Greatest film ever made....Go!

rick snagwell said:

dumb and dumber

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Scepticalscribe said:

How do you define what you think might be the 'Greatest Film Ever Made?' What criteria do you use?

By that I mean, are you simply asking what film you liked best (when I was a small child 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' was a firm favourite of mine, and has left me with an insane veneration of and fascination with vintage cars which I expect I shall retain until the day I pop my clogs).

Or, do you mean a film which altered the way in which movie making was viewed, which stretched boundaries, used film as a means of telling a story in a new radically different (and challenging) way? Or a film which has stood the test of time? Or one which was extremely popular?

I'm an historian by background, and I love challenging, nuanced thoughtful movies. As someone who enjoys theatre, I also admire excellent acting, sharp and literate scripts, and those who can inhabit a character so well that you forget that you are looking at someone pretending to be someone else. So, I prefer character actors to conventional leading men; I also prefer actors with lived in faces, faces where it is clear that life has been lived, and such experiences have been etched as laugh lines, crinkles, and dare one admit to it, wrinkles, too, on the broad canvas of the human face. Bland perfection holds no attraction for me. Botox even less.

I also love atmosphere, and, if it is supposed to be history, accuracy. In movies, I love a form of cinematography that uses light intelligently; I am a keen photographer, and love art where the mastery of light plays a key role; thus, it should come as no surprise to learn that I love the Renaissance and post Renaissance painting of the Low Countries, artists such as Velazquez, and of course much of the work of the Impressionists.

Comedy, horror, and romance don't interest me as much, unless the tale is exceptionally well told. My personal preference when emerging from a movie is to be made to think - and not to feel - and to be made to look at something in the world in a new way. If feelings are to be explored, I have the European preference for the bitter sweet integrity of art rather than the more popular 'feel good' outcome often demanded by US film studios.

Thus, I don't much like conventionally happy endings, desirable though such an outcome is; I prefer scenes such as the superb scene at the end of 'The Third Man' (a scene which took courage to even film let alone insist on remaining as the end of the movie when it was later released) when it is clear That Holly Didn't Get The Girl, for she coolly and coldly walked past him, and out of his life, shunning him and snubbing him, as the credits rolled. Magnificent, and yes, heart-breaking - heartbreaking for them both, in different ways. But brilliant.

This is all by way of explanation as to the criteria I would use for 'Greatest Movie of all Time', rather than a response to a question of 'what movies have you really liked?'

Therefore, none of the movies cited above would I regard as the 'Greatest Movie Of all Time'; some were merely entertainment, some were terrific movies, (Casablanca and The Godfather in particular) but not ground breaking or transformative in any way.

The movie that still blows me away is 'Citizen Kane'; this was nothing short of revolutionary when it was made.

The script; direction; the ensemble acting (none of the Mercury Theatre - bar perhaps Welles himself for his radio work were even known before the movie); the multiple narrators; the nuanced narrative; the stunning lighting; the epic scope and range of the story told; the sheer depth of the exploration of the possibility of human greatness and the cost to lives (and a life) of human flaws in the morality tale the movie told; the splendid cinematography - the angles, how film was used to convey the passage of time (the way Kane's disintegrating marriage was conveyed was stunning; as was the scene after he took over his first paper), the various startling and new narrative devices (i.e. the fake documentary news reel at the outset), and the sheer brilliance of the pacing. And of course, the famous 'red herring' which also told its own story.

This is a work of cinematic genius, and a brilliantly told jaw-dropping tale of hubris and nemesis. And it stands the test of time. Even though it was made in 1940, the tale it tells is an eternal one which has permanent and universal relevance. It is a movie I could watch again and again, as the story it tells is one which is so richly and magnificently told.

I have posted elsewhere that when I first saw it I was blown away, bowled over, awestruck; this is nothing short of superlative on every conceivable level of using the medium of film to tell a story.

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