A while back I rescued from the hard drive of a now 20 year old computer, a list of the Best Movies Ever that I put together back in the summer of 1998. That was the year I moved to Seattle (a couple blocks away from the Best Video Store in the World) and watching movies became the thing I did for school and work instead of the thing I did instead of school or work. The list is reflective of the lack of viewing options I had as a young moviegoer in the cinema wasteland that was Spokane in the mid-90s, possibly (hopefully) the last time in history that a person's geographic location was a major limiting factor in what films they could see. It also shows the influence of my pre-film studies reading: I'd spent the previous year and a half reading every movie book I could get my hands on, working my way up from Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert and VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever to Pauline Kael, François Truffaut and Jonathan Rosenbaum, along with scholarly books on Orson Welles (James Naremore), Akira Kurosawa (Donald Richie), Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut as well as David Sterritt) and Martin Scorsese (Lawrence Friedman).
So, like all lists, it's a snapshot of a particular person at a particular time. And also like all lists, it's notable as much for its omissions as for what it includes. But still, looking back on it fourteen years later, I can help but be a little surprised at it. Not because there are films ranked highly that I no longer think are any good (though there are a couple of slight embarrassments), but rather at how many of the films that I ranked highly then continue to occupy the top spots on the lists I've made more recently (I have four here at The End: a Top 150 from 2008, a Top 250 from 2009, a Top 600 from 2010 and a Top 1000 from 2011). Of course that shouldn't be a surprise, as these are many of my favorite films, and one of the ways I define that inescapably vague term "favorite film" is by how long I've lived with them, not simply in terms of rewatchability (though several of these I've seen many, many times), but in how over time these particular movies have come to define what I think cinema is, what it should be, and what it can be.
With the release of the latest Sight & Sound poll this week, and Labor Day Weekend, the time of year I traditionally create a new Best of All-Time, fast approaching, lists have been on my mind. Every year, my Best Lists have gotten bigger and bigger, culminating last year, when I spent a month or so creating a Top 1000 list, an inherently ridiculous task that was as fun as it is absurd. I could keep that trend going, with ever longer and more tedious lists (1500!, 2000!, 5000!), or I could try something new. And so I'm going to follow the advice of the great Kristin Thompson, who in a post at her blog in March on the topic of Best Of lists suggested abandoning the repetitive reassertions of the canon that inevitably result from consensus-based polls like Sight & Sound's in favor an approach more like that of the National Film Registry:
I think this business of polls and lists for the greatest films of all times would be much more interesting if each film could only appear once. Having gained the honor of being on the list, each title could be retired, and a whole new set concocted ten years later. The point of such lists, if there is one, is presumably to introduce people who are interested in good films to new ones they may not have seen or even known about.And so I'm going to create a The End of Cinema Hall of Fame, inducting a few movies each year and writing about them along the way. Sometime soon, I'll name 25 films, then spend the next year writing about them every two weeks or so until it's time to name the next class. I'm not going to rank them, instead I'll just go along with the assumption that all Hall of Famers are equally canonical. I haven't decided what, if any, criteria I'm going to use: just naming my Top 25 films as of that moment or maybe using a quota system (Best film noir, Best Western, Best French movie, etc) or perhaps some kind of a combination of the two. Rest assured, it'll be arbitrary.
As a warm-up, here's my recently unearthed1998 Top 200 Movies of All-Time List:
1 Manhattan
2 Casablanca
3 Seven Samurai
4 Annie Hall
5 Citizen Kane
6 Miller's Crossing
7 Ran
8 Singin' in the Rain
9 The Birds
10 Mean Streets
11 Lawrence of Arabia
12 The Rules of the Game
13 The Empire Strikes Back
14 Psycho
15 L. A. Story
16 Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
17 The Philadelphia Story
18 The Godfather Part II
19 It's a Wonderful Life
20 Goodfellas
21 The Wizard of Oz
22 Rashomon
23 Do the Right Thing
24 On the Waterfront
25 Taxi Driver
26 Three Colors: Blue
27 The Lion in Winter
28 The Mission (Joffe)
29 The Godfather
30 Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind
31 Star Wars
32 Pulp Fiction
33 Kiss Me Deadly
34 North by Northwest
35 The Manchurian Candidate
36 Duck Soup
37 American Graffiti
38 Six Degrees of Separation
39 Harvey
40 Throne of Blood
41 The Big Sleep
42 Touch of Evil
43 Schindler's List
44 Amadeus
45 Sanjuro
46 8 1/2
47 Raging Bull
48 The Red Shoes
49 Children of Paradise
50 Crimes and Misdemeanors
51 Kagemusha
52 Dangerous Liaisons
53 The English Patient
54 Quiz Show
55 Unforgiven
56 Hannah and Her Sisters
57 Jaws
58 Platoon
59 Patton
60 The Seachers
61 Boogie Nights
62 Broadcast News
63 Out of the Past
64 Vertigo
65 Blood Simple
66 Seven
67 All About Eve
68 Henry V (Branagh)
69 The Seventh Seal
70 The Graduate
71 Suspicion
72 The Third Man
73 Stranger than Paradise
74 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
75 The Last of the Mohicans (Mann)
76 Bringing Up Baby
77 The Player
78 Bugsy
79 Trainspotting
80 Yojimbo
81 Rebecca
82 The Maltese Falcon
83 The Shawshank Redemption
84 Brief Encounter
85 Bonnie and Clyde
86 Fantasia
87 Silence of the Lambs
88 JFK
89 Raiders of the Lost Ark
90 Zelig
91 The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail
92 Fargo
93 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
94 Sleeping Beauty
95 The Age of Innocence
96 Reservoir Dogs
97 High Plains Drifter
98 A Clockwork Orange
99 Laura
100 The Outlaw Josey Wales
101 Stagecoach
102 Day for Night
103 Ugetsu
104 Wings of Desire
105 Swingers
106 The Lady from Shanghai
107 To Have and Have Not
108 Empire of the Sun
109 Three Colors: Red
110 Barton Fink
111 ET: the Extra Terrestrial
112 Out of Africa
113 Chasing Amy
114 Bull Durham
115 It Happened One Night
116 The Lady Vanishes
117 Double Indemnity
118 Kicking and Screaming
119 Clerks
120 The Thin Man
121 Big Night
122 The Princess Bride
123 Rope
124 Play It Again, Sam
125 The Right Stuff
126 Shadow of a Doubt
127 High and Low
128 Jules and Jim
129 Rear Window
130 The Fisher King
131 Sunset Boulevard
132 Hard Eight
133 The 39 Steps
134 The Last Temptation of Christ
135 Shoot the Piano Player
136 The Awful Truth
137 Le Samourai
138 Chinatown
139 The General
140 Monty Python's the Life of Brian
141 The Asphalt Jungle
142 Z
143 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
144 Force of Evil
145 Das Boot
146 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
147 Slacker
148 Point Blank
149 Kundun
150 The Big Lebowski
151 2001: A Space Odyssey
152 When Harry Met Sally. . .
153 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
154 Halloween
155 Notorious
156 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
157 Steamboat Bill, Jr
158 Kids
159 The Hidden Fortress
160 Top Hat
161 Party Girl
162 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
163 The Sorrow and the Pity
164 Once Were Warriors
165 Sleeper
166 Marnie
167 Dreams
168 The Purple Rose of Cairo
169 Red River
170 Grand Hotel
171 Blow Out
172 Field of Dreams
173 Shadowlands
174 Nobody's Fool
175 Fort Apache
176 Sullivan's Travels
177 Beautiful Girls
178 Shampoo
179 Rosemary's Baby
180 The Grand Illusion
181 The Ice Storm
182 Brazil
183 The Natural
184 Dazed and Confused
185 The Night of the Hunter
186 In the Company of Men
187 Love and Death
188 Judgement at Nuremburg
189 Nashville
190 Scream
191 Metropolitan
192 Edward Scissorhands
193 The Day the Earth Stood Still
194 The Hustler
195 Night on Earth
196 The Wild Bunch
197 The Magnificent Ambersons
198 Return of the Jedi
199 Afterhours
200 The Secret of NIMH
