A Cursory Glance At The BBC’s Best Films Of The Century List.
The BBC today revealed the results of their best films since the year 2000 poll. The resulting list is an interesting, worthy one, with a “winner” that is neither out of place nor a great surprise, but a picture nonetheless that it’s exciting to see featured so prominently.
That movie is David Lynch’s majestic Mulholland Dr., the director’s 2001 negative imprint of Sunset Boulevard, and the great modern noir. It’s one of the great cinematic puzzle-boxes, and it is incredibly encouraging to see it praised by such a vast collective of people (some 177 film critics from around the world were invited to participate). Televisual origins-aside, Mulholland Dr. also serves as the pre-eminent example of a master auteur working outside of the studio system too, with the project “rescued” by European investment (one of the great trends of the era) after Hollywood abandoned the thing. While many of us were no doubt aware of this before the BBC poll, it’s now becoming a commonplace line of thinking that Mulholland Dr. is one of the handful of post-2000 pictures that can comfortably sit alongside the established canon of classic cinema, alongside such A-grade masterpieces of the medium as Jean Renoir’s The Rules Of The Game, or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
That Mulholland Dr. is a film that was once and almost a TV series makes it an apt feature to place so prominently in a list of great movies, given that much of the cultural discourse of the post-millenial period has revolved around the so-called Golden Age Of Television. While the fleeting nature of television and television spectatorship makes it difficult to judge that form on the same terms as we do the movies (how many people look back to classic television with any form of regularity in the way they do classic cinema? Fret not though, for I suspect that the medium is still in its infancy), it’s broader reach and influence on the cinema makes it apt consideration fodder. There are echoes of television in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood too, which comes in at fifth place on the list. While that film was rendered notable thanks to it being a work produced in lines with the rules of cinema it’s central creative device (in which the life of a young boy is captured in real-time over a period of twelve years) would have been an unremarkable prospect had it been projected in the form of a serialised television show, or a soap opera. Handfuls of actors have “grown up” on-screen over great periods of time on the likes of Eastenders, Coronation Street and Neighbours, but obviously they lack the intent that was driving the Linklater production, which sought to cut and place these fragments of time together, next to one another.
The complete BBC list of the best films of the century can be found here, and it makes for a timely reminder(at least for me, a writer that is becoming increasingly disillisuioned with contemporary cinema) that the modern cinematic landscape is often an awe-inspiring place. While I didn’t participate in the poll, my own list of ten films can be found here.
