So which one of us is going to write properly about Alonso? Because the critical establishment has failed so far. I can do the work, but I’m not smart enough.
You’re smart enough. Everyone can see that. I’d personally love to see what you have to say about Alonso’s works.
Now are you willing to admit that the critical establishments of the past may have failed in similar ways to how they have so far (largely) failed to write properly about Alonso?
And I didn’t mean that this poll should be placed in opposition to the canon. I just want people to be able to see that political dynamics played a role in the formation of the canons as well.
Come on, Jerry. This isn’t a debate about the birth rates of different countries.
You brought up the percentages.
That the presence of only two American films in any list of top 20 films of all time should result in cries of an anti-American bias is itself the biased thinking.
I’m much more upset about the lack of genre films.
And Odil- don’t try to mother us until AFTER we’ve bloodied each other’s noses.
Now are you willing to admit that the critical establishments of the past may have failed in similar ways to how they have so far (largely) failed to write properly about Alonso?
Yes. They speak of this “minimalism” in his work. Are you kidding me? He lived with the protagonists of his first two films for 6 months before he started filming them. That’s not minimalism- that’s epic filmmaking.
It’s no use Jerry, you are right.
Enjoy your knocking each others’ heads off, boys.
I’ll keep out of it.
(I’m only a mother to two people in this world, and I’m keeping it to that number, but thanks for the acknowledgement of my comfort skills (crooked smile)).
Yes. They speak of this “minimalism” in his work. Are you kidding me? He lived with the protagonists of his first two films for 6 months before he started filming them. That’s not minimalism- that’s epic filmmaking.
Thanks for pointing that out. Now go tell that to the clowns who group a bunch of films under the banner of contemporary contemplative cinema (and shit on it indiscriminately as a default “hack” style) even though they have nothing in common with each other outside of the facts that they’re usually not in English and don’t contain explosions and shootings.
Please keep smacking each other around. You two just made me love Alonso a little more (I already love him quite a bit).
The list is a bit on the pretentious side, but I guess that is fitting for MUBI…
Glughk.
Glughk indeed
For good or ill, I’ve never seen a top 20 list like this anywhere. Personally I think the variety is great, and it’s always good to look at things from a new angle.
Has anyone linked again to Jon K’s “every film to enter the mubi forum users’ top 20” list?
http://www.listsofbests.com/list/99043-every-film-to-enter-the-mubi-forum-users-top-20
Jon, would you consider transferring the list to mubi so I can fan it? :)
It’s a hell of a list of films, I’m looking forward to going through it and seeing those I haven’t yet.
I wonder if the final top 20 list could feature on the mubi home page or the “lists” page, so you could locate it in the same way you can say the imdb top 250? Just a thought.
Thanks again Dib :)
@David
http://mubi.com/lists/every-film-to-enter-the-mubi-forum-users-top-20-list
:)
“The result of the poll is arbitrary to me, because we could easily run this show again and come up with something completely different.”
I think that is especially true for this forum simply because members would actively resist letting the same movies win twice. We talked about the potential for running it again and various people (me and House of Leaves probably the most because we talked about it the most) agreed that it shouldn’t be an every year thing so that the times have time to “the times they are a changin’”, but nevertheless I am confident that we could start the whole thing from scratch today and end up with a completely different top 20 in two/three months.
—PolarisDiB
@Jon: Yay!
I used the word “list” a lot in my last post
“Also, we had much more participation in this poll throughout compared to DC. That itself proves that this exercise was much more encouraging. "
Nah, it’s just easier to vote for what you’ve already seen than watch movies anew and compare/contrast one by one. This is really kind of why lists are made — information filters. Facing the noize of an ocean of content, people want to know “where to start”, best-ofs favorites important works highlights begin, and yes, canons are formed, perhaps through some elaborate post-modern geopolitical situation or simply because best-of lists beget best-of lists in succession as people over time start with the best-of lists presented before (there’s a social theory term for that but I’ve forgotten it).
This game was designed as what is easy in contrast to the Director’s Cup, which is what is analytical. Well I mean technically it was designed for smaller forums where everyone has seen a certain core group of movies and sort of familiarize their relationships around each other on those movies. This forum is too big and too serious for that.
Now in defense of the Director’s Cup, we get people criticizing it for the competitive aspects all the time but until a featured filmmaker actually says, “I don’t want anybody watching my movies as some sort of competitive game,” I find it difficult to swallow that most filmmakers, especially the more obscure ones, wouldn’t be honored to have their work promoted and discussed to such a degree. Yes they may think, "Wait… why am I up against Orson Welles? " or something like that, maybe even, “What? C’mon people, I’m nowhere NEAR as good as Orson Welles!” but it would certainly be surprising to me to find out a director thinks, “If you’re watching this movie in competition against Orson Welles then fuck you, that’s not what I made it for.” And even if a director did say that, I’d pretty much do the, “Well the director is kind of a dick, but anyway Orson Welles — 0; Dick Director — 1” because a director being a dick doesn’t always affect my appreciation of his or her movies (I try to make it never, but sometimes I can’t help myself).
Honestly if a director cared at all about this sort of thing, I think it would be along the lines of, “Wow guys! Thanks for featuring my works in your game! I love reading the analyses and seeing what you guys think about it!”
—PolarisDiB
Cheers to the list, Polaris! Nicely done. Looks as though I have some movies to check out now…
A step in the right direction? The cinematic canons were established by committed individuals who put talent, time, and effort into writing high-quality criticism. This Mubi poll was perfectly designed to let anybody promote a film with the least amount of effort possible. It was fun, and it introduced great films to a lot of people, but it was no different from a Family Feud gameshow.
I didn’t vote for various reasons – objective observer status?
Of the many points being made, one of the things that I want to question is motivation. The process is akin to saying: “I want to enlist so I can see what it is like to kill somebody.”
People were motivated to see films that they clam they wouldn’t have watched otherwise – within the context of which, they can now claim what? they killed Citizen Kane?
Congrats !
Re canon
I’ve seen many outlier films. Imo, the bell curve would be evenly distributed: some great, some terrible but most falling in the center of the graph.
The cannon’s bell is skewed off center i.e. there are many more effective
films in the canon because of the selection process for reasons Jerry pointed out.
Is the canon culturally biased ? That can not be denied, just as it can not be denied certain cultures have greater insight into the structure of reality – and that shifts the entire cannon graph towards more effective films vs the outlier graph.
Robert, insight into the “structure of reality”, depending on how one would measure such a thing,has only a tenuous connection to art at best, and is completely orthagonal at worst. Art is more about one’s personal understanding of reality, not scientific advancement, and even if that were not the case, during the history of cinema, most of that “understanding” has been widely available to almost all people of the world. What any alleged canon, like the polls used by TSPDT, are inherently flawed and represent commercial concerns and the interests of those polled as much as anything else. That isn’t to say that the history of scholarship around the film generally found on such lists isn’t of value in itself, but at the same time such writing helps to further reinforce the status quo rather than look beyond it for works that inspire others who are well versed in the art, but who haven’t had the same opportunities to express their perspectives. How would one measure more effective in terms of art anyway? Popularity? If one accepts any notion of aesthetic response, that seems an iffy proposition at best, and one which speaks to those who already have a voice rather than those who haven’t been “polled” for their response in the same numbers.
It’s true that the cinematic canons were established by committed individuals who put talent, time and effort into high quality criticism. But they were also established by people employed by magazines trying to sell copies. They want to write about the films that will create buzz in the year they come out, so their own critical experience is filtered that way.
Let’s not mistake breadth of appeal for extent.
Also let’s not mistake the 10%-some of personal best lists a film has to be on to be considered canon for a consensus.
Applying the blanket label ‘Pretentious’ to anybody who would rather watch something outside the mainstream than inside it is in itself extremely pretentious, and a little defensive.
But Greg….
Look at the process: we went from a list of the ‘known’, as condition of submission, to a list of ‘unknown’.
What the fuck does that have to do with art?
How is that even possible?
It was done by bullying ! Ironically, the same motivation leveled against the canon: the canon is canonists bullying people into thinking the canon has meaning !
…depending on how one would measure such a thing….
Filmically, that would be formalist insights into relationships.
Greg, we have a very fundamental philosophic disagreement here regarding art vs nations & culture.
I don’t want to view art in terms of nationality. One of things culture does is make us strangers to one another.
Removing those two things and others, I am left with formalism.
Here’s the thing though, that formalism has selection bias based on where I am in history, my culture, politics personal experience and qualia.
Thus, I am not claiming ‘objectivity’, but focusing perception on something other than those things I willfully want to exclude, which gives me a ‘raw feel’ for work that I can then look at with formalist factors.
…insight into the “structure of reality”,….. has only a tenuous connection to art at best…
We disagree partly by way of formalist factors – they come from somewhere – it is not so much tenuous
as it is tautological.
We also apparently disagree about the nature of relationships. Is there a culture that sees a large object as LESS powerful than a small object? Is that relationship subjective, inter-subjective, or objective?
Seemingly way off topic….but the post-game analysis is primarily about power dynamics, no?
I would take the position that academic formalism has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the exhibition of the appreciation of art, but we’ve traveled that debate already. ;)
This game was simple. To be near the top you have to have 1) A few posters supporting you and 2) Not too many attacking you. Take that for what it is. I’d personally rather watch films a few people think is the greatest of all time than ones a lot of people think is just pretty good.
Two of the most obscure films that I consider among the greatest of all time made the list. I’m pretty happy about that. I also consider Bicycle Thieves, Taxi Driver and Sunrise among the greatest of all time, and they were targeted for being more canonical. But that’s just how this game works.
There was a piece posted at MUBI that claimed N Korea was “okay” in comparison to the West. The underlying belief expressed was that power dynamics are a matter of how a narrative is written. It was implied that, if the N Korean narrative was written in a certain manner, it makes N Korea’s narrative comparable or even as good as the West’s narrative.
That approach is the same being used to attack the canon. It is a denial of understandings, linkages and relationships.
I would take the position that academic formalism has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the exhibition of the appreciation of art.
I am saying that power is inherent to an object and that some of these power dynamics are thereby capable of achieving a universality that cuts across nations and cultures. It is a property of art to do so, based on producing a totality of feelings.
What you are saying Jirin, is that academic formalism has no basis to be found in the work – a very Kois—ian position.
It was done by bullying ! Ironically, the same motivation leveled against the canon: the canon is canonists bullying people into thinking the canon has meaning !
Yes. This is sort of what I was saying. The intention of both sides are cut from the same cloth (i.e. Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are both full of shit) even if the specific positions are different.
Seemingly way off topic….but the post-game analysis is primarily about power dynamics, no?
Well, isn’t that always the case around here? hehe
The game had as much to do with art as the TSPDT lists or Sight and Sound polls, which is to say about as much as the limited number of participants with unknown amounts of experience or knowledge were willing to put into it. The answer is somewhere between vague to completely empty depending on the person looking at the final tally and what they do with it. Is this list somehow inherently worse than the top twenty of either of those two forementioned polls? I don’t see how. It is certainly flawed in terms of it holding any parsable larger sensibility to it, but that’s part of the problem with pseudo-canons, they don’t “mean” anything beyond the rules formulating them and can’t held to be anything more than a measurement of the prejudices of those rules and the people being asked to make use of them.
I don’t appreciate art in terms of nations or culture beyond the boundaries that might set up for my own understanding, say failure to understand a language and therefore nuance or some cultural act which would have more resonance if I lived in the culture, but I also have to accept that isn’t the way art has been valued or been able to find attention in the world, so the commercial, political and cultural issues are automatically involved when looking at much of the way art is talked about.
Regarding formalist factors, I’m not following your argument at all. Either they are universal or they aren’t if it’s the former, than insight into the structure of reality in those terms goes along with it so that isn’t an issue, and if its the latter, then the reality being claimed isn’t as stable as it sounds. We can find art from centuries ago as moving as art today, and the same would go for art from any part of the world and from any time, so the question isn’t about some better or worse insight into the structure of reality as that would suggest a deeply problematic attitude towards an evolutionary quality to art which simply doesn’t hold for many of us.
We obviously do disagree on some aspects of formal concerns, and I would add on some other things regarding our response to art as well it appears though, but I’m not really sure what that suggests about the issues that have been raised this game.
Anyway, I made a resolution to try and not get involved with as many general discussions that can’t be resolved and to focus more on discussing specific films or other more readily demonstrated subjects. So I’m going to try and let this one go and get back to the Black Swan and some Ozu Boetticher stuff since that seems to have more promise of getting somewhere other than to endless circling. This kind of thing is easier to dash off quickly, which is its allure, but I don’t think its as worthwhile beyond a certain point.
Is this list somehow inherently worse than the top twenty of either of those two forementioned polls?
I don’t know enough about those other two polls but I would be inclined to say yes, based on some of the points Jerry mentioned earlier. It’s certainly not better than any other list. The sincerity of this list, the effort of +2’s and -1’s is vastly different than critics and historians putting in loads more effort in creating those other lists, no? That isn’t to say one list is better or more definitive though. As stated early, politics and plenty of other factors beyond quality always seep into effecting the ultimate outcome of these surveys.
I don’t disagree with many of the points Jerry and Robert have made, about the quality of films from the canon and the invaluable film scholarship that surrounds much of it, but a few observations, primarily about the use of the word ‘outlier film’ (or ‘obscure’, the other choice). I can only talk about the Indian films on the list, and a couple of others which made the top 100, but the two films which made the top 20 are both easily part of the “Indian canon of greatest films of all time”, not to mention films whose aesthetic and emotional qualities aren’t very different from the canonical films which they share similarities with. Ray is of course perhaps the only name that can also be called part of the “Western canon” and Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara is easily his most well-known film, certainly in India but most likely also abroad. To call them ‘outlier’ films is not only inaccurate, but becomes doubly unjust when a generalization is made about the quality of these films. Isn’t their obscurity “outside of the art”, something always painstakingly pointed out while justifiably pouring scorn on the “overrated/underrated/overhyped” threads on this forum?
A couple of other films from the top 100, Pyaasa and Kagaaz ke Phool, both by Guru Dutt, made within the Bombay “studio system” are genre films (melodrama), and are as dear to many film-going audiences in India as the many classic Westerns might be for American audiences. The interest in film scholarship in India is admittedly much lesser than the West, but there has been some great writing on many of these films, and if they’ve been less successful in getting that attention from abroad (except Ray, and recently, even if still to a much lesser extent, Ghatak), how is that the fault of the films? In one of the threads here, I read a forum member who goes/went to film school claim that everybody there only wants to study Tarkovsky and Bresson and Ozu and Mizoguchi (I’m paraphrasing from memory, it might have been some other canonical directors), so maybe that herd mentality has something to do with some works remaining obscure.
My views on the complex relationship between art and the cultural and social reality of the nation and milieu it is created in might be somewhat primitive, but to judge a work entirely in terms of its formal qualities is limiting, similar to treating it almost like it exists in a vacuum (I’m sure that’s not the intention, so please correct me on this). Now I’m inclined to agree with the fact that the art lies in the form, or the style, or whatever we choose to call it, but what is that style/form if not a personal reaction to or an endeavor to understand the many aspects of reality that surrounds the artist?
I must reiterate that I’m not defending this game, and I’d never once pretend that it struck any meaningful blows in favor of any of the “lesser-appreciated masterpieces” that made the final list; it was governed by politics, it had many limitations, and yet we ended up with some great films. Exactly like all those other polls with their own politics and limitations.
Did you ever look at who was polled for the Sight and Sound list and what some of those people submitted? There was often little evidence of a wide body of knowledge or “seriousness” as the attiudes seemed to vary considerably over what was being sought and what polemical point they wished to make. Many critics get the job for reasons that have little to do with knowledge of film history or any sort of scholarship, so taking their opinions more seriously than many of the people here would be a mistake to my mind. Your mileage may vary of course.
“The cinematic canons were established by committed individuals who put talent, time, and effort into writing high-quality criticism.”
I think what Jerry says is largely correct whether ones likes it or not. Canons are as much the product of the influence of those who built them rather than the films themselves. On the other hand, I’m not sure what that says about canons.
Side note, Jerry, the birthrate in India is 2.66 not 8.5 and it’s decreasing consistently (in other words, it’s getting closer to the U.S). Try not to make such broad assumptions about the developing world.
Blue K, I think you may be excited and confused, as you were in the “recent muzzling” thread where you reached the tragicomic conclusion that I, as opposed to Dimitri, actually harbored “ill will.”
Re: “However, there is justifiable and vociferous objection against the opinions of people like you who confuse the mere commercial proliferation and global availability of American cinema with some kind of inherent artistic excellence.”
In which case this alleged “vociferous” objection is misdirected, because I do not, in fact, hold the opinion that the factors you mention imply artistic excellence in American cinema.
You made that erroneous leap (speaking of poor logic) from the following:
“You’ve already shown your “American exceptionalism” bias by declaring that two American films making a list of 20 somehow constitutes bias.”
Wrong. I was referring to the fact that the great desire to make this list different, early on, seemed to suggest that many American films would be excluded. Nothing to do with bias against American films because they were AMERICAN, but because they were on so many lists already. Which in turn suggested to me that perhaps not many young Mubians were being compelled to watch American films they had not seen.
You strike me as a bit too eager to find some ill will or “bias” on my part. You are just wrong about this matter.
Put another way: Honi soit qui mal y pense.
“I ask because there seemed to exist all along a desire that American directors not make the list, as well as a celebration here, I think, that only two made the final 20.”
Sounds like you were making a point about anti-Americanism, rather than simply anti canon, that would coincidentally hurt US films.
Who didn’t want US directors to make the list, and who celebrated in an anti- US manner? There were participants who wanted a decent spread in various ways, and new discoveries, more so than wanting to hit the US in particular (for instance, Dimitris preferred for the 2 US films to make the 20 than some in the “world cinema” canon, or have many from France and Japan)
heh ^ i can vouch for this. i witnessed kenji trying to convince him otherwise (re:sansho) ;)
Nathan M...
…and completely poo poo the results of a poll in which every member of the forum had a chance to participate.
Just to be clear here: I’m not “poo poo”ing the results at all. The result of the poll is arbitrary to me, because we could easily run this show again and come up with something completely different. Why might we come up with something different? Because, as Jerry has already pointed out, this poll has nothing to do with talent, time, effort, or high quality criticism. Sure, I’ll use this poll as a recommendation source, but because the poll tells me nothing about the movies other than that some people on Mubi like ‘em, well…I can’t take it seriously as a “new” or “alternative” canon. Cinema politics and quality are not mutually exclusive. And based on the final 100 or so movies on this list, I’d say there was plenty of quality. But the fact that there are a lot of quality films represented here doesn’t mitigate the fact that the list itself is largely a byproduct of tactics.
I mean, c’mon, the list was decided by a bunch of people putting “+2” and “-1” next to movie titles.
But if I sound too negative, I want to say to Polaris (and everyone else) that I had a helluva time with this game. It was a lot of fun and I think it really brought out all the best and worst that Mubi has to offer in the forums. It was almost a microcosm of everything that this community has been and probably ever will be. For that alone the game was well worth playing and I hope that Polaris feels it was well worth hosting.