The All-Time List Discussion Thread (Decade Project Vol. 3)

[theflirtydozen]

I took the time to put together some relevant statistics with regards to our all-time list and some others (all values on graph are on the same scale). Hopefully this can help address this current topic:



I was limited for some of the reference lists in what I could quickly find as an IMDB list. Our top 100 displays a fairly good normal distribution, as would be naturally expected with a mean in the 60's. In fact, the most frequent year for us was 1974 and even with a weighted average, it falls in the 60's. CF top 100 does have one of the smallest spreads in values compared to the other lists, but our shortlist actually has the largest that I found! Also interesting is the radical change in the most frequent year from our shortlist -- 1946 -- to our final 100 -- 1974!

Note that our shortlist actually does not have a normal distribution, and that really only CF 100, CF 250, TSPDT 2017, and 1001 2CB4 display this nice quality. Oddly enough, S&S stays right on 1959/8 with every gauge of the year-bias.

Anyway, that's all the input I've got in me now... I'll let any interested parties pick out any other trends while I go eat

Also, I'd like to put in my own word of appreciation for TMDaines, since I used his IMDB lists for CF Shortlist and the 2017 TSPDT.
[Note: I am not a statistician by trade so you can take the above data with that in mind!]

[Mr Sausage]

are based on other films, they use what was done before, so for me it seems logical that modern films are in a certain way "better" than older films.

This is one of the key areas where art is not like the sciences or social sciences: there is no such thing as progress. The reliance on past achievements inhibits originality and innovation. Great art isn't made from assembling and refining other people's ideas and techniques, because those small additions and refinements are always dwarfed by the original achievements. This is why the great works of the past retain their relevance, why they're not continually rendered superfluous by later works that ape them (unlike science, whose history is an endless series of ideas rendered obsolete and irrelevant). Unlike other disciplines, there is no real utilitarian aspect to art, so later changes, additions, and alterations don't make an artwork more useful and therefore obviously preferable. They just make it a slightly different example of what someone else had already said. This is why Virgil has never been considered superior to Homer: because all Virgil's epic poem has to say about war, wrath, loss, fate, home, and wandering was already said by Homer. For all his brilliance, Virgil could not be the first to say those things; the best he could do was direct those insights to the more narrow end of nationalism and propaganda. This isn't progress, this is looking for any nook or cranny to inhabit after some giant has come to fill the space.

Film is a bad test case for progress in the arts because it's so new.

[Rayon Vert]

Great point about "progress" in art - I was thinking over some of Lighthouse's comments and something very similar came to mind, though I could never have articulated it as well as that!

Back to this project in general, I just wanted to say not only was it great fun, but doing those rewatches for several months of highest-ranked favourites will probably constitute the only time in my life where I've had the most consistently rewarding film watching experiences night after night for this long of a stretch! Although there's also great fun as well continuing to discover new directors and films, and going through experience-enriching supplements.

I'm catching up on some of the extras for the films I upgraded in this project, and the interviews with scholars on the new Gueule d'Amour, which was discussed here, made me see whole layers I hadn't. It's very unfortunate the new French blu-ray and the interviews don't have subtitles. Points were made about how Grémillon worked in Germany (making French films) in the mid-30s, so that all the interiors of Gueule d'Amour were filmed in Germany (and very artificial in contrast to the French sequences), and how Grémillon was heavily influenced by Murnau, and had a firm grasp of German expressionist cinema, with examples shown in the film (lots of Gabin's shadows playing a functional role); Grémillon's love of documentary and workers and how the exterior scenes are documentary-like and frequently showcase such workers; and Gabin's unique acting under Grémillon, where his "femininity" was made to show, as opposed to his usual virile persona. One of the points of the film, according to one of the scholars, is how we discover this "Lady Killer" to be so sensitive in the end, a "woman" of sorts. They go on also on how this is a great film about friendship and scenes of the two actors embracing and touching one another in the film (that I'd missed) that point to a "homosentimentality" (not sexuality), two people that achieve a deep connection no matter what sex they are. They also talked about how Grémillon wanted the situate the film in time (1937), and there's a long sequence where Grémillon walks along a street with a wall full of posters, and each was were deliberately put there by Grémillon referencing current events - political and artistic - and the last one frankly political and leftist, a workers' group asking to support the refugee children of the Spanish Civil War. And this made under the Hitler régime!

[TMDaines]

Also, I'd like to put in my own word of appreciation for TMDaines, since I used his IMDB lists for CF Shortlist and the 2017 TSPDT.
[Note: I am not a statistician by trade so you can take the above data with that in mind!]

Thanks. I did all the Criterionforum-related ones manually, but TSPDT was probably just an import from PeacefulAnarchy, who does a lot of these things on IMDb.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Gah, I missed this but then I would've voted Vertigo at #1 so I might not have influenced much by myself

[TMDaines]

Don't think I ever put the final results in handy IMDb form:

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls025254645/

[swo17]

Thanks!

[Lighthouse]

Another beautiful example for the preference of old films amongst film lovers if it comes to "best films", "greatest films" and that kind of stuff:

https://mubi.com/lists/cahiers-du-cinema-top-100

It looks like a list of US films made before 1960 (peppered up with some b/w French films). Yes, the Cahiers ...

Apart from that aspect the list contains several pretty interesting and unexpected choices.

[barryconvex]

This list raises a lot of questions most important being where the hell was I when it was being conducted and when is the next one?

[swo17]

Mark your calendar for 2026!

Or you might think of it as happening very slowly all the time. In other words, don't miss out on your chance to make some 1940s films eligible in the next few weeks