That’s a great thinking…
XD
How about La Jetée? (not exactly a personal favourite, but….)
Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy – the stories, the cinematography, the music, the acting, the direction = high art.
The rule I’d have is that the film can’t be submissive to the source material—if there is one. It would have to show films strengths over other forms of Art. Narrative or not, the worst case would be simply a lit visualization (or more recently graphic novel conversion, ugh). Then there are documentaries.
A strong argument could be made for a ton of films from Murnau’s Sunrise to Antonioni’s L’ Eclisse to Kubrick’s 2001 (source written for film) to maybe most obviously Paul Almond’s Up Series.
Let me nominate Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern filmmaker of the sound film. — Eric Rohmer
You can describe Hiroshima as Faulkner plus Stravinsky. — Jean-Luc Godard
We’ve already seen a lot of films that parallel the novel’s rules of construction. Hiroshima goes further. We are at the very core of a reflection on the narrative form itself. — Pierre Kast
Once Upon a Time in the West
Andrei Rublev
Passion of Joan of Arc
Siberiade
Children of Paradise
Red Beard
Shoot the Piano Player to me always is a good example when I explain the auteur theory as I understand it. In terms of art I might also say Vertigo, because of it’s use of mythic themes, confessional intimacy and aesthetic power and pioneering, it also addresses voyeurism which is a very cinematic perversion.
Jason beat me to it
Children of Paradise
Juliet of the Spirits
I think that the essence of cinema is what movies can do that the other arts can’t…montage, moving pictures and crane shots in combination with music-a new use for music in which it is subordinate to the image. But film, perhaps more than the other arts is dependent on the other arts as it has grown out of them. Some may argue that true cinema is only that which movies can do and other arts can’t but cinema was not created in a vacum anymore than opera or Jazz or dance or theatre. It was created with a fore-knowledge of the other arts and true cinema is inseparable from them. But the greatest cinema has a common goal with the greatest of all art, and that is to recreate and distill the joy, beauty, complexity, lonesomeness, ugliness, brutality, virtue, vice, courage, spirit, faith, and abiding love that is part of human nature and our human condition.
My nomination of La Jetée was not for overall greatness but as an example of what is cinema- the moving image. Sometimes the most dumb editing and needless camerawork are praised as cinematic. Too many directors are under a misconception that the more swirls and cuts they come up with the more cinematic they’re being
I’m glad to see the nomination by Blessing of Hiroshima mon Amour, which was rated among the very greatest films when it came out but has slipped out of the spotlight a bit since. Its elegance and form are a match for the range and importance of its subject matters (time, war, love, patriotism, individualism, communal pressure, subjectivity, memory, truth, nuclear holocaust,..) Great art needs integrity, vision, soul and mastery of the medium. I would also propose Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)- a separate thread on what i admire-, Sunrise (Murnau), Mirror (Tarkovsky)- Rohmer calls Hiroshima mon Amour cubist, well i think Mirror is too and it has fathomless depths-, Rules of the Game (Renoir)
The Best of Youth
Call me crazy but I think that cinema has turned a corner with ‘The Best of Youth’ and is not even in my top 5 Canon (just to get an idea my top 5 are The Third Man, Nashville, The Conversation, Citizen Kane, City Lights). It has everything that has gotten us to this point regarding art, film and inescapable influences from Television and Theater.
The movie is an epic which I am still digesting even after 2 years of having seen it. There are films that do certain things better but ‘The Best of Youth’ has such strong undercurrents that run deeper than all films I have seen—sure, Kane is Kane, Apocalypse is audacious, Gone With the Wind is pure Hollywood machine but there are moments in The Best of Youth that recall every significant film I have ever seen but is deceptively simple and a cinematic treasure.
“La Belle et la bête“ is not my favorite film but it is simple poetry!
“La Belle et la bête“ is not my favorite film but it is simple poetry!
If I had to convince an unbeliever that cinema was an art, I’d pick Touch of Evil.
The Third Man – a movie that didn’t even make the autuers poll top ten – not even close. It has everything: 1. A gripping story, where the narrative drive keeps changing focus, as we get closer to just who is this mysterious ‘Harry Lime’ (Orson Welles at his most sardonic); 2. Pure cinematography – no one has better used the motion picture camera to present us a world of light and shadow, where shadows can literally become taller than a building; 3. A great score – fittingly played by a zither – that most Viennese of instruments; 4. Poetry of image, music, and storyline – with a buildup of tension and suspense, ending in the maze like sewers beneath the city, where Harry is trapped like a rat and the final shots of him have his fingers reaching through the iron bars of the drain into the cold night air.
The end is perfect, too, as Martins (Joseph Cotten) looks back at Anna (Alida Valli) with longing and regret as the car whips him out of the city, a she refuses to return his gaze. A movie we could speak volumes about, as it exists on many different levels of interpretation, like any true work of art. We start with a mystery, Harry has supposedly died, but then we are unsure, Slowly the plot uncurls, like a spiral, as we get closer to the truth – or do we? Many mysterious characters and forces present themselves. Vienna swallows up Martins, just as Lime has been swallowed up. What is truth, what is reality? What is next around the never-ending corner? Lime exists as an ideal of freedon in Martins mind and an object of love for Anna. But who he is, and his dark side, become revealed as we peel off the onion layer by layer to reveal its rotten core. When Lime’s true crimes are revealed by the policeman Calloway (Trevor Howard), the zither music hits a frantic crescendo…
We have Holly Martins, a writer of westerns, who becomes the unsuspecting dupe of the mysterious forces around Lime. There is the ironic scene of this same Martins, being taken for a ‘great American writer’, being interrogated by a literary group for his opinions on James Joyce. We have the classic scene in the ferris wheel, with Welles as Lime, giving us his cynical view of humanity, which he sees like ants, when seen from the top, looking down. Each scene is calculated to give maximum effect, and takes us further and further into the heart of darkness that is Harry and post-war Vienna – the city of dreams. A film that represents the poetry of cinema. Maybe equalled here and there, but never surpassed.
Big Trouble in Little China, obviously.
I’ll toss out “Seven Samurai”, one of the few films that has managed to blend high art and entertainment spectacle without compromising on either angle. I can’t think of a film that even comes close to doing this as well, other then maybe “Vertigo” (my second choice), but that film stays on the darker side; lacking the kinetic liveliness found in “Samurai” (which also manages to be dark in places).
After that;
“La Jatee” is a good choice, as is the intro the “Grin Without a Cat”; juxtposing ’60’s protests in France with scenes from the Odessa Steps sequence in “Battleship Potemkin”, though the rest of the film is pretty good too. I’ve never seen it, but “Jeanne Dielman…” seems like another title to toss out. I’m sure there is a Stan Brakhage film worth considering as well. Another film that comes to mind is “Persona”. For some reason, I feel the answer to this question should some how expose the mechanism of film.
Really, I think you need 10 or so films at least in order to really encompass what cinema is all about as an art. They wouldn’t necessarily be the ten best, or ten most enjoyable. If I had to pick one though, it’d be “Seven Samurai”, which though not my fav, often makes my top 10 (sometimes I replace it with “Ran”).
I’m glad a few are recommending “The Third Man”. Although I didn’t mention it, it is a personal fave and like “2001” had its originating novel written specifically to create a screenplay. It just seems directors feel less compromised in vision when not adapting a popular source material… and maybe more obviously, some cinematic considerations may be there at the start (though I haven’t read Greene’s novel).
Aside from no originating source, other difficult/less restricting fields include poetry and music, so let me mention a film I used to show for years as an introduction to friends—Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”. Obviously, a very visual literary film that you never suspect has a “better book” out there and you never doubt is functioning strongest in the medium you’re watching.
More recently I’d suggest titles that came from visual artists primarily known outside of feature-length film (no matter the source). Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has a lot of lessons, most obviously any story can make a great film if done right. It’s another nearly perfect “gateway” flick for those uninitiated to the power of cinema. Depending on the country you’re in, the other Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” either came out last year or is just making it to theaters now, and if not quite as strong is close.
“C’era una Volta il West”, “Vertigo”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Fellini-Satyricon”. Impossible for me to choose one.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon
Seven Samurai. Though I proabally prefer Ran still with Seven Samurai you have an even wider scope of the nature of man.
2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, RAN, METROPOLIS,
Well, this is sort of too hypothetical for me, but I would say, to convince someone that film is an art, you would need a film that is primarily universal, one that has not dated significantly, one that brings fantasy to life, and one that would encourage the viewer to want to see more films. So, although it is emphatically not my favorite, I would show The Wizard of Oz.
Hmm, good question. Maybe… “Manhattan”. Drama, comedy, classic cinematography, Rhapsody in Blue. If the opening scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o6QKpNK9Cc isn’t art then I don’t really know what art is
Such a strange question. The introductory post points out something important, and that is that even if you cite one movie, a different movie can be completely different and in fact almost opposed to the first movie and still be an acceptable answer to the question.
Cinema is merely images on a timeline. What those images are, where they come from, what is done with them, and how they interact with the timeline is entirely up to the filmmaker. The possibilities are as many as there are possible pictures taken or drawn, stretched to any possible playlength. Is that way too open? Well, the opposite of essentializing is generalizing, so we fall into theoretical dead ends either way.
Ah, what the hell. I’ll throw away the superfluous language and say L’Eclisse. Every single frame means something.
Shrugs
—PolarisDiB
The question you should be asking is; Name a film that justifies the very existences of the cinema? A cathartic experience that can not be articulated by any other means.
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Definitely Bresson: Au hasard Balthazar or Diary of a Country Priest
There are many great films, but none are like anything Bresson has done after Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne.
Umberto L.
A Chaplin classic in pantomime like “City Lights”, or a canonical feature like “Citizen Kane”? Coppola’s “The Godfather” seems to be the most obvious… Maybe a masterpiece from Neorealism or Nouvelle Vague? Or a long story like “Gone with the Wind” or “Novecento”?
A film about alienation would be perfect… let’s think to “La Dolce Vita”, “Apocalypse Now” or “Taxi Driver”.
A love story like “Casablanca” is a nice entry, while Tornatore’s “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” already is the worldly-known anthem of Cinema…
Wait a minute! We forgot Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman… and many others who probably made the picture we are looking for!
Think hard about it and write down the title of the film that you think is the best one to describe the power, the beauty and the appeal of Cinema. (Pay attention: it isn’t necessarily your favourite movie!)