82. A Trip to the Moon

Easily the oldest film on the list, Le Voyage Dans La Lune is now 108 years old. There are various versions out there — short versions (at 25 fps and therefore speeded up from the original), long versions (the original 16 fps), versions with rock music, versions with narration, colourised versions, etc. etc. The first version I saw had just a soundtrack but it's impossible to follow. This version made sense of the story by reading the original script like they would have done at the theatre it was first shown, but the sound is fairly amateurish:



The film is pretty poor, frankly. Yes, it's groundbreaking, it has great special effects for its time and fantastical sets. It's also admirably ambitious. Where other film makers were content with replicating a stage play on the big screen, Georges Méliès made a science fiction movie with aliens and rocket ships. I recommend you all watch it as it's an intriguing bit of film history but, as a film, it's pretty terrible. The plot is nonsense and just involves a bunch of magicians flying to the moon, killing off some natives and falling back to earth. It's cartoonish but not in a good way.

There isn't really any acting to speak of, either. Part of this might be down to the narrative style of the film being so alien — directors hadn't yet learned the language of cinema and how to tell a story in the new medium. There are no close-ups — just a static camera sitting away from the action as if we're in the front row of the theatre. There's no voice acting either (duh) so there's no way for the actors to express themselves other than jumping around and pointing at things — you don't see their faces. It just feels very clunky.

It does have one glorious moment, though, and that's the iconic image we've all seen before of the rocket flying into the moon's eye. It's worth it for that at least.

It's not the oldest film I've seen, though. That would be this. Cool to say you've seen it, but that's as far as it goes. Why is the old woman in the background walking backwards, though?

62. La Jetée

Not a new film off the list, but something I've seen again recently. You may be familiar with La Jetée as the basis for Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. It's a fascinating piece of cinema as it involves almost no action at all — just a series of still photographs with a voice-over and soundtrack. The story involves a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic society being sent backwards and forwards in time in an effort to save the human race. It's a fairly simple tale, actually, but the way in which it's told is quite mesmerising and it really draws you in. You have to get over the fact that the time machine is just a woman's bra, though.

It's only 26 minutes long so watch it.

[It seems they took this video down so you'll just have to Google it. Or buy the DVD, you cheapskate!]

58. The Conformist

This was on TV earlier this year, but I only got round to watching it at the weekend. It's Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film* about fascist Italy and one man struggling with his place in it.

The most obvious and immediate quality about it is how incredible it looks. In the early scenes we see enormous sets depicting various government buildings. Many are quite surreal, for example this is apparently a mental asylum:

Towards the end we get this stunningly lit scene in the snowy woods:

Everything about the film is designed immaculately for both visual and emotional appeal but it's not just a pretty face — there's depth to it too.

The surreal start isn't limited to just the sets. It takes a while to understand exactly what is going on and the mixing about of time periods and use of disorienting camera angles doesn't help things. Of course, this is all very deliberate as these are the sequences set in Italy. Once they cross the border into France things become more conventional and the story begins to become a bit clearer.

The conformist of the title, a man called Clerici, isn't exactly one of cinema's great heroes. He's a sexually confused product of a drug addict and a lunatic and, like most sexually confused products of drug addicts and lunatics, he just wants to lead a normal life. Unfortunately in 1930's Italy this means becoming a slave to the fascist state, a role he nevertheless embraces. How Clerici deals with the sacrifice of his ideals is what the piece is about, but you won't see him unshackle himself, overcome his oppressors, kill Mussolini, and flee to freedom on a tropical island — it's much more realistic than that and consequently much more cynical.

It also has blind people having a fight.


* I should probably use the word "masterpiece" here, but I suspect that such clichés will get a bit repetitive after a while.

Looking through the list

There are a lot of rather random films on this list. It seems that it was put together by asking film critics to supply their top ten and a number of the films towards the bottom have just one low-ranked vote. For example, Justine Elias made some eccentric choices for her films 8-10 and this was enough to rank them on the overall list. This will have skewed things somewhat at the bottom. Still, it also makes things interesting and will reveal a few films that might not have made other lists. One person thinks the Joan Crawford film Trog (no. 240) is one of the best of the century, so that must mean it's worth a look even if it looks dreadful and gets "9 beans" in this review.

The Zapruder Film at no. 112 is slightly odd, but you can't argue against its historical significance. Porky in Wackyland (also no. 112) I thought must be a joke, but I suppose you could say it was a landmark. But then there is no. 229 El Paso Wrecking Company which presumably is the same as gay porn film El Paso Wrecking Corp.? Why Dennis Dermody thinks this is the 8th best film of the last century, I have no idea.

121. Porky in Wackyland

I watched this on a Romanian video site. I've embedded it here, but I'm not sure how long it's likely to stay there. Watch it if you can, though, as it's pretty strange and only 7 minutes long.


Vezi mai multe din Desene animate pe 220.ro

I'm not convinced that this is really a masterpiece of 20th century film-making but it's certainly interesting, packed full of sight-gags and surrealist flights of fancy. Great silly fun.

6. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

So this was the film that inspired me to start this blog. If such a good film could pass me by all these years what other gems have escaped me? Laziness is the reason that I haven't yet got round to watching All About Eve (it's been sitting on my freeview box for about a year now unwatched) but ignorance is the reason I hadn't seen Sunrise.

I watched it on Youtube, where you can find it in nine 10-minute parts. The quality is fine for Youtube, but if you want to watch it on your 40" plasma telly you might want to get the DVD instead.

I'm not going to play the film critic — there are far more learned writers out there than me (for example they would use than I) — and neither am I going to pointlessly spew out the plot which will just be dull for those who have seen it and spoil things for those who haven't. Instead I intend to simply jot down some impressions of the films I watch. There will inevitably be some spoilers but I'll try to only reveal as much as any newspaper review would reveal and I promise not to give away any endings.

One thing that really struck me is how unusual Sunrise is, at least to my modern eyes. This might sound rather trite but it genuinely reminded me of Bollywood films with their pot pourri of action, drama, romance, comedy and everything else under the sun. Sunrise has romance in spades, of course, but also very funny scenes, psychedelic fantasy scenes, melodrama, scenes of dramatic tension. There are special effects (at least, what passed for special effects in 1927), elaborate sets, dancing and even a drunken animal doing a slapstick routine — something which sadly we don't see in many mainstream films nowadays.

But most striking of all is how dark it is in places. The first segment is like something out of a gothic horror film (it has the same director as Nosferatu after all) with mist sweeping over the swamp, grotesque villagers gossiping and a man bewitched by an evil harpy. We see this man's tormented eyes and heavy walk as he contemplates and almost carries out an unforgivable crime. Later on he confronts a stranger who has been rude to his wife. It doesn't last long but his reaction is terrifying with a real — almost psychotic — malice. This kind of character just isn't seen as a romantic lead in today's cinema and the experience is a little strange.

The film presents itself as some kind of fable (the characters are called "The Man", "The Wife" etc.) but I'm not entirely sure what the moral of the story is supposed to be apart from perhaps giving some hope to the Ike Turners of the world. Maybe more subtle metaphors will reveal themselves with further viewings but that's not really what interests me here. I've read reviews which describe this as the last great film of the silent era and mourn the backwards step that cinema took with the introduction of sound and I can completely see the point — it's visually enthralling from the first scene to the last, shot by a director at the height of his powers. But its narrative is equally strong — powerful and frightening and sad — and it's for this reason that the film is so astonishing in my opinion. Everybody should see at least one silent film and I can't think of a better example.

The title's rubbish, though.