As someone who listed "list making" as one of my favorite activities well into my life in college, it gets hard for me to admit how obnoxious I find "best of" lists for movies and entertainment in general these days. Maybe it comes from an understanding of the mindset for these things - the need for list makers to vaunt themselves into a position of expertise simply by creating a list, the need to manufacture contraversy to by creating a few "edgy" choices in order to defend their viewpoint, thereby exerting that expertise again. I know because I've done it, and because I still do it, really - make lists at the end of every year of the best movies and music. I still love those lists, honestly, and it may be because I just think in lists, or maybe things on an annual basis are just manageable enough that I don't feel like I'm straining, and I can still write an opinion or two, which is clearly something I love.
But in any case, I found myself upset about one of those lists recently - a daily IMDb link to eddieonfilm.com, another blog on this site, which listed the "Top 100 Foreign Films Ever Made." I read lists like those (and they pop up every damn day by some blogger and get linked to IMDb, whose daily posts these days are half E! news castoffs, half geeks-only contentious minutiae) to get movie recommendations, as much as to cringe of the idea. I made a post on there, actually, first because the description of Jean-Luc Goddard's Contempt read "more terrifying than a Joan Didion novel" as if she were Dean Koontz (was the history of Caliornia pioneers in Where I Was From supposed to be terrifying? The description of rain in Run River?), but also at the idea in general:
"Joan Didion novels aren't terrifying, that's a weird comparison.
And "foreign movies" isn't a genre - why are you putting so much privilege on the American movie, making it the default from which these other movies compare to. Those Top Ten movies are just great movies and are each pretty essential to the history of all movies. This list seems like an elaborate way to brag about an inclusive knowledge of movies, but it only points out how ghettoized you see non-American movies."
The writer of the website, Edward Copeland, points out that I really meant non-English Speaking movies (guess I see movies as pretty American by default too), but still - the list is strange when it's not just self-important. Of those top ten movies, it seems to me that 9 are obvious, as they helped change the history of movies, and the tenth - Warner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God - is thrown in for good measure, to add a movie shot in color, a movie that feels "modern" in order to disguise the list as something other than fodder for film majors discussing the same "important" international releases over and over again. Don't get me wrong - Aguirre is an auterist masterpiece, a distinctive work made unlike any other movie before or since, and is the central movie of Herzog's incredible career. But it is a kind of ahistorical film classic - it's not The 400 Blows or 8 1/2 or The Rules of The Game, it's just its own entity.
Not that these sort of unique aberrations can't stand alone on top ten lists, but it leads to the central problem of Best Ever lists - it says more about popular opinion at the time the list is being made than it does about "Ever." My dad pointed out to me once that on the lists of "Best Ever" albums, there's a rotation every decade of which Beatles album tends to show up on top - in the 70's, it was Sgt. Pepper's, in the 80's it was Abbey Road, in the 90's The White Album, and now Revolver. Just like the most recent Best Ever list of songs in Rolling Stone - these days the popular opinion on Bob Dylan is so high that "Like A Rolling Stone" feels appopriate on top (and why wouldn't it appear on top then - when compiling lists from any number of sources, they are popular opinion, and the list is compiling those opinions), whereas even five years earlier, the same magazine said the Best Ever song was the Beatles' "Yesterday."
In the same sense, Herzog is perhaps more popular a filmmaker now than ever - after Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn, two of the most accessible movies of his career. How strange was it two years ago in that summer o' documentaries that Grizzly Man, a movie about man's imbecility in the face of nature, became a crowd pleaser. The eddieonfilm.com list also represents the current strain of popular opinion about Ingmar Bergman (always amongst the greatest of all filmmakers, but, it must be said, is perhaps more popular now due to his still-fresh death), that Persona is his best movie, and not The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.
But what I was initially calling ghettoizing non-English speaking movies I think is true, but also shortsighted. The truth is the history of movies is one tennis match between the English language movies and the international movies - those obvious 9 of the top 10 in the eddieonfilm.com list come from times in which international cinema was such a force that it influenced every American director who watched those movies - they may not look the same, but it's true: without Bicycle Thieves there is no Midnight Cowboy, without Breathless there is no Mean Streets, without Belle du Jour, there is no Blue Velvet.
However, when including non-English movies after the 70's, the opposite is true - Herzog notwithstanding, these are artistic accomplishments made becasue of American movies. Run Lola Run or Croughing Tiger, Hidden Dragon are movies made for international audiences. Almodovar, probably the most famous of European directors in the past 25 years, is an admitted film packrat, a postmodern collector of intertexts using old movies to create modern pastiche.
Frankly, the only thing that connects pre-1970 and post-1970 foreign movies is a subtitle. International movies after that point are often great, of course, but they're typically made as movies for the international marketplace and are made of certain recognizable tropes - the Cinema Paradisos or Burnt By The Suns or Central Stations that are typically congenial movies about cranks and the kids who soften them up, and wind up winning Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Or, they're the Asian regime-change epics - Farewell My Concubine or The Emperor and the Assassin or Yellow Earth or Not One Less or Raise The Red Lantern or... well, you get the idea.
Even the distinctive foreign movies get churned into international commodities these days - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was famously a bomb in China, but it hasn't stopped China from trying to make that thing a dozen times since with diminishing effect each time. Tom Tykwer, the German kineticist of Run Lola Run could easily be prosecuted for plaigarizing himself in movie after movie since then (although, I sort of like that movie he keeps remaking, The Princess and the Warrior is just as good). Danish Dogmatists made Breaking The Waves a masterpiece, but then just added their poorly lit aesthetics to movies you swear you've seen made in English. And then of the real international artists? There should be no distinction in discussing their careers or American movie director's careers - take Almodovar or Krzysztof Kieslowski for what they are, modern auteurs, just like Robert Altman or David Lynch or Spike Lee (and often times, even more popular).
I pick this battle because ultimately, I think, while Best Ever foreign film lists do ghettoize foreign movies, it limits them even more to think of non-English movies throughout the history of film as a continual experience - there's a million stories waiting to be told about each era of movies, and continuing to think of them all as the same thing means only nitpicky film geeks will get to it - or worse, apparently, they're not getting to it either.
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For one thing, the list (though categorized by many) as a "best" list was never intended as such and is not presented as such. That's why I called it "The Satayajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films," not only to emphasize we weren't saying these were the best but to also note the surprising absence of Ray's films, which failed to get enough votes to get past the initial nominating process. It's the list of favorites as decided by the 174 people who bothered to vote on the survey. The reason certain titles show up time and time again on all these lists is simple: They have stood the test of time. Too often people in all areas (not limited to the arts) have developed an idea that if something didn't happen in their lifetime, it doesn't matter. That's why I wouldn't let anything more recent than 2002 be eligible. My purpose for the list, if it did nothing else, was to encourage people to seek out these films because otherwise, they might not even think about it. I know it's worked for me as there are several films on the list that I've never seen and that I'd never even heard of prior to starting the survey. In many cases, I still can't see them because another reason the same titles keep surface is simply accessibility. If a title isn't available to a lot of people, it's unlikely it's going to show up on a list like that. My purpose was to celebrate non-English language films simply because too many people avoid them, either because of subtitles or because they haven't heard of them. If the list has encourage people to seek out these films, it's more than achieved its purpose.
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