2 Years 2 Late: Final Thoughts on the BFI Top 50

Well this post is no longer relevant, but I just recently finished my marathon of the most venerable of lists so I thought I’d chime in on the discussions that happened back in 2012.

First, it is mind-boggling amazing that all 50 of these films are easily available in one form or another. Sure, there are a few that have poor home video releases (Pather Panchali, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, The Mirror), but there are solid versions of the Tarkovsky films if you have the means to go the import route or have no compulsions about piracy. And Pather Panchali, along with the rest of the Apu Trilogy, is undergoing restoration and awaiting a Criterion release that will surely be one of the major film-related events of the upcoming year. For the most part though, these classics are available fully restored and on extras-packed Blu-rays. In addition, with the rise of disc-by-mail and streaming services these films are available at very little cost. You can basically go through the first year of film school with a few extra bucks and a lot of free time.

As much as I sometimes wish I could have witnessed the birth of cinema or been present for the various new waves that rocked the film world in the 60’s, I am incredibly glad I was born in an era where becoming a film buff is this easy. It took me about a year and a half to go through all 50 films. I could have easily cut that to a year, and possibly whittled it down to as little as six months if I had really wanted to push myself. If I was born two generations ago and wanted to do a similar project, I would have either had to have gone to film school, in which case I would be watching beat-up, incomplete 16 mm prints of the classics, or been at the mercy of repertory screenings. It would have taken me a lifetime to do this marathon.

Let’s say I was born in 1930 and died in the year 2000. There are many films on the BFI list that were banned, ignored, or partially destroyed at some point in their existence. If I had died at the end of the 20^th century it would have been totally impossible for me to see complete prints of Battleship Potemkin or Metropolis, and, unless I was an academic or film critic, the opportunity to see films never given a wide release in the U.S., such as Andrei Rublev or L’Atalante, would have been nonexistent. Basically what I’m saying is that this is an awesome time to be a film fan.

Second, I would like to defend the existence of this list. I know I’ve been using BFI and Sight and Sound as if those organizations were solely responsible for the list, that’s not true. 800+ critics, academics, and festival programmers were asked to list 10 films. There were no rules about what films could be chosen. The list is simply a consensus based around which films got mentioned the most. The common criticisms of the list are that it is stodgy, that there aren’t enough modern films, that there aren’t enough comedies and that it is unnecessary and people should be free to discover cinema however they want to. To the first charge, if you think the list is too stodgy or that the films on it are boring, then you either haven’t watched any of the films listed or mistakenly think old = boring. Any list that jumps between a tender Japanese drama, a few silent epics, a huge sci-fi spectacle, a proto-revisionist western, and strange dream movies cannot possibly be considered boring, and all that is just in the top 10. As for the other complaints, all of those are addressed if you expand the list to the top 250 or start poking through the individual ballots. Just in the top 50, there are a few modern (let’s define that as being released after the 80’s) films, such as Close-Up, Sátántangó, In the Mood for Love, and Mulholland Drive, and a handful of comedies like City Lights, Some Like it Hot, The General, and Singin’ in the Rain. Looking further down the list reveals films only a few years old such as The Tree of Life, There Will Be Blood, and WALL-E; perennially popular titles like E.T. and The Wizard of Oz; and even more comedies like Dr. Strangelove and Annie Hall. My only complaint is that there aren’t nearly enough animated films with only four in the top 250 (Spirited Away, A Tale of Tales, WALL-E, and My Neighbor Totoro). That’s a shame and I was surprised not to see any of the movies from the golden age of Disney, any of the Looney Tunes shorts (my vote would be for Duck Amuck), some more Eastern European stop motion (like Jan Švankmajer’s Alice), or some very early animation such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed or The Cameraman’s Revenge.

Finally, I know these lists can sometimes be seen as rigid or as having a monopoly on film history, but I don’t think that’s the case. The BFI list is simply a suggestion, a starting guide for people who want to learn the basics of film style, history, and criticism. And as that, I find the list useful. Setting the goal of watching everything in the top 50 forced me to watch, read about, and ruminate on films that weren’t a high priority in my personal queue. I doubt I would have seen, or even heard about, many of the films on the list if no type of film canon existed.

At the beginning of my marathon, I thought, by the end, I would reach a plateau of cinematic knowledge. That was silly. While the films listed provided a good overview of film history and a sampling of the wide variety of cinematic styles, there are still mountains of stuff I have yet to experience. For example, I have yet to view anything by the following directors (take a big breath): Howard Hawks, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Max Ophüls, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Luis Buñuel, and Samuel Fuller. Every day I learn about a new film, director, or movement; hear about a forgotten masterpiece that’s being restored; or read an opposing view of a film I had dismissed. I could watch a film a day for the rest of my life and not see all that’s out there…

 Here’s to that.