypnotic
visual beauty. After years of being available only  in a shabby, beaten-up
version usually known as Drifting Weeds,  this film has now been re-released in
superb videotape and  Laserdisc editions.

    Gates of Heaven. This film, not to be confused in any way  with Heaven's
Gate (or with Gates of Hell, for that matter) is a  bottomless mystery to me,
infinitely fascinating. Made in the  late 1970s by Errol Morris, it
 would appear
to be a documentary  about some people involved in a couple of pet cemeteries in
northern California. Oh, it's factual enough: The people in this  film really
exist, and so does the pet cemetery. But Morris is  not concerned with his
apparent subject. He has made a film about  life and death, pride and shame,
deception and betrayal, and the  stubborn quirkiness of human nature.
     He points his camera at his subjects and lets them talk. But  he points it
for hours on end, patiently until finally they use  the language in ways that
reveal their most hidden parts. I am  moved by the son who speaks of success but
cannot grasp it, the  old man whose childhood pet was killed, the cocky guy who
runs  the tallow plant, the woman who speaks of her dead pet and says,  "There's
your dog, and your dog's dead. But there has to be  something that made it move.
Isn't there?" In those words is the  central question of every religion. And
then, in the  extraordinary centerpiece of the film, there is the old woman,
Florence Rasmussen, sitting in the doorway of her home,  delivering a
spontaneous monolog that Faulkner would have killed  to have written.

     La Dolce Vita. Fellini's 1960 film has grown pass in some  circles, I'm
afraid, but I love it more than ever. Forget about  its message, about the
"sweet life" along Rome's Via Veneto, or  about the contrasts between the sacred
and the profane. Simply  look at Fellini's ballet of movement and sound, the
graceful way  he choreographs the camera, the way the actors move. He never
made a more "Felliniesque" film, or a better one.
Then sneak up on the subject from inside. Forget what made  this film
trendy and scandalous more than thirty years ago. Ask  what it really says. It
is about a man (Marcello Mastroianni in  his definitive performance) driven to
distraction by his hunger  for love, and driven to despair by his complete
inability to be  able to love. He seeks love from the neurosis of his fiance,
through the fleshy carnality of a movie goddess, from prostitutes  and
princesses. He seeks it in miracles and drunkenness, at night  and at dawn. He
thinks he can glimpse it in the life of his  friend Steiner, who has a wife and
children and a home where  music is played and poetry read. But Steiner is as
despairing as  he is. And finally Marcello gives up and sells out and at dawn
sees a pale young girl who wants to remind him of the novel he  meant to write
someday, but he is hung over and cannot hear her  shouting across the waves, and
so the message is lost.

     Notorious. I do not have the secret of Alfred Hitchcock and  neither, I am
convinced, does anyone else. He made movies that do  not date, that fascinate
and amuse, that everybody enjoys and  that shout out in every frame that they
are by Hitchcock. In the  world of film he was known simply as The Master. But
what was he  the Master of? What was his philosophy, his belief, his message?
It appears that he had none. His purpose was simply to pluck the  strings of
human emotion--to play the audience, he said, like a  piano. Hitchcock was
always hidden behind the genre of the  suspense film, but as you see his movies
again and again, the  greatness stays after the suspense becomes familiar. He
made pure  movies.
     Notorious is my favorite Hitchcock, a pairing of Cary Grant  and Ingrid
Bergman, with Claude Rains the tragic third corner of  the triangle. Because she
loves Grant, she agrees to seduce  Rains, a Nazi spy. Grant takes her act of
pure love as a tawdry  thing, proving she is a notorious woman. And when Bergman
is  being poisoned, he misreads her confusion as drunkenness. While  the hero
plays a rat, however, the villain (Rains) becomes an  object of sympathy. He
does love this woman. He would throw over  all of Nazi Germany for her,
probably--if he were not under the  spell of his domineering mother, who pulls
his strings until they  choke him.

     Raging Bull. Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver  was on my list
of the ten best films. I think Raging Bull  addresses some of the same
obsessions, and is a deeper and more  confident film. Scorsese used the same
actor, Robert De Niro, and  the same screenwriter, Paul Schrader, for both
films, and they  have the same buried themes: a man's jealousy about a woman,
made  painful by his own impotence, and expressed through violence.
     Some day if you want to see movie acting as good as any ever  put on the
screen, look at a scene two-thirds of the way through  Raging Bull. It takes
place in the living room of Jake LaMotta,  the boxing champion played by De
Niro. He is fiddling with a TV  set. His wife comes in, says hello, kisses his
brother, and goes  upstairs. This begins to bother LaMotta. He begins to quiz
his  brother (Joe Pesci). The brother says he don't know nothin'. De  Niro says
maybe he doesn't know what he knows. The way the  dialogue expresses the inner
twisting logic of his jealousy is  insidious. De Niro keeps talking, and Pesci
tries to run but  can't hide. And step by step, word by word, we witness a man
helpless to stop himself from destroying everyone who loves him.

     The Third Man. This movie is on the altar of my love for the  cinema. I saw
it for the first time in a little fleabox of a  theater on the Left Bank in
Paris, in 1962, during my first $5-a-  day trip to Europe. It was so sad, so
beautiful, so romantic that  it became at once a part of my own memories--as if
it had  happened to me. There is infinite poignancy in the love that the  failed
writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) feels for the woman  (Alida Valli) who
loves the "dead" Harry Lime (Orson Welles).  Harry treats her horribly, but she
loves her idea of him, and  neither he nor Holly can ever change that.
     Apart from the story, look at the visuals! The tense  conversation on the
giant Ferris wheel. The giant, looming  shadows at night. The carnivorous faces
of people seen in the  bombed-out streets of postwar Vienna, where the movie was
shot on  location. The chase through the sewers. And of course the moment  when
the cat rubs against a shoe in a doorway, and Orson Welles  makes the most
dramatic entrance in the history of the cinema.  All done to the music of a
single zither.

     28 Up. I have very particular reasons for including this  film, which is
the least-familiar title on my list but one which  I defy anyone to watch
without fascination. No other film I have  ever seen does a better job of
illustrating the mysterious and  haunting way in which the cinema bridges time.
The movies  themselves play with time, condensing days or years into minutes  or
hours. Then going to old movies defies time, because we see  and hear people who
are now dead, sounding and looking exactly  the same. Then the movies toy with
our personal time, when we  revisit them, by re-creating for us precisely the
same experience  we had before.
     Then look what Michael Apted does with time in this  documentary, which he
began more than thirty years ago. He made a  movie called 7 Up for British
television. It was about a group of  British seven-year-olds, their dreams,
fears, ambitions,  families, prospects. Fair enough. Then, seven years later, he
made 14 Up, revisiting them. Then came 21 Up and, in 1985, 28 Up,  and next
year, just in time for the Sight & Sound list, will come  35 Up. And so the film
will continue to grow ... 42 ... 49 ... 56  .. 63 ... until Apted or his
subjects are dead.
     The miracle of the film is that it shows us that the seeds  of the man are
indeed in the child. In a sense, the destinies of  all of these people can be
guessed in their eyes, the first time  we see them. Some do better than we
expect, some worse, one seems  completely bewildered. But the secret and mystery
of human  personality is there from the first. This ongoing film is an
experiment unlike anything else in film history.

     2001: A Space Odyssey. Film can take us where we cannot go.  It can also
take our minds outside their shells, and this film by  Stanley Kubrick is one of
the great visionary experiences in the  cinema. Yes, it was a landmark of
special effects, so convincing  that years later the astronauts, faced with the
reality of outer  space, compared it to 2001. But it was also a landmark of non-
narrative, poetic filmmaking, in which the connections were made  by images, not
dialogue or plot.
     An ape learns to use a bone as a weapon, and this tool,  flung into the
air, transforms itself into a space ship--the tool  that will free us from the
bondage of this planet. And then the  spaceship takes man on a voyage into the
interior of what may be  the mind of another species.
     The debates about the "meaning" of this film still go on.  Surely the whole
point of the film is that it is beyond meaning,  that it takes its character to
a place he is so incapable of  understanding that a special room--sort of a
hotel room--has to  be prepared for him there, so that he will not go mad. The
movie  lyrically and brutally challenges us to break out of the illusion  that
everyday mundane concerns are what must preoccupy us. It  argues that surely man
did not learn to think and dream, only to  deaden himself with provincialism and
selfishness. 2001 is a  spiritual experience. But then all good movies are.