Woke Cine World

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Greatest Movie Ever, You Never Heard Of?

In yet another sign of the UK's cultural collapse, the British Film Institutes Sight and Sound poll have just voted the film 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles' as the 'greatest of all time'.

So, have you ever heard of this obscure 1975 French language film?

No, me neither. But there are some clues as to why this film that no one has ever seen before (outside of a brief run in art house cinemas), has suddenly come from nowhere (well 12th a decade ago), to being voted the greatest of all time by a 'group of experts':

1. It was directed by a woman .... Chantal Akerman.
2. It's in a foreign language (so sub titles or dubbed).
3. It's three and half hours long (and so with sub titles, requires huge concentration from non French speaking viewers to watch).
4. It's an experimental, art cinema, type of movie.
5. It's about a prostitute who kills one of her male clients.
6. It's been lauded as a "masterpiece", and a ground-breaking piece of feminist film (Lillian Crawford, a film critic and writer who contributed to the poll, said the film was the "essential text" in feminist cinema).

And therein lies all the clues .... its an obscure, feminist movie, that would mainly appeal to critics, fans of art house films and rabid feminists. After all we have the much admired 'Thelma and Louise,' and numerous movies about Aileen Wuornos (a prostitute, serial killer), such as 'Monster', which explore very similar themes, but were box office successes .... but they are not on the British Film Institutes Sight and Sound poll top 20 ... perhaps they aren't feminist enough?

Now lets get this right, by 'experts', they mean people who watch films as a living, and then tell us whether they like it or not, often in a long-winded and politically correct manner. So invariably films that are incredibly popular with the public, such as the Marvel Universe movies are not anywhere in these lists, whilst movies that were box office death, are often near the top.

So for four decades (the poll is only once every decade), 'Citizen Kane' won the accolade (story, innovative, and ground breaking cinematography, and bravura performance by Actor/Director Orson Welles), only to be overtaken at the last poll in 2012, by master film maker, Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'. Citizen Kane was a box office flop at the time of its release, and it was only when it started being shown on TV that its merits came to be wider appreciated. Vertigo was initially also a box office flop, but Hitchcock was churning out movies at the time, and its special merits kind of got of got lost in the mix. It was only in the 1980's when it was re-released that it suddenly got re-evaluated.

So why did this film suddenly appear, well the British Film Institute (I emphasise British, not the French, Japanese or Nigerian), had been criticised for a lack of diversity in the experts polled, and the list of 100 best films chosen to be picked from .... 'diversity' meaning not enough black people and women, regardless of their abilities or qualification, to vote on the British Film Institute sights and sounds poll, and that the films considered didn't include enough foreign language movies.

So this decades list BFI top five is:

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (French language).
2. Vertigo.
3. Citizen Kane.
4. Tokyo Story (Japanese).
5. Mood For Love (Chinese).

However should you look at the list of the local national film institutes greatest movies, then depending upon which country, they are either as snobby as the BFI, or ignore foreign films completely. So for example French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma compile a list of the 100 greatest films of all time.

1.  Citizen Kane (US).
2. The Night of The Hunter (US).
3. The Rules Of The Game.
4. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (Silent - US).
5. L'Atalante 

However, elsewhere, the other nations are far less generous as the British and the French, and its remarkable how few foreign films enter their consciousness. For example, all the most popular films in Japan are either Anime (cartoon) and Live action (Godzilla for example). In fact based upon the few Japanese voted film lists that I could find .... there are no foreign films in the lists.

Seven Samurai - Voted Greatest Ever Movie In Japan

The Kinema Junpo critics top 200 listed the top 5 as:

1. Tokyo Story.
2. Seven Samurai.
   
3. Floating Clouds.
4. Sun In The Last Days Of The Shogunate.
5. The Yakuza Papers 1: Battles Without Honour And Humanity.
   

Whereas Kinejun readers listed their top 5 as:

1. Seven Samurai.
2. Tokyo Story.
3. Ikiru.
4. The Castle of Sand.
5. Floating Clouds.

While in China, the foreign films are all recent, and basically Marvel movies. Chinese movies are all post 1948, and can only be judged by gross box office admissions records, and not by critics choice, as they are all politically selected.

1. Legend of the White Snake.
2. Full House of Joy (no link).
3. The Undaunted Wudang (no link).
4. Gunshots in the CIB (no link).
5. Murder in 405 (no link).

They are largely all communist propaganda films, that promote certain socially acceptable messages or histories .... nowadays Chinese people want spectacular CGI type movies, and that reflects in the top box office for home made and foreign movies. So number one is The Battle at Lake Changjin which is about Chinese soldiers defeating American/UN troops in the Korea war. It was commissioned by the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party.

Apparently film criticism in China is a comparatively recent and somewhat undeveloped activity, and therefore is often just of the 'I really liked this Thor movie' type of comment. All the movies are from the 1980's, and the foreign movies from the 2010's onward, all of which reflects the censored society that the Chinese live in.

If your interested, the full top 20 greatest film ever, as voted for by the 'diverse' BFI Sight and Sound once a decade poll are:

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975).
2. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).
4. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953).
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2001).
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
7. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1998).
8. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001).
9. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov,1929).
10. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951).
11. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927).
12. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972).
13. La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939).
14. Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962).
15. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956).
16. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943).
17. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989).
18. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966).
19. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979).
20. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954).

What strikes me about this is .... if the current #1 was #12 in 2012 .... how has it got better somehow in the intervening 10 years? Was there a directors cut? No, they have simply woked up the voters, so this year its a feminist .... in a decade, some African movie will supplant it as the greatest movie ever made.

The clue to this inevitability is that Jason Wood, the BFI’s executive director of public programmes and audiences, who gushed .... " ... part of the BFI’s remit is to not only revisit film history but to also reframe it, it’s so satisfying to see a list that feels quite radical in its sense of diversity and inclusion.” 

.... diversity and inclusion, these are the keys to what now determines what is the greatest ever movie, as opposed to cinematic criteria .... a film that was 12th a decade ago can't suddenly be better a decade later .... only the judging criteria can have changed.