Greatest Culture...

[stlukesguild]

Since we all seem to love to engage in those inane discussions debating the greatest writer, greatest poet, greatest national body of literature, etc... let's take it to the logical extreme and discuss what you think is/was the greatest or most influential culture on the whole of culture? Of all time? Over the last 100 years. Some logical reasoning behind your choices would be appreciated as opposed to "I like Russia/France/Poland".

AS JBI is certain to jump in and point out that we cannot offer any such assessment with our middling grasp of Chinese, Indian, Persian cultures (etc...) shall we limit this to Western culture?

Anyway... let the games begin.:boxing_smiley:

[prendrelemick]

Panieillium culture.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Over the last 100 years would have to be America, in terms of the mass media, film etc. Of all time (Western) it would have to be the Greek/Roman culture, cornerstone of Western thought etc, I can't see any arguments with that...;)

[PeterL]

Wine yeast

[cafolini]

Wine yeast

San Francisco sourdough.
ROFLMAO

[Darcy88]

I'm a huge fan of German expressionist painting, and Herman Hesse was the author who really got me into literature, so German culture would be near the top for me. Its hard though to deny America's 20th century cultural preponderance. That nation produced Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner and a host of other great literary figures. Then there is American cinema with individuals like Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles, Coppola, Scorsese, not to mention all the actors and actresses. In many musical genres America also led the way. France deserves mention as well, but for me its American culture followed by German.

[hannah_arendt]

I'm a huge fan of German expressionist painting, and Herman Hesse was the author who really got me into literature, so German culture would be near the top for me. Its hard though to deny America's 20th century cultural preponderance. That nation produced Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner and a host of other great literary figures. Then there is American cinema with individuals like Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles, Coppola, Scorsese, not to mention all the actors and actresses. In many musical genres America also led the way. France deserves mention as well, but for me its American culture followed by German.

I am a very big fan of German philosophy. I love H. Mueller too.

It is very difficult to decide which culture is the most powerful. However I think that we could take into account languages, f. ex majority of the people around the world speaks English or Spanish. However English seems to me more 'important'. There are also many english or american writers who became very famous and appreciated.

[cafolini]

I am a very big fan of German philosophy. I love H. Mueller too.

It is very difficult to decide which culture is the most powerful. However I think that we could take into account languages, f. ex majority of the people around the world speaks English or Spanish. However English seems to me more 'important'. There are also many english or american writers who became very famous and appreciated.

There is no greatest literary culture. You make it very difficult by thinking it is possible to get an answer to this.

[mortalterror]

In terms of literature, over the last century, I give it to the USA. Henry James, Jack London, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, Eugene O'Neill, Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Edward Albee, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and William Foster Wallace.

1998 My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
1996 Infinite Jest by William Foster Wallace (USA)
1992 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago (Portugal)
1991 Angels in America by Tony Kushner (USA)
1990 Omeros by Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia)
1987 Beloved by Toni Morrison (USA)
1987 Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Japan)
1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (USA)
1985 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Canada)
1981 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (India)
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Italy)
1979 If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (Italy)
1974 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert (Poland)
1973 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Russia)
1973 The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russia)
1970 The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima (Japan)
1969 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (USA)
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (USA)
1967 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia)
1966 The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (USA)
1966 Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
1965 Closely Watched Trains Bohumil Hrabal (Czechoslovakia)
1965 The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
1964 The Homecoming by Harold Pinter (Britain)
1963 Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (Argentina)
1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (USA)
1962 The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)
1961 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (USA)
1961 A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (India)
1959 The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (Germany)
1958 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Italy)
1957 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Russia)
1957 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (USA)
1957 Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs by Adonis (Syria)
1956 Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (USA)
1956 Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill (USA)
1956 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa (Brazil)
1955 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Russia)
1955 The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens (USA)
1955 Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (Mexico)
1954 Sunstone by Octavio Paz (Mexico)
1954 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Britain)
1953 Gimpel, the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Poland)
1953 Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett (Ireland)
1952 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (USA)
1952 The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (Britain)
1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (USA)
1952 The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan (India)
1951 Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas (Britain)
1951 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (USA)
1951 Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (France)
1950 Canto General by Pablo Neruda (Chile)
1950 The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco (Romania)
1949 1984 by George Orwell (Britain)
1949 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (USA)
1948 The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (Japan)
1948 The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht (Germany)
1948 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (USA)
1948 Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)
1948 Death Fugue by Paul Celan (Romania)
1947 Fortress Besieged Qian Zhongshu (China)
1945 Rescue by Czeslaw Milosz (Poland)
1944 No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (France)
1944 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
1944 The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist (Sweden)
1942 The Stranger by Albert Camus (France)
1942 Antigone by Jean Anouilh (France)
1940 Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (Russia)
1939 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (USA)
1938 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greece)
1937 Out of Africa by Isak Dineson (Denmark)
1937 The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (Iran)
1935 Wings of Gabriel by Muhammad Iqbal (India)
1935 Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias by Federico Garcia Lorca (Spain)
1934 Message by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal)
1933 Man's Fate by Andre Malraux (France)
1932 Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (France)
1932 The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (Austria)
1929 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (USA)
1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (Britain)
1927 Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (Germany)
1926 Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard (France)
1925 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Britain)
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (USA)
1925 Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale (Italy)
1924 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Germany)
1924 Anabase by Saint-John Perse (France)
1923 The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (China)
1923 The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (Lebanon)
1923 Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo (Italy)
1922 The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot (USA)
1922 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (France)
1922 Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke (Germany)
1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (Italy)
1920 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (USA)
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound (USA)
1919 The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (Ireland)
1918 Ulysses by James Joyce (Ireland)
1918 The Hellscreen by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japan)
1918 The Black Heralds by Cesar Vallejo (Peru)
1917 The Young Fate by Paul Valery (France)
1915 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Czechoslovakia)
1915 The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (Britain)
1915 Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (Britain)
1914 Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (Japan)
1914 Mending Wall by Robert Frost (USA)
1913 Alcohol by Guillaume Apollinaire (France)
1911 Ithaca by Constantine P. Cavafy (Greece)
1910 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (India)
1910 Peruvian Traditions by Ricardo Palma (Peru)
1907 The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg (Sweden)
1907 The Travels of Lao Ts'an by Liu E (China)
1906 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind (Germany)
1905 Songs of Life and Hope by Ruben Dario (Nicaragua)
1904 The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (Russia)
1903 Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw (Ireland)
1903 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (USA)
1903 The Ambassadors by Henry James (USA)
1902 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Britain)
1902 The Immoralist by Andre Gide (France)
1902 The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky (Russia)
1902 The Rain in the Pinewood by Gabriele D'Annunzio (Italy)
1901 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Britain)
1900 La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler (Austria)

In terms of painting I give it to Spain for Picasso, and Salvador Dali, followed by Mexico for the muralists Diego Rivera, Jorge Camarena, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueros, then maybe France for the late Impressionists, Magritte, and Matisse.

For classical music, the best was done by the Russians: Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Khachaturian, and Kabalevsky.

1901 Pomp and Circumstance- Elgar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moL4MkJ-aLk
1901 Prelude in G minor- Rachmaninoff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QB7ugJnHgs
1904 Un Bel Di- Puccini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLaY2VcIEqo
1916 The Planets- Holst
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B49N46I39Y
1917 Dream of Doretta- Puccini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3PtVRWNYus
1918 O Mio Babbino Caro- Puccini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxy4qrnKwVo
1920 The Lark Ascending- Vaughan Williams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKz6XJlI_jk
1924 Rhapsody in Blue- Gershwin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc
1926 Nessun Dorma- Puccini
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOfC9LfR3PI
1928 Bolero- Ravel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-4J5j74VPw
1932 Suite For Jazz Orchestra 2- Shostakovich
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYhZVqODYsI
1934 Rhapsody on a Theme By Paganini- Rachmaninoff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Z-HCq5EeU
1934 Troika- Prokofiev
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hINfOSlMANc
1935 Dance of the Knights- Prokofiev
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUmq1cpcglQ
1936 Carmina Burana- Orff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNWpZ-Y_KvU
1936 Adagio For Strings- Barber
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRMz8fKkG2g
1939 Concerto De Aranjuez- Rodrigo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9DOtuPLqNI
1940 Violin Concerto- Khachaturian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZexcMRKVMkk
1940 Comedians Gallop- Kabalevsky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw0oQ4sD4us
1942 Rodeo- Copland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajQYANLiug
1942 Fanfare for the Common Man- Copland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEro8pG0hiE
1942 Sabre Dance- Khachaturian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqg3l3r_DRI
1947 Petrushka- Stravinsky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFvjao_RHVU
1952 Blue Tango- Anderson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQRIL4q7IPw
1956 Candide Overture- Bernstein
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=422-yb8TXj8
1966 The Ecstasy of Gold- Morricone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV0wPBYDQ6Y
1975 Einstein on the Beach- Glass
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmX_GgozpQs
1976 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs- Gorecki
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miLV0o4AhE4

[mortalterror]

As far as popular music goes, I'm no expert on world music, but America did invent jazz, country, blues, rock, and hip hop. However, there is one caveat to that opinion, since perhaps the best performers of those styles (at least rock and roll) were British: ie The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Pink Floyd, Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, etc. vs Americans: Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Metallica, Elvis, etc.

1902 Scott Joplin- The Entertainer (ragtime)
1903 Banjo Paterson- Waltzing Matilda (ballad)
1904 Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych- Carol of the Bells (carol)
1905 Civilla D. Martin- His Eye Is On the Sparrow (gospel)
1908 Jack Norworth & Albert Von Tilzer- Take Me Out to the Ball Game (pop)
1912 Chauncey Olcott- When Irish Eyes Are Smiling (show tune)
1912 George Bennard- The Old Rugged Cross (hymn)
1913 Frederick Weatherly- Danny Boy (ballad)
1916 Sir Hubert Parry- Jerusalem Hymn (hymn)
1916 Enrico Caruso- O Sole Mio (Neapolitan)
20s
1925 Al Jolson- I'm Sitting On Top of the World (pop)
1927 Paul Robeson- Ol' Man River (show tune)
1928 Jimmie Rodgers- In the Jailhouse Now (country)
1928 Harry McClintock- The Big Rock Candy Mountain (country)
1928 Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill- Mack the Knife (show tune)
1929 Nick Lucas- Tip Toe Through the Tulips (pop)
1929 Joseito Fernandez- Guantanamera (latin)
1929 Ethel Waters- Am I Blue? (blues)
30s
1930 Comedian Harmonists- Veronika (a capella)
1930 Blind Willlie Johnson- John the Revelator (blues gospel)
1930 Mississippi Sheiks- Sitting on Top of the World (blues)
1931 Duke Ellington- It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got that Swing) (swing jazz)
1931 Cab Calloway- Minnie the Moocher (jazz)
1934 Cole Porter- Anything Goes (show tune)
1935 Carlos Gardel- Por una cabeza (tango)
1935 Fred Astaire- Cheek to Cheek (show tune)
1935 Artie Shaw- Begin the Beguine (jazz)
1936 Robert Johnson- Crossroad (blues)
1937 Benny Goodman- Sing, Sing, Sing (swing)
1937 The Andrews Sisters- Bei Mir Bist du Schoen (show tune)
1937 Glenn Miller- In the Mood (big band)
1939 Judy Garland- Over the Rainbow (ballad)
1939 Billie Holiday- Strange Fruit (blues)
1939 Django Reinhart- In a Sentimental Mood (jazz)
40s
1940 The Ink Spots- Maybe (doo wop)
1941 Bing Crosby- White Christmas (pop)
1941 Lena Horne- Stormy Weather (jazz vocal)
1941 Lil Green- Why Don't You Do Right (blues)
1942 Vera Lynn- We'll Meet Again (jazz vocal)
1944 Leadbelly- Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (blues)
1944 The Mills Brothers- Till Then (pop)
1944 Woody Guthrie- This Land is Your Land (folk)
1945 Tino Rossi- Besame Mucho (chanson)
1946 Edith Piaf- La Vie en Rose (pop)
1946 Louis Jordan- Choo Choo Ch'Boogie (jump blues)
1946 Bill Monroe- Blue Moon of Kentucky (country)
1948 John Lee Hooker- Boogie Chillen (blues)
50s
1951 Elmore James- Dust My Broom (blues)
1952 Hank Williams- Your Cheatin' Heart (country)
1952 Little Walter- Juke (blues)
1955 Muddy Waters- Mannish Boy (blues)
1955 Bo Diddley- Bo Diddley (rock)
1955 The Platters- Only You (doo wop)
1955 Eddy Arnold- Cattle Call (country)
1955 Tennessee Ernie Ford - Sixteen Tons (country)
1955 Little Richard- Tutti Frutty (rock)
1957 Buddy Holly- Peggy Sue (rock)
1957 Jerry Louis- Great Balls of Fire (rock)
1957 Elvis Presley- Jailhouse Rock (rock)
1958 Ella Fitzgerald- Blue Skies (vocal jazz)
1958 Chuck Berry- Johnny B. Goode (rock)
1959 Marty Robbins- El Paso (country)
1959 The Staple Singers- I'm Coming Home (gospel)
60s
1960 Howlin' Wolf- Spoonful (blues)
1960 Etta James- At Last (soul)
1961 Patsy Cline- Crazy (country)
1961 Ray Charles- Hit the Road Jack (R&B)
1962 Gene Chandler- Duke of Earl (doo wop)
1963 The Kingsmen- Louie Louie (rock)
1963 Johnny Cash- Ring of Fire (country)
1963 The Four Seasons- Walk Like a Man (rock)
1964 Jacques Brel- Amsterdam (chanson)
1964 The Animals- House of the Rising Sun (rock)
1965 Sam Cooke- Chain Gang (R&B)
1965 Bob Dylan- Like a Rolling Stone (rock)
1965 Wilson Pickett- Mustang Sally (R&B)
1965 The Yardbirds- For Your Love (rock)
1966 Cannonball Adderly- Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (jazz)
1967 Aretha Franklin- Respect (R&B)
1967 The Velvet Underground- I'm Waiting For The Man (rock)
1967 Otis Redding- Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (R&B)
1967 Albert King- Born Under a Bad Sign (blues)
1967 The Doors- Break on Through (rock)
1968 The Beatles- Hey Jude (rock)
1968 Steppenwolf- Born to Be Wild (rock)
1968 Louis Armstrong- What a Wonderful World (pop)
1968 Jimi Hendrix- All Along the Watchtower (rock)
1968 Tammy Wynnettte- Stand By Your Man (country)
1968 Taj Mahal- Leaving Trunk (blues)
1969 Frank Sinatra- My Way (pop)
1969 Crosby, Stills, and Nash- Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (rock)
1969 David Bowie- Space Oddity (psychedelic rock)
1969 The Band- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (rock)
1969 Credence Clearwater Revival- Bad Moon Rising (rock)
70s
1970 George Harrison- My Sweet Lord (rock)
1970 B.B. King- The Thrill is Gone (blues)
1970 Black Sabbath- Iron Man (metal)
1970 Eric Clapton- Layla (rock)
1970 Conway Twitty- Hello Darlin' (country)
1971 John Lennon- Imagine (rock)
1971 Janis Joplin- Me and Bobby McGee (rock)
1971 Marvin Gaye- What's Going On? (soul)
1971 Jethro Tull- Aqualung (prog rock)
1971 Led Zepplin- Stairway to Heaven (rock)
1971 The Who- Baba O'Riley (rock)
1972 Neil Young- Heart of Gold (country rock)
1973 Bob Marley- I Shot the Sheriff (reggae)
1973 The Rolling Stones-Angie (rock)
1973 John Denver- Rocky Mountain High (country)
1973 Deep Purple- Smoke on the Water (rock)
1973 Aerosmith- Dream On (rock)
1973 Alice Cooper- No More Mr Nice Guy (rock)
1973 Pink Floyd- Eclipse (progressive rock)
1973 Lynryd Skynyrd- Free bird (rock)
1975 Queen- Bohemian Rhapsody (rock)
1975 Frank Zappa- Muffin Man (rock)
1976 KISS- Detroit Rock City (rock)
1976 Sex Pistols- Anarchy in the UK (punk)
1976 Gordon Lightfoot- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (folk)
1977 Van Halen- Eruption (rock)
1977 Kansas- Dust in the Wind (rock)
1977 The Eagles- Hotel California (rock)
1977 Fear- I Love Living in the City (punk)
1979 Sugarhill Gang- Rapper's Delight (hip hop)
1979 The Dead Kennedys- California Uber Alles (punk)
80s
1980 Ozzy Osbourne- Crazy Train (metal)
1980 George Jones- He Stopped Loving Her Today (country)
1981 Rush- Tom Sawyer (rock)
1982 The Clash- Straight to Hell (punk)
1982 Iron Maiden- Run to the Hills (metal)
1982 George Thorogood- Bad to the Bone (blues rock)
1983 Dio- Holy Diver (metal)
1984 Saxon- Crusader (metal)
1984 Michael Jackson- Thriller (pop)
1984 Run DMC- Rock Box (hip hop)
1984 Bruce Springsteen- Born in the USA (rock)
1985 Billy Bragg- The World Turned Upside Down (punk folk)
1985 Anthrax- Madhouse (metal)
1985 The Highwaymen- Highwayman (country)
1986 Megadeth- Peace Sells (metal)
1987 Guns N Roses- Sweet Child o' Mine (rock)
1988 Poison- Every Rose Has It's Thorn (rock)
1988 Jane's Addiction- Jane Says (rock)
1988 Danzig- Mother (metal)
1989 Public Enemy- Fight the Power (hip hop)
1989 Pixies- Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) (rock)
90s
1990 Scorpions- Wind of Change (metal)
1990 Pantera- Cemetery Gates (metal)
1990 AC/DC- Thunderstruck (hard rock)
1991 LL Cool J- Mama Said Knock You Out (hip hop)
1991 Pearl Jam- Black (metal)
1991 Metallica- Enter Sandman (metal)
1991 Nirvana- Smells Like Teen Spirit ( grunge rock)
1992 2pac- Changes (hip hop)
1992 Kyuss- Thong Song (desert rock)
1992 Dr. Dre- Nuthin' But a G Thang (hip hop)
1993 Alice in Chains- Rooster (rock)
1993 Smashing Pumpkins- Today (rock)
1994 Nine Inch Nails- Closer (rock)
1995 Monster Magnet- Negasonic Teenage Warhead (rock)
1997 Green Day- Good Riddance(Time of Your Life) (rock)
1997 Rammstein- Engel (metal)
1997 Notorious B.I.G.- Mo Money Mo Problems (hip hop)
1997 Radiohead- Karma Police (rock)
1998 Fatboy Slim- Renegade Master (techno)
1998 Blind Guardian- Mirror Mirror (metal)
1999 The Offspring- The Kids Aren't Alright (punk rock)

[mortalterror]

For film, it shouldn't even be a contest. Hollywood crushes all of it's closest rivals. Bollywood and Nollywood have produced more films in recent decades, but I don't think they've brought their standards up to the polished level of the big Hollywood studios. Italy brought us neorealism and the directors: Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Leone, Bertolucci, and Visconti. France gave us The New Wave and Jean Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Bresson. Japan gave us Akira Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Ozu, Oshima, Imamura and samurai movies. Sweden gave us Ingmar Bergman, and Carl Dreyer. Germany gave us Expressionism and Fritz Lang. Russia gave us Eisenstein and Tarkovsky and Britain gave us Hitchcock and David Lean. Poland is responsible for Kieslowski and Polanski. But America is where Kubrick, Scorsese, Welles, Spielberg, Hawks, Capra, Ford, Griffith, Coppola, Tarantino, Kazan, Peckinpah, Lumet, the Coen Brothers, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, De Palma, Zemeckis, etc. were born. South Korea and Hong Kong have had a really good 21st century so far, but we're only talking 20th century right now.

2000 Battle Royale, Memento, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Requiem For a Dream, Traffic
1999 The Matrix, American Beauty, One Day in September, The Boondock Saints, Dogma
1998 The Big Lebowski, Saving Private Ryan, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Thin Red Line
1997 L.A. Confidential, Character, Boogie Nights, Life is Beautiful, Gattaca, Taste of Cherry,
1996 Hamlet, Trainspotting, Pretty Village Pretty Flame, Fargo
1995 The Usual Suspects, Shanghai Triad, Mallrats, Se7en, Ghost in the Shell, Day of the Beast
1994 Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, To Live, Forest Gump, The Professional, Natural Born Killers, Three Colors Red,
1993 Schindler's List, Farewell My Concubine, The Fugitive, Sonatine, Stalingrad, Tombstone,
1992 Reservoir Dogs, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Few Good Men
1991 The Silence of the Lambs, Raise the Red Lantern, Terminator 2, JFK
1990 Goodfellas, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Miller's Crossing, Dances With Wolves, Cyrano de Bergerac, Europa Europa, Dreams,
1989 Do the Right Thing, Lonesome Dove, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Henry V, When Harry Met Sally, Field of Dreams, Driving Miss Daisy
1988 Die Hard, Heathers, Akira, Cinema Paradiso, A Short Film About Killing, Dangerous Liasons, Rain Man
1987 Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Robocop, The Princess Bride, Predator, The Last Emperor, Wings of Desire, Au Revoir Les Enfants
1986 Aliens, Platoon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Big Trouble in Little China, Jean de Florette, Ginger and Fred
1985 Brazil, Ran, Back to the Future, Come and See
1984 The Terminator, Amadeus, Once Upon a Time in America, The Killing Fields
1983 Scarface, The Right Stuff, And the Ship Sailed On
1982 Fanny and Alexander, Blade Runner, The Thing, Ghandi, The Wrath of Khan, First Blood, Conan the Barbarian
1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, Das Boot, Chariots of Fire
1980 Raging Bull, Kagemusha, The Shining, The Empire Strikes Back, Ordinary People, Breaker Morant
1979 Apocalypse Now, Alien, Stalker,
1978 The Deer Hunter, Autumn Sonata, Dawn of the Dead
1977 Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever
1976 Rocky, Network, Taxi Driver, All the President's Men
1975 Jaws, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dersu Uzala
1974 Hearts and Minds, Blazing Saddles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Chinatown, The Godfather Part II
1973 Amarcord, Mean Streets
1972 The Godfather, Solaris
1971 A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Dirty Harry
1970 Patton, The Conformist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
1969 The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Z
1968 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Hour of the Wolf
1967 In the Heat of the Night, Samurai Rebellion, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Marat/Sade
1966 The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Andrei Rublev, Sword of Doom, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Battle of Algiers, Closely Watched Trains, Persona
1965 Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, The Shop on Main Street, For A Few Dollars More, The Flight of the Phoenix, Juliet of the Spirits
1964 Dr. Strangelove, A Fistful of Dollars, Zulu, Zorba the Greek
1963 8 1/2, High and Low, The Leopard, The Great Escape
1962 Lawrence of Arabia, Harakiri, The Longest Day, The Miracle Worker, Sanjuro
1961 Yojimbo, Through a Glass Darkly
1960 La Dolce Vita, Spartacus, The Virgin Spring, Inherit the Wind
1959 Anatomy of a Murder, 400 Blows, Fires on the Plain, Some Like it Hot
1958 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hidden Fortress
1957 Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Paths of Glory, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Bridge on the River Kwai, 12 Angry Men, Witness For the Prosecution, Kanal
1956 The Searchers, A Man Escaped
1955 Smiles of a Summer Night, Night of the Hunter
1954 Seven Samurai, La Strada, On the Waterfront
1953 Julius Caesar, The Wages of Fear, From Here to Eternity, I Vitelloni,
1952 High Noon, Ikiru, Umberto D., Singin' in the Rain, Forbidden Games, The White Sheik
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire, An American in Paris, The African Queen
1950 Rashomon, Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Asphalt Jungle, Harvey
1949 All the King's Men, Stray Dog, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
1948 The Bicycle Thief, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Drunken Angel, Red River, Rope, The Red Shoes
1947 Out of the Past, The Lady From Shanghai
1946 The Big Sleep, It's a Wonderful Life
1945 Rome, Open City, Children of Paradise, Scarlet Street
1944 Double Indemnity, Arsenic and Old Lace
1943 Ossessione
1942 Casablanca
1941 Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, How Green Was My Valley
1940 The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday
1939 Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz
1938 Pygmalion
1937 The Grand Illusion
1936 My Man Godfry
1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1934 The Scarlet Empress
1933 Gold Diggers of 1933
1932 Trouble in Paradise
1931 M, City Lights
1930 All Quiet on the Western Front
1929 Living Russia, or The Man With A Camera
1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc
1927 Metropolis
1926 The General
1925 The Gold Rush
1924 Sherlock Jr.
1923 Safety Last!
1922 Nosferatu
1921 The Kid
1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
1919 Sunnyside
1918 A Dog's Life
1917 The Immigrant
1916 Intolerance
1915 The Birth of a Nation
1903 The Great Train Robbery
1902 A Trip to the Moon

Which culture is the best for all time?

English, Italian, Persian, Greek, and Sanskrit are all monsters of literature. Just pitting the best poet of each language against each other is daunting. Shakespeare, Dante, Firdawsi, Homer, Vyasa. It's a push.

Germany/Austria has the best music with Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, Schubert, Strauss, Mendelssohn, Brahms, followed by the Italians Monteverdi, Puccini, Allegri, Vivaldi, Rossini, Verdi, Palestrina, Corelli, then the Russians I've already named above with Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Borodin, then the French for Saint Saens, Delibes, Debussy, Ravel, Faure.

Italy has the best art with all that stuff from the Renaissance and Baroque eras Michelangelo, Bernini, Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Donatello, Lippi, Bellini, Mantegna, Botticelli, Signorelli, Titian, Sarto, Corregio, Pontormo, Cellini, Tintoretto, Bologna, Allori, etc. Then the Dutch have Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Bruegel, Bosch, Ter Brugghen, Van Den Broecke, and all the little Dutch masters. Then the French have the Neo-Classicists and the Impressionists which are pretty good. I'd say for the West it goes Italian, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, English, then all the rest as far as visual arts go.

[Darcy88]

For film, it shouldn't even be a contest. Hollywood crushes all of it's closest rivals. Bollywood and Nollywood have produced more films in recent decades, but I don't think they've brought their standards up to the polished level of the big Hollywood studios. Italy brought us neorealism and the directors: Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Leone, Bertolucci, and Visconti. France gave us The New Wave and Jean Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Bresson. Japan gave us Akira Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Ozu, Oshima, Imamura and samurai movies. Sweden gave us Ingmar Bergman, and Carl Dreyer. Germany gave us Expressionism and Fritz Lang. Russia gave us Eisenstein and Tarkovsky and Britain gave us Hitchcock and David Lean. Poland is responsible for Kieslowski and Polanski. But America is where Kubrick, Scorsese, Welles, Spielberg, Hawks, Capra, Ford, Griffith, Coppola, Tarantino, Kazan, Peckinpah, Lumet, Cameron, the Coen Brothers, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, De Palma, Zemeckis, etc. were born. South Korea and Hong Kong have had a really good 21st century so far, but we're only talking 20th century right now.

2000 Battle Royale, Memento, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Requiem For a Dream, Traffic
1999 The Matrix, American Beauty, One Day in September, The Boondock Saints, Dogma
1998 The Big Lebowski, Saving Private Ryan, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Thin Red Line
1997 L.A. Confidential, Character, Boogie Nights, Life is Beautiful, Gattaca, Taste of Cherry,
1996 Hamlet, Trainspotting, Pretty Village Pretty Flame, Fargo
1995 The Usual Suspects, Shanghai Triad, Mallrats, Se7en, Ghost in the Shell, Day of the Beast
1994 Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, To Live, Forest Gump, The Professional, Natural Born Killers, Three Colors Red,
1993 Schindler's List, Farewell My Concubine, The Fugitive, Sonatine, Stalingrad, Tombstone,
1992 Reservoir Dogs, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Few Good Men
1991 The Silence of the Lambs, Raise the Red Lantern, Terminator 2, JFK
1990 Goodfellas, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Miller's Crossing, Dances With Wolves, Cyrano de Bergerac, Europa Europa, Dreams,
1989 Do the Right Thing, Lonesome Dove, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Henry V, When Harry Met Sally, Field of Dreams, Driving Miss Daisy
1988 Die Hard, Heathers, Akira, Cinema Paradiso, A Short Film About Killing, Dangerous Liasons, Rain Man
1987 Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Robocop, The Princess Bride, Predator, The Last Emperor, Wings of Desire, Au Revoir Les Enfants
1986 Aliens, Platoon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Big Trouble in Little China, Jean de Florette, Ginger and Fred
1985 Brazil, Ran, Back to the Future, Come and See
1984 The Terminator, Amadeus, Once Upon a Time in America, The Killing Fields
1983 Scarface, The Right Stuff, And the Ship Sailed On
1982 Fanny and Alexander, Blade Runner, The Thing, Ghandi, The Wrath of Khan, First Blood, Conan the Barbarian
1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, Das Boot, Chariots of Fire
1980 Raging Bull, Kagemusha, The Shining, The Empire Strikes Back, Ordinary People, Breaker Morant
1979 Apocalypse Now, Alien, Stalker,
1978 The Deer Hunter, Autumn Sonata, Dawn of the Dead
1977 Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever
1976 Rocky, Network, Taxi Driver, All the President's Men
1975 Jaws, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dersu Uzala
1974 Hearts and Minds, Blazing Saddles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Chinatown, The Godfather Part II
1973 Amarcord, Mean Streets
1972 The Godfather, Solaris
1971 A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Dirty Harry
1970 Patton, The Conformist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
1969 The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Z
1968 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Hour of the Wolf
1967 In the Heat of the Night, Samurai Rebellion, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Marat/Sade
1966 The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Andrei Rublev, Sword of Doom, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Battle of Algiers, Closely Watched Trains, Persona
1965 Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, The Shop on Main Street, For A Few Dollars More, The Flight of the Phoenix, Juliet of the Spirits
1964 Dr. Strangelove, A Fistful of Dollars, Zulu, Zorba the Greek
1963 8 1/2, High and Low, The Leopard, The Great Escape
1962 Lawrence of Arabia, Harakiri, The Longest Day, The Miracle Worker, Sanjuro
1961 Yojimbo, Through a Glass Darkly
1960 La Dolce Vita, Spartacus, The Virgin Spring, Inherit the Wind
1959 Anatomy of a Murder, 400 Blows, Fires on the Plain, Some Like it Hot
1958 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hidden Fortress
1957 Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Paths of Glory, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Bridge on the River Kwai, 12 Angry Men, Witness For the Prosecution, Kanal
1956 The Searchers, A Man Escaped
1955 Smiles of a Summer Night, Night of the Hunter
1954 Seven Samurai, La Strada, On the Waterfront
1953 Julius Caesar, The Wages of Fear, From Here to Eternity, I Vitelloni,
1952 High Noon, Ikiru, Umberto D., Singin' in the Rain, Forbidden Games, The White Sheik
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire, An American in Paris, The African Queen
1950 Rashomon, Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Asphalt Jungle, Harvey
1949 All the King's Men, Stray Dog, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
1948 The Bicycle Thief, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Drunken Angel, Red River, Rope, The Red Shoes
1947 Out of the Past, The Lady From Shanghai
1946 The Big Sleep, It's a Wonderful Life
1945 Rome, Open City, Children of Paradise, Scarlet Street
1944 Double Indemnity, Arsenic and Old Lace
1943 Ossessione
1942 Casablanca
1941 Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, How Green Was My Valley
1940 The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday
1939 Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz
1938 Pygmalion
1937 The Grand Illusion
1936 My Man Godfry
1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1934 The Scarlet Empress
1933 Gold Diggers of 1933
1932 Trouble in Paradise
1931 M, City Lights
1930 All Quiet on the Western Front
1929 Living Russia, or The Man With A Camera
1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc
1927 Metropolis
1926 The General
1925 The Gold Rush
1924 Sherlock Jr.
1923 Safety Last!
1922 Nosferatu
1921 The Kid
1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
1919 Sunnyside
1918 A Dog's Life
1917 The Immigrant
1916 Intolerance
1915 The Birth of a Nation
1903 The Great Train Robbery
1902 A Trip to the Moon

I messed up putting Hitchcock as American but there's no way in hell we Canadians are letting you Americans claim James Cameron.

[mortalterror]

I messed up putting Hitchcock as American but there's no way in hell we Canadians are letting you Americans claim James Cameron.

That's fine, he's probably done more harm than good after The Terminator and Aliens. Titanic, Avatar, True Lies, and Dark Angel sucked. You can have him back and put him alongside Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, Justin Bieber, The Red Green Show, Tim Hortons, and Martin Short.

[Darcy88]

That's fine, he's probably done more harm than good after The Terminator and Aliens. Titanic, Avatar, True Lies, and Dark Angel sucked. You can have him back and put him alongside Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, Justin Bieber, The Red Green Show, Tim Hortons, and Martin Short.

Okay, so long as you prohibit Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton, Honey Boo-boo, Rob Schneider and Kevin James from ever slithering across the border into my fair country. And you must also return to us Ellen Page, Jason Reitman, Ryan Gosling and Christopher Plummer.

Termintor 2 is a classic. Titanic and Avatar were grossly over-rated, maybe two of the most over-rated films ever, but they were still visually spectacular, very well-made films.

[JBI]

Over the last 100 years would have to be America, in terms of the mass media, film etc. Of all time (Western) it would have to be the Greek/Roman culture, cornerstone of Western thought etc, I can't see any arguments with that...;)

Yes and no. England is easily a contender on media, but you forget things, China has been isolated from American culture for 70 or so of those 100 years. All of the "west" put together doesn't pass China in terms of population. India is similar, but their swallowing of European culture has been rather large, especially English culture.

Still, I am not going to play with this argument because I don't really believe in cultural isolation, in the sense of "civilizations" being divided entities, especially since there has almost been constant contact between China and Europe for the past 2000 years.

[hannah_arendt]

There is no greatest literary culture. You make it very difficult by thinking it is possible to get an answer to this.

You are right. It is very dificult and even impossible. Why is the reason to do it?

[mortalterror]

So you are saying we can take Poland out of the running?

[hannah_arendt]

I am not however I am concious of the fact that polish culture isn`t well known. Many artist coming from this country creat things considered as 'strange' or not understood for non-polish. To tell you the truth, I haven`t been brought up on polish literature and I am very gratefull for it. Thanks to this fact I am not so passive and pessimistic.

Other thing is that before the II ww Poland was a normal, european country such as UK, France or Germany. If it comes to literature, I like very much polish literature from 20s. and 30s. I think it was a beautifull and very creative period in polish history.

[cacian]

this is getting a little bit like the Eurovision culture contest haha.
I personally could not tell a greatest culture from another not yet anyway. The other thing is what does one mean by culture?

[mortalterror]

this is getting a little bit like the Eurovision culture contest haha.
I personally could not tell a greatest culture from another not yet anyway. The other thing is what does one mean by culture?

I for one can't even make distinctions among the English language and I don't understand what you mean by "personally" "greatest" "another" or "yet." I don't judge words or see differences between them. You see, I lost my sense of judgement in a freak paper or plastic bag accident when I was a young boy. Ever since, I don't know my right hand from my left, or my own **** from steak tartare. I don't even know how I feel about that, because is happy better than sad and who am I to privilege one emotion over another? I drive when I see red or green, because they're both nice colors, aren't they? And what's a contest? Is that one of those divisive things with winners and losers? I'm not for that. In fact, I think at the Olympics everyone should just receive a participation trophy for showing up. You can't say Usain Bolt ran faster than all the other runners! That would hurt their feelings.

[hypatia_]

I for one can't even make distinctions among the English language and I don't understand what you mean by "personally" "greatest" "another" or "yet." I don't judge words or see differences between them. You see, I lost my sense of judgement in a freak paper or plastic bag accident when I was a young boy. Ever since, I don't know my right hand from my left, or my own **** from steak tartare. I don't even know how I feel about that, because is happy better than sad and who am I to privilege one emotion over another? I drive when I see red or green, because they're both nice colors, aren't they? And what's a contest? Is that one of those divisive things with winners and losers? I'm not for that. In fact, I think at the Olympics everyone should just receive a participation trophy for showing up. You can't say Usain Bolt ran faster than all the other runners! That would hurt their feelings.

green is go, red is stop, but the definition of culture is not as concrete.

[stlukesguild]

Dan Brown sucks. Shakespeare doesn't. Seems pretty concrete to me. :yesnod:

[stlukesguild]

In terms of painting I give it to Spain for Picasso, and Salvador Dali, followed by Mexico for the muralists Diego Rivera, Jorge Camarena, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueros, then maybe France for the late Impressionists, Magritte, and Matisse.

I agree with much of the rest of your posts... but your anti-Modernism really mars your appraisal of Modern painting/sculpture. Picasso is the Titan of the age, no doubt... and after that the Spanish produced Dali, Miro, Juan Gris, Tapies, Antonio Lopez-Garcia and a few others of real merit. Mexico is underrated, I will grant you... but greater that the French? France remained the undisputed center of the art world until WWII. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, and Rodin all lived well into the 20th century and produced some of their most influential works late into their lives. Post-Impressionism continued even further in the form of Signac, Vuillard, and Bonnard. The Fauves (French Expressionists) are the first major 20th century art movement and included artists such as Derain, late Signac, Kees van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, and early Braque and Matisse. Picasso only really comes into his own in Paris and with Braque and the example of late Cezanne they develop the mnost influential movement of the 20th century: Cubism... which shatters the notion held since the Renaissance that the goal of painting is to mimic the appearance of reality. Matisse will go on to rival Picasso... and in many ways his influence is felt more today than Picasso's. Sonia and Robert Delaunay will go on to become leading figures in the move to absolute abstraction. Other leading French artists will include Constantin Brâncuşi, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Yve Tanguy, etc... A great many other artists from abroad (including Picasso) will make France/Paris their home and becomes part of the School of Paris. Among these we might include young John Singer Sargent, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, etc...

France was also the leader in the graphic/commercial arts. Both Art Nouveau and Art Deco are of French birth and leading graphic artists include Alphonse Mucha, Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, Pierre Bonnard, Jules Cheret... as well as crafts-artists Émile Gallé and René Lalique. Leading practicioners of Art Deco include the architect, Le Corbusier, George Barbier, Pierre Brissaud, etc...

Then if we look into the post-WWII we find Jean Dubbufet, Giacometti, and Balthus all as major alternatives to the American Abstract Expressionist juggernaut.

The United States... especially New York... clearly becomes the art capital after WWII but the work is difficult to judge in many ways. First of all, we are too close in time. Secondly, the critical writings in support of "The Triumph of American Painting"... especially those of Clement Greenberg... are clearly overblown hyperbole and we find many of the Abstract Expressionists being reassessed with the passage of time. There is also the problem of the huge sums of money invested in the works of artists such as Andy Warhol and the even more questionable Jean-Michel Basquiat and thge blatant attempts to maintain the reputations of these artists. Quite honestly, I can think of no American post-WWII painter that begins to rival Beckmann, Klee, or Bonnard... let alone Picasso, Matisse, Monet, and Degas.

[astrum]

Paintballing culture.


That's the greatest.

[cafolini]

It has been said: Wine yeast wins, followed by San Francisco sourdough.

[JBI]

Dan Brown sucks. Shakespeare doesn't. Seems pretty concrete to me. :yesnod:

The thing I don't get it this - some people think there is no such thing as an aesthetic criteria, the problem is they don't understand their own theory. Post-modernism says the canon is assembled from a ruling class's Aesthetic criteria - usually attributed to white, male, Christians and usually they throw dead in there too. My point is, what better criteria has one actually proposed to replace this. If we agree that criterias are biased, as they assuredly are, the question remains, is this actually a bad thing?

The dead old white canon has been the foundation of "western culture" for thousands of years already, wouldn't it make sense for us to study it, seeing as how it has been the norm of studied works until now? Why must people look to bring a mediocre person who does not fit such an aesthetic requirement into the same ranks as a tradition developed on a specific criteria, namely that of the white male christian.

It's one thing to say we must look at other cultures (the most important being the Arab, Persian, Indian and East-Asian traditions in terms of literature), but when you begin to unpack those other civilizations, it becomes clear that you are required to absorb yourself within those specific aesthetic criteria in order to get the works. Someone who reads Chinese poetry needs to recode their interpretive and critical judgments to the tradition of Chinese literature in order to delve deep into it.

One of the poems I have been reading almost daily lately has been Sima Xiangru's High Park Rhapsody. The work has been translated into English successfully at least once by one David Knechtges, but the work does not translate. The translation is helpful to someone as me, as the poem is virtually a dictionary in and of itself of every plant, bird, river, type of rock, type of tree imaginable, loaded with layers and layers of internal rhyming and rhetorical flourishing. It is more baroque than baroque, and reading it is like chewing through marble.

How do we approach something like that in English? How do we ever get near that, given that it requires a very specific language background that 99.9% of Chinese native speakers don't even have. Do we simplify it into English and pretend it was better in the original as a means of justifying reading a poem we don't find interesting (which happens with many translated works), or do we simply ignore it?

The tradition is the only thing that keeps the literary world together. IT has maintained a sort of conversation for thousands of years, my point is why should we abandon that now, given that it has been successful for so long. We can modify, or develop the canonical standard, but abandon it? To what purpose?

[PeterL]

Paintballing culture.


That's the greatest.

Nah, there are some yogurt cultures that better.

[cafolini]

Nah, there are some yogurt cultures that better.

That's true if the Pasteurization doesn't happen after fermentation. One more piece to deal with in healthcare. We shall soon have a statement: fermented after Pasteurization is over.

[lichtrausch]

The thing I don't get it this - some people think there is no such thing as an aesthetic criteria, the problem is they don't understand their own theory. Post-modernism says the canon is assembled from a ruling class's Aesthetic criteria - usually attributed to white, male, Christians and usually they throw dead in there too. My point is, what better criteria has one actually proposed to replace this. If we agree that criterias are biased, as they assuredly are, the question remains, is this actually a bad thing?

The dead old white canon has been the foundation of "western culture" for thousands of years already, wouldn't it make sense for us to study it, seeing as how it has been the norm of studied works until now? Why must people look to bring a mediocre person who does not fit such an aesthetic requirement into the same ranks as a tradition developed on a specific criteria, namely that of the white male christian.

It's one thing to say we must look at other cultures (the most important being the Arab, Persian, Indian and East-Asian traditions in terms of literature), but when you begin to unpack those other civilizations, it becomes clear that you are required to absorb yourself within those specific aesthetic criteria in order to get the works. Someone who reads Chinese poetry needs to recode their interpretive and critical judgments to the tradition of Chinese literature in order to delve deep into it.

One of the poems I have been reading almost daily lately has been Sima Xiangru's High Park Rhapsody. The work has been translated into English successfully at least once by one David Knechtges, but the work does not translate. The translation is helpful to someone as me, as the poem is virtually a dictionary in and of itself of every plant, bird, river, type of rock, type of tree imaginable, loaded with layers and layers of internal rhyming and rhetorical flourishing. It is more baroque than baroque, and reading it is like chewing through marble.

How do we approach something like that in English? How do we ever get near that, given that it requires a very specific language background that 99.9% of Chinese native speakers don't even have. Do we simplify it into English and pretend it was better in the original as a means of justifying reading a poem we don't find interesting (which happens with many translated works), or do we simply ignore it?

The tradition is the only thing that keeps the literary world together. IT has maintained a sort of conversation for thousands of years, my point is why should we abandon that now, given that it has been successful for so long. We can modify, or develop the canonical standard, but abandon it? To what purpose?
Great post. I think a sort of global canon is something worth striving for, even though people from varying cultural spheres are going to have a difficult time learning to appreciate each others' literature. It would help if polyglottery was encouraged more. This sort of effort is a good first step:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/08/books.booksnews

[country doctor]

'greatest culture'? the doc aint gonna get pulled into that, literature chatters...

but he will let you all know where you'll find the strongest culture...

and that's in texas, literature chatters...the lonestar state...

on the other hand if you want to associate 'strongest culture' w/ 'greatest culture', you probably won't find an argument from the doc...

some examples of the tall texans that have helped produce the strongest, most capable culture known to man?

nolan ryan, billy joe shaver, larry mcmurtry and coke stevenson are just a few...

and as long as that texas culture remains as strong as forged steel, america will stand tall...

if the literature chatters ever have a chance they need to get down to the lonestar state for a couple of months...

if and when you do, the doc's sure that you will agree 100 percent w/ his analysis...

[Ecurb]

The noble, freedom-loving Texans rebelled against Santa Anna and the Mexican government, and won their independence. They were an independent nation before joining the U.S. Why did they want to separate from Mexico? One key reason was that the oppressive Mexican Government did not allow its citizens to own slaves. Horrors! How can one expect the dead, white males so all-important to the literary canon to function without the right to own people of other racial heritages?

[hypatia_]

slavery is the only way to establish a true culture. one needs the simple, beast tasks of food, water, and shelter to be taken care of by others so that one can focus on the more aesthetic aspects of a cultured life.

[Ecurb]

slavery is the only way to establish a true culture. one needs the simple, beast tasks of food, water, and shelter to be taken care of by others so that one can focus on the more aesthetic aspects of a cultured life.

It worked for the Athenians.

[Darcy88]

slavery is the only way to establish a true culture. one needs the simple, beast tasks of food, water, and shelter to be taken care of by others so that one can focus on the more aesthetic aspects of a cultured life.

That's what Nietzsche thought. But I don't agree. Much of America's greatest cultural production took place post-abolition. Most of my favourite authors were poor.

[ennison]

Methinks a game's being played with "true" - a true game I guess.

[hypatia_]

It worked for the Athenians.

:lol:


That's what Nietzsche thought. But I don't agree. Much of America's greatest cultural production took place post-abolition. Most of my favourite authors were poor.

I haven't had a chance to get into Nietzche yet. I have a few books written down to get into after Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Antichrist, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Human, All Too Human. Could you recommend something that might be better in terms of representing his philosophy (if you had to pick just one)?

[stlukesguild]

Most of my favourite authors were poor.

Many of the artists may have been poor... but the cultures that supported such artists... that allowed for the "free time" and could afford the luxury of financially supporting something not essential to survival... these were wealthy. Look at where all the great artistic movements come from.

[Darcy88]

:lol:



I haven't had a chance to get into Nietzche yet. I have a few books written down to get into after Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Antichrist, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Human, All Too Human. Could you recommend something that might be better in terms of representing his philosophy (if you had to pick just one)?

Twilight of the Idols is the one I would read first. All his books are fun and profound though. I've read them all several times each. On the Genealogy of Morality is one you ought to read as well, it might just be his most important single text, but I would start with Twilight of the Idols.

My personal favourite is The Gay Science, but it is not one I would recommend beginning with.

[The Atheist]

Since we all seem to love to engage in those inane discussions debating the greatest writer, greatest poet, greatest national body of literature, etc... let's take it to the logical extreme and discuss what you think is/was the greatest or most influential culture on the whole of culture? Of all time? Over the last 100 years.

Greatest and most influential culture of all time: The British Empire.

Those nations we didn't destroy the culture of, our descendants, Americans, converted to theirs.

Never mind the Italians, classical Greeks or German philosophers, Britain ruled the waves for hundreds of years, ushered in the greatest culture-changing phenomena in history - the Industrial Revolution and the internet, and ran most of the world for hundreds of years, shaping fashion, arts and music.

Easy. Next question!

[hannah_arendt]

Greatest and most influential culture of all time: The British Empire.

Those nations we didn't destroy the culture of, our descendants, Americans, converted to theirs.

Never mind the Italians, classical Greeks or German philosophers, Britain ruled the waves for hundreds of years, ushered in the greatest culture-changing phenomena in history - the Industrial Revolution and the internet, and ran most of the world for hundreds of years, shaping fashion, arts and music.

Easy. Next question!

Firstly, I mus say that it is very modest:D
However , in about 70% , you are right.

[hypatia_]

Easy. Next question!

:lol:

"The only thing I know is that I know nothing."

[hannah_arendt]

:lol:

"The only thing I know is that I know nothing."

It`s a lot:)

[JBI]

Greatest and most influential culture of all time: The British Empire.

Those nations we didn't destroy the culture of, our descendants, Americans, converted to theirs.

Never mind the Italians, classical Greeks or German philosophers, Britain ruled the waves for hundreds of years, ushered in the greatest culture-changing phenomena in history - the Industrial Revolution and the internet, and ran most of the world for hundreds of years, shaping fashion, arts and music.

Easy. Next question!

Are you being serious ? You seem to lack a concept of both culture and history.

[hannah_arendt]

Are you being serious ? You seem to lack a concept of both culture and history.

We live in a self- regulating system. There are of course many situations where the impact of british culture is seen however , f.ex English has many french loans. English is one of the most popular languages but it`s not the only one.

[Emil Miller]

The noble, freedom-loving Texans rebelled against Santa Anna and the Mexican government, and won their independence. They were an independent nation before joining the U.S. Why did they want to separate from Mexico? One key reason was that the oppressive Mexican Government did not allow its citizens to own slaves. Horrors! How can one expect the dead, white males so all-important to the literary canon to function without the right to own people of other racial heritages?


Given its size, I don't know why Texas joined the union anyway. Of course, the downside to remaining an independent country would have been to have potential enemies on its respective borders. The upside would have been that the US wouldn't have had George W Bush as president.

[JBI]

We live in a self- regulating system. There are of course many situations where the impact of british culture is seen however , f.ex English has many french loans. English is one of the most popular languages but it`s not the only one.

English dominance internationally lasted about 200 years - dominance as in being markedly the best - and even then it was not always stable. The Chinese economy throughout the Tang occupied 70% of the world Economy - China has consistently had a population larger than all of Europe put together - it still remains larger than all of the "west" put together.

In the early days of Empire, Asia was uncontrolled. The big players for the Americas were Spanish and Portuguese - at that time also linked to the Austrian throne, as Charles the 5th had major titles throughout Europe as a whole. The dutch in terms of a Merchant empire were almost a century ahead of the British, the biggest difference is they in many places weren't trying to repopulate or depopulate, but merely assert control and make money - but that is another matter.

the British have been drinking Chinese - then later Ceylon Tea - for centuries, using Porcelain just as long, and importing culture for thousands of years. China in contrast got its biggest dumping of cultural influx in 300AD or so, and has been more influential than influenced, relatively speaking. In letters, most definitely so.

In Economic terms China has been rolling ahead of the world for most of recorded history, and certainly from the Han through the Mongol invasion. England is a late player that never really solidified its grip on the world the way China did.

To make this such a cut and paste "easy" argument is to just show a lack of knowledge of any culture but one's own (Mr. Atheist being from the Common Wealth).

[mortalterror]

English dominance internationally lasted about 200 years - dominance as in being markedly the best - and even then it was not always stable. The Chinese economy throughout the Tang occupied 70% of the world Economy - China has consistently had a population larger than all of Europe put together - it still remains larger than all of the "west" put together.

In the early days of Empire, Asia was uncontrolled. The big players for the Americas were Spanish and Portuguese - at that time also linked to the Austrian throne, as Charles the 5th had major titles throughout Europe as a whole. The dutch in terms of a Merchant empire were almost a century ahead of the British, the biggest difference is they in many places weren't trying to repopulate or depopulate, but merely assert control and make money - but that is another matter.

the British have been drinking Chinese - then later Ceylon Tea - for centuries, using Porcelain just as long, and importing culture for thousands of years. China in contrast got its biggest dumping of cultural influx in 300AD or so, and has been more influential than influenced, relatively speaking. In letters, most definitely so.

In Economic terms China has been rolling ahead of the world for most of recorded history, and certainly from the Han through the Mongol invasion. England is a late player that never really solidified its grip on the world the way China did.

To make this such a cut and paste "easy" argument is to just show a lack of knowledge of any culture but one's own (Mr. Atheist being from the Common Wealth).
70% seems a little high. Weren't India and the Abbasid Caliphate fairly prosperous during that period (600-900CE)?

[Ecurb]

Two people are culturally dominant figures today, and have been for millenia. They lived within a few hundred miles of each other. Jesus and Mohammed.

Neither was British, although Jesus and his teaching were the single most important influence on British culture at the height of its power, and Mohammed has increasing influence today.

[WICKES]

. Its hard though to deny America's 20th century cultural preponderance. . In many musical genres America also led the way. France deserves mention as well, but for me its American culture followed by German.

If we are talking 20th century popular music, I think the British are the equals of the Americans: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Radiohead, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, Joy Division, The Stone Roses...that is a pretty impressive list (actually, to be specific, they are all English). Then again, they are all unthinkable had it not been for America- the blues, jazz, rock and roll etc were born in America. It's odd that the British, who never produced any great classical composers, have been so good at pop music in the 20th century.

Culture is a tough one. If you are talking classical music then Germany; if you are talking literature then the British Isles (Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales), with France a close second; if you are talking about art generally then the French and Italians take some beating...it's impossible. Some people would say Athenian culture 2,500 years ago has never been surpassed in the intensity of its genius. Then again, what about the spiritual traditions of the East: The Bhagavad Gita, Vedanta, Yoga, Zen, Taoism etc.


The influence of English culture on the modern world has been immense. In fact, if England had never existed, the world of 2013 would be unrecognizable (the Industrial revolution, the empirical/ scientific approach to the world, modern democracy, liberalism etc). If you had to list the 10 most important and influential thinkers/ writers/ humans (disregarding mythic-religious figures like Jesus and Muhammed) who ever lived, a very strong case could be made for placing the following Englishmen on that list: John Locke, Newton, Darwin and Shakespeare. That's pretty impressive given how small England is. James Joyce, no friend of the English, thought the three greatest poets of all time were Englishmen: Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley.

Right now, American culture dominates (though that doesn't mean it's the best). Pretty soon Chinese culture may dominate Asia, and eventually replace the USA as the most influential (already, lots of ambitious parents in the West are teaching their kids Cantonese etc).

[Ecurb]

I think Americans dominated popular music for the first half of the 20th century (compared to the Brits, at least). Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Richard Rodgers were writing all those classic songs for Broadway. Jazz and the Blues were revolutionizing popular music. From 1960 on, the Brits were in the ascendency.

Russia surely rates a mention with its great 19th century novelists, and it's dominance in classical dance. Nijinski, Pavlova, Nurneyev, Barishnikov, Pliesetskaya, Marakova -- which non-Russians can compare? Maybe Fonteyn. The greatest ballets were also composed by Russians (Tchaicovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, or however one spells their names), and choreographed by Russians. As with Jazz and the Blues, the U.S. chipped to the less classical scene with Bill Robinson, Astaire, and the Nicholas Brothers. What country dominated a major art form to the extent that Russia dominated ballet?

[Darcy88]

If you look at the linguistic contributions made by the Italian peninsula, at how the Roman Empire was vital to the spread of Christianity, and then at the Renaissance, I'd say Italy is the "greatest culture" of all time in the Western world.

[hannah_arendt]

To sum up, everything depends on the point of view we share:)

[Darcy88]

If we're speaking globally then in addition to China I think India deserves mention. Indian philosophy undoubtably influenced the ancient Greeks. To what extent I am not sure, but if its as great as I sometimes suspect then western religion and philosophy owe India a great debt. Its the land from whence Buddhism sprung. Yoga is all the rage now and that system originated in India. Much new age thought is heavily influenced by Indian sources.

[cafolini]

Excuse me, to whom it might concern. I think it's time for LitNet to have a thread called HEALTHCARE, where doctors, nurses, nutrinional experts, assistents, internists, etc. can point out what is known in these fields and help people live well where it counts the most.

[PeterL]

If we're speaking globally then in addition to China I think India deserves mention. Indian philosophy undoubtably influenced the ancient Greeks. To what extent I am not sure, but if its as great as I sometimes suspect then western religion and philosophy owe India a great debt. Its the land from whence Buddhism sprung. Yoga is all the rage now and that system originated in India. Much new age thought is heavily influenced by Indian sources.

Good points, and the same applies to Persia, but I still think that the culture that gave us wine was even. Here's to the Georgians.

[WICKES]

It's probably best to talk about specific places at specific times- Athens from c.500BC-350BC; England, especially London, from c. 1580s- 1690s; 18th century France; Paris from 1870-1939...etc. For example, I'd love to go to San Francisco in about 1967 or Paris in 1922 or London in 1600.

[lichtrausch]

(already, lots of ambitious parents in the West are teaching their kids Cantonese etc).

Surely you mean Mandarin?

[Ecurb]

It's probably best to talk about specific places at specific times- Athens from c.500BC-350BC; England, especially London, from c. 1580s- 1690s; 18th century France; Paris from 1870-1939...etc. For example, I'd love to go to San Francisco in about 1967 or Paris in 1922 or London in 1600.

Did you see "Midnight in Paris"? That's the plot.

[The Atheist]

English dominance internationally lasted about 200 years - dominance as in being markedly the best - and even then it was not always stable. The Chinese economy throughout the Tang occupied 70% of the world Economy - China has consistently had a population larger than all of Europe put together - it still remains larger than all of the "west" put together.

I thought my post was so obviously humourous that nobody would be silly enough to argue against it, but there you go.

You do make some nonsensical points, though.

The population is irrelevant when talking about either culture or economy, and apart from the past decade, China has never had much influence on anyone outside of their direct sphere of influence. The percentage of cultures outside of South-east Asia that embrace more than a touch of Chinese culture is close to zero. Chop suey, anyone?

Drinking tea out of porcelain hardly counts as a major cultural shift, but please do post evidence about the time when China accounted for 70% of the world economy - this I have to see.


In the early days of Empire, Asia was uncontrolled. The big players for the Americas were Spanish and Portuguese - at that time also linked to the Austrian throne, as Charles the 5th had major titles throughout Europe as a whole. The dutch in terms of a Merchant empire were almost a century ahead of the British, the biggest difference is they in many places weren't trying to repopulate or depopulate, but merely assert control and make money - but that is another matter.

Now you're on track, Spanish culture was the obvious one, given South America alone.

You still forgot France, though, which did have just a little impact on the dominant culture today - American.



In Economic terms China has been rolling ahead of the world for most of recorded history, and certainly from the Han through the Mongol invasion. England is a late player that never really solidified its grip on the world the way China did.

Speaking of knowledge of history, yours must indeed far outweigh mine, since mine totally lacks any knowledge of China dominating the world at any stage of history. In terms of truly dominant, worldwide cultures, you have England, Rome and not much else.

Your view of history is skewed to China for some inexplicable reason, but I'm open to evidence, so please go ahead and back up your points.

Covering the 70% of the world's economy will be an easy one for you, but when you're demonstrating China's "grip on the world" that I missed, please do include how that is possible when they never even crossed the Pacific Ocean, or even Bass Strait.

[Darcy88]

If we are talking 20th century popular music, I think the British are the equals of the Americans: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Radiohead, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, Joy Division, The Stone Roses...that is a pretty impressive list (actually, to be specific, they are all English). Then again, they are all unthinkable had it not been for America- the blues, jazz, rock and roll etc were born in America. It's odd that the British, who never produced any great classical composers, have been so good at pop music in the 20th century.


If you add the blues, jazz, hip-hop and "grunge" greats then I'd say America is close to equalling if not altogether surpassing Britain when it comes to 20th century music.

Even though they get a lot of hate I'd say the British band Coldplay might have the strongest case for being the greatest band in contemporary popular music.

[hypatia_]

You have to be more specific with "greatest" when talking about music. there's artistry, there's integrity, there's pop culture, there's influence.

[The Atheist]

That's why boxing is such an excellent subject for this kind of thing. Everyone knows who The Greatest was.

Culture is pretty subjective.

[mortalterror]

That's why boxing is such an excellent subject for this kind of thing. Everyone knows who The Greatest was.

Culture is pretty subjective.
Actually, there's a great deal of debate on the boxing forum I visit about who the greatest are. Of course, Muhammad Ali was nicknamed The Greatest, and he's generally considered the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, but some people say that title belongs to Joe Louis, and younger people like to say Mike Tyson. In the pound for pound sense, most people agree that Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest, though others will say that Henry Armstrong, or Harry Greb deserve that title more. Then there are the moderns who think that everything new is better than everything ancient and propose Roy Jones Jr. or Floyd Mayweather as the best there's ever been.

[hannah_arendt]

If we're speaking globally then in addition to China I think India deserves mention. Indian philosophy undoubtably influenced the ancient Greeks. To what extent I am not sure, but if its as great as I sometimes suspect then western religion and philosophy owe India a great debt. Its the land from whence Buddhism sprung. Yoga is all the rage now and that system originated in India. Much new age thought is heavily influenced by Indian sources.

Do you think that chinese culture is attractive for Europeans or Americans?

[JBI]

I thought my post was so obviously humourous that nobody would be silly enough to argue against it, but there you go.

You do make some nonsensical points, though.

The population is irrelevant when talking about either culture or economy, and apart from the past decade, China has never had much influence on anyone outside of their direct sphere of influence. The percentage of cultures outside of South-east Asia that embrace more than a touch of Chinese culture is close to zero. Chop suey, anyone?

Drinking tea out of porcelain hardly counts as a major cultural shift, but please do post evidence about the time when China accounted for 70% of the world economy - this I have to see.



Now you're on track, Spanish culture was the obvious one, given South America alone.

You still forgot France, though, which did have just a little impact on the dominant culture today - American.



Speaking of knowledge of history, yours must indeed far outweigh mine, since mine totally lacks any knowledge of China dominating the world at any stage of history. In terms of truly dominant, worldwide cultures, you have England, Rome and not much else.

Your view of history is skewed to China for some inexplicable reason, but I'm open to evidence, so please go ahead and back up your points.

Covering the 70% of the world's economy will be an easy one for you, but when you're demonstrating China's "grip on the world" that I missed, please do include how that is possible when they never even crossed the Pacific Ocean, or even Bass Strait.

China has been influential in India, most of South East Asia, and all of East Asia. It has also been influential in much of Central Asia, all of Northern Asia, and had extensive trade and communication with Persia and Turkey for an extended period of time. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but that is somewhere near the bigger part of the world population.

You miss something, that sphere is significantly larger than the rather late-developing Western world, which for most of history was centuries behind China in terms of economic and cultural development, including science and technology. The big shift it would appear began in the 17th or early 18th century when England developed rapidly and Chinese development halted. Until then nobody would ever have considered England important on an historical scale.

You forget yourself. If you wish to speak of exploration, Zhang He made it to Africa far before European exploration - that has been documented extensively. They never crossed the pacific, that is true, but you forget another thing - What was Columbus actually looking for when he set sail? Oh that's right, he was looking for the place where all the fashionable and excellent things came from, namely China.

The Han territory was as extensive as the roman, and the economy and culture as developed, if not more. I personally own at least 3 books on the subject giving direct comparison between both empires, as they generally lasted through similar periods, and peaked at similar times, it is actually interesting to note their similarities.

Your biggest problem seems to be that you cannot realize that the majority of the world's population has historically not been in Europe, and centred more in Asia, which developed faster than Europe for several reasons. The so called dark Ages were about 600 years earlier in arriving to the Sinosphere, and the sort of peak of Chinese traditional culture in terms of international dominance was on the eve of the Mongol invasion, the same cultural event that would lead to the stunting of the growth of the British islands, through the importing of Mongolian plague to England (known as the black death). The renaissance came late to England in part as a result of the stunting of growth accompanying the black death, as well as a culture of warfare, and general submission of the peasants to a brutally ingrained feudal system - of which More would write extensively in Utopia.

None of these arguments are any bit uncommon or unwritten, and have been the common discussions and knowledge of sinologists in Europe since Matteo Ricci, who, though Christian wrote extensively of the superiority of Chinese culture.

That you are ethnocentric and culturally isolated does not excuse you for being ignorant, it only illustrates the point that you are unread in world history.

The Americas in general were undeveloped and rather unpopulated throughout history, as was Europe in comparison to Asia. China has always had a significantly larger economy and population than other cultures, as has been the trend for the past 2000-odd years. The early development of centralization and agriculture in China had led to a system that maximized output - for a nice overview on the subject check Ledderose's Ten Thousand Things, which outlines how the Chinese economy developed into a mass-production machine as early as the Bronze Age (which came relatively late to the area).

As for China not having a direct influence outside of their sphere, how many of Bacon's great advancements of his age didn't come from China? Gutenberg and the printing press, China, Gunpowder and the canon, China, the Compass (which fueled exploration one might add), China. Paper in general was a Chinese invention long before it made it to the west.

I am not trying to advocate a sort of Chinese-centered history, though one could easily read world history with China in the centre, without being far off from a fairly accurate portrait. Yet one cannot help but feel such an argument for English-centered world views is symptomatic of ethnocentric upbringings and general lack of knowledge on anything in world relations and history pre-1700.

[mortalterror]

Fascinating, JBI. I hadn't made the comparison of the Han Dynasty to the Roman Empire before, but it's staring me in the face now. However, I did a quick internet search and unearthed this article http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/34145-the-pre-industrial-economies-of-western-europe-and-china/ comparing their respective economies. At least in that article and in the studies he cites The Roman Empire was slightly more prosperous and there is reason to believe that medieval Europe when considered as a whole would be the near equal of China economically if not technologically. Also, I know that the Chinese invented many things before the West, but I've heard that they were very secretive and often would not share their advances; leading Western countries to re-invent them independently much later. Is there actual evidence that Gutenberg and other inventors had knowledge of the Chinese machines before they reproduced them here? For instance, I think Egypt invented paper on it's own, and that's where the Greeks and other Europeans got it from.

[OrphanPip]

In terms of science, Europe has certainly pulled far ahead in the last 500 years. The scientific method revolutionized European approaches to science, and it was largely due to Bacon's influence on the Royal Society and the emergence of international scientific communities in Europe around such organizations. Of course, a great deal of the success of European scientists during this period can be attributed to the economic success of Europe, but the Enlightenment's quick adoption of methodological science allowed Europe to refine a number of imported technologies in ways they never had before, which combined with an emergent proto-capitalist culture gave them the thrust to take over the world. A history teacher I had back in college, who got her PhD in East Asian history from Cambridge (so sharing JBI's biases probably), said to me once that the only thing Europeans are really better at than the rest of the world is music.

[cafolini]

That's why boxing is such an excellent subject for this kind of thing. Everyone knows who The Greatest was.

Culture is pretty subjective.

As much as I dislike letting you win this argument for finality, I have to say you are correct. JBI once threw a hook that played well. Since then, he has been a delirium of BS. I would guess he works for some group related to the Chinese government. Obviously forced to consider numbers to try to impress with useless propaganda.

[mortalterror]

In terms of science, Europe has certainly pulled far ahead in the last 500 years. The scientific method revolutionized European approaches to science, and it was largely due to Bacon's influence on the Royal Society and the emergence of international scientific communities in Europe around such organizations. Of course, a great deal of the success of European scientists during this period can be attributed to the economic success of Europe, but the Enlightenment's quick adoption of methodological science allowed Europe to refine a number of imported technologies in ways they never had before, which combined with an emergent proto-capitalist culture gave them the thrust to take over the world. A history teacher I had back in college, who got her PhD in East Asian history from Cambridge (so sharing JBI's biases probably), said to me once that the only thing Europeans are really better at than the rest of the world is music.
That's an interesting point, Pip. I've found the literature of the East and to be just as good as the West's. The fine art isn't quite as good. There are many fine pieces, but nothing I would compare with the finest works of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Praxiteles, or Rembrandt, however much I like Qiu Ying, Kano Sanraku, Abid, Ogata Korin, Utamaro, Purkhu, Sultan Muhammad, Guo Xi, Unkei, and Wang Ximeng. But the music, I've been completely unable to find anything from the East that is anywhere near as good as western classical music. Even StLukesGuild with his fondness for Ravi Shankar will probably back me on this. Chinese opera is no match for Italian opera. Sitars and zithers don't match the piano and nothing I've heard is as good as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony or Vivaldi's Four Seasons. That doesn't mean there isn't anything, but just that I haven't heard it. Perhaps, I've been listening to the wrong instruments or compositions. I'd have a much different idea of western musical traditions if all I'd ever heard were bagpipes, accordions, saxophones, and yodeling.

[Ecurb]

Without the influence of Australian aboriginal culture, the Crocodile Dundee movies would not have been possible. Case closed.

[mal4mac]

Over the last 100 years would have to be America, in terms of the mass media, film etc. Of all time (Western) it would have to be the Greek/Roman culture, cornerstone of Western thought etc, I can't see any arguments with that...;)

But even the best films are inferior art. You might say that America is unequivocally top for popular entertainment, but for "Culture" with a capital C you have to produce better arguments if you want to pitch for yankees. It's interesting that top film critics, with rounded cultural pretensions, often make this argument. Bryan Appleyard is famous for it in the UK, another critic who often points this out is Ronald Bergen:

http://www.theartsdesk.com/film/opinion-vertigo-really-greatest-ever-film

"... if one accepts the fact that the majority of film critics in the world think that Vertigo is the best film ever made, it raises the question of whether film as an art form is perhaps inferior to the other, older, arts. As someone who has made a living of sorts for over 30 years writing about film and teaching film history and film theory, that may seem like sacrilege. But if one were to assess the greatest works in each art in categories like at Crufts, then bring the winner of each category together for the Best in Show, then I’m afraid Vertigo, whatever its many virtues, wouldn’t stand a chance against, say, Don Giovanni, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Hamlet or the Ninth Symphony.... is there really a film that can match any of the genuine masterpieces in the other arts?"

[mal4mac]

I'm a huge fan of German expressionist painting, and Herman Hesse was the author who really got me into literature, so German culture would be near the top for me. Its hard though to deny America's 20th century cultural preponderance. That nation produced Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner...

All round I think Britain has a good claim for the last hundred years, with writers like Lawrence, Woolf, Huxley, Orwell, Pinter, Larkin, ..., plus composers like Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Britten... And the other major European nations could easily come up with a list to match or better America, I feel. Given the differences in population size, it's perhaps fairest to compare "Europe" with "the Americas", and then victory is obvious... Don't be too sad America, you are a young culture and given a few centuries you might catch up...

Hitchcock is British, by the way, but film is an inferior art form...

[mal4mac]

As far as popular music goes, I'm no expert on world music, but America did invent jazz, country, blues, rock, and hip hop. However, there is one caveat to that opinion, since perhaps the best performers of those styles (at least rock and roll) were British: ie The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Pink Floyd, Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, etc. vs Americans: Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Metallica, Elvis, etc.

This is *popular* music, not "Culture" with a capital C. There may be some connection between the two, but you need to distinguish. Vaughan Williams is Culture, "the Who" are not, though they are very good "pop".

[mal4mac]

Culture is a tough one. If you are talking classical music then Germany...

St Luke specified "the last hundred years" and I don't think you can be so sure about Germany for this period... France and Britain have strong claims, and Russia very strong...

[mortalterror]

But even the best films are inferior art. You might say that America is unequivocally top for popular entertainment, but for "Culture" with a capital C you have to produce better arguments if you want to pitch for yankees. It's interesting that top film critics, with rounded cultural pretensions, often make this argument. Bryan Appleyard is famous for it in the UK, another critic who often points this out is Ronald Bergen:

http://www.theartsdesk.com/film/opinion-vertigo-really-greatest-ever-film

"... if one accepts the fact that the majority of film critics in the world think that Vertigo is the best film ever made, it raises the question of whether film as an art form is perhaps inferior to the other, older, arts. As someone who has made a living of sorts for over 30 years writing about film and teaching film history and film theory, that may seem like sacrilege. But if one were to assess the greatest works in each art in categories like at Crufts, then bring the winner of each category together for the Best in Show, then I’m afraid Vertigo, whatever its many virtues, wouldn’t stand a chance against, say, Don Giovanni, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Hamlet or the Ninth Symphony.... is there really a film that can match any of the genuine masterpieces in the other arts?"
I don't know anyone who thinks that Vertigo is the greatest film ever. It's not even the greatest British film ever. That is probably David Lean's adaptation of Dr. Zhivago, and that is as great a piece of art as any opera, which is what it should be compared to. Opera and cinema are both combinations of writing, acting, music, and visuals. I'd say that Pulp Fiction, Gone With the Wind, Schindler's List, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Goodfellas, 8 1/2, Wild Strawberries, Seven Samurai, Andrei Rublev, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca count as great examples of art. Cinema is only a century old so it may not have had enough time to produce it's Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, but it's done pretty well for all that. Kubrick, Fellini, Bergman, or Kurosawa are probably worth as much to the history of this young art as Monteverdi was to a nascent opera.


All round I think Britain has a good claim for the last hundred years, with writers like Lawrence, Woolf, Huxley, Orwell, Pinter, Larkin, ..., plus composers like Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Britten... And the other major European nations could easily come up with a list to match or better America, I feel. Given the differences in population size, it's perhaps fairest to compare "Europe" with "the Americas", and then victory is obvious... Don't be too sad America, you are a young culture and given a few centuries you might catch up...

Hitchcock is British, by the way, but film is an inferior art form...
My general impression of Europe is that in the 20th century it became a trash factory, destroying all of it's great traditions, self-inflicting crippling psychic wounds, and systematically dismantling all of the tools it once used to make beautiful art.

It's a little weird that you'd try to poach the music prize with such feeble offerings as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and Britten. They are good but hardly iconoclasts. I didn't offer America as a classical music idol just because I didn't think we compared to the Russians with Copland, Ives, Bernstein, and Gershwin.

This is *popular* music, not "Culture" with a capital C. There may be some connection between the two, but you need to distinguish. Vaughan Williams is Culture, "the Who" are not, though they are very good "pop".
Well, considering that the popular culture has frequently produced better art than the high culture this last century I feel it's worth including the two in an assessment.

[ashulman]

There's no question that the last 100 years has been the American century as many have called it, for better or worse. But before the fall, I think we have to give the nod to Germany. If you look at rational thought, represented by philosophy, science and literature, you'd have a hard time stacking up to the collective influence of Einstein, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Mann, Freud, among countless others and you have the foundations for the modern mind. Throw in music and you're on a whole other level.

[The Atheist]

Actually, there's a great deal of debate on the boxing forum I visit about who the greatest are.

That's why you need to distinguish between the proper noun "The Greatest" which can only be Ali, and the adjective "greatest" applied to boxing.

It's as subjective as all the others.

[The Atheist]

Your biggest problem seems to be that you cannot realize that the majority of the world's population has historically not been in Europe, and centred more in Asia, which developed faster than Europe for several reasons.

No, I don't forget that at all; Europe has never had the majority of population, as anyone who can count will tell you.

Nice of you to completely avoid presenting evidence for your claims, however. Is that an admission that your "facts" were in fact "fantasy"?

Even when you try to present examples of Chinese influence, you come up with a couple of false positives:

Printing and the idea for paper both came to China from Africa. Printing had been old for centuries before China got in on the act. Certainly the Chinese refined manufacture of paper from papyrus to fibres, but I would have expected you to know that the root word for "paper" is "papyrus" and that China - as they still do - picked up someone else's discovery and went with it.

You're also assuming I don't have a good grasp of world history and you would be utterly incorrect. I understand exactly where Chinese influence was and has been, and it has never dominated the world.

At times the Chinese did indeed have as wide an influence as the Roman Empire, but you totally ignore the irrefutable evidence that the Chinese influence did not create a lasting legacy of culture in any way, whereas it is equally obvious that the Roman did.

Except for gunpowder.

Thanks, China.

Instead of worrying about what you think I do and don't know, why don't you attempt to make an actual case for your revisionist historical beliefs? I'm pretty sure I could make a more coherent case for Egypt than China.

[The Atheist]

But even the best films are inferior art.

That's a widely-held belief, but I can only disagree strongly with it.

Shakespeare is a good example. His plays are more than the sum of the words, and a good rendition can give a lot more than the bare words, or an inferior production.

Movies are just stage plays done for mass audiences, and the best of them can actually offer more than the story that spawned them.

[Mr.lucifer]

Mal-4-mac, you need more experience with film. Not even citizen kane is the pinnacle of film. The best directors of the 20th century are just as good artists are the great writers and great composers of the 20th century. Film already has a reputation as a high art. Besides,its been around for little over a century. Its has come a long way for a newer medium.

[Mr.lucifer]

Movies are just stage plays done for mass audiences the best of them can actually offer more than the story that spawned them.

Im sorry but that is an over-simplification of what films can do. Besides, art films are for a refined audience like serious literature.

In fact, I'd argue that film has produced artists just as good as the great playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries. Mike leigh is just as great as an artist as Tom Stoppard or Harold pin-tar. Ingmar Bergman is probably as great as August Strindberg. In fact, they rival some of the best novelists of the 20th century. I doubt anyone rivals Kafka, Proust, and Joyce, but those guys are among the best of the best. Ozu is certainly the greatest Japanese artist of the 20th century, and Tarkovsky is definitely the best narrative artist of Russia since Tolstoy died.

Documentaries are the newest and most relevant of non-fiction. Shoah is maybe the best work of art about the holocaust. West of the tracks maybe the best work of post-war art from china. There has been film equivalents of epic novels. Satan-tango and Lav diaz's oeuvre are great examples.

[Emil Miller]

There's no question that the last 100 years has been the American century as many have called it, for better or worse.


My general impression of Europe is that in the 20th century it became a trash factory, destroying all of it's great traditions, self-inflicting crippling psychic wounds, and systematically dismantling all of the tools it once used to make beautiful art.


And there you have it.

[hypatia_]

i hate when people say a certain medium of art is not considered "art" based on it's length of existence. every form of art was new at some point. and in my opinion, one medium does not trump another, in any case.

[stlukesguild]

If we are talking 20th century popular music, I think the British are the equals of the Americans: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Radiohead, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, Joy Division, The Stone Roses...that is a pretty impressive list (actually, to be specific, they are all English).

The problem here is that you are focusing upon a single branch of "popular music"... ie. rock/pop from the Beatles forward. Undoubtedly there are some impressive names here... but the United States wholly owns Jazz which a good many would argue is a far greater musical genre: W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, John Coletrane, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Dizzie Gillespie, Count Basie, and the list goes on and on. You could then add the jazz/blues vocalists to this list: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Julie London, etc... Then what about the Blues? Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Slim Harpo, etc... on through Stevie ray Vaughan, etc... And what of R & B? I'm speaking of the original Rhythm & Blues in which acted as the transitional movement from jazz to rock & roll in which the rhythm section of the old jazz big bands broke away after the big bands were no longer financially viable: Cab Calloway, T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, etc... Bluegrass/Country/Western? The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, The Louvin Brothers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, etc...

And then... American rock isn't all that bad either: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Big Mamma Thornton, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, CCR, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimi Hendrix...

And are we ignoring the contributions of black musicians after the 1950s? Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the whole of Motown, Michael Jackson, Al Green, the Temptations, etc...

[Ecurb]

The problem with film (at least it’s a problem to some people) is that it is such a corporate art form. First of all, the “auteur theory” of film, in which the director is the key “artist” is clearly silly. Why is the director so much more important than the screenplay writer, or the producer, or the cinematographer? For drama, it’s the other way around. Shakespeare is the great artist, not some famous director.

Of course in the case of some less corporate films (e.g. the European classics), the director is the screenplay writer. In those cases, the “auteur” approach makes more sense.

It seems to me that some critics want an “artiste” to admire as much as they want a work of art. (Tolstoy, whom we were discussing in the other thread, certainly did.)

Literature used to be a cooperative enterprise: Homer was telling stories in a shared tradition, doubtless borrowing not only plots but phrases. We don’t even know who “wrote” Gilgamesh. Modernism, however, worships individuals. So in order for film to be a “true” art, there needs to be ONE artist to admire.

[PeterL]

i hate when people say a certain medium of art is not considered "art" based on it's length of existence. every form of art was new at some point. and in my opinion, one medium does not trump another, in any case.

I hate when people assert that only the arts that they like are art at all, and call the mechanical and other practical arts something else.

[stlukesguild]

But even the best films are inferior art. You might say that America is unequivocally top for popular entertainment, but for "Culture" with a capital C you have to produce better arguments if you want to pitch for yankees.

I'm sorry. I'm as big of a cultural elitist as anyone on this site... but that's just pure ignorance? Please explain to us just what imaginary separation there is between what you deem as "Popular Culture" ("Entertainment", "Low Art", etc...) vs "High Art"/"Culture"? Silly me... but I thought the novel began as a literary form deemed as "Low" popular entertainment. The same was true of opera. How are the grandiose theatrical paintings of Peter Paul Rubens inherently superior to the greatest Hollywood films?

The whole division between "High" and "Low" was promoted by the upper classes as a means of maintaining an illusion of cultural superiority after popular culture became increasingly dominant. We have little record of the popular music of the past centuries due to the simple facts that the masses generally didn't have the time or financial ability to create or support music. Whatever popular music there was rarely survived due to the fact that the amateur popular (folk) musicians lacked the ability to read or write (and thus preserve) music. With the innovation of recording technology the best popular music... be it Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones etc... is not only able to survive... but also is able to reach a far larger audience than ever before possible. Ravel, George Gershwin, Milhaud, Shostakovitch, Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass... nearly any Modern "classical" composer you dare name has been profoundly impacted by popular music... and written music that blurs any distinction between "classical" and "popular" music. There is no reason to assume that "Summertime", "Stormy Weather" or "Norwegian Wood" will not continue to be recognized (as they now are) as "standards" or "classics". Neither is there any reason to assume that "Vertigo" is not every bit as great as "The Liver is the ****'s Comb".

But certainly... we are all open to a logical reason why Die Zauberflote, Hansel und Gretel, Offenbach, Andy Warhol, and Johann Strauss Jr. are all "High Art/Culture" while Miles Davis, Casablanca, F.W. Murnau, and R. Crumb are all "Low Art/Entertainment".

[stlukesguild]

...in order for film to be a “true” art, there needs to be ONE artist to admire.

That is surely one of the dumbest things I've read here in some time. You are living in a 19th century Romantic fantasy of the sole artist/visionary/prophet. This is one of the greatest masterpieces of Western painting:

http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/3/flashcards/926003/jpg/picture141334616826214.jpg

The painting may have been painted by as Many as four different artists (Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo)

Here is another such example... one of the greatest paintings of the early Renaissance:

http://www.cinemamir.com/forum/uploads/attachment/2011-09/1317148666_lippi.-fra-filippo-poklonenie-volhvov.jpg

Painted by Fra Angelico and Fra Fillipo Lippi.

Then there is this:

http://gwawww2012.weebly.com/uploads/9/5/5/4/9554873/6259814_orig.jpg?135

St. Peter's is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of Art of the Renaissance. Obviously it wasn't constructed by one man... but neither was it designed by one artist. Among the major names that were employed in the design of St. Peters are Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bellini.

The fact that more than one artist is employed in the creation of a work in no way inherently diminishes that work or excludes it from the realm of "true art".

[stlukesguild]

First of all, the “auteur theory” of film, in which the director is the key “artist” is clearly silly. Why is the director so much more important than the screenplay writer, or the producer, or the cinematographer?

I think you need to educate yourself upon just how a film is created. The "screenplay" is important... but it is the director who controls just how that narrative will be interpreted through the artistic form that is film. The narrative was certainly important in these paintings...

http://www.artunframed.com/images/reynolds55/rubens169.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0aKXM5LIYlQ/TbKtrK80hMI/AAAAAAAAAbo/4dEh6-Tr0Co/s1600/weyden_deposition.jpg

... but the form that the work takes is painting and ultimately it is the painter whose vision is central... it is the painter who decides how the narrative will be interpreted.

In film, the director has the ultimate say over the music, cinematography, editing, etc...

Even if this were untrue... even if the work were wholly the product of collaborative effort... which it is to a good extent... that has nothing whatsoever to do with the artistic merit of the work.

[JCamilo]

The thing is movie technology changes way too fast, so it is an artform much more dynamic for a proper judgment of vallue. Of course, we all feel many directors are notable, but lets see how many are timeless. In my opinion 2001 can stand up with Picasso or Joyce and comedies with Ben Stiler do not make it less or more artistic than traditional artforms.

In the end we will judge by the top not by something in the gutter.

Also, would say: of course america is the top pop music of XX century. Specially if you consider only american manifestations.American Tango and Samba sucks donkey balls.

[JBI]

Fascinating, JBI. I hadn't made the comparison of the Han Dynasty to the Roman Empire before, but it's staring me in the face now. However, I did a quick internet search and unearthed this article http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/34145-the-pre-industrial-economies-of-western-europe-and-china/ comparing their respective economies. At least in that article and in the studies he cites The Roman Empire was slightly more prosperous and there is reason to believe that medieval Europe when considered as a whole would be the near equal of China economically if not technologically. Also, I know that the Chinese invented many things before the West, but I've heard that they were very secretive and often would not share their advances; leading Western countries to re-invent them independently much later. Is there actual evidence that Gutenberg and other inventors had knowledge of the Chinese machines before they reproduced them here? For instance, I think Egypt invented paper on it's own, and that's where the Greeks and other Europeans got it from.

The secretive and restrictive policy is generally an outcropping of post-Mongolian Chinese policy. The Tang and much of the Song benefited greatly from foreign export and trade. The general problem is Europe got most of these things through their enemies, namely Turkey, who had imported them on other roots.

There is significant debate mind you, but most generally see the link, as Marco Polo seemed to make it clear, with Chinese technology and importing goods. Granted Europe did generate their own, later equivalents, but still many were imported. As for China history Forum, I have posted there, but their stuff is mostly done by amateurs and undergraduates, as can be seen by the poster bellow literally butchering the work to shreds. For a general political comparison try Conceiving the Empire - China and Rome Compared which though not economic in focus, centers around more the political history.

[JBI]

No, I don't forget that at all; Europe has never had the majority of population, as anyone who can count will tell you.

Nice of you to completely avoid presenting evidence for your claims, however. Is that an admission that your "facts" were in fact "fantasy"?

Even when you try to present examples of Chinese influence, you come up with a couple of false positives:

Printing and the idea for paper both came to China from Africa. Printing had been old for centuries before China got in on the act. Certainly the Chinese refined manufacture of paper from papyrus to fibres, but I would have expected you to know that the root word for "paper" is "papyrus" and that China - as they still do - picked up someone else's discovery and went with it.

You're also assuming I don't have a good grasp of world history and you would be utterly incorrect. I understand exactly where Chinese influence was and has been, and it has never dominated the world.

At times the Chinese did indeed have as wide an influence as the Roman Empire, but you totally ignore the irrefutable evidence that the Chinese influence did not create a lasting legacy of culture in any way, whereas it is equally obvious that the Roman did.

Except for gunpowder.

Thanks, China.

Instead of worrying about what you think I do and don't know, why don't you attempt to make an actual case for your revisionist historical beliefs? I'm pretty sure I could make a more coherent case for Egypt than China.

What utter nonsense again. Papyrus and Paper are not the same thing, though they are similar in function, hence their shared etymology. As for non-lasting influence, are you kidding? How do you measure something like that, and how are you so dismissive?

You are so full of nonsense its insufferable. The greater the population in the cultural sphere, clearly the greater the influence. Why bother with a few small barbarian countries on the fringes of civilization when the majority of the world is in your cultural sphere. That is the general argument which shows Europe as the borderlands of civilization long into the renaissance. Cut the crap, you bigot.

[Ecurb]

...in order for film to be a “true” art, there needs to be ONE artist to admire.

That is surely one of the dumbest things I've read here in some time. You are living in a 19th century Romantic fantasy of the sole artist/visionary/prophet.
".

Are you able to read? If you were, you would recognize that my post clearly DISAGREED with the notion that there needs to be one artist to admire. In fact, that was the entire point of my post. Your "cut and dispute" method of posting (a silly method) simply allowed you to remove one of my statements from its context, then rudely insult it as if it were something I was actually arguing FOR instead of AGAINST. That's not only illiterate, but ill mannered.

In addition, it is you, not I who "needs to educate yourself about just how a film is created." It is created by a collection of artists: actors, cinematographers, directors, sreenplay writers, etc. The director does NOT necessarily have the "ultimate say over the music, cinematography, etc." Although many modern directors have more say than they did in the past, in the case of many great Hollywood films the producer (not the director) had the ultimate say over casting, music, and even editing.

Perhaps you should return to bragging about your extensive library, and resist making idiotic comments like these, which serve only to make you look foolish.

[cafolini]

But even the best films are inferior art. You might say that America is unequivocally top for popular entertainment, but for "Culture" with a capital C you have to produce better arguments if you want to pitch for yankees.

I'm sorry. I'm as big of a cultural elitist as anyone on this site... but that's just pure ignorance? Please explain to us just what imaginary separation there is between what you deem as "Popular Culture" ("Entertainment", "Low Art", etc...) vs "High Art"/"Culture"? Silly me... but I thought the novel began as a literary form deemed as "Low" popular entertainment. The same was true of opera. How are the grandiose theatrical paintings of Peter Paul Rubens inherently superior to the greatest Hollywood films?

The whole division between "High" and "Low" was promoted by the upper classes as a means of maintaining an illusion of cultural superiority after popular culture became increasingly dominant. We have little record of the popular music of the past centuries due to the simple facts that the masses generally didn't have the time or financial ability to create or support music. Whatever popular music there was rarely survived due to the fact that the amateur popular (folk) musicians lacked the ability to read or write (and thus preserve) music. With the innovation of recording technology the best popular music... be it Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones etc... is not only able to survive... but also is able to reach a far larger audience than ever before possible. Ravel, George Gershwin, Milhaud, Shostakovitch, Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass... nearly any Modern "classical" composer you dare name has been profoundly impacted by popular music... and written music that blurs any distinction between "classical" and "popular" music. There is no reason to assume that "Summertime", "Stormy Weather" or "Norwegian Wood" will not continue to be recognized (as they now are) as "standards" or "classics". Neither is there any reason to assume that "Vertigo" is not every bit as great as "The Liver is the ****'s Comb".

But certainly... we are all open to a logical reason why Die Zauberflote, Hansel und Gretel, Offenbach, Andy Warhol, and Johann Strauss Jr. are all "High Art/Culture" while Miles Davis, Casablanca, F.W. Murnau, and R. Crumb are all "Low Art/Entertainment".

This is a very good post.

[stlukesguild]

Are you able to read? If you were, you would recognize that my post clearly DISAGREED with the notion that there needs to be one artist to admire. In fact, that was the entire point of my post. Your "cut and dispute" method of posting (a silly method) simply allowed you to remove one of my statements from its context, then rudely insult it as if it were something I was actually arguing FOR instead of AGAINST. That's not only illiterate, but ill mannered.

In addition, it is you, not I who "needs to educate yourself about just how a film is created." It is created by a collection of artists: actors, cinematographers, directors, sreenplay writers, etc. The director does NOT necessarily have the "ultimate say over the music, cinematography, etc." Although many modern directors have more say than they did in the past, in the case of many great Hollywood films the producer (not the director) had the ultimate say over casting, music, and even editing.

Perhaps you should return to bragging about your extensive library, and resist making idiotic comments like these, which serve only to make you look foolish.

Hmmm... indeed I did misread the post. My mistake.

On the other hand... "illiterate"... "foolish"... criticism of my manner of posting. I could respond in like with a slew of personal insults but ultimately you are not worth the effort.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

....St. Peter's is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of Art of the Renaissance. Obviously it wasn't constructed by one man... but neither was it designed by one artist. Among the major names that were employed in the design of St. Peters are Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bellini....

Minor correction or, let's at least consider an addition; don't forget Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was responsible for many of the great sculptures within the Basilica proper including the Baldacchino, but even more so for designing the most prominent feature in your photo, that being the Piazza of St. Peters including the monumental colonnades surrounding the Piazza.

As for my thoughts on cultural influences, I'm partial to Country Docs comments on Texas, but outside of that, Atheist beat me to the punch on China and gunpowder. Gunpowder has been quite an influence around the world in the past few hundred years.
Of all time? ... I'll throw in Greek/ Roman for the west and China for the east.

Something that came to mind, how about the Arab-Islamic influence at least in terms of math, science and medicine?

[stlukesguild]

Yes Bernini not Bellini. Bellini probably just popped into my mind in connection with the painting Fete Champetre which I had just posted. I actually love Bernini's work... and one must credit him for attempting to counter the stupid additions made by Raphael and Maderno to the building. Bramante's original plan was a central plan... based upon the Greek Cross:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/SaintPierre.svg/170px-SaintPierre.svg.png

Raphael pushed to extend the central nave to echo the classical Roman basilicas thus changing the floor-plan to a Roman cross:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/SaintPierreRaphael.JPG/170px-SaintPierreRaphael.JPG

In spite of whatever disagreements Michelangelo had over the years with Bramante, he sought to return to something closer to Bramante's original concept. He cut back on the length of the extension to the original cruciform plan:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/PetersdomGrundriss.jpg/170px-PetersdomGrundriss.jpg

The shortened nave also allowed for the entire dome... designed by Michelangelo... to be seen properly from ground level. Today this can only be seen from above... as in this view from the Castel Sant Angelo

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Petersdom_von_Engelsburg_gesehen.jpg/800px-Petersdom_von_Engelsburg_gesehen.jpg

(or from the rear). The later addition by the architect, Maderno completely ruined the view of Michelangelo's dome.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/0_Basilique_Saint-Pierre_-_Rome_%282%29.JPG/800px-0_Basilique_Saint-Pierre_-_Rome_%282%29.JPG

[Darcy88]

If we are talking 20th century popular music, I think the British are the equals of the Americans: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Radiohead, The Smiths, Pink Floyd, Joy Division, The Stone Roses...that is a pretty impressive list (actually, to be specific, they are all English).

The problem here is that you are focusing upon a single branch of "popular music"... ie. rock/pop from the Beatles forward. Undoubtedly there are some impressive names here... but the United States wholly owns Jazz which a good many would argue is a far greater musical genre: W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Bix Beiderbeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, John Coletrane, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Dizzie Gillespie, Count Basie, and the list goes on and on. You could then add the jazz/blues vocalists to this list: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Julie London, etc... Then what about the Blues? Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Slim Harpo, etc... on through Stevie ray Vaughan, etc... And what of R & B? I'm speaking of the original Rhythm & Blues in which acted as the transitional movement from jazz to rock & roll in which the rhythm section of the old jazz big bands broke away after the big bands were no longer financially viable: Cab Calloway, T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, etc... Bluegrass/Country/Western? The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, The Louvin Brothers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, etc...

And then... American rock isn't all that bad either: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Big Mamma Thornton, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, CCR, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimi Hendrix...

And are we ignoring the contributions of black musicians after the 1950s? Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the whole of Motown, Michael Jackson, Al Green, the Temptations, etc...

I agree. I hear this Britain > America in 20th century music thing so often but if you really examine the totality of American music it is pretty clear that the quality of output exceeds that of Britain.

[The Atheist]

Im sorry but that is an over-simplification of what films can do.

Sure it is. I agree with you entirely.

I wasn't damning them with faint praise so much as being lazy.

[MorpheusSandman]

Lots of good discussion here, so many good (and several bad) posts to respond to:


For film, it shouldn't even be a contest… Germany gave us Expressionism and Fritz Lang.No Murnau, Lubitsch, or the German New Wave (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders)?


Britain gave us Hitchcock and David Lean.Please don’t forget Powell/Pressburger, Roeg, Reed, and Davies!


I don't know anyone who thinks that Vertigo is the greatest film ever. It's not even the greatest British film ever. That is probably David Lean's adaptation of Dr. Zhivago, and that is as great a piece of art as any opera, which is what it should be compared to.I think one thing to consider about those film lists is that a film can reach #1 simply by being high on a great many lists as opposed to being #1 on those lists. So maybe, eg, 2001: ASO appears as #1 on more people’s lists, but is equally absent from many other lists because it’s a film that’s always divided critics, so it ends up being ranked lower than Vertigo by virtue of it being more controversial.

I wouldn’t name Vertigo the greatest film either; personally, I think Seven Samurai and 2001:ASO are definitively better, and I honestly prefer Hitch’s Rear Window to Vertigo. However, I simply can’t agree that Dr. Zhivago is any way better; I always found that to be the most turgid and cinematically dull of Lean’s epics (but that’s individual tastes for you). However, I wouldn’t consider Vertigo a “British” film anyway given that it was made/produced in Hollywood (that’s one dilemma with regards to determining what country films come from; most tend to go by a combination of where they’re produced and shot). Personally, I’d put several of Powell/Pressburger’s (Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I’m Going!, A Canterbury Tale), a few of Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) and Roeg’s (Don’t Look Now) ahead of Zhivago.


Opera and cinema are both combinations of writing, acting, music, and visuals. I'd say that Pulp Fiction, Gone With the Wind, Schindler's List, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Goodfellas, 8 1/2, Wild Strawberries, Seven Samurai, Andrei Rublev, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca count as great examples of art. Cinema is only a century old so it may not have had enough time to produce it's Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, but it's done pretty well for all that. Kubrick, Fellini, Bergman, or Kurosawa are probably worth as much to the history of this young art as Monteverdi was to a nascent opera.The core art of cinema is mise-en-scene (what’s in front of the camera & how it moves) and editing; both of which make it a unique art-form separate from all others. Opera doesn’t have the “camera as narrator” aspect, and that’s a crucial difference. Cinema is young, true, but it’s evolved faster than most arts because, for one, it had a whole lot of past culture to draw from, two, the technology itself grew so rapidly, and, three, it came to prominence in the century of globalization. As for the latter, filmmakers soon had access not just to films and filmmakers from their own country, but those of every other country. So I don’t think it’s fair to compare its growth with that of, say, opera or the novel; but I agree with you about the worthiness of its best works and artists.




The thing I don't get it this - some people think there is no such thing as an aesthetic criteria, the problem is they don't understand their own theory. Post-modernism says the canon is assembled from a ruling class's Aesthetic criteria - usually attributed to white, male, Christians and usually they throw dead in there too. My point is, what better criteria has one actually proposed to replace this. If we agree that criterias are biased, as they assuredly are, the question remains, is this actually a bad thing?I don’t think most that criticize the “dead, white, hetero, male, Christian” canon are arguing for it being completely replaced so much as they’re arguing for attention being paid to other sets of aesthetic criteria. The problem is that they tend to lack anything approaching a majority voice. Even most of the, eg, feminist critics I know of read, enjoy, and praise much of the classic canon, while, at the same time, trying to bring more attention to authors that appeal uniquely to their sensibilities.




It's odd that the British, who never produced any great classical composersThis is the point where Henry Purcell and RV Williams bops you upside the head from their respective graves.




But even the best films are inferior art.Complete and utter nonsense, as others have said. The only people that make this argument tend to be ignorant of what makes film a unique art form to begin with; they tend to judge it on the same standards as literature (plays, novels, etc.), which is obviously not a battle film can win. The battle it can win, though, is showing how all of film’s components (mise-en-scene, editing, sound, music, acting) can come together to create something that is as profound—emotionally, aesthetically, thematically, etc.—as the best of the other arts.


It's interesting that top film critics, with rounded cultural pretensions, often make this argument. Bryan Appleyard is famous for it in the UK, another critic who often points this out is Ronald Bergen:The problem is that he presents no legitimate argument; WHY wouldn’t Vertigo “stand a chance” against Don G., The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Hamlet, or Beethoven’s 9th? Being a lover of all those works, I don’t see Vertigo as being inferior at all. It’s certainly capable of provoking as many interpretations as Don G. and Hamlet, as capable of being appreciated technically as Ulysses, as capable at eliciting our awe as the 9th (though I honestly don’t know how to compare it with the Comedy)…. so where, exactly, is it lacking?





Movies are just stage plays done for mass audiences, and the best of them can actually offer more than the story that spawned them.Actually, it’s the thinking that “movies are just plays for mass audiences” that prevented them (and still prevents them to some extent) from being taken seriously as an art-form. The best films tend to break away strongly from the theatrical traditions, leaning more heavily on what is communicable via the camera and editing, as opposed to relying on language and acting as theater does. One reason Hitch is so revered is because he showed how crucial framing and editing was; Rear Window is a master class on how to construct a film via point-of-view editing; there are long stretches where it’s nothing but Stewart’s character looking and Hitch cutting to what he’s looking at. Hitch builds up an entire film out of this voyeuristic notion, not unlike how Beethoven created an entire symphony on almost nothing but a 4-note motif, and it’s extraordinary what complexity (aesthetic, emotional, thematic) is built up from something so simple. Vertigo does this a lot too, though it plays with larger structural devices more akin to, say, Beethoven’s 9th as opposed to his 5th.




art films are for a refined audience like serious literature.Not just art films, though. Hitchcock is more refined than most art-film directors, much like how Shakespeare was popular enough for mass audiences but refined enough for refined ones as well.


Ozu is certainly the greatest Japanese artist of the 20th century, and Tarkovsky is definitely the best narrative artist of Russia since Tolstoy died. I go back and forth between Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa. I find it hard to state a definitive “winner” because the three of them were so different, but equally accomplished in their own respects. If we’re talking artistry, though, I think Mizoguchi is probably more complex/refined than either Ozu or Kurosawa. I’d also place Eisenstein (and maybe Kalatazov) ahead of Tarkovsy… I’ve never really gotten what the big deal over Tarkovsky was. I tend to prefer the directors he inspired far more than Tarkovsky himself.




The problem with film (at least it’s a problem to some people) is that it is such a corporate art form.Depends on the film. This describes Hollywood, but less so small-budget art-house and independent films. A lot of filmmakers prefer small budgets because they’re allowed more freedom, as there’s less pressure to make the money back. Even in Hollywood there have been many filmmakers (like Kubrick and Hitchcock) that had complete autonomy because of their success.


First of all, the “auteur theory” of film, in which the director is the key “artist” is clearly silly. Why is the director so much more important than the screenplay writer, or the producer, or the cinematographer? For drama, it’s the other way around. Shakespeare is the great artist, not some famous director. If you had actually read the texts that initially advocated the auteur theory (Truffaut and Sarris, especially) you’d already have an answer to your question. Firstly, the auteur theory was never meant as a blanket theory to describe every film and filmmaker, it was designed to single out those directors whom had a singular, identifiable style (visually, thematically, etc.) throughout their work, regardless of their collaborators. There’s no other explanation as to why there are so many consistencies throughout the cinema of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ford, Welles, et al. without the auteur theory.

The simple answer to your “why is the director more important than…” is that they aren’t always. This is heavily dependent on the era, country, and director we’re discussing. Hollywood’s golden age, eg, was quite homogeneous; it was a factory in which every member of the production (writers, directors, DPs, etc.) were interchangeable. It’s why a film like The Wizard of Oz could have a change of directors mid-way through, but no noticeable change in style. In that time of filmmaking, producers arguably WERE more important as they were the ones that had to oversee productions. I’d argue that, eg, Daryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick, and Irving Thalberg were as much “auteurs” as any director ever was.

However, the focus on directors comes mostly from the fact that, during production, the director is the person telling everyone else what to do. So while you may praise a cinematographer for a certain shot, you may praise the director choosing to put the camera there; while you may praise an actor for a performance, you may praise the director for allowing/provoking them to give that performance. There are also more examples of directors having ultimate control more than any other member of the production does. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Wilder, Ford, Hawks, et al. often had a guiding hand in every single phase of the production including the writing. It’s well known that Hitch co-wrote most all of his best films, even though he never took a credit.

Writers generally aren’t as praised because writing alone usually can’t make a film great (there are a few exceptions), because how a filmmaker presents what is written had a tremendous effect on how well it works. Hitch even told Truffaut that the reason he chose such terrible source material for Psycho was to show how a master could take atrocious writing and turn it into a cinematic masterpiece solely through the directorial art, and this “bad/mediocre writing -> masterful directing -> masterpiece film” is far more common than “great writing -> bad/mediocre directing -> masterpiece film”.




I'm sorry. I'm as big of a cultural elitist as anyone on this site... but that's just pure ignorance? Please explain to us just what imaginary separation there is between what you deem as "Popular Culture" ("Entertainment", "Low Art", etc...) vs "High Art"/"Culture"? Silly me... but I thought the novel began as a literary form deemed as "Low" popular entertainment. The same was true of opera. How are the grandiose theatrical paintings of Peter Paul Rubens inherently superior to the greatest Hollywood films?

The whole division between "High" and "Low" was promoted by the upper classes as a means of maintaining an illusion of cultural superiority after popular culture became increasingly dominant. We have little record of the popular music of the past centuries due to the simple facts that the masses generally didn't have the time or financial ability to create or support music. Whatever popular music there was rarely survived due to the fact that the amateur popular (folk) musicians lacked the ability to read or write (and thus preserve) music. With the innovation of recording technology the best popular music... be it Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones etc... is not only able to survive... but also is able to reach a far larger audience than ever before possible. Ravel, George Gershwin, Milhaud, Shostakovitch, Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass... nearly any Modern "classical" composer you dare name has been profoundly impacted by popular music... and written music that blurs any distinction between "classical" and "popular" music. There is no reason to assume that "Summertime", "Stormy Weather" or "Norwegian Wood" will not continue to be recognized (as they now are) as "standards" or "classics". Neither is there any reason to assume that "Vertigo" is not every bit as great as "The Liver is the ****'s Comb".

But certainly... we are all open to a logical reason why Die Zauberflote, Hansel und Gretel, Offenbach, Andy Warhol, and Johann Strauss Jr. are all "High Art/Culture" while Miles Davis, Casablanca, F.W. Murnau, and R. Crumb are all "Low Art/Entertainment".Excellent post, Luke!




The thing is movie technology changes way too fast, so it is an artform much more dynamic for a proper judgment of vallue. Of course, we all feel many directors are notable, but lets see how many are timeless.I’ve never been of the mind that the evolving technology of film has had any effect on the artistic quality of film, though I do understand what you mean about our aesthetic criteria changing because of it… on the other hand, I greatly admire (and enjoy) Guy Maddin’s modern silent films. What you say about directors requiring the test of time is true, though, but I can only see the likes of Hitch, Welles, Kubrick, and a handful of others being praised more and more as time goes on. At least, I see no signs of the trend reversing itself.

[mortalterror]

The whole division between "High" and "Low" was promoted by the upper classes as a means of maintaining an illusion of cultural superiority after popular culture became increasingly dominant. We have little record of the popular music of the past centuries due to the simple facts that the masses generally didn't have the time or financial ability to create or support music. Whatever popular music there was rarely survived due to the fact that the amateur popular (folk) musicians lacked the ability to read or write (and thus preserve) music. With the innovation of recording technology the best popular music... be it Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones etc... is not only able to survive... but also is able to reach a far larger audience than ever before possible. Ravel, George Gershwin, Milhaud, Shostakovitch, Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass... nearly any Modern "classical" composer you dare name has been profoundly impacted by popular music... and written music that blurs any distinction between "classical" and "popular" music. There is no reason to assume that "Summertime", "Stormy Weather" or "Norwegian Wood" will not continue to be recognized (as they now are) as "standards" or "classics". Neither is there any reason to assume that "Vertigo" is not every bit as great as "The Liver is the ****'s Comb".

Actually, the popular music composers were frequently able to leave records and sheet music for their songs since at least the Renaissance. I've been enjoying a lot of old ballads, hymns, seasonal songs, and sea shanties from centuries ago. Guys like Francis James Child and other scholars have been kind enough to compile the songs into comprehensive scholarly collections the way the 19th century folklorists the Brothers Grimm collected the people's stories. Just as the Grimm Brothers were able to unearth Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, the old songbooks are like a mine full of priceless gems. Here are a few selections:

Tam Lin is a Scottish ballad by Robert Wedderburn written in 1548. It's about a young woman who falls in love with an enchanted knight, who is enslaved by the queen of the fairies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy3ihk205ew

Then there's The Three Ravens, from 1611 by Thomas Ravencroft, sung by Andreas Scholl a favorite classical singer of yours. He actually released a whole CD of old English Ballads. The song is about three ravens conversing over the body of a fallen knight, and how his hounds, hawks, and a pregnant doe symbolizing his subjects and lover keep the birds of prey away and honor him in death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1JScWuKnI0

The Sailor's Hornpipe was an anonymous tune composed by British sailors and first written down in 1770.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_JeKZd9ecE

Anyone who's grown up in a Protestant church will be familiar with the 1779 hymn Amazing Grace by John Newton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMLMj-SibU

Three fun sea shanties, Spanish Ladies, Drunken Sailor, and Dead Man's Chest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZfYtCLA23s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyPuey-1Jw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzcv5TJkJBA

A patriotic Scottish song The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond, and a whiskey drinking hard fighting Irish song Whiskey in the Jar (1870 Colm O Lochlainn).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uZ-p-tN8Gs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boanuwUMNNQ

Two great 1862 war tunes from different sides of the world. 1862 George F. Root- Battle Cry of Freedom, a hit for the Union and then slightly altered for the Confederacy as well. John Owen- Men of Harlech, a welsh regimental song about a famous siege.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kWADI4umuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Gxd9zhsag

And even Neapolitan classics popular with Italian opera singers today. Luigi Denza- Funiculi, Funicula:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaO1GrltxwM

So you see, we have good records of popular music even predating recording technology, and some of those tunes are still popular today. Just think of the works of Stephen Foster or Gilbert and Sullivan.

1549 Robert Wedderburn- Tam Lin (ballad)
1580 Richard Jones- Greensleeves (ballad)
1599 John Farmer- Fair Phyllis (madrigal)
1602 William Shakespeare- Feste's Song (show tune)
1611 Thomas Ravencroft- The Three Ravens (ballad)
1719 Isaac Watts- Joy to the World (hymn)
1740 James Thomson- Rule, Britannia! (anthem)
1758 Richard Shuckburgh- Yankee Doodle (anthem)
1770 Anonymous- The Sailor's Hornpipe (sea song)
1779 John Newton- Amazing Grace (hymn)
1788 Robert Burns- Auld Lang Syne (folk)
1792 Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle- The Marseillaise (anthem)
1796 Anonymous- Spanish Ladies (sea shanty)
1800s
1814 Francis Scott Key- The Star-Spangled Banner (anthem)
1839 Anonymous- Drunken Sailor (sea shanty)
1841 Sarah Flower Adams- Nearer, My God, To Thee (hymn)
1841 Anonymous- The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond (folk)
1847 Adolphe Adam- O Holy Night (hymn)
1847 Stephen Foster- Oh Susannah (minstrel)
1850 Daniel Decatur Emmett- Dixie (minstrel)
1852 Frederick Oakeley- O Come All Ye Faithful (hymn)
1855 William H. Cummings- Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (hymn)
1855 Joseph M. Scriven- What a Friend We Have in Jesus (hymn)
1857 James Lord Pierpont- Jingle Bells (carol)
1858 Charles H. Brown- The Yellow Rose of Texas (folk)
1859 John Freeman Young- Silent Night (hymn)
1862 Julia Ward Howe- Battle Hymn of the Republic (hymn)
1862 George F. Root- Battle Cry of Freedom (folk)
1862 John Owen- Men of Harlech (march)
1862 Wallis Willis- Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (hymn)
1863 Patrick Gilmore- When Johnny Comes Marching Home (folk)
1863 John Henry Hopkins, Jr.- We Three Kings (hymn)
1868 Philips Brooks- O Little Town of Bethlehem (hymn)
1870 Colm O Lochlainn- Whiskey in the Jar (folk)
1871 Eugene Pottier- The Internationale (anthem)
1873 Brewster M. Higley- Home on the Range (folk)
1874 Jesus Gonzalez Rubio- Jarabe Tapatio (mariachi)
1879 Gilbert and Sullivan- Major-General's Song (operetta)
1880 Luigi Denza- Funiculi, Funicula (Neapolitan)
1884 Percy Montrose- Oh My Darling, Clementine (ballad)
1885 J.E. Clark- Away in a Manger (hymn)
1885 Carl Gustav Boberg- How Great Thou Art (hymn)
1889 Charles David Tillman- Old-Time Religion (gospel)
1891 Young E. Allison- Dead Man's Chest (sea shanty)
1894 Anonymous- I've Been Working on the Railroad (folk)
1896 John Philip Sousa- Stars and Stripes Forever (march)
1899 Joseph E. Howard, Ida Emerson- Hello! Ma Baby (minstrel)

[mortalterror]

Even when you try to present examples of Chinese influence, you come up with a couple of false positives:

Printing and the idea for paper both came to China from Africa. Printing had been old for centuries before China got in on the act. Certainly the Chinese refined manufacture of paper from papyrus to fibres, but I would have expected you to know that the root word for "paper" is "papyrus" and that China - as they still do - picked up someone else's discovery and went with it.

You're also assuming I don't have a good grasp of world history and you would be utterly incorrect. I understand exactly where Chinese influence was and has been, and it has never dominated the world.

At times the Chinese did indeed have as wide an influence as the Roman Empire, but you totally ignore the irrefutable evidence that the Chinese influence did not create a lasting legacy of culture in any way, whereas it is equally obvious that the Roman did.

Except for gunpowder.

Thanks, China.

I have to agree with JBI here, Atheist. China was as influential in Asia as Rome was in Europe. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, were all writing, and dressing in the Chinese fashion until about a thousand years ago. And all the places calling themselves China after the earlier dynasties are certainly influenced by ancient Chinese empires. Asian culture is basically dominated by China in the East, India in the West, and both influenced each other greatly. If you look at the painting styles of India or the middle east you can see similar treatment of clouds and rocks, the influence of Chinese landscape painting.

The real question in terms of Chinese influence to ask is which dynasty was the most influential, because the different empires and dynasties that comprised China during it's thousands of years of history had different cultures. The Roman Empire is still largely like the Roman Republic only much larger, but the Byzantine Empire and Italy are something different culturally. The Han Dynasty would be equivalent to the Roman Empire and it would be fair to compare the two cultures achievements within a similar block of years. By isolating these distinct cultures, we show that they are different from the Song, the Tang, the Ming etc. when China wasn't really the same entity any more than Europe was. JBI is sort of taking liberties considering China as a continuous whole, which I'm sure he knows is not the case. For the sake of this discussion, we should probably also consider the Gupta Empire rather than just all of India.


No Murnau, Lubitsch, or the German New Wave (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders)?
I like Lubitsch and Wenders, the others not so much. I might throw a little love Pabst's way for The Threepenny Opera though.


Please don’t forget Powell/Pressburger, Roeg, Reed, and Davies!
I wasn't really trying to list everyone, but Powell/Pressburger is a good pull. I like their work, especially Colonel Blimp and The Red Shoes.


I think one thing to consider about those film lists is that a film can reach #1 simply by being high on a great many lists as opposed to being #1 on those lists. So maybe, eg, 2001: ASO appears as #1 on more people’s lists, but is equally absent from many other lists because it’s a film that’s always divided critics, so it ends up being ranked lower than Vertigo by virtue of it being more controversial.

I wouldn’t name Vertigo the greatest film either; personally, I think Seven Samurai and 2001:ASO are definitively better, and I honestly prefer Hitch’s Rear Window to Vertigo. However, I simply can’t agree that Dr. Zhivago is any way better; I always found that to be the most turgid and cinematically dull of Lean’s epics (but that’s individual tastes for you). However, I wouldn’t consider Vertigo a “British” film anyway given that it was made/produced in Hollywood (that’s one dilemma with regards to determining what country films come from; most tend to go by a combination of where they’re produced and shot). Personally, I’d put several of Powell/Pressburger’s (Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I’m Going!, A Canterbury Tale), a few of Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) and Roeg’s (Don’t Look Now) ahead of Zhivago.
You must be on crack. Zhivago is divine. And Lean made other films which are also better than Vertigo or Rear Window: Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, The Bridge on the River Kwai. I see what you are saying about determining whether a film is a British film or a Hollywood film is sometimes tricky. Milos Forman is a Czech, but when he filmed Amadeus an adaptation of a play by an English playwright, shot in Prague and Vienna with American actors, American money, and American crews he made a Hollywood movie. I feel that the bulk of the creators were American so we can claim it, sort of like how a lot of Hollywood films and tv shows are shot abroad in places like Canada.


The core art of cinema is mise-en-scene (what’s in front of the camera & how it moves) and editing; both of which make it a unique art-form separate from all others.
It can be, just like the core of painting can be color, or the core of music harmony, or the core of writing style, character, or plot.


Opera doesn’t have the “camera as narrator” aspect, and that’s a crucial difference. Cinema is young, true, but it’s evolved faster than most arts because, for one, it had a whole lot of past culture to draw from, two, the technology itself grew so rapidly, and, three, it came to prominence in the century of globalization. As for the latter, filmmakers soon had access not just to films and filmmakers from their own country, but those of every other country. So I don’t think it’s fair to compare its growth with that of, say, opera or the novel; but I agree with you about the worthiness of its best works and artists.
Agreed. It's had it's advantages.


Complete and utter nonsense, as others have said. The only people that make this argument tend to be ignorant of what makes film a unique art form to begin with; they tend to judge it on the same standards as literature (plays, novels, etc.), which is obviously not a battle film can win. The battle it can win, though, is showing how all of film’s components (mise-en-scene, editing, sound, music, acting) can come together to create something that is as profound—emotionally, aesthetically, thematically, etc.—as the best of the other arts.

The problem is that he presents no legitimate argument; WHY wouldn’t Vertigo “stand a chance” against Don G., The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Hamlet, or Beethoven’s 9th? Being a lover of all those works, I don’t see Vertigo as being inferior at all. It’s certainly capable of provoking as many interpretations as Don G. and Hamlet, as capable of being appreciated technically as Ulysses, as capable at eliciting our awe as the 9th (though I honestly don’t know how to compare it with the Comedy)…. so where, exactly, is it lacking?
I had a group of friends over to watch Vertigo a few years back and it quickly devolved into us making fun of the film for one thing or another. The high point, as I remember was when Jimmy Stewart talks his girlfriend into wearing his old flame's clothes and dying her hair the same color. He's upset that she's resisting his obsession and blurts out "It couldn't mean anything to you!" Also, the weirdness of the plot, the fake picture reincarnation story, hiring a look alike actress to fake your wife's death, and the whole plan hinging on hiring a detective who's afraid of heights to be the witness? C'mon son, that's terrible writing. That film lives by Jimmy Stewart's acting and the cool effect Hitchcock would do with camera focus, lighting, and editing. That scene in the bookstore was pretty dope though. For the best Hitchcock, I don't go Rear Window, North By Northwest, or Psycho either. I like Strangers on a Train and Rope, with those long tracking shots. Lifeboat was good too. He had a John Steinbeck script for that.


I go back and forth between Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa. I find it hard to state a definitive “winner” because the three of them were so different, but equally accomplished in their own respects. If we’re talking artistry, though, I think Mizoguchi is probably more complex/refined than either Ozu or Kurosawa. I’d also place Eisenstein (and maybe Kalatazov) ahead of Tarkovsy… I’ve never really gotten what the big deal over Tarkovsky was. I tend to prefer the directors he inspired far more than Tarkovsky himself.
You think Mizoguchi is more artsy than Kurosawa? Have you seen Dreams or Dodes'ka-den? And Tarkovsky is awesome. Watch Andrei Rublev if you haven't. That long seen where the Huns invade the village is masterful, as good as any war scene ever, like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan good. There's so much going on, and it all looks super realistic. If you like a Bergman film I don't see why you wouldn't like a Tarkovsky film. Then Solaris, the use of color, and Stalker what fantastic minimalism, like a Beckett play.


However, the focus on directors comes mostly from the fact that, during production, the director is the person telling everyone else what to do. So while you may praise a cinematographer for a certain shot, you may praise the director choosing to put the camera there; while you may praise an actor for a performance, you may praise the director for allowing/provoking them to give that performance. There are also more examples of directors having ultimate control more than any other member of the production does. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Wilder, Ford, Hawks, et al. often had a guiding hand in every single phase of the production including the writing. It’s well known that Hitch co-wrote most all of his best films, even though he never took a credit.
He also meticulously story boarded the shots beforehand so he didn't need to hold his cinematographer's hand.


Writers generally aren’t as praised because writing alone usually can’t make a film great (there are a few exceptions), because how a filmmaker presents what is written had a tremendous effect on how well it works. Hitch even told Truffaut that the reason he chose such terrible source material for Psycho was to show how a master could take atrocious writing and turn it into a cinematic masterpiece solely through the directorial art, and this “bad/mediocre writing -> masterful directing -> masterpiece film” is far more common than “great writing -> bad/mediocre directing -> masterpiece film”.
But why handicap yourself like that? The odds of making a great film are better with great source material, and I hate watching Hitchcock movies because of the stupid writing.


I’ve never been of the mind that the evolving technology of film has had any effect on the artistic quality of film, though I do understand what you mean about our aesthetic criteria changing because of it… on the other hand, I greatly admire (and enjoy) Guy Maddin’s modern silent films. What you say about directors requiring the test of time is true, though, but I can only see the likes of Hitch, Welles, Kubrick, and a handful of others being praised more and more as time goes on. At least, I see no signs of the trend reversing itself.
There are a few notable exceptions like The Passion of Joan of Arc, City Lights, or Metropolis but on average I think that film is much better post 1930s sound era. And with a few exceptions (Schindler's List, Raging Bull) films are better with color than in black and white. I think the best period for film is probably post 1960. We'll have to wait and see what the new 3D era has in store, but I haven't seen anything yet that makes me think "Wow, this is totally better!"

[JBI]

I would never propose the propaganda model of China as an entity with 5000 years of history that seems so preached by both educators and textbooks in China. In truth, even in written Chinese I refuse to use the terms "China (中国）" or "Chinese (中国的“ when dealing with anything pre 1911, as a principal.

Still, in terms of the Sinosphere as a cultural phenomenon, through just linguistic developments we can see a sort of dominance spreading to the beginnings of central Asia, out through the far reaches of Japan, and down to Indonesia. This is a given, from just the spread of language and aspects of language. This also is markedly continuous, in terms of the letter sets, from the collapse of the Han through the modern Era, with literacy in classical Chinese being almost required by educated elites in Vietnam, China (Qing Empire), Japan, Korea, etc. until the modern era.

But then, we have a problem, can we even call the Roman republic the same as the Roman Empire? Politically they are structurally different, though culturally there is a continuity. Can we call the Han China? Where is the line drawn on "civilization" or "culture" when countries are new, and borders always fluctuating.

Like I mentioned on the first page, it is difficult to see history as either isolated, or as specific "cultures" when borders of culture did not exist, and cultural interaction has been going on for 2000 years, from Portugal to Japan.

When we think of even music, or art, it is enough just to note that Titian was working much for Austrian patrons, and Da Vinci was in France for much of his career just to blur borders. I like to take Erasmus as a classical example showing that Europe pre-empire was very much a sort of borderless cultural exchange, especially when the literate population conversed in Latin texts.

We should not imagine borders where they don't exist mind you, especially when dealing with cultures that don't fit schemes that easily. Aristotle, in terms of country of Origin, seems to be Greek by today's definition, despite being Athenian in thought, and Macedonian in application.

[Ecurb]

If you had actually read the texts that initially advocated the auteur theory (Truffaut and Sarris, especially) you’d already have an answer to your question. Firstly, the auteur theory was never meant as a blanket theory to describe every film and filmmaker, it was designed to single out those directors whom had a singular, identifiable style (visually, thematically, etc.) throughout their work, regardless of their collaborators. There’s no other explanation as to why there are so many consistencies throughout the cinema of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ford, Welles, et al. without the auteur theory......


I own one of Sarris's books (the one in which he ranks all the Hollywood directors, as if posting in a thread on Literary Forum), and I agree that the actual auteur theorists (I haven’t read enough Truffaut to remember it well) are more reasonable than some less sophisticated individuals who misunderstand their theories about the "personal touch" in corporate films. Sarris thought that DESPITE the fact that film is a cooperative art form, the "signature" of pantheon directors could be seen in their films, and it is worth studying the body of work of Ford, Hawkes, Lubitsch, et. al. in order to distinguish that touch. Even a bad movie directed by a great director (Sarris thought) provides worthwhile viewing.

My own tastes in film criticism lead me to admire Pauline Kael, who famously battled with Sarris through the years. Perhaps, however, that’s because I like her literary style more than Sarris’s, not because I think her judgments superior.

Gone with the Wind is the classic example of a Hollywood film that reflected the producer’s influence more than the director’s.

Obviously, the director is an important figure in filmmaking. He or she is also important to drama – but the playwright gets the glory in the theater, while the director gets it in film. Elia Kazan supposedly worked with Tennessee Williams to rewrite entire acts of his famous plays (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I think) so that they would “work” on stage. But nobody calls Kazan the author (or even “auteur”) of “Cat”.

To some extent, this is reasonable, because film is more of a visual art, while drama is more literary. Indeed, the notion that the director is the “author” of film is dependent on the notion that film is more a visual art form than a literary one.

I recently attended a film festival where they showed “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (great movie, by the way), along with a lecture by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote the screenplay. Arriaga has since gone on to direct his own movies, but I doubt he’d agree that Tommy Lee Jones (in his directorial debut) was more the author of “Three Burials” than he was.

[mal4mac]

Cinema is only a century old so it may not have had enough time to produce it's Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, but it's done pretty well for all that.

It hasn't done well at all. You should watch the BBC programme on F. Scott Fitzgerald, shown last Saturday on BBC 2, which gives an account of how American film producers destroyed one of America's greatest writers. Film has done very badly because it is controlled by money men and ego-maniacs who think they can rewrite the work of great authors.

The move from baroque forms of music to classic (J.C Bach, Haydn, Mozart...) took decades. If film has taken over a hundred years and still hasn't become a really good art form then something is very wrong in the state of California.

[LitNetIsGreat]

But even the best films are inferior art. You might say that America is unequivocally top for popular entertainment, but for "Culture" with a capital C you have to produce better arguments if you want to pitch for yankees. It's interesting that top film critics, with rounded cultural pretensions, often make this argument. Bryan Appleyard is famous for it in the UK, another critic who often points this out is Ronald Bergen:

http://www.theartsdesk.com/film/opinion-vertigo-really-greatest-ever-film

"... if one accepts the fact that the majority of film critics in the world think that Vertigo is the best film ever made, it raises the question of whether film as an art form is perhaps inferior to the other, older, arts. As someone who has made a living of sorts for over 30 years writing about film and teaching film history and film theory, that may seem like sacrilege. But if one were to assess the greatest works in each art in categories like at Crufts, then bring the winner of each category together for the Best in Show, then I’m afraid Vertigo, whatever its many virtues, wouldn’t stand a chance against, say, Don Giovanni, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Hamlet or the Ninth Symphony.... is there really a film that can match any of the genuine masterpieces in the other arts?"

I just think it is difficult to make a comparison across the arts and I don't really think it is necessary. It reminds me of the saying 'I'd rather read the worse book than watch the best film.' What nonsense! I'd rather read the best book (or a good book) and then later go and watch the best film and enjoy both experiences!! I don't see each medium in competition with each other, I just try to enjoy the different experiences each bring. For me it's a mood thing anyway.

In terms of me mentioning America in the last 100 years or so...well of course no person or country operates in isolation, in this sense there no greatest culture, or rather to unpack one is difficult or problematic, just that over the last 100 years or so it is difficult to complete with American media, certainly film, whose influence has spread everywhere. The British film/music industry yes has produced some good material, especially in terms of popular music, but the size and scale that the US can churn stuff out is far greater than what the UK can.

I've been waiting for the BBC's latest production of Sherlock Holmes or a new one off episode of Jonathan Creek for about the last two years. If those shows had been produced in the US there would have been dozens of them by now. The US industry would not let something quite good and very popular rest for years. They would have pumped them out, even if the motivation was to make money off the advertising of course, not to make art.

[Mr.lucifer]

It hasn't done well at all. You should watch the BBC programme on F. Scott Fitzgerald, shown last Saturday on BBC 2, which gives an account of how American film producers destroyed one of America's greatest writers. Film has done very badly because it is controlled by money men and ego-maniacs who think they can rewrite the work of great authors.

The move from baroque forms of music to classic (J.C Bach, Haydn, Mozart...) took decades. If film has taken over a hundred years and still hasn't become a really good art form then something is very wrong in the state of California.

My god, this is one of the most ignorant posts I have ever seen, and I am the most ignorant person I know. What does one case of Producers screwing over one great writer has to do with the entirety of Film history? Have you ever actually seen any films of the great directors of World Cinema?

Have you seen any of the films of Tarkovsky, Ozu, Bela Tarr, John Cassavettes, Mizoguchi, Bunuel, Dreyer, and over fifty or more others who have earned the title of great artist. If Roger ebert were alive and saw this, he would give you a very intense and passionate lecture of why Film is a great art.

[Emil Miller]

I wouldn’t name Vertigo the greatest film either;

Neither would I and putting it ahead of Citizen Kane is simply silly. However, that's the current view of Sight and Sound.
In my view Vertigo shouldn't be on the list at all, it was a good and entertaining film but not worthy of being called a great one.
I have no idea what The Searchers is doing on the list either and I wouldn't include 2001 either. I have no quibble with the rest of the films which are all worthy of inclusion. I was not familiar with Murnau's Sunrise and have just watched it on YouTube. Although he made it in the USA with American actors, it has Germany stamped all over it and is one of the most remarkable films I have seen, with Murnau's hallmark expressionism creating kaleidoscopic effects through stunning camerawork that's unbelievable for 1927.


SIGHT AND SOUND'S TOP 10

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)

2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

4. La Regle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)

5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)

10. 8½ (Fellini, 1963)

[stlukesguild]

Film has done very badly because it is controlled by money men and ego-maniacs who think they can rewrite the work of great authors.

The move from baroque forms of music to classic (J.C Bach, Haydn, Mozart...) took decades. If film has taken over a hundred years and still hasn't become a really good art form then something is very wrong in the state of California.

The publishers of literature, art dealers, music publishers and theater owners/producers have been no less dominated by money men and ego maniacs. None of this has prevented the greatest artists from finding a way of producing great art.

Has film produced an artist equal to Michelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, etc...? This is open to debate... but quite honestly artists on this scale are rare in an art form... and rarely recognized as the Titans they are until the passage of some time.

[Darcy88]

Do you think that chinese culture is attractive for Europeans or Americans?

I haven't read much Chinese literature, but Laozi and Zhuangzi are in my top 5 favourite philosophers, and I've read most of the great Western ones. I was heavily into Zen buddhism a few years back and that system of thought largely originated in China.

[JBI]

I haven't read much Chinese literature, but Laozi and Zhuangzi are in my top 5 favourite philosophers, and I've read most of the great Western ones. I was heavily into Zen buddhism a few years back and that system of thought largely originated in China.
as an answer to that, I would say Chinese literature is right now incredibly unattractive to Chinese students, and has always had a weird place in Western culture. In France, for instance, Chinese philosophy has always had a great reception - the Francophone world has sort of absorbed the tradition, and researched it better than China itself. As for the English speaking world, Chinese literature has never been popular and never will. Classical Chinese really doesn't translate that well, and the art form is generally lost in the linguistic barriers of interpretation.

[Darcy88]

As for the English speaking world, Chinese literature has never been popular and never will. Classical Chinese really doesn't translate that well, and the art form is generally lost in the linguistic barriers of interpretation.

Except for the Tao te ching. That book is pretty popular.

[MorpheusSandman]

You must be on crack. Zhivago is divine. And Lean made other films which are also better than Vertigo or Rear Window: Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, The Bridge on the River Kwai.Except for Lawrence, I’ve never been overly thrilled with Lean’s epics. In some respects I prefer his smaller films, like the utterly charming Hobson’s Choice. I simply can’t agree about any of them being better than Vertigo or Rear Window… or any of Hitch’s 4-5 best films.


It can be, just like the core of painting can be color, or the core of music harmony, or the core of writing style, character, or plot.When I speak of “core of the art” I speak of the elements that the work simply can’t do without in order to exist. With film those two elements are undoubtedly mise-en-scene and editing. For music, I’d simply say the “core” is “organized sound,” since there is plenty of music without harmony. Character and plot is only needed in narrative fiction, and even then it can be de-emphasized in the extreme (I’m thinking of Finnegans Wake).


I had a group of friends over to watch Vertigo a few years back and it quickly devolved into us making fun of the film for one thing or another. Hitch’s plots are frequently silly, if not risible, but making fun of them for that would be the equivalent of making fun of Shakespeare’s plots for being equally silly, full of inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies; it’s missing the artistic genius for the vehicle for that genius, the depths for the surface. Vertigo is not unlike Hamlet in its ability to stand up to every kind of critical scrutiny. Formally, it’s flawless, from the usage of color to the choice of lenses to the editing to the music to the evolution of narrative perspective; but it’s also one of the most daring experiments in genre ever crafted. Ostensibly, it’s a mystery, but it’s a mystery whose answer is explicitly spelled out 2/3 through, and that revelation and the resulting shift in perspective is as ingenious as anything that’s ever been done in film. It’s the very embodiment of the idea of epistemology remodeling ontology, as from that moment on the camera and our perspective have a completely different perspective and relationship with the characters. The audience goes from sharing in Stewart’s mystic bewilderment to criticizing what we now recognize as a near psychotic obsession.

After that, what kind of film is it? It’s no longer a mystery; it becomes closer to a psychological character study, with Stewart trying to project his haunted unconsciousness onto a reality that will no longer cooperate. Plus, there’s the whole carefully composed mirroring structure, where we get echoed events in both halves with that change of perspective. You can even take a metafictional perspective (most of Hitch’s late masterpieces are, in some respect, allegorical for filmmaking and its viewing audience) in regards to how film remakes reality into a fantasy that audience’s gullibly buy into for the length of its runtime. I think Hitch was quite consciously aware of how manipulative the filmmaker/audience relationship was, with the filmmaker essentially playing the same role as Gavin. There’s the metaphoric quality of the vertigo itself, a psychological stalling on the brink of revelation. Hitch’s films are full of liminal characters being faced with physical, psychological, and social boundaries, and how/when they cross that boundary, and what’s on the other side, is one thing that gives his films their suspense, but also their philosophical depth and complexity.

If all you’ve done is ridicule the surface “story” of Vertigo then you haven’t really seen the film at all; I say the same thing to people that ridicule Marnie, Notorious, Spellbound, The Birds, and other Hitch films that tend to turn on some kind of superficial absurdity. I’d highly recommend Robin Wood’s analysis of the film in his pioneering book on Hitch called Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. His essay almost single-handedly ignited the reevaluation of that film, and has regularly been cited as one of the best essays ever written on any film. Spoto’s essay in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock is also superb; he devotes almost 40 pages to Vertigo, far more than any other film covered in the book. There are also three books on the film: one from BFI, one by Dan Aulier, and one edited by Katalin Makkai (“Philosophers on Film”). If you really doubt the film’s substance, Makkai’s book would remedy that; the others are more concerned with the factual account of the production.


For the best Hitchcock, I don't go Rear Window, North By Northwest, or Psycho either. I like Strangers on a Train and Rope, with those long tracking shots. Lifeboat was good too.You won’t get me to denigrate SoaT, Rope, or Lifeboat as I think they’re all superb, but SoaT and Lifeboat is more “Hitch as master entertainer” as opposed to “Hitch as master artist.” Rope, for all its surface philosophical discussion, has always seemed relatively shallow to me compared with his best. I also hated Hitch’s “compromise” of pushing the camera into the backs of characters in order to cut inside a black screen. What I don’t get about that is that there are several cuts within takes, so I don’t know why he was so adamant about hiding the “end-of-reel” cuts by the most annoyingly obvious of means.


You think Mizoguchi is more artsy than Kurosawa? Have you seen Dreams or Dodes'ka-den?I’ve seen every Kurosawa film; we simply meant different things by “artsy”. Dreams and Dodes’ka-den (and Ran and Kagemusha to a certain extent) are “artsy” in regards to Kurosawa’s interest in painting, so they all have an extremely vibrant, painterly use of color. Mizoguchi didn’t make many color films, but his Yokihi aka Princess Yang Kwei-fei proves he had a knack for it; it’s arguably as gorgeous as Kurosawa’s color films). However, what I meant by “artsy,” though, was in a cinematic context. No filmmaker ever cultivated a more complex mise-en-scene than Mizoguchi. His long-takes, especially in conjunction with the crane, multiple visual planes of action (foreground, mid-ground, background), geometric frames, extreme depth-of-focus, refusal to rely on close-ups etc. are pristine, and have been an enormous influence on all long-take filmmakers that came afterwards (another favorite of mine, Angelopoulos, cited Mizoguchi as THE influence on his decision to use extremely long takes). By comparison, Kurosawa was more traditional (certainly more western), modeling much of his cinematic style on Welles and Ford. Kurosawa is the more dynamic of the two, with his greater reliance on impactful editing and oblique angles. Kurosawa frames and cuts for drama, Mizoguchi frames and cuts for observation (it’s one reason many find Mizoguchi too cool and detached compared to Kurosawa’s drama/action and Ozu’s melodrama). While Kurosawa is more popular amongst viewers, Mizoguchi is probably more popular amongst academics, especially formalists.


And Tarkovsky is awesome. Watch Andrei Rublev if you haven't.I’ve also seen all of Tarkovsky’s; I do greatly admire Andrei Rublev, more than any of his other films, and love Stalker for its otherworldly atmosphere, but outside that I’ve been left disappointed by his other work. Solaris, IMO, simply doesn’t justify its runtime, and his late films just seem completely turgid and overwrought. His Mirror has always left me cold, despite seeing it three times (on the insistence of one of my best cinephile friends who claims Mirror as his favorite film ever). For the super artsy filmmakers I vastly prefer Hou Hsiao-hsien, Theo Angelopoulos, and Stan Brakhage.


He also meticulously story boarded the shots beforehand so he didn't need to hold his cinematographer's hand.True; for Hitch and a lot of the early filmmakers, storyboarding really WAS the creative process of filmmaking. The actual filming was more or less just routine.


But why handicap yourself like that? The odds of making a great film are better with great source materialI simply don’t agree; I’ve never noticed any correlation between the quality of the source and the quality of the film. How many adaptations have there been of great novels? How many have been turned into masterpieces? In fact, looking at most any significant “greatest films” list, it’s difficult to find any films that were adapted from upper echelon source material. Even outside of film, one can look at the crappy/middling/unknown sources Shakespeare adapted and turned into masterpieces. If anything, it seems like it’s easier for great artists to do more with sources for which there isn’t much there to start with; there’s more for their imagination to transform and elevate.


There are a few notable exceptions like The Passion of Joan of Arc, City Lights, or Metropolis but on average I think that film is much better post 1930s sound era. And with a few exceptions (Schindler's List, Raging Bull) films are better with color than in black and white. I think the best period for film is probably post 1960. We just disagree on everything regarding film!  I love silent cinema but, tragically, it ended right at the pinnacle of its artistry with filmmakers like Dreyer, Murnau, Eisenstein, Lang, Stroheim, Sternberg, and others all making their best films in the mid-to-late 20s. Personally, I think silent cinema gets closer to the core art of film than sound does, it pushes film closer to the abstraction of music. I simply disagree about color being better than black-and-white; I’ve always preferred B&W because of what can be done expressively through the play of light and shadow. So much of that is eliminated with color, and far too few directors pay attention to how to utilize a color palette as expressively as it can be, so color just becomes a distraction (for me). The number of directors adept at using color I can count on my fingers. I also tend to prefer pre-1960s cinema, especially the 50s, which had my three favorite filmmakers (Hitch, Bergman, and Kurosawa) at the height of their powers.

[JBI]

Except for the Tao te ching. That book is pretty popular.

No, its translation is. The flavor of the original is different (coming from someone who has more than half of it memorized).

We like to think of it in different terms, mostly based on a misreading of Wang Bi's Jin Dynasty commentary. But even in the early ages, it was translated as a sort of Christian propaganda, and even today there are countless translation issues, mostly focusing on the inputting of other traditions, and values into a rather open text. That's why there are so many Buddhist translations of the work, when the book predates Chinese Buddhism by hundreds of years.

[MorpheusSandman]

My own tastes in film criticism lead me to admire Pauline Kael, who famously battled with Sarris through the years. Perhaps, however, that’s because I like her literary style more than Sarris’s, not because I think her judgments superior. Kael is probably the most literary and eloquent film critic ever, but I’ve never found her especially insightful or analytical; she frequently seems to write reviews as if she was reconstructing a screenplay in lovely prose. She definitely seemed to be in the “movies as filmed theater/literature” mode of criticism, which is why I tend to prefer Bordwell (more of an academic than critic, really), Rosenbaum, Hoberman, and Agee.


I recently attended a film festival where they showed “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (great movie, by the way), along with a lecture by Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote the screenplay. Arriaga has since gone on to direct his own movies, but I doubt he’d agree that Tommy Lee Jones (in his directorial debut) was more the author of “Three Burials” than he was.Well, a lot of screenwriters resent their marginalization in auteur theory, but I don’t think it can be helped since most of the influential film critics are more interested in the visual/directorial aspect as opposed to the literary aspect. As you said, the whole thing turns on theater being more literary and film being more visual, and as long as there is that visual element to film I don’t think writers will get their due. Personally, I think the primary strength of Wilder’s, Sturges’, and the Coen’s cinema is in their writing as opposed to direction.

[MorpheusSandman]

Has film produced an artist equal to Michelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, etc...? This is open to debate... but quite honestly artists on this scale are rare in an art form... and rarely recognized as the Titans they are until the passage of some time.Time will indeed tell, but Robin Wood noted in his book that Hitch's arch from a popular entertainer suddenly proclaimed as a great artist by future critics and filmmakers is extremely similar to Shakespeare's reputation's ascendancy.

[The Atheist]

I have to agree with JBI here, Atheist. China was as influential in Asia as Rome was in Europe.

Actually, if you check what I wrote, I agreed with that myself.

Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, were all writing, and dressing in the Chinese fashion until about a thousand years ago. And all the places calling themselves China after the earlier dynasties are certainly influenced by ancient Chinese empires. Asian culture is basically dominated by China in the East, India in the West, and both influenced each other greatly. If you look at the painting styles of India or the middle east you can see similar treatment of clouds and rocks, the influence of Chinese landscape painting.

I'll just repeat that I'm neither denying Chinese influence or the extent of it, but I won't sit idly by and let yet a Sinophile give out false information as factual.

As has been shown by the continued refusal to give evidence for the claims, I'll ignore them now.

[The Atheist]

Has film produced an artist equal to Michelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, etc...?

Stanley Kubrick. He's no Mozart, Beethoven or Rembrandt, but I'd happily put him up against Bach.

[MorpheusSandman]

Stanley Kubrick. Outside of 2001:ASO, Lyndon, and Strangelove, I find Kubrick a bit overrated, though I certainly couldn't deny his supreme level of artistry. 2001 alone proves that film is capable of the same artistic heights as the best of any other artistic medium. I just wish he'd made more films, because the one thing I miss with Kubrick that is there in spades with more prolific great directors is a depth and richness to his oeuvre. Once you've exhausted, say, the 4-5 best Hitch, Kurosawa, Bergman, Renoir, etc. films, there's still a lot of great (if lesser) films left to see from them; you can't really say that about Kubrick. I get his striving for perfectionism, but I just don't think he achieved it every time out, and something like EWS, whatever its qualities, simply wasn't worth the 12 year wait.

[Aylinn]

Since there is focus on music and movies, etc. in this thread and since I have been a fan of animation for ten years, I thought I may put in my tuppence worth. With animation it’s quite easy. Japan is the leader here. It makes more animated films, series, etc. than any other country and it has influenced the way animation is done in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Obviously, animation cannot compete with other forms of art that have existed longer, but there are talented people in this industry.

[The Atheist]

Outside of 2001:ASO, Lyndon, and Strangelove, I find Kubrick a bit overrated, though I certainly couldn't deny his supreme level of artistry. 2001 alone proves that film is capable of the same artistic heights as the best of any other artistic medium. I just wish he'd made more films, because the one thing I miss with Kubrick that is there in spades with more prolific great directors is a depth and richness to his oeuvre.

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.

I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.

[MorpheusSandman]

Since there is focus on music and movies, etc. in this thread and since I have been a fan of animation for ten years, I thought I may put in my tuppence worth. With animation it’s quite easy. Japan is the leader here. It makes more animated films, series, etc. than any other country and it has influenced the way animation is done in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Obviously, animation cannot compete with other forms of art that have existed longer, but there are talented people in this industry.Good call on animation and Japan, Aylinn. I'm a huge fan of anime myself and frequently feel it doesn't get the serious critical attention it deserves. I'm on record as stating that Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the finest works of art of the 20th century, but there are also other masterpieces like Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, and Ueda/ABe's Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze (the three taken together form an almost Divine Comedy trilogy), Ikuhara's Utena, and Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop; and films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, et al. all deserve their place amongst the best films ever made.

[MorpheusSandman]

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.I think it had more to do with him being a perfectionist that couldn't make a film unless he had every detail planned out to the most minute. There's the now-infamous story about his lifelong dream project Napoleon that he kept a file cabinet documenting every day of Napoleon's life.


I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.I agree that The Shining film is far superior to its source material, but I still feel it's only, at best, a minor masterpiece. ACO has its strong-points, but I feel it's a bit overlong and, as one critic said, a case of production design gone berserk. Ebert also gave an eloquent, negative review of the film that echoes many of my thoughts (though I liked it more than he did).

[mortalterror]

Except for Lawrence, I’ve never been overly thrilled with Lean’s epics. In some respects I prefer his smaller films, like the utterly charming Hobson’s Choice. I simply can’t agree about any of them being better than Vertigo or Rear Window… or any of Hitch’s 4-5 best films.
I see where you are coming from. I think there are British people who really enjoy his quieter more human films like Brief Encounter, the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.


Hitch’s plots are frequently silly, if not risible, but making fun of them for that would be the equivalent of making fun of Shakespeare’s plots for being equally silly, full of inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies; it’s missing the artistic genius for the vehicle for that genius, the depths for the surface. Vertigo is not unlike Hamlet in its ability to stand up to every kind of critical scrutiny. Formally, it’s flawless, from the usage of color to the choice of lenses to the editing to the music to the evolution of narrative perspective; but it’s also one of the most daring experiments in genre ever crafted. Ostensibly, it’s a mystery, but it’s a mystery whose answer is explicitly spelled out 2/3 through, and that revelation and the resulting shift in perspective is as ingenious as anything that’s ever been done in film. It’s the very embodiment of the idea of epistemology remodeling ontology, as from that moment on the camera and our perspective have a completely different perspective and relationship with the characters. The audience goes from sharing in Stewart’s mystic bewilderment to criticizing what we now recognize as a near psychotic obsession.
Flawless? You think that Vertigo is flawless? I don't know about that. I see room for improvement all over the place in that film. There were a lot of things that Hitchcock didn't do as well as it can be done.

Also, of course, I mock Shakespeare's plots where they warrant it. Hamlet is full of junk he should have cut or changed. For instance, there's the part where he leaves the country but comes back in the next scene. He's been miraculously saved by benign pirates and returned to his doorstep without a scratch on him. Pirates? Really, pirates? That's the best he could do? And then we don't ever see them. Why not ninjas? And then that play within a play, I could never stand. "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" Yeah, this is way better than fingerprints. I think I saw them do this on The First 48.


After that, what kind of film is it? It’s no longer a mystery; it becomes closer to a psychological character study, with Stewart trying to project his haunted unconsciousness onto a reality that will no longer cooperate. Plus, there’s the whole carefully composed mirroring structure, where we get echoed events in both halves with that change of perspective. You can even take a metafictional perspective (most of Hitch’s late masterpieces are, in some respect, allegorical for filmmaking and its viewing audience) in regards to how film remakes reality into a fantasy that audience’s gullibly buy into for the length of its runtime. I think Hitch was quite consciously aware of how manipulative the filmmaker/audience relationship was, with the filmmaker essentially playing the same role as Gavin. There’s the metaphoric quality of the vertigo itself, a psychological stalling on the brink of revelation. Hitch’s films are full of liminal characters being faced with physical, psychological, and social boundaries, and how/when they cross that boundary, and what’s on the other side, is one thing that gives his films their suspense, but also their philosophical depth and complexity.
It didn't seem deep or complex to me. It seemed stupid.


If all you’ve done is ridicule the surface “story” of Vertigo then you haven’t really seen the film at all; I say the same thing to people that ridicule Marnie, Notorious, Spellbound, The Birds, and other Hitch films that tend to turn on some kind of superficial absurdity. I’d highly recommend Robin Wood’s analysis of the film in his pioneering book on Hitch called Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. His essay almost single-handedly ignited the reevaluation of that film, and has regularly been cited as one of the best essays ever written on any film. Spoto’s essay in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock is also superb; he devotes almost 40 pages to Vertigo, far more than any other film covered in the book. There are also three books on the film: one from BFI, one by Dan Aulier, and one edited by Katalin Makkai (“Philosophers on Film”). If you really doubt the film’s substance, Makkai’s book would remedy that; the others are more concerned with the factual account of the production.
Yeah, I mostly hate Hitchcock films. Like that spot in Rebecca where the villain of the piece is trying to convince the girl to jump off the building to her death. "C'mon jump! Jump!" and the poor little doe is just shaking and maybe about to. I couldn't help but be sickened thinking, "This is your villain, someone who suggests to the heroine that she kill herself. Lady, if you want someone dead, you best push them off yourself, 'cause this ain't getting it done. How is she even afraid of this old bat? She could crush her orbital socket with one punch!"

Or how about 'The Birds' where they whole up in that bar and just happen to have a world class scholar on ornithology with them? And that drunk in the corner keeps saying "It's the end of the world." Then a seagull cuts a man's jugular, he falls down dead and the gas he's pumping hits a cigarette and explodes. Hitchcock's films are as simplistic and cheezy as Frank Capra's. That said, I really liked 'The Trouble with Harry'. I got a kick out of how everyone thought they'd killed him and kept trying to cover their tracks. It had that great black humor that Arsenic and Old Lace or Weekend at Bernies had.


I’ve seen every Kurosawa film; we simply meant different things by “artsy”. Dreams and Dodes’ka-den (and Ran and Kagemusha to a certain extent) are “artsy” in regards to Kurosawa’s interest in painting, so they all have an extremely vibrant, painterly use of color. Mizoguchi didn’t make many color films, but his Yokihi aka Princess Yang Kwei-fei proves he had a knack for it; it’s arguably as gorgeous as Kurosawa’s color films). However, what I meant by “artsy,” though, was in a cinematic context. No filmmaker ever cultivated a more complex mise-en-scene than Mizoguchi. His long-takes, especially in conjunction with the crane, multiple visual planes of action (foreground, mid-ground, background), geometric frames, extreme depth-of-focus, refusal to rely on close-ups etc. are pristine, and have been an enormous influence on all long-take filmmakers that came afterwards (another favorite of mine, Angelopoulos, cited Mizoguchi as THE influence on his decision to use extremely long takes). By comparison, Kurosawa was more traditional (certainly more western), modeling much of his cinematic style on Welles and Ford. Kurosawa is the more dynamic of the two, with his greater reliance on impactful editing and oblique angles. Kurosawa frames and cuts for drama, Mizoguchi frames and cuts for observation (it’s one reason many find Mizoguchi too cool and detached compared to Kurosawa’s drama/action and Ozu’s melodrama). While Kurosawa is more popular amongst viewers, Mizoguchi is probably more popular amongst academics, especially formalists.
I can agree with that.


I’ve also seen all of Tarkovsky’s; I do greatly admire Andrei Rublev, more than any of his other films, and love Stalker for its otherworldly atmosphere, but outside that I’ve been left disappointed by his other work. Solaris, IMO, simply doesn’t justify its runtime, and his late films just seem completely turgid and overwrought. His Mirror has always left me cold, despite seeing it three times (on the insistence of one of my best cinephile friends who claims Mirror as his favorite film ever). For the super artsy filmmakers I vastly prefer Hou Hsiao-hsien, Theo Angelopoulos, and Stan Brakhage.
Yeah, Solaris does seem unnecessarily long at times, but it's just so rich visually. When I first saw a clip of Mirror on youtube it was that long tracking shot through the house, then you see like the fire on the house behind them, and I thought that was just beautiful. That same scene didn't have that effect when I watched it in the actual film. Maybe, I was a bit weary by all the jumping around in time and perspective, or confused by how odd the characters acted. There's a lot to like about that film, but you are right it's no Andrei Rublev.


I simply don’t agree; I’ve never noticed any correlation between the quality of the source and the quality of the film. How many adaptations have there been of great novels? How many have been turned into masterpieces? In fact, looking at most any significant “greatest films” list, it’s difficult to find any films that were adapted from upper echelon source material.
Cloud Atlas, No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Battle Royale, The Thin Red Line, Hamlet, Trainspotting, Ghost in the Shell, To Live, Glengarry Glen Ross, Henry V, Dangerous Liasons, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, Solaris, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Marat/Sade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Closely Watched Trains, Doctor Zhivago, Zorba the Greek, The Leopard, Inherit the Wind, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Julius Caesar, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rashomon, All the King's Men, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, All Quiet on the Western Front.


Even outside of film, one can look at the crappy/middling/unknown sources Shakespeare adapted and turned into masterpieces.
His Greek and Roman plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Hamlet is based on The Oresteia of Aeschylus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona come from Boccaccio's Decameron, Troilus and Cressida is taken from Chaucer's epic poem, Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, The Comedy of Errors is a combination of two plays by Plautus.


If anything, it seems like it’s easier for great artists to do more with sources for which there isn’t much there to start with; there’s more for their imagination to transform and elevate.
The story of the House of Atreus begun by Homer has been a touchstone of playwrights for over two thousand years. You could read the whole story, in chronological order through six tragedies and six great authors if you wanted: Thyestes by Seneca, Iphigenia by Racine, Agammemon by Aeschylus, Elektra by Sophocles, Orestes by Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris by Goethe. How about the Oedipus cycle just starting with Sophocles, then you get The Thebaid by Statius, and the Thebaid by Racine. Jean Anouilh is known in the twentieth century for his Antigone. Brecht produced an Antigone. Eugene O'Neill wrote a modern adaptation of Aeschylus called Mourning Becomes Electra. How many crucifixions and passions are there in art?


We just disagree on everything regarding film! 
Yes, but how dull it would be to agree on everything?

I love silent cinema but, tragically, it ended right at the pinnacle of its artistry with filmmakers like Dreyer, Murnau, Eisenstein, Lang, Stroheim, Sternberg, and others all making their best films in the mid-to-late 20s. Personally, I think silent cinema gets closer to the core art of film than sound does, it pushes film closer to the abstraction of music. I simply disagree about color being better than black-and-white; I’ve always preferred B&W because of what can be done expressively through the play of light and shadow. So much of that is eliminated with color, and far too few directors pay attention to how to utilize a color palette as expressively as it can be, so color just becomes a distraction (for me). The number of directors adept at using color I can count on my fingers. I also tend to prefer pre-1960s cinema, especially the 50s, which had my three favorite filmmakers (Hitch, Bergman, and Kurosawa) at the height of their powers.
Sure, the number of directors adept at using color can be counted on one's fingers, but so can the number who can play with light and shadow the way that black and white is intended. They are both rare skills, and if the majority of film makers can't accomplish those feats of excellence then at least they can give us some semblance of reality and color. The masters can do what they want, but your average film is better off for the color and sound. And let's be honest, most of the films we watch aren't masterful. We must wade through twenty middling films to find one great one and an average film without sound or color is unbearable.

The best year in film history is 1957. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Paths of Glory, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Bridge on the River Kwai, 12 Angry Men, Witness For the Prosecution, Kanal. You've got Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Fellini, Lean, Lumet, and Wilder all producing gems. More than half of those, like you say, are in black and white; but I think all of these men went on to show us they could handle color just as well.

[Ecurb]

Yes, he was less-prolific than many directors, but I think that was more to do with only wanting to do films that turned him on.

I can understand you missing out The Shining*, but A Clockwork Orange stands out as a piece of work that looks as fresh today as it did 40 years ago and still retains its bite.

*Actually a hugely under-rated film, mostly because it's based on a Stephen King novel, I think. The film is different from, and so much better than the source material.

Since we were just discussing the Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris debates, I thought I'd mention that Kael despised Kubrick. Her evisceration of "A Clockwork Orange" shows Kael at her best: opinionated, moralizing, literate, and knowledgable. She had generally read the novels on which movies were based, and was often critical of the changes (as in the case in her review of "Clockwork Orange"). Also, Kael supports the argument I made earlier in another thread (with regard to Tolstoy) that we need not agree with the judgment of a critic to think he or she writes great critiques.

Here's a link: http://visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html

Kael loved to battle what she considered overly "high-brow" movie critics (I remember her trashing Dwight McDonald's rave about "Hiroshima Mon Amour"). (By the way, Kubrick isn't my favorite director, but I like many of his movies, including "The Shining".)

Speaking of highbrow movies, I saw Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" last night. I'm a big Malick fan (I think "Days of Heaven" is a great movie), but "To the Wonder" is not his best. It skips about in time, outlining a relationship between Ben Afleck and a young beauty whose name I didn't catch. The beauty enjoys gamboling, first in France, then in the American Southwest. Raising her arms and spinning appears to be her favoirite pasttime, although she occasionally indulges the audience with some sexy, feline crawling.

Her relationship with Affleck involves very little talking -- it's mainly nuzzling and gamboling. Javier Bardim plays a priest, whose bored, monotone sermons are funny, at first, because they are the precise opposite of "fire-breathing". Nonetheless, the movie grabs the viewer visually (like all Malick movies). The scenes aroung Mt. St. Michael in France are stunning. When the couple moves to a treeless, drab sub division; when the priest visits parishoners in the slums; when the Polish beauty has an affair at a sordid Econolodge; Malick's photographs of these seemingly ugly places transform them into gorgeous still lifes. The priest, fruitlessly seeking God, continues with his bored monotones: "You are everywhere, God, but I cannot see you. You are below me and above me, to my left and to my right....." Once you actually start listening to his words, the seemingly disconnected still lifes begin to make sense. Yes, unpainted wooden houses with hulking wrecks of cars strewn in the front yard are beautiful. Yes, mud filled ditches surrounding oil wells are beautiful. Yes, divinity is above and below, left and right.

When I walked out of the theater into a cloudy Eugene evening, there was beauty everywhere I looked. Any movie that can help one see that can't be all bad.

[Emil Miller]

I see where you are coming from. I think there are British people who really enjoy his quieter more human films like Brief Encounter, the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.


Including myself. I consider Lean's Brief Encounter as the best British film and if you haven't seen it you can't credibly discuss his work as it's the benchmark by which everything else he directed is usually measured. It's worth recalling that it had great success in Japan and many Japanese came to England to visit the railway station which is its main setting. Noel Coward, the film's screen writer said that he thought it was quite a good little film, which was a good example of English understatement. One can see the similarities in Tokyo Story which is also heartbreakingly sad and, for my money, the best Japanese film I have seen despite great work by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

[JBI]

Actually, if you check what I wrote, I agreed with that myself.


I'll just repeat that I'm neither denying Chinese influence or the extent of it, but I won't sit idly by and let yet a Sinophile give out false information as factual.

As has been shown by the continued refusal to give evidence for the claims, I'll ignore them now.
Give me the claim I'll give the reference book. For technology you can skip right ahead and check the works of Needham, particularly the Cambridge history of Chinese Technology.

For Economic history there is a lengthy history by a a scholar named Nicolo Di Cosimo published by E J Brill.

For literary discussions of transmission there are numerous books and articles.

As for Chinese language sources you cannot expect me to pretend to your familiarity with them, especially since you know nothing about the subject let alone the language itself.

Arguing with you is arguing with an ignorant child who wants proof in the absolutist sense. Did I ask you for proof of Britain. Why apply the double standard?

Seriously you're infuriating in your deliberate polemical ignorance and accuse me of being a sinophile as if to not be a Mother Country Colonial Worshiper is dismissed as ridiculous. Get over yourself. I have no invested interest in proving china the greatest, as I noted I dismissed such a notion on page 1.

[OrphanPip]

Good call on animation and Japan, Aylinn. I'm a huge fan of anime myself and frequently feel it doesn't get the serious critical attention it deserves. I'm on record as stating that Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the finest works of art of the 20th century, but there are also other masterpieces like Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, and Ueda/ABe's Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei, and Texhnolyze (the three taken together form an almost Divine Comedy trilogy), Ikuhara's Utena, and Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop; and films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, et al. all deserve their place amongst the best films ever made.

Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history. I'm even fond of non mainstream American animators like Ralph Bakshi (though lord knows he's got his major flaws).

Walt Disney stands at the centre of film animation in a way no other figure can. Disney's early stuff is pretty much responsible for inspiring the careers of Osamu Tezuka in Japan and Fydor Khitruk in the Soviet Union. Tezuka is on record citing Disney for the large expressive eyes characteristic of much of the Japanese animation that followed him.

I'm also ambivalent to aspects of Japanese animation which have popularized artistic styles from French and Belgian comics, and which many people assume to be of exclusively Japanese origin. The history of animation, as much as that of film, is one of complex international influences.

[Darcy88]

No, its translation is. The flavor of the original is different (coming from someone who has more than half of it memorized).

We like to think of it in different terms, mostly based on a misreading of Wang Bi's Jin Dynasty commentary. But even in the early ages, it was translated as a sort of Christian propaganda, and even today there are countless translation issues, mostly focusing on the inputting of other traditions, and values into a rather open text. That's why there are so many Buddhist translations of the work, when the book predates Chinese Buddhism by hundreds of years.

But there must be translations which are better than others. Right now I have that done by Jonathan Star as well as this one which has multiple translators http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Text-Only/dp/0679724346/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369428340&sr=1-3&keywords=tao+te+ching+star

I read a couple other translations year ago. I think the reason there are what you call "Buddhist translations" of the work is the fact that the Tao te ching was a major influence on Zen Buddhism.

[islandclimber]

Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history. I'm even fond of non mainstream American animators like Ralph Bakshi (though lord knows he's got his major flaws).

Walt Disney stands at the centre of film animation in a way no other figure can. Disney's early stuff is pretty much responsible for inspiring the careers of Osamu Tezuka in Japan and Fydor Khitruk in the Soviet Union. Tezuka is on record citing Disney for the large expressive eyes characteristic of much of the Japanese animation that followed him.

I'm also ambivalent to aspects of Japanese animation which have popularized artistic styles from French and Belgian comics, and which many people assume to be of exclusively Japanese origin. The history of animation, as much as that of film, is one of complex international influences.

Svankmajer and Norstein are two of my favourites. Popescu-Gopo might be my favourite animator/director though.Petrov and Dinov were pretty amazing too. Jankovics. So many talented Eastern Europeans. Outside of a few select directors (Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Eisenstein, Wajda), Eastern European film is far too ignored. Even a director like Bela Tarr is relatively unknown in North America. And then you have Wojciech J. Has, and his rarely seen masterpieces Saragossa Manuscript and Hourglass Sanatorium. Kira Muratova from Russia. It's almost impossible to find her films. I saw Melody for A Street Organ in 2009 at TIFF. Just a brilliant film. The list goes on though. Mitulescu. Mungiu. Porumboiu. Djulgerov. Heskiya. Korabov. Georgescu. Meszaros. Makk. Lanthimos. Tsangari. Zafranovic. Pavlovic. Etc. Etc.

[MorpheusSandman]

...the same way that Kurosawa's non-samurai films like Ikiru or High and Low are more popular in Japan than abroad.Ikiru is pretty damn popular; it's usually mentioned with Rashoman and Seven Samurai as being Kurosawa's best (I place it second). High and Low is certainly underrated, though, along with Kagemusha; however, I see H&L show up on more lists of "underrated films" than any other film, probably. It has a strong following, but, for whatever reason, has never moved to the forefront of Kurosawa's oeuvre.


Flawless? You think that Vertigo is flawless? I don't know about that. I see room for improvement all over the place in that film. There were a lot of things that Hitchcock didn't do as well as it can be done.Well, go ahead and name them--and I'm talking formally, here. I know you don't like it from a writing perspective, but I really don't care much about that.


Also, of course, I mock Shakespeare's plots where they warrant it. Hamlet is full of junk he should have cut or changed. For instance, there's the part where he leaves the country but comes back in the next scene. He's been miraculously saved by benign pirates and returned to his doorstep without a scratch on him. Pirates? Really, pirates? That's the best he could do? And then we don't ever see them. Why not ninjas? And then that play within a play, I could never stand. "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king!" Yeah, this is way better than fingerprints. I think I saw them do this on The First 48.I agree about the leaving the country bit; I also think Mozart was right that the ghost encounter goes into a state of entropy very quickly and needed editing. The play within a play, though, I disagree with; it's crucial as the turning point of the play, the point where Hamlet realizes that, with reality being so mutable, unreliable, a mere matter of perspective, that fiction is actually better at capturing the truth of things. "By indirections we find directions out," indeed.


It didn't seem deep or complex to me. It seemed stupid.Yeah, but, you're wrong. :p Seriously, read some of those essays; probably no film has had more brighter critical minds analyzing it, and it's not because it's stupid.


Like that spot in Rebecca where the villain of the piece is trying to convince the girl to jump off the building to her death. "C'mon jump! Jump!" and the poor little doe is just shaking and maybe about to. I couldn't help but be sickened thinking, "This is your villain, someone who suggests to the heroine that she kill herself. Lady, if you want someone dead, you best push them off yourself, 'cause this ain't getting it done. How is she even afraid of this old bat? She could crush her orbital socket with one punch!"Rebecca was as much Selznick's film as Hitch's; certainly much of it is rather outside of Hitch's comfort zone of perversities and obsessions. I think his attempt at turning Danvers into a murderous lesbian was hit attempt at injecting something darker into the film, but it still plays like an awkward mix of Hitch's oddities and Selznick's mainstream, crowd-pleasing sensibilities. I don't think Danvers is meant to be a villain, per say, she was just someone obsessed with her dead mistress. She's not the murdering type at all. Of course Fontaine is a weakling, but she's characterized as that from the beginning.


Hitchcock's films are as simplistic and cheezy as Frank Capra's.No. You couldn't be more wrong if you said the earth is flat. Seriously, stop looking at the silly superficialities of the stories; otherwise, you're not really watching the films, you're just playing Mystery Science Theater 3K. Logicality in stories is not what makes a great work of art, like, at all. There's an ornithographer in The Birds because Hitch needed an "expert" to ridicule and put on the same level as drunkards and everyone else. It's meant to parallel the audience and critics interpreting the film itself.


Cloud Atlas, No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Battle Royale, The Thin Red Line, Hamlet, Trainspoting, Ghost in the Shell, To Live, Glengarry Glen Ross, Henry V, Dangerous Liasons, Amadeus, The Right Stuff, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, Solaris, A Clockwork Orange, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Lion in Winter, Marat/Sade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Closely Watched Trains, Doctor Zhivago, Zorba the Greek, The Leopard, Inherit the Wind, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Julius Caesar, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rashomon, All the King's Men, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, All Quiet on the Western Front.I wasn't asking for a list, since I could provide an even longer one of bad/mediocre film adaptations of great novels. It should also be said that several of these films are not masterpieces, nor are their source material. I thought Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff (film) were awful, and you didn't even bother to list which Henry V/Hamlet you're referring to (and you really don't want to get in to figuring how many Shakespeare adaptations have made great films; the answer is not many at all, and even the best tend to only be good, but hardly great). The Godfather novel is mediocre, at best, as was The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, and Gone with the Wind.


His Greek and Roman plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Hamlet is based on The Oresteia of Aeschylus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona come from Boccaccio's Decameron, Troilus and Cressida is taken from Chaucer's epic poem, Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, The Comedy of Errors is a combination of two plays by Plautus.You're fond of listing exceptions; I didn't claim every Shakespeare adaptation came from crappy sources, I said many of them did. Besides that, what makes any of them great has absolutely nothing to do with what the source is to begin with; it has to do with what Shakespeare did with them. Othello, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, R&J, et al. certainly have dubious sources. I don't know where you get the Hamlet/Oresteia connection; I've never heard that, nor do I see many connections between them. Most modern scholars believe there was an ur-Hamlet text probably by Thomas Kyd.


The story of the House of Atreus begun by Homer has been a touchstone of playwrights for over two thousand years.I don't get your point; there are some classic stories that artists continue to draw inspiration from? I never denied that, but a lot of these adaptations tend to have very different takes on the matter than their predecessors. What makes any adaptation great has nothing to do with the source and everything to do with what the artist does with it. If a terrible writer were to take up the Atreus or Oedipus myth the result would in all likelihood be a terrible novel/play/poem. I don't see what's controversial about that; you listing great authors that have tackled the same source is hardly proof that a great source is important, since you're conveniently leaving out all of the adaptations that have been forgotten because of how bad/mediocre they were.


Sure, the number of directors adept at using color can be counted on one's fingers, but so can the number who can play with light and shadow the way that black and white is intended.They are both rare skills, and if the majority of film makers can't accomplish those feats of excellence then at least they can give us some semblance of reality and color. The masters can do what they want, but your average film is better off for the color and sound.Honestly, I do think there are more masters of B&W than color, perhaps because many of the early great directors had a background in art and they tended to pay more attention to how to expressively use the visual medium they were working in. By the time color came out, most young filmmakers came to film through film as opposed to the other visual arts. It's also more difficult to manage color since there's simply more to work with. What you say about a "semblance of reality and color" means nothing to me (perhaps you've noticed that in my lack of concern that Hitch's plots are so silly); I find bad/bland use of color far more distracting than bland use of black & white. I simply prefer the abstraction of B&W that, even when it's rather bland, it has a certain stripped down, focused quality that doesn't get in the way of what's going on. Plus, I often say that even if we see the world in color we experience it in black & white.

[MorpheusSandman]

Since we were just discussing the Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris debates, I thought I'd mention that Kael despised Kubrick… Also, Kael supports the argument I made earlier in another thread (with regard to Tolstoy) that we need not agree with the judgment of a critic to think he or she writes great critiques. I often use Kael as THE example of a critic when, even when their judgment is off, I still admire their ability to express their opinion intelligently and eloquently, so I very much agree with you and Tolstoy on that. In fact, I often cite her review of 2001:ASO as the antidote for all of the terrible negative reviews the film receives; she may be wrong, but at least she didn’t turn into a blathering idiot when expressing that wrongness.


Speaking of highbrow movies, I saw Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" last night. I'm a big Malick fan (I think "Days of Heaven" is a great movie), but "To the Wonder" is not his best. Shame to hear that; I quite like Malick too, and both DoH and TTRL are amongst the 10 most gorgeous films ever made, but I feel like he’s been going downhill since then. The New World was just dull, Tree of Life was too pretentious for its own good (I tend not to mind such ambition, but I think you could feel Malick striving towards masterpiece status too much there)… I’ll be seeing TTW soon.

When I walked out of the theater into a cloudy Eugene evening, there was beauty everywhere I looked. Any movie that can help one see that can't be all bad.[/QUOTE]


Including myself. I consider Lean's Brief Encounter as the best British film… One can see the similarities in Tokyo Story which is also heartbreakingly sad and, for my money, the best Japanese film I have seen despite great work by Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.Tokyo Story’s source is actually Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, a sublime film in its own right (Orson Welles said of it: “My God, that’s the saddest movie ever made; it would make a stone cry!”). The only major difference is that Make Way doesn’t end with a death. FWIW, I don’t even think Tokyo Story is Ozu’s best; I’ve always thought Late Spring was better. It has the same emotional punch, but is much subtler. Ozu once said that Tokyo Story was so popular because it was the most melodramatic film he ever made, and there is some truth to that. He also made a lot of films that are nearly as good (The Only Son, There Was a Father, An Autumn Afternoon, Floating Weeds, etc.).


Japan's animation style is Western influenced as well though. Eastern European animation is far more ignored than Japanese, though Jiri Trnka, Yuri Norstein and Jan Svankmajer are all fantastic. In general, Japanese animation is often overrated because of the attention it receives as a popular medium, along with Disney whose technical innovations are without par at many points in history.Oh, no doubt that Japan’s animation is Western influenced, but so is their filmmaking; I think a certain amount of cross-influence is inevitable in this day and age. I do agree about European animation being unfairly ignored, and outside the more experimental animators like Svankmajer (whom I love), there’s also great, more mainstream films like Persepolis, The Triplets of Belleville, and Waltz with Bashir (the last one not European, though). I also love The Quay Brothers, whom are kind of a gothic version of Svankmajer. Their In Absentia is my favorite short film (though there’s not much animation in it). As for Japanese animation being overrated, I think its best work stands with the greatest art produced in the century; the bad part is that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of it is merely popular crap that’s no different than your average Saturday Morning Cartoons.


Even a director like Bela Tarr is relatively unknown in North America.Tarr’s reputation has grown in leaps and bounds in the past several years after getting released on DVD. Satantango is now within the Top 100 on TSP’s 1000 Greatest Films list. I do think he’s extraordinary, though. I do hope The Turin Horse isn’t really his last film.

[islandclimber]

Tarr’s reputation has grown in leaps and bounds in the past several years after getting released on DVD. Satantango is now within the Top 100 on TSP’s 1000 Greatest Films list. I do think he’s extraordinary, though. I do hope The Turin Horse isn’t really his last film.

You are right. It has grown by leaps and bounds, but it is still severely lacking for how incredible his body of work really is, in my opinion. I really hope The Turin Horse isn't his last film either. I'd really love to see Krasznahorkai's "War and War" made into a film. And Tarr is the only man for the job. Brilliant novel. Imagine Bela Tarr completing a "Cloud Atlas" type project... But from an even better book.

Speaking of film adaptations of books. Tarr's adaptations of Krasznahorkai's "Melancholy of Resistance" (Werckmeister Harmonies) and "Satantango" are pretty incredible. Tarkovsky's adaptation of the Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" (Stalker) also. Wojciech Jerzy Has did a couple brilliant adaptations as well... "The Saragossa Manuscript" based on the Jan Potocki novel, and "The Hourglass Sanatorium" based on the Bruno Schulz stories. The Yuri Kara version of "Master and Margarita" is quite good as well.

I do agree with you though, that the vast majority of adaptations are quite terrible. It makes one wonder why they keep adapting the same works over and over, poorer than the previous attempt. Oh well.

[mortalterror]

Well, go ahead and name them--and I'm talking formally, here. I know you don't like it from a writing perspective, but I really don't care much about that.
I'd have to re-watch a film I really don't care for to do that, but I'm willing to concede that the film has good technical points since you concede that it's got bad writing.


Yeah, but, you're wrong. :p Seriously, read some of those essays; probably no film has had more brighter critical minds analyzing it, and it's not because it's stupid.
I've seen some very bright people write some very witty things that were entirely off the mark. That's one of the flaws of intelligent people, they are very good at constructing arguments full of sophistries and lying to themselves, convincing others even when they are wrong. Critics often see things were nothing exists and read into texts or films some grandiose meaning where nothing was intended. Sometimes they get a hold of some bad ideology or some fashionable idea in academia and apply it in their judgements. Personally, I've never seen the wonder in metafiction, or marxism, or any of the isms and philosophies that people frequently apply to these sorts of things and get so excited by. I like traditional aesthetics, the kind that Aristotle, Horace, or Longinus would talk about.

I don't think I've ever had my mind changed by reading an essay. I've read reams and reams about Joyce's Ulysses and I still hate it like poison.


No. You couldn't be more wrong if you said the earth is flat. Seriously, stop looking at the silly superficialities of the stories; otherwise, you're not really watching the films, you're just playing Mystery Science Theater 3K.
I like MST3K.


Logicality in stories is not what makes a great work of art, like, at all. There's an ornithographer in The Birds because Hitch needed an "expert" to ridicule and put on the same level as drunkards and everyone else. It's meant to parallel the audience and critics interpreting the film itself.
That seems a little far fetched to me. It feels like you're reaching in order to justify all the flaws of the film and turn them into positives. I see a very simple work of art being championed by some very creative people.


I wasn't asking for a list, since I could provide an even longer one of bad/mediocre film adaptations of great novels. It should also be said that several of these films are not masterpieces, nor are their source material. I thought Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff (film) were awful, and you didn't even bother to list which Henry V/Hamlet you're referring to (and you really don't want to get in to figuring how many Shakespeare adaptations have made great films; the answer is not many at all, and even the best tend to only be good, but hardly great). The Godfather novel is mediocre, at best, as was The Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, and Gone with the Wind.
I loved Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff. I'd be interested to hear what you disliked about them. The Henry V and Hamlet I referred to are the Kenneth Brannaugh versions. I really hate the old Lawrence Olivier versions. IMDB says that there have been 950 Shakespeare films. At least some of those have been good if not great. I like almost all the ones Kenneth Brannaugh and Orson Welles did. Then there's the Julius Ceasar with Brando, even though I don't like Brando in that, I thought John Gielgud's Cassius was spectacular. There's Kurosawa's Ran, Throne of Blood. Shakespeare isn't usually a masterpiece on the stage, as any high school drama teacher could tell you. The reason that it's hard to make a hit with Shakespeare is because you have to be a master yourself to properly interpret another master. Beethoven said something similar about setting Schiller's Ode To Joy to music. It's not that the subject matter doesn't matter, it's that the content is so rich that a novice misses most of it. As for the Godfather, I liked the novel more than the film. It's one of the best action books I've ever read with a pacing and page turning quality that is seldom seen. Also, I loved The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I'm a big fan of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet. They both had great literary styles and their stories were incredibly innovative for their time bringing murder out of the drawing room and into the streets. I haven't read Gone with the Wind, but it's still a popular book a century later and that tell's me something.


You're fond of listing exceptions; I didn't claim every Shakespeare adaptation came from crappy sources, I said many of them did. Besides that, what makes any of them great has absolutely nothing to do with what the source is to begin with; it has to do with what Shakespeare did with them. Othello, Measure for Measure, Much Ado, R&J, et al. certainly have dubious sources.
You see, I tend to think that Shakespeare found these great plots which lesser writers just hadn't made the most of and used them to their fullest extent.


I don't know where you get the Hamlet/Oresteia connection; I've never heard that, nor do I see many connections between them. Most modern scholars believe there was an ur-Hamlet text probably by Thomas Kyd.
Starting with the father King Hamlet/Agamemnon is murdered by his brother/cousin Claudius/Aegisthus who's the lover of Queen Gertrude/Clytemnestra. Hamlet/Orestes returns from abroad and is told by the ghost of his father to kill the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes is accompanied by his trusty companion and foil Horatio/Pylades. The ghost of Hamlet's/Orestes' father comes and warns him not to kill his mother the queen when he takes his vengeance but to limit it to the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes both go mad from time to time. And Eletra's role as the sister has been transformed into the love interest Ophelia.


I don't get your point; there are some classic stories that artists continue to draw inspiration from? I never denied that, but a lot of these adaptations tend to have very different takes on the matter than their predecessors. What makes any adaptation great has nothing to do with the source and everything to do with what the artist does with it. If a terrible writer were to take up the Atreus or Oedipus myth the result would in all likelihood be a terrible novel/play/poem. I don't see what's controversial about that; you listing great authors that have tackled the same source is hardly proof that a great source is important, since you're conveniently leaving out all of the adaptations that have been forgotten because of how bad/mediocre they were.
Numerous masters have reworked old tales by their predecessors because they've seen how rich they were in possibilities. When a terrible writer gets a hold of an Atreus or Oedipus he fails to exploit all that he finds there.


Honestly, I do think there are more masters of B&W than color, perhaps because many of the early great directors had a background in art and they tended to pay more attention to how to expressively use the visual medium they were working in. By the time color came out, most young filmmakers came to film through film as opposed to the other visual arts. It's also more difficult to manage color since there's simply more to work with. What you say about a "semblance of reality and color" means nothing to me (perhaps you've noticed that in my lack of concern that Hitch's plots are so silly); I find bad/bland use of color far more distracting than bland use of black & white. I simply prefer the abstraction of B&W that, even when it's rather bland, it has a certain stripped down, focused quality that doesn't get in the way of what's going on. Plus, I often say that even if we see the world in color we experience it in black & white.
You said it yourself, with color there is more to work with.

[The Atheist]

Did I ask you for proof of Britain.

Did you net see the point where I noted that I had considered it so blindingly obvious that it was satire that I didn't qualify the post itself?

You know, I always like when responses asking for evidence instead produce a tirade of abuse, but heck, I'm used to it.

As to the claims you need to support, since you obviously don't know what you typed yourself, I'll give you just the first three that spring up:


The Chinese economy throughout the Tang occupied 70% of the world Economy

Any kind of evidence will be fine. I'd buy almost half, say around 40-45%. Why ridiculously overstate an already impressive statistic?


In Economic terms China has been rolling ahead of the world for most of recorded history

Palpable nonsense. For some periods, it certainly has, but "most of recorded history" is simply incorrect. Unless you have proof to the contrary, you really ought to retract that one. As I will, should you actually present evidence that proves your case. I will gladly apologise for my "ignorance", so please do enlighten me.


England is a late player that never really solidified its grip on the world the way China did

Again, a massive overstatement. China has never, ever dominated more than half the world. As I pointed out, they didn't even know one half existed. I don't know of any historian that would ever try to claim world dominance for the Romans, because that would be truly absurd. Like the Chinese, they didn't know a large part of the world existed.

Note that I don't claim world dominance for England, either. Half the world, sure, and with a lasting legacy as the spread of the language proves.

How many people outside of China speak Chinese again?

[JuniperWoolf]

Walt Disney stands at the centre of film animation in a way no other figure can. Disney's early stuff is pretty much responsible for inspiring the careers of Osamu Tezuka in Japan and Fydor Khitruk in the Soviet Union. Tezuka is on record citing Disney for the large expressive eyes characteristic of much of the Japanese animation that followed him.

Yeah, just look at Donald Duck (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y-bmS_KisAY/UYeEOFLm1JI/AAAAAAAAZyg/djHEDVgiWok/s1600/donald_duck_by_zdrer456-d3brmlu.jpg)'s moe eyes.

[The Atheist]

Since we all seem to love to engage in those inane discussions debating the greatest writer, greatest poet, greatest national body of literature, etc... let's take it to the logical extreme and discuss what you think is/was the greatest or most influential culture on the whole of culture?

Just to go right back to the start, surely we must make a case that the greatest culture ever is the current one.

We live in a time where we can look at da Vincis and Dalis by day, watch movies in 3d or cyberspace in the evening then fall asleep to Mozart. We have created a culture which is not just a blend of all cultures before us, but an amelioration of them as well.

[cafolini]

Just to go right back to the start, surely we must make a case that the greatest culture ever is the current one.

We live in a time where we can look at da Vincis and Dalis by day, watch movies in 3d or cyberspace in the evening then fall asleep to Mozart. We have created a culture which is not just a blend of all cultures before us, but an amelioration of them as well.

I have to agree with you again there. But let's keep atheism out of this.

[The Atheist]

If you check the post, I didn't mention it.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm willing to concede that the film has good technical points since you concede that it's got bad writing.I didn't concede it has bad writing; what I would say, though, is that I rarely care about writing in film unless it's unusually great (Wilder, Sturges, Coens, Allen) or unusually terrible. I don't consider Vertigo (or most Hitch) either. Plus, his writing is inextricably bound up with his visual imagination, ie, he didn't conceive of one without the other.


I've seen some very bright people write some very witty things that were entirely off the mark. That's one of the flaws of intelligent people, they are very good at constructing arguments full of sophistries and lying to themselves, convincing others even when they are wrong. Critics often see things were nothing exists and read into texts or films some grandiose meaning where nothing was intended. Sometimes they get a hold of some bad ideology or some fashionable idea in academia and apply it in their judgements. Personally, I've never seen the wonder in metafiction, or marxism, or any of the isms and philosophies that people frequently apply to these sorts of things and get so excited by. I like traditional aesthetics, the kind that Aristotle, Horace, or Longinus would talk about.Well, there’s a lot of thoughts going in a lot of different directions here. In principle, there’s nothing here I disagree with and, in fact, I’ve been openly hostile to literary and film theory in the past. I greatly appreciate criticism and its ability to lend genuine insight to art (indeed, I would’ve been lost on many writers and filmmakers were it not for a handful of very perceptive critics), but I’m also very aware of its pitfalls, sophistries, inaccuracies, biases, etc. However, I think there’s more to it than “intelligent people constructing sophistic arguments, lying to themselves, and convincing others even when they’re wrong,” or “reading grandiose meanings in films/texts where nothing was intended,” or, at least, the issue is more complicated than that.

At least when it comes to the second, I’m of the mind that in any great art there is inevitably more in a work than the artist consciously intended. So much of art is an unconscious, creative act, and the aspects that are conscious usually pertain to craft as opposed to meaning. In a respect, it’s always been the job of critics to “find meaning” in texts and films because the artists usually don’t think about such things during creation (or, if they do, it’s usually in much simpler terms). I mean, I doubt Shakespeare thought about 1/1000 of everything that’s been written about his plays, and there’s even that anonymous poem written about the famous Shakespearean critic AC Bradley:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.

Like it or not, though, these critics have a profound effect on what art lasts and gets passed onto the next generations, so whether what they see is there or not is rather irrelevant. The larger point is that Hitch has been one of those artist that every type of critic/theorist just loves to sink their teeth into, and that usually only happens to artists whose work is inviting in the first place. So, perhaps you wouldn’t have your mind changed by those essays, but they might at least illuminate some things you hadn’t thought about before.


I like MST3K.I do too, but it’s no way to seriously critique films.


That seems a little far fetched to me. It feels like you're reaching in order to justify all the flaws of the film and turn them into positives.Why does it seem far-fetched? The whole point of The Birds is that there is no explanation for why they’re attacking, so everyone is invited to offer their $0.02 and the opinions of a drunk are worth the same two pennies as that of the expert. It shouldn’t seem far-fetched that an artist as painfully aware of the perspectives, interpretations, and reputations amongst viewers and critics as Hitch (an awareness he cultivated into a brand more impressively than anyone in cinema’s history) would make a film that has such a gleeful time ripping apart both establishments. For what other reason would the ornithologist exist in the film for? It’s certainly not for the crucial explanatory exposition she offers. FWIW, I don’t even see it as a “fault” that needs “justifying,” I just see it as one of those insignificant illogicalities that you can find in almost every work of fiction that’s ever existed. What’s more, even if you found a work that didn’t contain one of them, it wouldn’t make that work a single bit better for not having them. It’s not a flaw, it’s just an excuse not to critically engage with the film.


I see a very simple work of art being championed by some very creative people.So what makes you think what you see is any more truthful than what the creative people see? What’s more, if it was a simple matter of creative people championing simple works of art, why does Michael Bay have no such champions?


I loved Cloud Atlas and The Right Stuff. I'd be interested to hear what you disliked about them.The Right Stuff I remember being so painfully boring I think I blocked it out, and I generally have a high threshold for what most consider boring (being a lover of Bela Tarr and Tsai Ming-liant). I actually realized I hadn’t seen Cloud Atlas but was thinking of a completely different movie, so never mind on that one. As for the rest of the list, we could go back and forth on each thread for ages, but I think the most telling thing you pointed out was that there have been 950 Shakespeare adaptations, and you can probably count on two hands (and maybe a foot) the number that are genuinely great. I love Branagh AND Olivier’s Shakespeare, an Kozintsev’s and Kurosawa’s and Welles, but even that doesn’t bring the number to 10; 10 out of almost 1000, or 1%. Do you really need any more proof that source doesn’t matter and the quality of the rendition matters completely?


You see, I tend to think that Shakespeare found these great plots which lesser writers just hadn't made the most of and used them to their fullest extent.I really don’t think any of Shakespeare’s great plays (maybe Macbeth excepted) really have “great plots” nearly as much as they simply have Shakespeare’s genius for language, characterization, and drama. Really, if you think about Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Tempest, et al., if you told the stories with all of Shakespeare’s language removed, not much happens: old king divides his kingdom between daughters, gets ticked off when one won’t suck up to him, banishes her, travels from one daughter to another getting progressively ticked off because they won’t cater to him… then there’s a whole convoluted letter swapping thing and parallel storyline with Gloucester, his real son, and bastard son etc. I mean, there’s nothing there that screams MASTERPIECE PLOTTING! I rather think it’s not that Shakespeare took “great plots” and “made the most” of them so much as he took rather basic, even mediocre plots, and really worked to make them transcendentally great.


Starting with the father King Hamlet/Agamemnon is murdered by his brother/cousin Claudius/Aegisthus who's the lover of Queen Gertrude/Clytemnestra. Hamlet/Orestes returns from abroad and is told by the ghost of his father to kill the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes is accompanied by his trusty companion and foil Horatio/Pylades. The ghost of Hamlet's/Orestes' father comes and warns him not to kill his mother the queen when he takes his vengeance but to limit it to the usurper. Hamlet/Orestes both go mad from time to time. And Eletra's role as the sister has been transformed into the love interest Ophelia.Fair enough; I guess it’s been too long since I read Aeschylus that I hadn’t even thought about all those connections. But if that’s all it takes to make a work great, then I guess Lion King is a masterpiece too. ;)


Numerous masters have reworked old tales by their predecessors because they've seen how rich they were in possibilities. When a terrible writer gets a hold of an Atreus or Oedipus he fails to exploit all that he finds there.All true, but I find it just as common that an artist finds a bad/mediocre source but is equally inspired by all of the missed opportunities and what s/he feels s/he can do with it. I remember Howard Hawks once said to Hemingway that source and writing mattered so little in film that he could take even his worst work and make a great film of it, and the result was To Have and Have Not, which is indeed a masterpiece IMO.


You said it yourself, with color there is more to work with.There’s more to work with, which means there’s also more to bungle if you don’t utilize it well, and I see more bunglings than, err, well-handlings.

[lawpark]

Has anyone voted for Cuba yet?

[Shevek]

Just to go right back to the start, surely we must make a case that the greatest culture ever is the current one.

We live in a time where we can look at da Vincis and Dalis by day, watch movies in 3d or cyberspace in the evening then fall asleep to Mozart. We have created a culture which is not just a blend of all cultures before us, but an amelioration of them as well.

So there's only one culture today?

[hypatia_]

So there's only one culture today?

i get what both of you are saying.

we are certainly heading in the direction of one culture. if that will ever actually happen is a different story.

i think the language barrier between diff cultures is the biggest deterrent from all the cultures blending. even mass comm tech's like the internet/television can't really cross that, though google has begun to by offering free translation built in as a plugin in its browser.

[hannah_arendt]

i get what both of you are saying.

we are certainly heading in the direction of one culture. if that will ever actually happen is a different story.

i think the language barrier between diff cultures is the biggest deterrent from all the cultures blending. even mass comm tech's like the internet/television can't really cross that, though google has begun to by offering free translation built in as a plugin in its browser.

Language has always been a very big barrier bewteen cultures because it`s not only a superficial comunication but laso a way of thinking. Nowadays thanks to internet everything is becoming more and more easier however some problems still seem to be impossible to solve.Language is something inborn whyich determines our behaviour an way of thinking sometimes. You can speak very well foreign language but it`s very difficult to change your way of thinking.

[Shevek]

i get what both of you are saying.

we are certainly heading in the direction of one culture. if that will ever actually happen is a different story.

i think the language barrier between diff cultures is the biggest deterrent from all the cultures blending. even mass comm tech's like the internet/television can't really cross that, though google has begun to by offering free translation built in as a plugin in its browser.

There are also vast differences among people with respect to geographic location, economic status, religion, age, race, political values, gender norms, literacy rates, demographic contingencies (birth rates and death rates, population density, outmigration, immigration, urban/rural divides), etc, etc... to overcome before considering what a universal culture might look like. Even if everyone in the world spoke one language and spoke it in the same way -- which is absurd considering what we know about language historically -- these differences would still separate people culturally.

[Darcy88]

Just to go right back to the start, surely we must make a case that the greatest culture ever is the current one.

We live in a time where we can look at da Vincis and Dalis by day, watch movies in 3d or cyberspace in the evening then fall asleep to Mozart. We have created a culture which is not just a blend of all cultures before us, but an amelioration of them as well.


So there's only one culture today?


i get what both of you are saying.

we are certainly heading in the direction of one culture. if that will ever actually happen is a different story.

i think the language barrier between diff cultures is the biggest deterrent from all the cultures blending. even mass comm tech's like the internet/television can't really cross that, though google has begun to by offering free translation built in as a plugin in its browser.


Language has always been a very big barrier bewteen cultures because it`s not only a superficial comunication but laso a way of thinking. Nowadays thanks to internet everything is becoming more and more easier however some problems still seem to be impossible to solve.Language is something inborn whyich determines our behaviour an way of thinking sometimes. You can speak very well foreign language but it`s very difficult to change your way of thinking.


There are also vast differences among people with respect to geographic location, economic status, religion, age, race, political values, gender norms, literacy rates, demographic contingencies (birth rates and death rates, population density, outmigration, immigration, urban/rural divides), etc, etc... to overcome before considering what a universal culture might look like. Even if everyone in the world spoke one language and spoke it in the same way -- which is absurd considering what we know about language historically -- these differences would still separate people culturally.

Even centuries ago there was a kind of pan-european culture. If each nation had been autonomous and cut-off from others few of the classics we now have would've been written. Without the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures I can't begin to imagine how radically altered the entirety of Western culture would be. In every art the artists react to the works of their predecessors and peers regardless of their nationality. There is also a solid line from India to Japan of shared philosophical/religious ideas.

Nowadays, on an individual level, we do in certain people see manifested a kind of global culture. Over half the books I read are translations. I watch a lot of foreign subtitled movies and listen to a lot of music from other languages. The visual artists whose works I consume the most are from Spain, France and Germany. Through childhood and adolescence my culture was almost entirely American, but for the last 10 years or so it has been truly global. Maybe it is different for people in countries that are not comprised mostly of immigrants, but I struggle to find in myself and my life anything uniquely Canadian. When I was obsessed with German philosophy and German composers I felt more German than anything. When I was deeply into Zen Buddhism my thoughts turned most to China and Japan. White British Columbians who do not partake of higher culture are not going to be this way. They are going to be predominantly American culturally. But the intellectuals and aesthetes I know are more globally than they are nationally minded.

[Shevek]

Of course culture is global, and no culture is 100% autonomous from outside influences. But as culture diffuses, even on a national level, it gets wrapped up in power struggles and ceases to become universal. The struggle to define what is Canadian is one example of this. There are some traces of cohesion, but when we unravel something that seems "Canadian" -- such as, the donut as a working-class snack food -- we find regional distinctions throughout Southern Ontario alone. The landscape art of the Group of Seven was initially asserted (more so by commercial interests such as railway and hospitality industries) as "Canadian" despite the obvious fact that it was created for a privileged group of Ontarians. And while Hockey Night in Canada transformed the spectator experience of hockey, there has never been a universal (at least, a meaningfully national) acceptance of why hockey is important, who can play it, who can watch, how to play it, etc. Your struggle to find anything uniquely Canadian might be the result of circumstances that have separated inhabitants of Canada for hundreds of years, and that has resulted in a fairly fragmented culture even with mass media. (This is a struggle I have almost given up on myself)

My objection with the idea of a single, "blended" culture is not the notion that people are able to share more ideas, values, forms of expression and material goods with each other. I accept this, but I reject the atheist's suggestion that we are all 100% free to ameliorate the cultures before us (as if cultures have a start and end date? As if there is a single authority on who does this cultural ameliorating? As if "ameliorating" even makes sense when you consider some of the cultural downsides of reliance on information technologies and mass media?). There are circumstances that draw people to accept particular cultural elements and reject/reshape others, and while we might be more free to do this now with certain technologies, circumstances (including language) still play a major role in how culture becomes diffused.

[hannah_arendt]

I have to admit that I don`t know much about Canada and I ma sorry for that:( However I do my best to change it in the future:) As a child I was forced to read polish literature but I remember having some problems with understanding it. Then I studied at polish department. Now, I read mostly english and spanish literature. However there are few polish books which I like. I write in spanish mostly, sometimes in english. I started writing something in polish but it takes me much effort to finish it, I must say.

I agree that nowadays our culture is global and probably this process cannot be stopped. Thanks to this fact I can talk with you now.