We all walk around with an unwritten list in our head; private and cherished. Our best-loved films, whether they once comforted us or exhilarated us, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, are up there, haphazardly filed away, in a mental vault of privileged memories.
Some organised people, of course, actually write down these lists on paper and actively curate them. Such film buffs might be quiet, introverted enthusiasts, commonly also keeping an alphabetised vinyl album collection to match. Or they might be evangelical communicators. If they actually earn a living from it, we call them film critics.
On Friday, the New York Times put out a list of 25 top quality films that has got people talking. The newspaper’s chief critics collated an eclectic chart drawn only from world cinema releases since the turn of the millennium. They also had the chutzpah to suggest these are the classics of the future.
Among them were Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, Richard Linklater’s moving epic Boyhood and the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. There is a chunky weighting towards American output, yet films such as Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light are in there too, as well as the animations Spirited Away and Inside Out, and the splendidly silly Judd Apatow comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
It is a truism these days that all the really great storytelling is found on television. And it is quite a compelling platitude. With adventurous and sophisticated work such as Mad Men or The Crown now available in the corner of the living room, and with great film directors such as David Lynch and Jane Campion taking artistic delight in creating drama for the small screen, cinemas sometimes seem like the tawdry domain of the historical blockbuster or the superhero franchises.
But this new NYT roll-call of modern greats has arrived to blow a cloud of trendy vape smoke in the face of such lazy thinking. Sofa-bound viewers in search of the best stories out there really need to get up and go to their local arthouse cinema or at least check regularly on their streaming service recommendations. Because feature-length, big-screen tales with proper closure and a sense of purpose, rather than just an open-ended, cliffhanging trailer for the next season, remain a lovely thing.
The NYT 25 makes an appealing lineup because the films are all recent enough to seem like unpretentious choices. What is more, in an age in which there is so much readily available entertainment, the thought that someone else has picked out the key titles on our behalf is welcome. On the other hand, why isn’t Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon there? Or Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Saudi story, Wadjda?
For definitive lists always provoke irritation, even heated disputes. There is a pretty good defence, though, for such invidious attempts to isolate and promote true classics. We all need our lists of favourites, either notionally or set out more formally in newspapers, in order to get to know ourselves and to get to know each other. In fact, it is possibly the purpose of art.
Our tastes in film will always define us and as long as the canon is regularly revised and not allowed to become sacrosanct, then that is a healthy thing. Perhaps less healthy for western society is the worrying thought that all memory of film culture from the last century is fading away. This is the melancholy belief of the actor James Spader, once best known as the star of the 1989 Steven Soderbergh hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, now famous for starring in the television thriller series The Blacklist.
“There is no legacy in film any more,” he once told the Observer. “I am not so sure that even classic films really live on now – and that means ultimately that maybe film is an entertainment, or a provocation, just for a specific time.”
Since networked TV has stopped screening films from the back catalogue, historical perspective is certainly harder to come by. So, unless an inspiring teacher is on hand to introduce the next generation of teenagers to the first version of Ben Hur or to original film noir, all lists of classic films will soon be drawn from just the last decade or two.
