Cahiers du Cinema has published its list of the 100 greatest films, and we finally get a ranking that actually makes some kind of sense!
Obviously, all of these lists must be taken with a grain of salt, beginning with the now obligatory number one spot always going to Citizen Kane, which many (including myself) would argue is NOT Orson Welles best film.
However, given the totally absurd choices on display in the lists offered up by such dubious chroniclers of film taste as The American Film Institute, Entertainment Weekly and Empire Magazine, the Cahiers list offers a refreshing counter-balance from those organizations blatantly commercial choices. It’s actually hard to blame them, since their audiences have never heard of directors like Robert Bresson or Kenji Mizoguchi, much less seen any of their films, but given that fact, their lists should be called “The 100 best commercial films,” not the “best of all time.”
Cahiers list is also a bit of a surprise in that so few living directors make the grade, but that is quite as it should be. As a result, there are no recent mega box-office directors represented, such as Spielberg, Lucas or Cameron. The dozen or so directors still around who make the list include these men:
Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt)
Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour)
Michael Cimino (Deer Hunter)
Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather)
Chris Marker (La Jetée)
Pedro Almodovar (Talk to Her)
Blake Edwards (The Party)
Jacques Demy (Lola)
Woody Allen (Manhattan)
David Lynch (Mulholland Drive)
Eric Rohmer (My Night at Mauds)
Strangest omission appears to be the lack of Welles’s Chimes of Midnight on the list, but Touch of Evil does make it into the top 50.
The complete ranking along with trailers for many of the films can be seen at the Cahiers website here:
http://www.cahiersducinema.com/article1337.html
It’s also interesting to note that Welles only comes in at #6 in the ranking of directors based on the number of times one of their films was chosen. Given the stellar company surrounding Welles, it’s hard to complain too much, especially since the overall list of directors seems to be a fairly accurate account of the worlds great filmmakers, although of the 30 directors listed below, only four have actually won an Academy Award for best directing.
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1. Jean Renoir 155
2. Alfred Hitchcock 146
3. Fritz Lang 143
4. Charles Chaplin 128
5. John Ford 124
6. Orson Welles 114
7. Ingmar Bergman 113
8. Luis Buñuel 110
9. F.W. Murnau 108
10. Howard Hawks 105
11. Jean-Luc Godard 99
12. Federico Fellini 99
13. Ernst Lubitsch 98
14. Luchino Visconti 90
15. Robert Bresson 90
16. Kenji Mizoguchi 87
17. Akira Kurosawa 86
18. Max Ophuls 83
19. Alain Resnais 82
20. Carl Theodor Dreyer 76
21. François Truffaut 75
22. Stanley Kubrick 75
23. Vincente Minnelli 73
24. Joseph L. Mankiewicz 73
25. Roberto Rosselini 73
26. Josef von Sternberg 69
27. Michelangelo Antonioni 67
28. Segei Eisenstein 65
29. Marcel Carné 64
30. Billy Wilder 61