Listosaurus Rex

 Piero Scaruffi is, I’ve gathered, an academic and historian on film, music, and philosophy. I know very little about him, though I’m considering picking up his acclaimed history of rock book (in spite of its famous claims that the Beatles are overrated and bad).  So I googled the guy and found his web-site, which includes a section of film critiques and rankings.

One feature, which was composed by Scaruffi either in 1998 or some time before — the site is ambiguous — contains his list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.”The list contains 100 items, the first 194 (?) ranked, the other 806 seemingly in no particular order. To me, this list encompasses almost everything that’s wrong with film studies as an educational subject and film criticism in general.  

Here are some of the faults with it: first, it’s a list. Now, as we know, I’m a list fiend. But lists are fun. They’re ridiculous. They put logical order and ranking to taste. They are most certainly not scholarly. Scaruffi takes great pride in the fact that his site is scholarly:

 This web site is an online service devoted to the world of culture and entertainment. Unlike other online magazines of this kind, which target mainly the general audience of tv viewers, this web site caters to the upscale audience of “intellectuals” and experts, who are more interested in critical news than in mundane news.      

–Piero Scaruffi, advertising/about page

If his readership is intellectual, why do they need a rigid list?  Any true scholar of art would know that there is no best or worst art.  To attempt to rank the greatness of one piece of art to another’s is a silly side-squabble that is both impossible and a distraction from the point of the art.  If we’re intellectually approaching it as art, why spend time discussing its greatness? Why not discuss the art itself?  

Don’t get me wrong, I love lists about movies. But not lists that rank movies as a cerebral art form. I like lists that rank movies as engrossing, emotive cinematic experiences.  

Other lists that are good are collections of opinions about what the greatest movies are: Sight and Sound is the most respected example, and IMDb is my favorite of these. Statistically mashing people’s opinions on what films are great is different from one critic ranking the greatest pieces of art.

Let’s move on.  Here are Scaruffi’s top ten:

1. Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
2. Alfred Hitchcock: North By Northwest (1959)
3. Orson Welles: Touch Of Evil (1958)
4. Roman Polanski: Chinatown (1974)
5. Robert Altman: Nashville (1975)
6. Sam Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch (1969)
7. Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Part II (1974)
8. Elia Kazan: Splendor In The Grass (1961)
9. John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
10. Lars von Trier: Riget/ Kingdom (1995)

Sorry, folks, Citizen Kane is not the greatest movie to watch today.  It might be the most influential, perhaps one of the most visually interesting, but it is not the single greatest. It’s still a great movie today, but the time-tripping chronology is old hat at this point, and the movies have gotten better at telling stories as time has passed.  (Side note: I will let you know if this is still my opinion after I have seen the movie with Roger Ebert’s legendary commentary.)

North by Northwest at number two? Really? The movie might be worth a second watch for me, but the awkward sexual puns that made up 80% of the script bothered me. Plus, isn’t this more a piece of entertainment than an artful film?  Sure, Hitchcock was famous for making films that seemed like entertainment but really contained great artistic value. But is it reallybetter than Touch of Evil? Better than The Godfather, or Chinatown, or… etc.?

More than anything else, it’s the precision of the ranking that bothers me. If you read any of his film reviews, he rates movies out of ten, but down to a tenth of a point.  This is ludicrous!  There are one hundred possible rankings.  What really separates a 6.7 from a 6.8?  Remember that this isn’t just anyone picking number ratings for a movie, willy-nilly. This is one of the most respected scholars of film!  And he deems it appropriate to quantify art’s value. Down to a number that precisely.  Ridiculous.

You know what, Scaruffi?  I give your list a 3.7.  And your web-site and the rest of your lists, too.  You call Dogma the tenth best film of the ’90s but Schindler’s List the forty-first.  Now, Dogma’s a good movie, three stars probably, but better than Schindler’s List?  Are you sure your “upscale audience” is going to dig that pick?

Does the guy have some keen insights? Yeah. Do his picks probably have more reasoning than I’m seeing? Probably. Does he know more about film than I ever will? Absolutely. 

But learn something from Roger Ebert, Piero Scaruffi.  Cinema is an art of images and emotion and stories.  It’s one thing to develop a keen eye for what makes a film tick, what makes it valuable and memorable. It’s another thing to elevate art to such an intellectual level that it’s no longer fun.

[link to the list]

The headline reads:

The New York Times has assembled a very thorough list of their picks for the 1000 best talkies ever. It’s quite a list, and each one is linked to the original NYTimes review which you can access with a free nytimes.com account. This list is one of the most substantial, deep resources for movies that I’ve found on the ‘net.

The list starts with The Jazz Singer in 1927 and goes up through the end of 2002. The picks range from documentaries like Hoop Dreams to gangster flicks like Mean Streets to musicals like West Side Story to kids films like Bambi to timeless epics like Ben-Hur, and everything in between, including plenty of indie and unheralded films.

Because they gave themselves a thousand spots, they are able to fit in most of the great and beloved movies that come to mind. You’ll never be able to please everyone, though, and because so many movies are included, it makes some of the surprising absences even more disturbing. I’ll give them that Great Escape spoof Chicken Run is a charming animated flick, but is it really better than the source material, which somehow is not included on the list?

I had to stop and take a deep breath when I realized The Empire Strikes Back somehow got snubbed.

I’ll grant them the two very different and impressive interpretations of Beauty and the Beast being included, but do they really need two versions each of Little Women, Henry V, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, yet can’t find a spot cult favorite and critical darling Donnie Darko?

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve seen fewer than a hundred of these films (about 75 on a cursory counting). I’m a child of the eighties and nineties, that much is true. Of course I’ll grumble about personal favorites Jurassic Park and Rudy not being on the list. And, sure, both of the Indiana Jones sequels weren’t as impressive as the Raiders, though I think they should both be on any Top 1000 list. But I draw the line when the list leaves out Terminator 2, The Matrix, There’s Something About Mary, and Field of Dreams.

I’m also surprised not to see Before Sunrise or City of God, though the latter might not have been reviewed by the time they made the list. Pet cemetary documentary Gates of Heaven, which Roger Ebert once called one of the ten greatest films ever, is nowhere to be seen. Though I’ve never seen it, this discrepency is pretty shocking.

Need a few more? The Princess Bride. Once Upon a Time in the West. Menace II Society. Caddyshack. All left out.

Okay, I’m done ranting now. They did hit 90+% of the movies I felt deserved a spot, including a few I didn’t expect to see, like Bull Durham, Shrek, and Adaptation.

It’s interesting to think about what movies that have come out since ‘02 would be on the list. The Prestige, Before Sunset, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, Spider-Man 2, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Pirates 1, Lost In Translation, Sin City, Casino Royale, and Batman Begins are all entries that both I liked and critics liked.

Overall though, what NYTimes.com has given us is a free and a massive resource of some of the most critically acclaimed movies to hit the big screen in the past eighty years. I certainly prefer the dynamic and more interesting IMDb Top 250, and 1000 is almost too many to be useful, but the list is certainly something to keep bookmarked before a trip to Blockbuster or as you update your NetFlix queue.

Any other movies you think should have been included?

This post is an entrant into the Carnival of Cinema: Episode 57