I was walking at high altitudes in New Mexico yesterday with three friends, and the conversation turned to where it inevitably goes when people know that part of what I do for a living is to watch movies.
‘So, what’s the best film ever made?’
It’s an impossible question, of course – I’m not sure that ‘best’ is even the most appealing category within which to talk about films. I mean, the cinematography in ‘The Third Man’ may outshine that in ‘Fanny and Alexander’, but Bergman’s film has more to say about relationships; ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ doesn’t exactly strive to be ‘great cinema’, but the scene at the train station is both a profoundly moving moment between a father and daughter, and is so well photographed it looks like the camera had a mist-vacuum attached to the lens. And so on.
I don’t like answering the ‘best’ question because naming one shuts out all the others; and so few films seem to me to be without reason for complaint – I have a lot of time for ‘Wings of Desire’, but the philosophical conversation at the bar between Bruno Ganz and Solveig Dommartin isn’t sure whether it’s deep and mystical or meant to make people laugh; ‘Chinatown’ feels nearly perfect, but its world – one without kindness – seems to reflect more the tragic cynicism of some of the people who made it than the truth about being human; ‘Magnolia’, the most recent film that I’ve been trying to convince myself is my favourite, while offering something almost unique in its type (people looking up from the lives that have become miserable because they have been taught to expect things most people never have), already feels a little shaggy, although perhaps that’s because it has had so many imitators.
So I’m left with the hypothesis that perhaps there is no such thing as the ‘best’ film ever made. There are only films that grant something special, perhaps unnameable, to their audience. The films that have given me this that happen to come to mind as I write this post? Listed below, at the risk of being mocked, although I am merely following my co-host’s commitment to truth in criticism:
‘Being There’
Disney’s ‘Grand Canyon’
Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Funeral’
Peter Weir’s ‘Fearless’
‘Fanny and Alexander’
‘The Third Man’
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’
‘The Muppet Movie’
‘The Black Hole’
‘After Life’
‘Wall-E’
‘L’appartement’
And the last five minutes of Rosselini’s ‘The Little Flowers of St Francis’.
Ask me tomorrow and the list will be entirely different. For today, however, here’s the question: Is there a best film ever made? What would have to be the criteria upon which such a selection were made? Which films come closest to meeting them?
