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1992-05-20
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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.