The origins of ranking

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I’ve been interested in the question of classic films for a long time. In Britain, we have a magazine called Sight & Sound. It’s actually the oldest continuous film magazine in the world; it goes all the way back to the 1930s. In 1952, Sight & Sound had the idea of asking a cross-section of film critics and filmmakers what they thought were the greatest films of all time. They brought all the answers together and came up with a kind of a ranking of the greatest films. The film that came out on top was Battleship Potemkin^*, by Eisenstein; a film that was very difficult to see when it came out in 1926. Between 1926 and 1952, people had more or less decided that was the greatest film of all time. After that, they chose a Chaplin: The Gold Rush. Then they chose a new film by Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica: Bicycle Thieves. So, that process of deciding what are the greatest films goes back to about 1952. Sight & Sound has continued, every 10 years, to take a poll on what an increasing number of people think are the greatest films.

Welles played around with space and time

The story is that from 1962 the same film held the top poll position for nearly 50 years: Citizen Kane, by Orson Welles. For nearly half a century, the entire film world was happy to agree that this was the greatest film of all time. It seems a bit strange; out of all the films that have been made, why that one? It wasn’t even a very popular or a very successful film when it first appeared in 1941. Somehow the post-war world arrived at a consensus that it was a film that showed what cinema could do; the way that Welles played around with space and time; the way that he told the story of his newspaper tycoon backwards, from death to birth, and probed the mystery of what really made him tick. All of that seemed to many people to be the absolute height of filmic sophistication.

No film touched it until something happened in our current century. People noticed that in the last two polls, another filmmaker and film had started to creep up: Alfred Hitchcock. In 2012, Hitchcock suddenly eclipsed Orson Welles, with Vertigo officially becoming the greatest film of all time. It’s an interesting case study, because nobody has ever doubted, not for a long time, that Hitchcock was a great, great filmmaker. The problem was, people couldn’t agree on what his best film was. There are so many to choose from, going way back to his early films, like Blackmail, in 1929, all the way through to his later films. Yet, somehow, the films of the 1950s, more than his masterpieces of the 1940s, gradually became the favourites. A kind of critical consensus built around Vertigo: this is the film that showed Hitchcock absolutely at the peak of his ability to create dreamlike narratives that draw us into a phantasmagoric world. That’s an example of how a new classic is born.

What makes a film a classic?

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There is a website called IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, which is probably the most widely used, interactive, database in the world. So many people use it that it’s become an informal way, or more like a formal way, of people exchanging their opinions on films. It’s led to an enormous industry of listing and ranking films, choosing The 10 Greatest This, The 10 Greatest That, etc. We’re now all experts.

I suppose we have to ask ourselves, to what extent does critical authority or the canon that was created by Sight & Sound every 10 years still hold? What do we feel about classics today? What makes a classic? It’s an interesting question! Frank Kermode, one of our great critics, wrote a fascinating book based on a series of lectures called The Classic. In that, Kermode came up with a very interesting definition: that a classic is a work that we can continue to reinterpret according to the way we see things at a given moment in time.

We are prisoners of canons

There is a problem with classics: all the official classics are films made by dead white men. There’s no getting away from that; that all the list-making that’s gone on among critics and filmmakers has been done in such a way that we have films like Citizen Kane, Vertigo and any of the other contenders – films by Dreyer, Renoir and so forth – all made by male filmmakers. That doesn’t quite answer our need to see cinema from different angles today. Why shouldn’t there be films from Africa in the top 10? Why should there not be films by women in the top 10? There’s an increasing number of films made by women today. Why shouldn’t those be represented in the top echelons? It’s a question which is not confined to cinema. It spreads across the arts and culture in general. Are we a prisoner of canons that were created in the past and a method of canonisation? Why does the canon of Soviet cinema put Sergei Eisenstein absolutely on top? Why does it not recognise the films of Kozintsev and Trauberg, which were just as popular and just as important in the 1920s but are not part of the canon? We have to recognise that canons keep people out. They repel borders.

The art of the people

If we’re thinking about how canons have been constructed, then we have to recognise that they’ve largely been constructed out of films that have minority appeal; what is often called ‘art cinema’. That’s not uniformly true. For instance, when early Soviet cinema arrived in the West, it was very much a minority cinema because only limited numbers of people could see these films. There were all sorts of restrictions on getting to see them.

The sense of good films or great films being something that is reserved for discriminating, and discerning, audiences has been there for a long time. Of course, cinema has traditionally been a popular art – it’s been something that has addressed the masses and the multitudes – but it is true that the critics and the historians of cinema have favoured art cinema over mass popular cinema.

The good vs. bad ranking

In 2011, I worked on a study commissioned by the British Film Institute and the UK Film Council to really find out what people felt about film – what its cultural impact was and what its presence in people’s lives was. We asked people to nominate one film that was especially significant for them. We didn’t ask, what’s the best film? We just said, name a film that’s been particularly important for you. The word we used was ‘significant’. We were trying to get past the question of good film/bad film.

One of the most highly rated and frequently mentioned films was Avatar, by James Cameron. This was also the film that ushered in digital and 3D for most people in the cinemas. It was a fairly recent film, so that’s obviously why it was very present in people’s minds. It was until quite recently the most widely seen film on the planet. Does that mean it’s a good film? I’m not so interested in the good vs. bad ranking. I’m more interested in why people found it significant. As I read the responses of this enormous cross-section of people to Avatar, I realised that people really brought their own cultural and personal experience to the film.

I think the big mistake of film aesthetics, criticism and history has been to see it as a one-way process: this is the film. How do we judge it? We should see it as an interactive process, because film is an intensely psychological business, and we, as viewers, invest in the film.

The importance of cinema to our culture

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The great art historian Erwin Panofsky, a specialist in Netherlandish art, wrote a really interesting essay about cinema back in the 1930s. He said there are two kinds of art: commercial art and non-commercial art. Critics have always tended to favour non-commercial art, but actually it’s commercial art that’s perhaps more important. He ends this essay by saying that if all the painters and poets and craftspeople in the world stopped producing art tomorrow, not many people would notice – but if the makers of films stopped producing films, the entire world would notice. I think for Panofsky to say that was real recognition of the importance, the continuing importance, of cinema to our culture, today.

^*Battleship Potemkin came on top in the original poll of filmmakers, but it would be outvoted by Bicycle Thieves in the critics' poll, later in 1952.

Discover more about

The history of cinema

Christie, I., & Taylor, R. (1994). Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. Taylor & Francis.

Christie, I. (2019). Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema. The University of Chicago Press.

Christie, I. (2008). The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design. Wallflower Press, Columbia University Press.

What makes a film a classic in a world where everyone is a critic