Blogdanovich and the Greatest Film Ever Made
The once-a-decade Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made is old news by now, the headline having been that longtime Number One Greatest Film Citizen Kane has been displaced after many decades by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (if you haven’t seen the poll: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time).
But I only recently discovered that the famed film director, producer, actor, historian etc. Peter Bogdanovich keeps a blog-called, inevitably, “Blogdanovich”-and that in an August entry he discussed this poll, making some salient points and a few that, to me, are not quite so salient. The full blog entry is here (http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/the-sight-and-sound-poll).
In brief, Mr. Bogdanovich reveals that he was asked to participate by creating his own top ten list of the greatest films of all time. He tried, he writes, but he “found the exercise impossible to complete.” He arrived at the conclusion that “the whole rating idea is anti-artistic, anti-film culture, just absurdly reductive.”
Of course Mr. Bogdanovich is perfectly correct about this.
He is also perfectly wrong.
Of course any attempt to rank artistic works is doomed from the outset, whether it’s a Greatest Films of All Time list or the winner of the Best Picture Oscar. For that matter, one can say the same thing about the Emmys, the Tonys, and Golden Globes. We can add in the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Edgar Award, the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the Golden Spur, the Bram Stoker Award, any critic’s top ten or twenty or hundred list of anything…novels, poems, plays, paintings, sitcoms, porn films, anything at all that exists at any point within the sphere of “artistic endeavor.”
All such lists are rubbish, and they’re all wrong.
Unless, of course, you are the one who made the list.
Naturally these lists are subjective; they can’t be anything else. A large poll like Sight & Sound’s tries to locate some generalized agreement among many assumedly informed individuals, but one could have asked other, similarly informed individuals and no doubt have gotten a much different list of the Greatest Films of All Time.
But I can’t go along with Mr. Bogdanovich’s assessment that such an endeavor is “anti-artistic” and “absurdly reductive.”
The truth is, such lists-and awards like the ones I’ve listed-are nothing but a snapshot in time: how certain individuals responded to a particular question at a particular moment. They mean nothing else. Politics often play into people’s choices, along with personal hostilities and resentments. Orson Welles had alienated much of Hollywood at the time he was making Kane, and he paid for it by having his film win no Oscar except Best Screenplay (which was really a way of acknowledging old Hollywood pro Herman Mankiewicz, its co-author). The Best Picture winner, How Green Was My Valley, is a nice little sentimental picture, but history has surely shown how wrong the judgment of the Academy voters was that year.
You want wrong, though? How about this: though it only won a single statuette, at least Kane received nine nominations, many in major categories including Best Picture, Actor, and Director. But the current “greatest film of all time,” Vertigo, received only two, both in minor categories (Art Direction, Sound)-and lost both.
So the awards are useless, right? Not really. They’re valuable if, for nothing else, generating discussion. After all, what better way is there to get people thinking about Citizen Kane than to tell them that it won no major awards in its year of release? Or that Alfred Hitchcock never won an Academy Award-and was not even nominated for Vertigo?
Anyway, can there even be something like a “greatest film of all time”? What does it mean? “Greatest” in what sense? Most entertaining? (In that case Star Wars or Titanic or Gone With the Wind would likely be most filmgoers’ top choice; Citizen Kane wouldn’t even make the top hundred.) Most historically important? Most technically innovative? There’s no answer.
Except that you have an answer, don’t you?
Of course you do.
For you, the greatest film of all time is the one you enjoyed the most, that had the greatest emotional impact on you, the one you remember most vividly, the one you can watch again and again and never become bored.
You see, that’s where lists like this have value-as discussion generators.
Don’t see your favorite movie on the list? Well, what does that say about the list and the people who voted on it? For that matter, what does it say about you? If you’ve never seen Vertigo, don’t you want to, now that you discover that it’s the “greatest”? Doesn’t that ranking make you at least a little curious? And if your own choice doesn’t appear on the list, don’t you want to coattail your friends and say, “Forget Sight & Sound! You want great? I’ll show you the greatest movie ever made! Sit down with me and watch Showgirls!”
Of course, I say all this as a preening film-school type who can always look at a list like this and feel confident that many of my own favorite movies will be on it. Looking at such a list helps reinforce my ego, my calm assurance that I, naturally, have the finest taste in the world. If your favorite movie is Ernest Goes to Camp or Troll 2, however, this might not be true.
There’s much I could say about many of the films listed in the poll, but I’ll just say this. When I was about eleven, I began to discover the works of Alfred Hitchcock through reruns of his movies on TV (also his TV show and the mystery anthologies that carried his name). By the time I was twelve or so I had seen and fallen in love with Lifeboat, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Frenzy, The Birds, and, of course, Psycho.
At age eighteen I finally saw Citizen Kane thanks to my videotaping a late-night TV screening, and I went completely mad for it. I loved the film so much that on more than one weekend night I would come home from my job as busboy at the Valley Steak House-usually around ten or eleven p.m.-pop open a can of Coke (caffeine seemed to have no effect on me in those days), and plug my home-taped VHS of Kane into my RCA top-loading VCR. I would watch it straight through.
Then I would rewind the tape and watch it straight through again.
By eighteen I knew that the two greatest moviemakers in the history of the world were Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.
By choosing Vertigo as Number One and Kane as Number Two, the critics of the world have finally caught up with what I knew when I was still a teenager.
Thanks, film critics of the world. I always knew I was right!
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