No they didn't. Did they?
Oh, those ignorant Brits! The Guardian recently published the results of its public poll for the "40 Greatest Foreign [sic] Films of All Time." Of course, we love these silly consensus games because they offer such a terrific opportunity to express outrage. Like this fellow, who denounces his limey countrymen (and -women) for their cretinous taste in a letter to the editor:
Your list of the top 40 greatest foreign films, voted for by readers (Films and music, May 11), serves only to expose the paucity of foreign-language films in the UK, together with a chronic loss of knowledge or appreciation of cinema history. What we get is a hotchpotch of well-worn classics and recent international hits of dubious merit. Your film writers chide the voters too gently. There is only one silent film ("Battleship Potemkin"): no "Napoleon," "Metropolis," "Passion of Joan of Arc" or "The Last Laugh. " Only one other title from before 1945 (Renoir's "Régle du Jeu)"; and no room for Dreyer, Lang, Murnau, Gance, Vertov, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Antonioni or Visconti (where is "The Leopard"?). Then to find Roberto Benigni's inane and offensive "Life is Beautiful" included is the final insult.Yikes! Those Brits should be barred from the cinema! Why, if USA Today were to conduct such a poll, the results would be... probably very similar. (But how do you tell what language the actors are speaking in a silent film when the intertitles have been swapped out? Best Films Not Lip-Read in English?) I have a better idea. Let's do a poll of the 40 best films of all time that were not made in any of the Romance Languages. Or how about the best films of all time in which nobody speaks Welsh. That ought to be comparably enlightening...
Clyde Jeavons
London
11 Comments
I think you bring up a really significant issue concerning how we (culturally and indvidually) understand cinema and filmmaking. Unforuntately, these lists impose an easily structured system of categorization on cinema that flies against everything that cinema is supposed to be about : abstraction, nuance, and reflexivity.
The term itself "foreign" or "foreign language" is insulting. It sustains a dualistic self/other view of culture and cinema which is staggering in its continued prominence. These ridiculous rules of where the film was shot, what language it's spoken in, where the director was born, etc. all sustain such a simplistic view of cinema.
Some may argue that these matters are purely semantic and not very important, but I think they are crucial in terms of how (in their very design) these structures and formats condition participants in them to structure their own thought about movies in a very specific manner, which in turns affects how they are perceived and ultimately produced.
That is why it's so important to refuse to pander to that simplicity, and in so doing move towards a greater perspective of how we understand cinema. The first step is to stand up in rejection of terms such as "foreign" and "foreign language."
Not a terrible list...the only one I say probably doesn't belong is "Cinema Paradiso"...eh...I saw the Director's Cut and didn't care for it. I think I still have a fractured skull from all the sentimentality.
David Thomson is a twit.
I nominate Costa-Gavras's 1969 film Z as the best movie ever set in Greece, but spoken in French.
I actually think it's a pretty poor list, and I'm just a fledgling cinephile. No Decalougue?Belle De Jour (Which I finally just saw)or Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise?
Battle of Algiers and Jules and Jim are my favorites from the list. At least they got those right.
Totally Disgusting!
Hooray for the wonderfully named Clyde Jeavons. He describes this list perfectly.
It's true that most lists are barely disguised parlor games, but people do love them. When I finally put up a list of some favorite films at my blog, I thought I'd be chided for laziness. Instead my traffic spiked quite a bit. I also cheerfully acknowledge that lists occasionally have led me to some pretty good movies.
I realize you're joking in your last graf, but I do think you may be on to something when you suggest that what we really need are some more creative organizing principles for these things.
Actually I find it very amusing that there are no American films on the list. I guess we suck...or they just mean foreign "language" films as opposed to foreign "soil" films.
To the listmakers: settle for me whether Sergio Leone's Italian-westerns-set-in-America-and-essentially-made-in-English count, and then we'll talk. Complaining about a list that's already fairly arbitrary is somewhat funny. Still, these distinctions, arbitrary or no, are helpful for introducing the uninitiated to world cinema. A lot of people tend to avoid, or simply don't have much access to, non-English language films, and so it makes sense to produce lists of "foreign" films for a starting point.
Gosh, the top 40 foreign movies from people who haven't watched enough foreign films.
To get an interesting list you might have to limit more than just romance languages. You could try a top whatever of third world films and maybe get something unique. An actual list of including things I haven't seen.
More interesting than the list (which, like all lists I didn't write myself, is seriously flawed), I find, is Mr. Jeavons' condescending rant, which somehow concludes that people should be chided for their taste in cinema or any other art form. Such an opinion is about as preposterous as the creation of this list in the first place.
Eh. This reminds me of that list of the world's 40 best directors, also the Guardian.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/page/0,11456,1082823,00.html
In both cases, what's most surprising is what (or who) is excluded, rather than included on the list(s).
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