Top 20 Films of All Time (Cahiers du Cinema 2008 Poll)

Cahiers du Cinema, the iconic high-brow French film journal, has released its 2008 list of the Top 100 films of all time. Citizen Kane (yawn) tops the list. The Top 20 are:

1. Citizen Kane, 1941, Orson Welles

2. (tied) The Night of the Hunter, 1955, Charles Laughton; La Règle de Jeu, 1939, Jean Renoir

4. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 1927, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

5. L'Atalante, 1934, Jean Vigo

6. M, 1931, Fritz Lang

7. Singin' in the Rain, 1952, Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen

8. Vertigo, 1958, Alfred Hitchcock

9. (tied) Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945, Marcel Carné; The Searchers, 1956, John Ford; Greed, 1924, Erich von Stroheim

12. (tied) Rio Bravo, 1959, Howard Hawks; To Be or Not to Be, 1942, Ernst Lubitsch

14. Tokyo Story, 1953, Yasujiro Ozu

15. Le Mépris, 1963, Jean-Luc Godard

16. (tied) Tales of Ugetsu, 1953, Kenji Mizoguchi; City Lights, 1931, Charlie Chaplin; The General, 1927, Buster Keaton; Nosferatu the Vampire, 1922, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; The Music Room, 1958, Satyajit Ray.

Cahiers conducts this survey every ten years or so. Biggest surprise is Night of the Hunter, one of the few on the list I've yet to see. It has had this tremendous cult reputation all these years, but rarely has it cracked the top ten lists.

Citizen Kane (1941) is a technically dazzling film, but one which is not extraordinarily insightful or especially relevant to the vast majority of us who are not megalomaniacal media tycoons. More deserving is La Regle de Jeu (1939), which artfully depicts the viciousness of the human impulse in genteel terms. No film I can think of is more evenhanded in exploring the divisions among the social classes. It has long been among my favorite films, one which I revisit every two years or so with new insights each repeated viewing.

To Be or Not To Be (1942), perversely enough, is the only movie in the list that concerns the evils of the holocaustal Nazis during World War 2. Its Polish refugees seem to be no more in harm's way than the presumably concentration-camp traumatized Victor Laszlo, who seemingly emerged from the tunnels and woods without so much a crumple on his three-piece suit. I like TBNTB, but don't see it as a top 20 film of all time. Probably due to the dearth of American participants in the Cahiers survey, the slapdash, brutally direct 1940s comedies of Preston Sturges were unjustifiably ignored, and I do prefer Sturges's bootleg whiskey to Lubitsch's champagne.

The last most recent silent film on the list is City Lights (1931), which might be Chaplin's best and which has an unarguably great ending, but I've never liked it much. The great silent film in the bunch is Sunrise (1927), a pleasant surprise at #4 (maybe too high). Don't be turned off by its annoying subtitle (or the overacting of Janet Gaynor), it does have a song/poem-like feel to it. The first sighting of The Woman From the City (Margaret Livingston) remains one of the great reveals of all-time, and her frolic in the swamp with The Man is unusually carnal for a 1927 movie (as well as my office desktop picture for quite a while).

As for the others on the list, save for those I have yet to see, I have no objections apart perhaps from a few quibbles in the ranking (Vertigo and Ugetsu too low, M is too high). Once I see an English-language link to the Top 100 films from Cahiers, I'll post it here. Many interesting discussion points from there as well.