Director's Poll from S&S

[John Cole]

Yesterday, I posted the critics' poll from Sight and Sound. Here's the poll results from directors world-wide. Films listed have received at least five top ten votes.

The rest of the dirctors' list... All the films which received more than 4 votes from directors.

Film
Votes
Rank


Citizen Kane (Welles)
42
1

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
28
2

8 1/2 (Fellini)
19
3

Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
16
4

Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
14
5

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
13
6

Raging Bull (Scorsese)
13
6

Vertigo (Hitchcock)
13
6

La Régle du jeu (Renoir)
12
9

Rashomon (Kurosawa)
12
9

Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
12
9

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
11
12

Sunset Blvd. (Wilder)
11
12

The Apartment (Wilder)
10
14

La dolce vita (Fellini)
10
14

Mirror (Tarkovsky)
9
16

Psycho (Hitchcock)
9
16

Tokyo Story (Ozu)
9
16

Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
8
19

Casablanca (Curtiz)
8
19

City Lights (Chaplin)
8
19

Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
8
19

Singin' in the Rain (Kelly, Donen)
8
19

Andrei Roublev (Tarkovsky)
7
24

L'avventura (Antonioni)
7
24

Chinatown (Polanski)
7
24

La Grande Illusion (Renoir)
7
24

Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
7
24

La strada (Fellini)
7
24

The Searchers (Ford)
7
24

Amarcord (Fellini)
6
31

Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
6
31

A bout de souffle (Godard)
6
31

Jules et Jim (Truffaut)
6
31

Les Enfants du paradis (Carné)
6
31

On the Waterfront (Kazan)
6
31

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
6
31

The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
6
31

Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
6
31

Touch of Evil (Welles)
6
31

The Conformist (Bertolucci)
5
41

Once upon a Time in the West (Leone)
5
41

Persona (Bergman)
5
41

Pickpocket (Bresson)
5
41

Ran (Kurosawa)
5
41

Sunrise (Murnau)
5
41

Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick)
5
41

The Third Man (Reed)
5
41

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston)
5
41

The Wizard of Oz (Fleming)
5
41


John

P.S. Are these too "artsy"?

[Clarkmeister]

"Are these too 'artsy'?"

I don't know about too artsy, but by definition the French ones suck. /forums/images/icons/laugh.gif

[andyfox]

How do they consider The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as one movie? Why don't they add in Part III as well (except for the fact that it was nowhere near as good as the other two)?

[Glenn]

Decent list. Thank God Apocalypse Now made it. There is still a bias toward old films but at least this list lacks the usual Anti-American bias (or maybe it has a pro-American bias but I like that better anyway /forums/images/icons/smile.gif ).

Why do you think they leave out movies like Star Wars? I am not a Star Wars fan by any means, but it seems they ignore the fact that some movies are made to entertain the viewer instead of to convey some deep message. One or two movies like that would make the list much more complete.

[John Cole]

Andy,

Apparently they decided to count the votes for both movies towards one total, which did cause some controversy since niether film would have been ranked as high. I guess nobody voted for III.

John

[John Cole]

As with the critics' poll, the directors were simple asked to pick their top ten and the votes were tabulated. If you check Sight and Sound's web site, you can find every movie that received a vote, and I'm sure someone voted for Star Wars. (However, Titanic, quite rightly, received no votes.)

[marbles]

Shorter list than yesterday, with many more pronounceable words! Of course, I'd also respect the opinion of a director far more than that of a critic. Incidentally, today's list contains one of my favorite ever last lines of a movie:

"Shut up and deal."

Anyone know the movie?

[John Cole]

Marbles,

Some of those artsy films aren't half bad, even the French ones despite Clarkie's declaration. You might like Goddard's Breathless (A Bout De Souffle).

BTW, I like Wilder, too. My favorite line comes from Ball of Fire: "You guys got the brains, but I got the boxtops."

Ya see, he needs the answers to win a contest, so he seeks the professors' help, but he holds the boxtops needed to enter the contest, so it's a great instance of a trade that suits everyone.

John

[marbles]

Don't get me wrong; I'm sure most of the artsy films are good... I just have a lot of trouble believing the critics when 90% of their list comes from relative obscurity. This doubt is underlined when the top directors include a ton of mainstream movies in their list.

Thanks for the recommendation. I may check that out this weekend.

[John Cole]

Marbles,

I think your view of the "critics" may be based somewhat on the popular critics you see on TV and read in newspapers. The critics polled by Sight and Sound include some of these popular critics but also include scholars, historians, and academics. Even though you might not recognize the movies on the list, they're really not very obscure. No documentaries or experimental films are included; in fact, some would claim this is a very conservative list. (You might also note that Jimbo--and I for that matter--have seen more films on the Sight and Sound Critics list than on the top grossing films list.

Sometimes it's also fun to see how directors use elements from other films. Brian DePalma takes the baby carriage scene in The Untouchables from Battleship Potemkin, and George Lucas draws on Kurasowa for C3PO and R2D2. Leone and John Sturges draw on Kurasowa as well for A Fistfull of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven. Next week, we'll see another remake when Solaris, which was made by Tarkovsky in 1972, opens. Critics have demonstrated how influential Ford's classic western The Searchers has been for Scorcese, Lucas, and others. The best critics, I think, help us to understand better than we ever could on our own.

John

[Phat Mack]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
George Lucas draws on Kurasowa for C3PO and R2D2.

[/ QUOTE ]

How so?

[John Cole]

Phat Mack,

Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress features two nattering idiots who accompany Mifune's character during his travels. Lucas has always, though, admittted this debt to Kurosawa.

John

[Zeno]

What! No Naked Gun movies? How can this be, other comedies are represented - Some Like It Hot, for example. One of the better lines in the Naked Gun moves (33 1/3, I think) was when Ms. Presley is asscending a ladder to get something and Leslie Nelson, looking up from below says: Nice Beaver! and Ms. Presley rejoins, Thanks, I just had it Stuffed. She then descends the ladder holding, you guessed it, a stuffed beaver, with flat tall and big teeth shining.

Now that is Art!

Some great Baseball scenes also. So, I can not believe that Andy Fox does not think that at least one of the Naked Gun movies should be in the greatest movies of all time list. /forums/images/icons/shocked.gif Maybe he does. /forums/images/icons/grin.gif

-Zeno

[Phat Mack]

OK, I see it now. Never really thought of it that way. There's another one, can't remember the title, where Mifune comes to town and plays off the two warring clans against each other. I think it had a couple of Bozos providing comic releif. The movie was a predesessor for one of the Leone-Eastwood westerns.

[John Feeney]

John -- We've been catching up on some movies in the past year. Here's what we've seen:

Twelve Angry Men

Double Indemnity

Brief Encounter

Mr Smith Goes to Washington

The Grapes of Wrath

The Philadelphia Story

The Ox-Bow Incident

The Magnificent Ambersons

The Thief of Baghdad

And Then There Were None

The Best Years of Our Lives

A Matter of Life and Death

The Naked City

Whiskey Galore (well, fell asleep and never finished that one)

The Third Man

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The Killers

The Southerner

On deck: Sullivan's Travels

Okay, an American bias, and not too artsy, I don't think. But most have been "family viewing." Now, what am I missing before we leave the 40s? (Yeah, I know 12 Angry... was the 50s, but...)
/forums/images/icons/cool.gif

[John Cole]

John,

I've never seen A Matter of Life and Death. Should I? The one you have on deck I'd have to put in my top ten. Yes, you should also see more of the great American comedies of that era, especially Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, all the rest of Sturges, His Girl Friday, and It Happened One Night.

Philosopher Stanley Cavell has written a great book on these comedies, Pursuits of Happiness, in which he claims that these films should be taken seriously as great works, "artsy" if you will.

John

[John Cole]

Phat,

Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars.

John

[John Feeney]

John -- Thanks for the suggestions. We'll be getting some of those. A Matter of Life and Death was not very memorable, or all that interesting for me, but my wife liked it pretty well. As I'm sure you know, it's generally highly regarded, so I'd say yeah, you should see it. Parts of it seem a little hokey now, but it's easy to appreciate how impressive the sets and effects must have been at the time the movie was made.

Here's the Internet Movie Database info on it:

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0038733

BTW, we saw American Graffiti recently for the first time in years. (We were looking for the ultimate artsy film. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif) I found it a bit darker and more somber than I had remembered. Funny how time can change the way we view things like that.

[John Cole]

John,

I didn't realize it was Stairway to Heaven. I loved it, but I like Powell and Pressburger. I'm almost ready to post my favorite artsy and non-artsy films. I'm sure you'll be on the edge of your seat. /forums/images/icons/grin.gif

John

[John Feeney]

"I'm sure you'll be on the edge of your seat."

I will. Sometimes I even find the artsy ones really good! Imagine that. /forums/images/icons/confused.gif

[The_Baron]

If you're looking at it from a directorial perspective, the Star Wars movies don't really count. They simply don't have the sophistication of directorial assembly that you get from Kurosawa or Scorcese. Lucas just isn't that good a director. Camera angling is general parallel or directly perpendicular to the action (looking straight down the corridor at Vader when he first enters the Princess's ship); camera motion is almost always entirely synchronised with the acting (pan of the Millenium Falcon leaving Bespin with Lando at the controls... why in hell didn't they use a tight close-up of the ship lifting and then let it move diagonally up and out of the frame to give a hint of the speed and desperation of the scene... the angles they shot it with made it look like a travelogue showing a 747 taking off from La Guardia).
Fields of view tend to be either very tight or artificially broad with minimal effort to transition between them. Medium distance shots, which in my view should be the "meat and potatoes" of any film tend to be very short and overemphasize single actions or characters. (Example, Luke and Obi Wan in O/W's home in the first movie... Luke first tries out his father's light saber... why in hell did the shot stay so wide for so long? If Lucas really needed reaction shots from Obi Wan, they could have been interspersed with tight shots of Luke's reactions... just loses a lot of the "OH WOW" potential for the scene).
Until Schindler's List, Spielberg had a lot of the same problems. Some shots just shouldn't have the action moving directly up and out of the frame...

Of course, YMMV...

The Baron

Who's not saying Lucas and Spielberg don't make good movies... I just think they didn't take advantage of techniques that could have done a lot for their early work.

[The_Baron]

Visually, Titanic simply sucked. Wrong lenses to give the proper mood for the picture. It could have been filmed using similar lenses to 12 Monkeys ("flat" Fresnel lensing... condenses the field of view) and the feelings of confusion and distress would have been enhanced a great deal. Unfortunately Cameron shot it as though it were a film school training film, "Hideously Expensive Special Effects and How They Work", a documentary by James Cameron.
Even the interiors were over lit and shot in a way that didn't really convey much other than the forced interactions between whazizass (Di Caprio???) and the chick who should have never gotten breast implants (can't remember her name... female lead... didn't die).
The movie had a tremendous amount of potential and Cameron made it into just another effect-o-thon. Better than Water World but then, I've had amoebic dysentery and I think that was better than Water World.


The Baron

[John Cole]

Baron,

How many of the problems you describe can be attributed to huge special effects budget and a desire to "show off" the effects?

Watched Resnais's Night and Fog yesterday-a film that will make my top ten artsy movies--and marvelled at its construction: the gliding camera, matches on stock footage, a memorable tilt down, back, and up on a still photograph. A brilliant piece of filmmaking in twenty-nine minutes, and a film that will stay with viewers many years later. Schindler's List pales in comparison.

John

[The_Baron]

I think it's a combination of things. First of all, I honestly don't think Lucas is a particularly good director. His story ideas were developed pretty well and the final movies was incredible for the time, hey, it was Star Wars, what can I say. By no means am I saying it's a bad movie. I just don't think it's a very well directed movie. (Of course, FF Copola(sp??) isn't particularly sophisticated technically and he does pretty well)
Second is that the state of the art for special effects was incredibly immature at the time. The scene at the rebel command post where they showed the computer graphic of the approach to the target was, at the time anyway, the longest and most costly computer generated effect in movie history. Given the cost and the fact that the intermingling of SFX techniques was incredibly new and untried, I think some of the problem is that Lucas, his cinematographer who's name I can't remember and the editors were playing it safe. It will always be easier to match effects to a square shot made at a long distance (example, stormtroopers firing into the cargo bay during the Millenium Falcon's escape from the death star... if it had been shot with more complex camera work, it would have been even more expensive and vastly more complex when you consider that they were, combining the rotoscope of the blaster bolts, the matte of the background and the widgets, doodads and thingies moving in the cargo bay... now it would be done as a combination of chroma key/ultimatte blue-screen work and computer generated graphics)
Finally was the fact that Lucas has always admitted he only made the movie when he felt the technology was adequate to work with his image of the story.
Unfortunately I've got to look at the most recent of the Star Wars films. It was shot completely digitally, not a single frame of film was used by anyone except perhaps the continuity staff. An example of my complaints with it is the battle scene in the colliseum. Tens of thousands of potential adversaries for the Jedi, dozens of Jedi, blaster bolts flying every which way, light sabers being whipped around like pencils... and all of the shots were either crane shots from the perspective of the upper rows of the colliseum or horizontal, paralell to the ground and from "eye level." Where were the low angled dolly shots from the crowd's point of view? Why were there so few shots from the POV of the combatants?
When it's said and done, I think the Star Wars movies are a lot of fun. In truth, I think the last one may well have been the death knell for traditional celluloid filmmaking. It may take a decade to do it, but Lucas has proven you can get the equivalent of 35mm Academy resolution from digital image sources. There's simply no reason to work with celluloid any more, it just complicates the process.

As always, YMMV

The Baron