Greatest Culture...

[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/opin...test-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 material

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. 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.