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.

Prince Andrei's Dream

Over the past several weeks, I have had the immense pleasure (tinged with some disappointment) of seeing once again the twenty-episode BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, made in 1972. I first watched the programmes, one episode per day, on summer afternoons in 1974, and it is one of my most cherished memories of television viewing. I was 16 and had yet to read Tolstoy's novel. Since I didn't know the novel's plot, nor how it would end, every new episode held me in suspense until the next one arrived. When it finally did arrive, I felt exactly as I did upon finally reading the novel in 1979 - not that it was too long, but that it was too short, so vivid and real were Tolstoy's characters - at least as real to me as people I had actually met.

The BBC production cast the young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, Alan Dobie as Prince Andrei, and a large cast of marvelous supporting actors. (Morag Hood, who was cast as Natasha, bore the unenviable burden of having to embody Natasha Rostova, and doesn't quite pull it off.) But the staging and costumes and the patience of the script (by Jack Pulman) provides plenty of room for the viewer to settle into the splendor of Tolstoy's tale. And it actually spares us those - to my mind - superfluous history lessons that Tolstoy occasionally indulges in once Napoleon enters the story. 

Of course, everyone has their own favorite scenes, like Prince Andrei's sight of the old oak tree stubbornly resisting the tumult of spring just before he meets Natasha, or the great battle set-pieces that Tolstoy handles so brilliantly, like Austerlitz and Borodino. One of my own favorite scenes, that I wrote about in a blog post from 2014 (see Look to the Sky), involves Andrei in a near-death experience at Austerlitz.

But much later in the novel, Andrei is mortally wounded at the battle of Borodino, and finds himself, half-conscious, caught up in the evacuation of Moscow. Also among the evacuees is Natasha, who was engaged to Andrei before it was called off. Natasha does her best to help Andrei convalesce, until it becomes clear that his condition is hopeless and he dies in one of the most moving scenes ever written:

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrei dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human — death — was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back — to lock it was no longer possible — but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrei died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

"Yes, it was death! I died — and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!" And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him.

When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natasha went up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at her strangely, not understanding. [Book Twelve: 1812, Chapter XVI]


As I mentioned, I was reading War and Peace in 1979 for a seminar college course in Russian Literature. I was reading the passage above one evening in my bedroom with my door closed, and when I came to the exact point at which "the door noiselessly opened" and death entered, my father opened my bedroom door. The timing couldn't have been more perfect, and I leapt to my feet and cried out in fright. But it was only my father - and not death - who had come through the door.

Looking at the same scene in the BBC television production, in Part Seventeen, with Alan Dobie playing Prince Andrei, I was surprised to find that they omitted the dream altogether. Andrei drifts in and out of sleep, with Natasha sometimes there, or his sister Maria. They even bring his little son, Nikolai, to see him. And then he awakes from a dream, tells Natasha that he loves her and . . . dies. It's a moving scene all the same, but I was waiting to see the dream in vain.

There is a great deal to be said in praise of the BBC production of War and Peace, as well as all such adaptations of literary classics. The careful, exceedingly patient dramatization of a big 19th-century novel, from the casting of actors to the creation of sets and costumes is one of the most respectful and faithful approaches to literature imaginable. But whether it was my age at the time I first watched the BBC production, or the expectations that an intervening lifetime of television and film viewing have inspired in me, but seeing each episode again after a  interval of 44 years, I found the re-encounter with the BBC's War and Peace disappointing. The faces of the actors, which I carried over in my imagination as I was reading the novel - so that I saw Anthony Hopkins face in Tolstoy's scenes of Pierre Bezuhov, or Alan Dobie's face when I read about Prince Andrei Bolkonsky - were still there, but the awfully flat television lighting of every scene seemed so unreal to me and the movement from one scene to the next felt so studio-bound, and the occasional outdoor scenes, especially the battles (which were shot in the former Yugoslavia) seemed almost silly in their lack of any real scale. I will always cherish the memory of watching the series when I was 16, but there lies the greatest hazard of trying to recapture the past, unless one applies some Proustian intellectual effort of recollection.

I have also recently had a chance to see the four parts of Sergei Bondarchuk's landmark film adaptation of War and Peace, produced at enormous cost in the former Soviet Union in the mid 1960s. I think I will write at greater length about the film, it is so extraordinary - so epic at precisely those points at which the BBC production couldn't hope to succeed on the small screen - namely, the great battle scenes that Tolstoy himself described so bravely. While the BBC was better at depicting the peace half of the novel, Bondarchuk is reported to have had thousands soldiers of the Red Army at his disposal with which to re-create Austerlitz and Borodino. 

Unfortunately, what Bondarchuk's War and Peace proves, with a breathtaking finality, is how a big budget can be an even greater liability to a filmmaker than a low budget. Bondarchuk started to shoot Andrei's dream exactly as Tolstoy described it. Andrei (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) is in the same room in which he had fallen asleep or into a delirium, but he is dressed in full military regalia. There is a large white wall and at its bottom left corner is a small door. A crowd of people, all dressed as at a ball or on military parade (and appearing to be transparent as phantoms) are coming towards him. They are talking but he can't hear what they're saying. The crowd of people are suddenly gone, and Andrei rises from his bed.  There is a sudden disruption, like an earthquake - the camera lurches and the whole room tilts to one side. Andrei - phantom-like - walks in slow motion toward the door of the room and presses with both hands against it, trying to prevent it from opening. But it opens. Only the look of fear on Andrei's face suggests to us what it could be that has entered the room. All Tolstoy needed to do was call it Death - death entered the room. But how could Bondarchuk show death to us? He could simply have cut to Andrei opening his eyes - but before he does so, he shows that the doors have become enormous and Andrei is a tiny figure walking into the darkness beyond. Which is it to be - does death break in on Andrei in his room or does Andrei enter the darkness beyond the opened door? Why is Andrei leaving? Where is he going? Bondarchuk's contribution to Tolstoy's simple dream doesn't quite work.