Цитатник Англофила - 38: 50 главных кинофильмов мирового кино по версии "Спектэйтор"
Вдогонку к моему предыдущему посту Путешествие дилетанта по книге Г. Дарахвелидзе "Ландшафты сновидений". Книга, напомню, посвящена классикам британского кино Майклу Пауэллу и Эмерику Прессбургеру. И вот не далее как вчера купил я свежий номер еженедельного журнала The Spectator. И - как по заказу - обнаружил там большой материал (начавшийся в предыдущем номере) под заголовком "The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films". И в этом списке 50-ти ключевых фильмов мирового кино (каждый сопровождается короткой рецензией) обнаружились два фильма "Арчеров" - "Черный Нарцисс" (на 4-м месте!) и "Красные башмачки" (на 20-м). После чего я решил скопировать в рамках моей цитатной рубрики этот список (вместе с вводной частью и рецензиями на три фильма).
Конечно же, все эти списки "лучших фильмов" весьма условны. Существует их немало (в том числе у ряда интересных жж-авторов), и различаются они довольно сильно. Вот у меня на полке стоит один из известных трудов такого рода - "Halliwell's Top 1000" (by John Walker). Как вообще можно ранжировать по порядку 1000 фильмов - это выше моего разумения. 50 фильмов - это, по крайней мере, обозримое количество. Хотя, как сделать такой список по-настоящему репрезентативным - с учетом разных жанров, стран, знаковых авторов, "волн" - и, наконец, одиноких шедевров - незамеченныхх единорогов (термин, если помните, из предыдущего уже упомянутого поста)? Любопытно, что 10 фильмов из этих 50-ти по версии Спектэйтора не вошли в 1000 по Халливеллу! Ну и "значимость" каждого фильма (то бишь его место в иерархии) тоже в этих двух списках весьма разнится (для каждого фильма из 50-ти я ради интереса привожу в скобках "[H...]" место и по Халливеллу).
В чем же специфика именно этого списка? "Спектэйтор" - это старейший (в прошлом году отметил 180-летие!) качественный консервативный общественно-политический журнал (та же группа издает и газету Daily Telegraph). Тираж для такого рода издания довольно велик - 78 тысяч (традиционный качественный соперник с левого фланга "New Statesman" имеет тираж 26 тыс.) и имеет тенденцию к росту. Целый ряд главных редакторов и сотрудников издания занимали важные посты в кабинетах министрах тори (а предыдущий редактор Boris Johnson ныне является мэром Лондона). В общем, эта такая цитатель консервативных британских интеллектуалов. В области культуры журнал довольно бескомпромиссно отстаивает ценности традиционной "высокой" культуры с упором на Britishness (что бы это ни означало).
Во введении к списку (приводимом на языке оригинала ниже) критерии отбора были заявлены такие: "wit, Britishness and - above all - intelligence" ("Britishness", надо полагать, прилагается к специфически британским особенностям восприятия кино). Ну и выбор фильма, возглавившего список, весьма полемичен ("It's eccentric, provocative choice, for sure"). Лично мне список кажется нетривиальным и вменяемым (хотя как можно не включить, скажем - если не удаляться от Англии, "The Third Man" или "Blow Up", выше моего понимания). Правда, я видел только 36 фильмов (что, наверное, подтверждает мой дилетантизм)... Помимо самого списка, привожу также три рецензии: на два фильма "Арчеров" и на единственный российский фильм ("Андрей Рублев").
The Spectator's 50 Essential Films of All Time
The studio logo fades. The opening credits roll. And so we come to the main feature: The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films - a selection of the very best that cinema has to offer, and all in glorious Technicolor.
This isn’t just a celebration of motion pictures - though it’s certainly that - but also a testament to The Spectator’s own passion for the medium. I’m certain that our offices on Old Queen Street contain a greater per capita proportion of film fans - crazed, honest-to-God, bleary-eyed film fans - than pretty much any other building in all London. And that gets reflected in a magazine which pays due attention and respect to the silver screen. Graham Greene, Basil Wright, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Mantel and now the inimitable Deborah Ross have ranked among our cinema critics. And we’re lucky to have frequent written contributions from the glamorous end of the film industry.
We’ve been guided by this wider legacy, as much as by our present deliberations, in choosing the final 50 films. A premium has been placed on wit, Britishness and - above all - intelligence; not to skew the final selection, you understand, but to distinguish this effort from other film lists out there. And, of course, it wouldn’t really be a Spectator product without a healthy dash of contrariness.
As a result, there are some notable absentees from our list, as well as a few less familiar entries... In the end, we hope that we’ve captured something of the breadth, mystery, intelligence and - yes - magic of the movies. As Jean-Luc Godard so rightly put it: ‘Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.’ Now it’s time to be deceived - and gladly.
1. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) [H193]
2. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) [H345]
3. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1928) [H29]
4. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell + Eric Pressburger, 1947) [H316]
5. L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) [H475]
6. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) [H14]
7. The Magnificient Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) [H38]
8. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) [H15]
9. L'atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) [H413]
10. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) [H-]
11. The Godfather Part I and Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 + 1974) [H4]
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) [H23]
13. La Grande illusion (Gean Renoir, 1937) [H210]
14. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) [H6]
15. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) [H512]
16. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) [H1]
17. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) [H471]
18. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) [H72]
19. Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) [H-]
20. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell + Eric Pressburger, 1948) [H53]
21. Madame de... (Max Ophuls, 1953) [H-]
22. Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) [H-]
23. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) [H950]
24. Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961) [H24]
25. Barry Lindon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) [H-]
26. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931) [115]
27. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) [H-]
28. Sunst Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) [H17]
29. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) [H494]
30. M (Fritz Lang, 1931) [200]
31. The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) [664]
32. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly, 1952) [H12]
33. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) [H488]
34. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) [H-]
35. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) [H-]
36. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966) [H22]
37. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976) [H13]
38. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffait, 1959) [H65]
39. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) [H455]
40. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) [H139]
41. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000) [H279]
42. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) [H40]
43. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) [H10]
44. Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske + Ben Sharpsteen, 1940) [H195]
45. Great Expectations (Davis Lean, 1946) [H60]
46. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) [H-]
47. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933) [H96]
48. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) [H-]
49. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) [H95]
50. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) [H-]
4. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell + Emeric Pressburger, 1947)
Right from the off, the omens aren't good for Deborah Kerr and her sister nuns, sent to establish a dispensary and school in a distant Himalayan comminity. The palace they are to convert was once a harem-cum-brothel, putting their Christian sensibilitis in immediate conflict with the Ghosts of Orgies Past. And it perches precariously aside a plummeting cliff-face: a magnificient abyss, waiting to swallow them up.
Inevitably, they fall. One by one the nuns sink into the lust, paranoia, despair and psychosis, as the environment at first rejects them and then violates them. Its aeliriously profane message: they are at the mercy not their own God, but of whatever supernatural forces reside in the mountaintops and in Jack Cardiff'd ecstatic Technicolor cinematography. For their part, Powell and Pressburger keep pushing, pushing, pushing this dark narrative until the skies turn blood red, shadows fill the frame, and the nuns come to the edge of their own personal apocalypse.
In the end, they descend from the mountain, defeated and - one assumes - scarred by it all. And we recall the simple lesson utterred earlier in the film: 'I think there are only two ways of living in this place... ignore it or give yourself up to it.' These nuns did neither, instead choosing limbo. (Peter Hoskin)
20. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell + Eric Pressburger, 1948)
Powell and Pressburger's most enigmatic film mines incredibly rich territory: the boundary between fantasy and reality, where life imitates art, and art imitates life. The reality, in this case, is a ballet troupe. And the fantasy is their production of Hans Christian Andrsen's The Red Shoes, in which a girl puts on a enchanted pair of red slippers that won't let her stop dancing. Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) plays the lead, and she so dedicates herself to the role that her life starts to mirror Andersen's plot. What follows are some of the most graceful exuberant dance sequences ever seen on screen.
The ending of the film doesn't come as a surprise, prefigured as it is in the Andersen tale: the red shoes simply drive Page to her death. But the predictability doesn't make it any less essential. Only when she becomes the first true martyr of the ballet does Powell and Pressburger's new morality for the postwar years become clear: art above all else - the only thing worth dying for. (Peter Hoskin)
36. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
So hostile were the Soviet authorities to this three-and-a-half-hour meditation on art and religion that it was not screened at Cannes until 1969 - out of the main competition, and at four o’clock in the morning. In spite of that, it still won the International Critics Prize.
That such a film was made at all in the permafrost of the Cold War is miraculous enough, but Andrei Rublev is much more than a dissident masterpiece. For a start, it is the best film ever made about the Middle Ages, plotting the life of a 15th-century icon painter swept up in the bloody feuds of rival princes and the savageries of the Tatar invasions. Tarkovsky eschews the sub-Chaucerian kitsch of most cinema notionally depicting the mediaeval era, and achieves instead a panoramic bleakness with an undercurrent of constant menace that makes for deeply unsettling viewing.
Yet the film’s greatest success is to carry off this pitiless naturalism while simultaneously staging a series of symbolic arguments about art, faith, sexuality, and moral despair. Debates that would have seemed contrived with a lesser director at the helm flow smoothly and authentically through this very human story. In this respect, at least, Tarkovsky is a more effective cinematic philosopher even than Bergman.
And he is so much more, too. Few moments in film are as unbearably tense as the moment when the boy Boriska waits to see if the bell that he has cast for the Grand Prince - with no formal knowledge of how to do so - will toll majestically. Your heart, I promise, will stop as you wait with him. (Matthew d'Ancona)
Конечно же, все эти списки "лучших фильмов" весьма условны. Существует их немало (в том числе у ряда интересных жж-авторов), и различаются они довольно сильно. Вот у меня на полке стоит один из известных трудов такого рода - "Halliwell's Top 1000" (by John Walker). Как вообще можно ранжировать по порядку 1000 фильмов - это выше моего разумения. 50 фильмов - это, по крайней мере, обозримое количество. Хотя, как сделать такой список по-настоящему репрезентативным - с учетом разных жанров, стран, знаковых авторов, "волн" - и, наконец, одиноких шедевров - незамеченныхх единорогов (термин, если помните, из предыдущего уже упомянутого поста)? Любопытно, что 10 фильмов из этих 50-ти по версии Спектэйтора не вошли в 1000 по Халливеллу! Ну и "значимость" каждого фильма (то бишь его место в иерархии) тоже в этих двух списках весьма разнится (для каждого фильма из 50-ти я ради интереса привожу в скобках "[H...]" место и по Халливеллу).
В чем же специфика именно этого списка? "Спектэйтор" - это старейший (в прошлом году отметил 180-летие!) качественный консервативный общественно-политический журнал (та же группа издает и газету Daily Telegraph). Тираж для такого рода издания довольно велик - 78 тысяч (традиционный качественный соперник с левого фланга "New Statesman" имеет тираж 26 тыс.) и имеет тенденцию к росту. Целый ряд главных редакторов и сотрудников издания занимали важные посты в кабинетах министрах тори (а предыдущий редактор Boris Johnson ныне является мэром Лондона). В общем, эта такая цитатель консервативных британских интеллектуалов. В области культуры журнал довольно бескомпромиссно отстаивает ценности традиционной "высокой" культуры с упором на Britishness (что бы это ни означало).
Во введении к списку (приводимом на языке оригинала ниже) критерии отбора были заявлены такие: "wit, Britishness and - above all - intelligence" ("Britishness", надо полагать, прилагается к специфически британским особенностям восприятия кино). Ну и выбор фильма, возглавившего список, весьма полемичен ("It's eccentric, provocative choice, for sure"). Лично мне список кажется нетривиальным и вменяемым (хотя как можно не включить, скажем - если не удаляться от Англии, "The Third Man" или "Blow Up", выше моего понимания). Правда, я видел только 36 фильмов (что, наверное, подтверждает мой дилетантизм)... Помимо самого списка, привожу также три рецензии: на два фильма "Арчеров" и на единственный российский фильм ("Андрей Рублев").
The studio logo fades. The opening credits roll. And so we come to the main feature: The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films - a selection of the very best that cinema has to offer, and all in glorious Technicolor.
This isn’t just a celebration of motion pictures - though it’s certainly that - but also a testament to The Spectator’s own passion for the medium. I’m certain that our offices on Old Queen Street contain a greater per capita proportion of film fans - crazed, honest-to-God, bleary-eyed film fans - than pretty much any other building in all London. And that gets reflected in a magazine which pays due attention and respect to the silver screen. Graham Greene, Basil Wright, Peter Ackroyd, Hilary Mantel and now the inimitable Deborah Ross have ranked among our cinema critics. And we’re lucky to have frequent written contributions from the glamorous end of the film industry.
We’ve been guided by this wider legacy, as much as by our present deliberations, in choosing the final 50 films. A premium has been placed on wit, Britishness and - above all - intelligence; not to skew the final selection, you understand, but to distinguish this effort from other film lists out there. And, of course, it wouldn’t really be a Spectator product without a healthy dash of contrariness.
As a result, there are some notable absentees from our list, as well as a few less familiar entries... In the end, we hope that we’ve captured something of the breadth, mystery, intelligence and - yes - magic of the movies. As Jean-Luc Godard so rightly put it: ‘Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.’ Now it’s time to be deceived - and gladly.
1. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) [H193]
2. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) [H345]
3. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1928) [H29]
4. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell + Eric Pressburger, 1947) [H316]
5. L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) [H475]
6. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) [H14]
7. The Magnificient Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) [H38]
8. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) [H15]
9. L'atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) [H413]
10. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) [H-]
11. The Godfather Part I and Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 + 1974) [H4]
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) [H23]
13. La Grande illusion (Gean Renoir, 1937) [H210]
14. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) [H6]
15. The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) [H512]
16. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) [H1]
17. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) [H471]
18. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) [H72]
19. Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) [H-]
20. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell + Eric Pressburger, 1948) [H53]
21. Madame de... (Max Ophuls, 1953) [H-]
22. Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) [H-]
23. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) [H950]
24. Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961) [H24]
25. Barry Lindon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) [H-]
26. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931) [115]
27. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) [H-]
28. Sunst Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) [H17]
29. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) [H494]
30. M (Fritz Lang, 1931) [200]
31. The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) [664]
32. Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly, 1952) [H12]
33. The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) [H488]
34. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977) [H-]
35. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) [H-]
36. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966) [H22]
37. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976) [H13]
38. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffait, 1959) [H65]
39. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) [H455]
40. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) [H139]
41. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000) [H279]
42. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) [H40]
43. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) [H10]
44. Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske + Ben Sharpsteen, 1940) [H195]
45. Great Expectations (Davis Lean, 1946) [H60]
46. Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) [H-]
47. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933) [H96]
48. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) [H-]
49. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) [H95]
50. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) [H-]
Right from the off, the omens aren't good for Deborah Kerr and her sister nuns, sent to establish a dispensary and school in a distant Himalayan comminity. The palace they are to convert was once a harem-cum-brothel, putting their Christian sensibilitis in immediate conflict with the Ghosts of Orgies Past. And it perches precariously aside a plummeting cliff-face: a magnificient abyss, waiting to swallow them up.
Inevitably, they fall. One by one the nuns sink into the lust, paranoia, despair and psychosis, as the environment at first rejects them and then violates them. Its aeliriously profane message: they are at the mercy not their own God, but of whatever supernatural forces reside in the mountaintops and in Jack Cardiff'd ecstatic Technicolor cinematography. For their part, Powell and Pressburger keep pushing, pushing, pushing this dark narrative until the skies turn blood red, shadows fill the frame, and the nuns come to the edge of their own personal apocalypse.
In the end, they descend from the mountain, defeated and - one assumes - scarred by it all. And we recall the simple lesson utterred earlier in the film: 'I think there are only two ways of living in this place... ignore it or give yourself up to it.' These nuns did neither, instead choosing limbo. (Peter Hoskin)
Powell and Pressburger's most enigmatic film mines incredibly rich territory: the boundary between fantasy and reality, where life imitates art, and art imitates life. The reality, in this case, is a ballet troupe. And the fantasy is their production of Hans Christian Andrsen's The Red Shoes, in which a girl puts on a enchanted pair of red slippers that won't let her stop dancing. Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) plays the lead, and she so dedicates herself to the role that her life starts to mirror Andersen's plot. What follows are some of the most graceful exuberant dance sequences ever seen on screen.
The ending of the film doesn't come as a surprise, prefigured as it is in the Andersen tale: the red shoes simply drive Page to her death. But the predictability doesn't make it any less essential. Only when she becomes the first true martyr of the ballet does Powell and Pressburger's new morality for the postwar years become clear: art above all else - the only thing worth dying for. (Peter Hoskin)
So hostile were the Soviet authorities to this three-and-a-half-hour meditation on art and religion that it was not screened at Cannes until 1969 - out of the main competition, and at four o’clock in the morning. In spite of that, it still won the International Critics Prize.
That such a film was made at all in the permafrost of the Cold War is miraculous enough, but Andrei Rublev is much more than a dissident masterpiece. For a start, it is the best film ever made about the Middle Ages, plotting the life of a 15th-century icon painter swept up in the bloody feuds of rival princes and the savageries of the Tatar invasions. Tarkovsky eschews the sub-Chaucerian kitsch of most cinema notionally depicting the mediaeval era, and achieves instead a panoramic bleakness with an undercurrent of constant menace that makes for deeply unsettling viewing.
Yet the film’s greatest success is to carry off this pitiless naturalism while simultaneously staging a series of symbolic arguments about art, faith, sexuality, and moral despair. Debates that would have seemed contrived with a lesser director at the helm flow smoothly and authentically through this very human story. In this respect, at least, Tarkovsky is a more effective cinematic philosopher even than Bergman.
And he is so much more, too. Few moments in film are as unbearably tense as the moment when the boy Boriska waits to see if the bell that he has cast for the Grand Prince - with no formal knowledge of how to do so - will toll majestically. Your heart, I promise, will stop as you wait with him. (Matthew d'Ancona)