Somewhat Less Than a World

"Without preferences a critic would be a monster."

- Vernon Young(1)


As taste deteriorates, lists proliferate. The BBC, evidently always looking for ways to kill time, has compiled yet another "Top 100" list. Not, this time, of the 100 Greatest Orchestra Conductors from Birkina Faso. Nor of the 100 Greatest Opera Tenors who prefer Pepsi to Coke. (Maybe I shouldn't give them ideas.) This time, it's THE 100 GREATEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS. Here's what they came up with, in their proper order (titles in bold are my own favorites):

1. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
2. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1956)
4. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
7. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
8. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
10. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
11. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
12. Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993)
13. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
14. Jeanne Dielman ... (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
15. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
16. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
17. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
18. A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)
19. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
20. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
21. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
22. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
23. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1928
24. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
25. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
26. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
27. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
28. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
29. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
30. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
31. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
32. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
33. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
34. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)
35. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
36. La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
37. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
38. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
39. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
40. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
41. To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994)
42. City of God (Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002)
43. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
44. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
45. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
46. Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945)
47. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
48. Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)
49. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
50. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
51. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
52. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
53. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
54. Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994)
55. Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)
56. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)
57. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
58. The Earrings of Madame de ... (Max Ophuls, 1953)
59. Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
60. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
61. Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
62. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)
63. Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
64. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993)
65. Ordet (Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1955)
66. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973)
67. The Externinating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
68. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
69. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
70. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
71. Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
72. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
73. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
74. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
75. Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)
76. Y tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
77. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
78. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
79. Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
80. The Young and the Damned (Luis Buñuel, 1950)
81. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)
82. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
83. La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
84. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
85. Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
86. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
87. The Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
88. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
89. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
90. Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
91. Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
92. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
93. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
94. Where Is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
95. Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
96. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
97. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
98. In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang Wen, 1994)
99. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
100. Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988)

Though this list isn't as bad as some others (only because it's about foreign language films), it won't satisfy anyone. If you asked 200 literary critics to name the Top 100 Foreign Language Novels, you would probably reach a much better consensus. Literature doesn't attract fans in anything like the numbers film does. There is simply no other way to account for Claire Denis's Beau Travail outranking L'Avventura, or Amélie sitting there stupidly three jumps ahead of Umberto D. 

I haven't seen 28 of the films on the list. But that's preferable to simply forgetting magnificent films like Le Jour se Leve, Open City, Smiles of a Summer Night, Lacombe Lucien, The Sorrow and the Pity, and the great filmmakers Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Ermanno Olmi, Mario Monicelli, Masaki Kobayashi, and Jan Troell. These lists are good for critical parlor games: what they reveal is sometimes counterproductive to their intentions. As someone has already pointed out, there are more films on the list from directors named Jean than from women. The statistics have changed dramatically in the past few decades, but exactly what percentage of filmmakers worldwide are women? Far from anything like parity, my guess. It has been forty years since Lina Wertmüller burst onto the world film scene, and a backlash (led, amazingly, by Feminist critics) has brought her down several pegs, but I still regard her as the greatest woman filmmaker. Just thinking about her makes me want to watch Love and Anarchy again, the story of a hapless, pimple-faced anarchist hiding out in a Roman brothel, waiting for an opportunity - that never materializes - to assassinate Mussolini.

How long does it take - should it take - for a new film to enter a canon? In the 1950s and '60s, it took only three years. I wrote about this in 2012, when the latest Sight and Sound Top Ten Critics' Poll was published: "The sense of permanence has long since, I think, gone out of discussions about films - especially Great Films, which the polls have inadvertently, decade after decade, demonstrated. Simply examine the newest film in each of the polls. In 1952, Bicycle Thieves was number one (it now ranks thirty-third) and was just three years old. In 1962, L'avventura was also just three years old. In 1972, Persona was the newest film in the poll, but it was made six years before. This sense that the art of film was a contemporary, ongoing phenomenon quickly began to fade. In 1982, 8 1/2 was the most recent film in the poll, made nineteen years before. In 1992, 2001: A Space Odyssey made its first appearance in the poll, thanks to its restoration and subsequent rediscovery. But it was a twenty-four year old film by then. By 2002, film's slide into the past was to The Godfather, a thirty year old film. In the latest poll, 2001 is again the newest film, except it has got twenty years older since 1992. So the latest film judged great enough to be in the top ten was made forty-four years ago."(2) (Written six years ago.)

So these attempts to create a canon, while filmmakers were engaged in the process of discovering a unified aesthetic for the medium, and while critics were struggling to account for their struggles, are stymied because the works that were central to our understanding of what constitutes film art kept shifting positions. The only answer to the question, What makes a film a work of art? has got to be, When it is made by an artist.

I can always tell an auteurist (but I can't tell him much). They are big on bestowing auteurship on the unlikeliest people (I get the feeling that eventually everyone who ever made a film will be an auteur), but they are terrible at naming what films made by each and every auteur are better than others. The list gives them away in several places. 4 Andrei Tarkovsky films, each one progressively worse than Ivan's Childhood (1961, which is at least unpretentious). I am not fond of Fassbinder, but surely Berlin Alexanderplatz , though a long way from the Döblin novel, is his best? I like Buñuel very much, but surely The Exterminating Angel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Belle de Jour are poor examples of his surrealist art? I would replace them with L'Age d'Or (1930), Simon of the Desert (1965) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Krzysztof Kieślowski is a bit overrated, but surely Three Colors: Blue is the worst part of the trilogy. Why not Dekalog (1989-90)? Bresson has only one film on the list, but it is neither Diary of a Country Priest (1950) nor A Man Escaped (1956), better examples of his austere style by far than Au hasard Balthazar. Godard is represented by three films, #s 11, 60, and 74. Breathless was his breakthrough, but Band of Outsiders (1964) and A Married Woman (1964) are immeasurably preferable to Contempt and Pierrot le fou. Making room for 4 Fellini films, then leaving out I Vitelloni (1953)? 5 Bergman films, including his muddled Fanny and Alexander, but ignoring Smiles of a Summer Night (1955 - easily one of the half-dozen most perfect films ever made), the early masterpiece Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), and the best of his chamber films, Winter Light (1962)? I realize that Rossellini's boat has sailed (so has Mizoguchi's), but Open City (1945) remains historically important. Shoah is ranked 96th. According to what aesthetic criteria? I don't mean to suggest that Claude Lanzmann's epochal film is not artfully made (it is deceptively, hypnotically fascinating), but however formidable its artistic merits are, Shoah stands alone and shouldn't have to jockey for position among the likes of Rififi and Amélie.

Further Objections. If you're going to limit Alain Resnais to one film, and you've included Chris Marker's short film La Jetée, why not let Resnais's sole film be Night and Fog (1955), which not only has great artistic merit, but historical relevance as well.

According to the BBC's list, the best decades for film were the 1950s (21 films) and the '60s (19 films). The worst decades were the 1920s and '40s (each with only 4 films).

What is most revealing in the latest lists is the critics' apparent inability to distinguish between what they like and what is good. How can one tell the difference? I like hotdogs, but I know what they're made of. No one is claiming that hotdogs are good food. So why are some critics so enamored of hotdogs like In the Mood for Love or The Spirit of the Beehive or All About My Mother?

But all these lists, which are increasing in number and absurdity, are a symptom of a serious problem among educated people. You can see it in all of the television talent competitions, each more irritating than the next, and even with the cooking competitions and the bake-offs. Self expression, which comes in a myriad of forms, can't be compared or reduced to a competitive sporting event. Some people won't read a book unless they see it listed as a Best Seller. And others want everything to be classified before they can bring themselves to read it or listen to it or watch it. They want to know beforehand if it's worthy of their attention, supposedly because they think that they have so little time to waste. Before they will consent to consuming it, they need it to be pre-digested. The very last thing they want is to be left out of a conversation, but the cultivation of taste that is exclusively their own, without the reinforcement of a support group, is inconceivable. The notion that they could be alone in their preference for a particular book or film or television program terrifies them. What good is personal taste if it isn't shared by others?



(1) Vernon Young, "Somewhat Less Than a World," The Hudson Review, Spring 1967.
(2) see "Poll Position," Widower's Tango, August 9, 2012.