but the film is a saddening bore/for she’s lived it ten times or more

This feature on Rotten Tomatoes brings to mind a pet hate of mine. As they explain on the site,

we have combed through eight decades of Oscar winners to determine which Academy Award-winning film truly stands above the rest.

The idea is that they have taken the last 79 winners of the ‘best picture’ Oscar and ranked them according to critical consensus (using a rather complicated formula). In other words, the article reflects which of the best picture winners from the last 8 decades were the most critically acclaimed (they also incorporate ratings from users of the site, i.e., movie buffs).

The results are relatively unsurprising. Their top ten includes:

1. The Godfather
2. On the Waterfront
3. All About Eve
4. Sunrise
5. Rebecca
6. Marty
7. The Best Years of Our lives
8. Lawrence of Arabia
9. The Godfather Part II
10. Casablanca

The years of those films, in order: 1972, 1954, 1950, 1927, 1940, 1955, 1946, 1962, 1974, and 1942. And therein lies the frustration: on almost any ‘serious’ list of the best films of all time, the results are massively skewed towards the period from around 1940 to around 1960. Can it really be true that no film that has won a best picture Oscar in the last 32 years is in the top 10? Were more than half of the top 10 Oscar winners really made in the years 1940-1955?

One might conclude that the problem is that the Academy Awards have made dubious selections for ‘best picture’ in the last few decades. Or that, because the Oscars are effectively only for American films from major studios, most of the good stuff from recent decades hasn’t made the list by default. But, as anyone who’s read other film buff-type ‘greatest films of all time’ lists will attest, the trend is more widespread. For instance, Halliwell’s Top 1000, an generally excellent movie reference book, lists its top 10 as follows:

1. Tokyo Story
2. La Regle du Jour
3. Lawrence of Arabia
4. The Godfather trilogy
5. The Seven Samurai
6. Citizen Kane
7. Raging Bull
8. Vertigo
9. Some Like It Hot
10. 8 1/2

Once again, the release years: 1953, 1939, 1962, 1972-74-90, 1954, 1941, 1980, 1958, 1959, and 1963. If we ignore the Godfather Part III, which presumably wouldn’t have made the top 1000, let alone top 10, on its own, then the most modern selection (Raging Bull) is 26 years old. IFC notes of Halliwell’s that:

the most recent five entries in the top 100 are “Toy Story” (#25), the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (#30), “Breaking the Waves” (#39), “Gosford Park (#71) and “Fargo” (#88).

Fargo. (Out of interest, Halliwell’s includes neither Fight Club or Aliens (the second one) in its top 1000.)

So what causes this trend towards picking movies from a very specific era? One theory I have is that old films are technically bad. Not necessarily in the sense that they were directed poorly by the standards of the day, but in the sense that film making techniques have developed dramatically since the 1940s and 1950s and today’s films are far more realistic in their depiction of… well, reality. After all, one of the reasons Citizen Kane is so adored is that it introduced many cinematic devices which are now absolutely commonplace and unremarkable.

The gist of this theory is that, because older films are technically poor (unsophisticated lighting; unrealistic effects; contrived dialogue; static camerawork), they are judged by a far kinder standard whereby misty-eyed film critics yearn for simpler, happier times when the world was black and white and grainy, and conversations were a series of delicate and subtle one-liners written by a team of writers who accompanied people around at all times. To put it another way, modern films have the potential to be so true to life that they are judged far more harshly for their small contrivances than older films are for their many lapses in authenticity.

We still have films where people say things like:

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine.

and:

Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.

We call them ‘bad romantic comedy-dramas starring Julia Roberts’, or sometimes ‘James Bond #24′ if there are guns involved. Serious contemporary films can’t hope to get away with such corny dialogue, because when everything else is faithful to reality, a bad line grates horribly and reminds us that we’re watching actors in a studio. Even the basic transition from black and white or garish technicolour to full, faithful colour film makes it harder to forgive minor lapses in dialogue or plot realism.

It is naturally hard to clearly identify the greatest works from the past decade or two because the perspective that hindsight allows is not yet upon us. Of course, one view is that art should be judged for its time. This cuts both ways though – a film as simple (in terms of plot) as Casablanca or Citizen Kane is unlikely to be as well received today as it would have been in the 1940s or 1950s: there is perhaps too great a consciousness of the complexity and ambiguity of the world in the early 21st century for something straightforward to be considered culturally relevant. As such, films with greater complexity and ambiguity should be judged fairly by contemporary standards and in a contemporary social and artistic context – to dimish them for those characteristics is otherwise to unwittingly criticise the state of the world, not the art itself.

What’s more, the majority of film critics seem to either be soft-around-the-edges 50- or 60-something year-old men who genuinely do pine for a kinder, simpler version of the world, or unbearably pretentious 20- or 30-somethings who worship the old and obscure because it provides a point of distinction between them and their ignorant, bleating peers. In the former category, Roger Ebert said of Fight Club:

It’s macho porn – the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights.

He gave the film two stars – the uneducated masses at IMDB (that is to say, not film critics but rather anyone who cares to vote) rank it as the #32 film of all time. Of course, when it comes to Raging Bull, Ebert is far, far kinder about the equally confronting violence in awarding it four stars:

The equation between his prizefighting and his sexuality is inescapable, and we see the trap he’s in: LaMotta is the victim of base needs and instincts that, in his case, are not accompanied by the insights and maturity necessary for him to cope with them.

What, in essence, is the ideological difference between the two films? Raging Bull is a traditional story about a competitive, emotionally stunted male unable to express himself other than through violence and control. Fight Club is about highly intelligent people violently confronting the apparent meaninglessness of life in the age of the white collar wage slave. Yet the film about the thug hitting his wife and anyone else gets in his way is a simple tale of human frailty, and the film with almost as much philosophical as physical violence is ‘macho porn.’

The current era of cinema is undeniably one in which a vast, vast amount of formulaic, pointless and intellectually empty filler is churned out by profit-obsessed studios. At the same time, however, it is an era in which (presumably) more films than ever are being made, and film industries are thriving not just in Los Angeles, but in Europe, Britain, Australia, India, Asia – across the world, in other words. And even in Hollywood, enough films are being made and enough interesting ideas are floating around that every now and then something really intriguing slips through the net and gets made with millions of dollars of studio backing.

We should have the courage to recognise that great movies are being made, and that cinema as an art film did not cease to evolve in 1960.