The Most Influential Movies Ever Made
I have a book about movies called Have You Seen... by David Thompson, a film critic who, tired of being asked what movies to watch, decided to collect 1000 of them into one book. I have seen 479 of them. I have several books like it, ones that list great movies and, because I already have a wife and have less of a need to appeal broadly to the opposite sex, I have a Google Sheet that compiles these lists into a master that includes lists from the New York Times, the British Film Institute and others. I have been working my way through the two or three thousand movies on the list for about ten years. Observing a number of surgeries will not make you a great surgeon but watching the right movies will definitely make you a good movie watcher.
Why does watching movies take practice? I mean, it's a pretty passive thing, isn't it? Well, that's what Kevin Feige, the master of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, would like you to think but no, watching movies—indeed, engaging with any art form—is very active and requires a broad base of knowledge to spot styles, influences and history to apply to your reading of a movie you see today. Lists are mostly arbitrary and pointless, especially if they are ranked (and Thompson's tastes are different than mine, leading me astray often), but they are fun to argue about (especially this CONTROVERSIAL ranking of Beyonce's 100 best songs) and are good at being a guide of what to consume and where to start. The Sight and Sound poll, the most respected movie list in the world, surveys critics and filmmakers every ten years to vote on the greatest films of all time. It says Vertigo is number one. Is it? I don't think so, I'm not even sure it's Hitchcock's greatest movie (that would be Notorious) but I know that no serious film lover can claim the title without having seen it, therefore its a worthy movie for the top spot. Before esteemed critic Roger Ebert died, he wrote some 300 essays about what he called "the Great Movies," I've seen every one of them and while I don't agree that each is deserving of the pantheon, his writing informed my viewing of the movie and his selections widened my taste level, which is the point of criticism.
I have not, however, seen all of the American Film Institute's top 100 movies. I have seen 99, with Titanic as the odd man out. I tried to see it, as everyone else did in the winter of 1997 but for one reason or another it never happened. I know what goes on in the movie, of course, not only is it history, it's enough of a pop culture behemoth that I understand references to Jack and Rose, "I'm the king of the world" and "draw me like one of your French girls." I once had a colleague who had proudly never seen Star Wars and would be performatively ignorant about references made in conversation, grinding a meeting to a halt to announce "I'm sorry, I don't know what Darth Vader is." You know who that is, Joanne. Anyway, I won't deny that despite my obsessive need to complete lists, I am in no hurry to see Titanic, not because it is beneath me, though, in a certain sense it is (that's a sunken ship joke, folks) but because its moment of influence ended almost as soon as the movie came out. Despite being wildly popular, Titanic wasn't the movie that launched 1000 earnest romances (Pearl Harbor notwithstanding), in fact, the backlash against the movie further entrenched the public into irony, punishing almost any genuine sentiment as cheesy and hideously uncool. The bathetic Marvel movies, which go to great pains to show how seriously they don't take themselves, are evidence of this. Not that every movie worth watching needs to be an influence on today but that fact hasn't vaulted Titanic to the top of my to-do list.
But what movies do inform what we see in in theaters today (or over streaming services, at least)? Since I've been talking about lists in this newsletter, I decided to make one of my own. Below are the ten most influential movies of all time, listed chronologically and each representing themes and ideas that are ascendent to this day. These aren't necessarily the greatest (in fact, one or two of them aren't even very good) but what they represent is still being represented and a movie lover won't have a full picture of history without them.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) - I wrote about this despicable silent movie a few weeks ago when discussing evil art. And The Birth of A Nation is evil, telling the story of the antebellum south brutalized by the war and the "cruelty" of Reconstruction. The movie's heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as defenders of a civil society helped revive that terrible organization. And yet, it is undeniably the most influential movie ever made, the first to codify and collect the burgeoning art of film language into one place. Here are the building blocks of what visual story telling is, it is a pitiable shame that they are brought together in the service of a film so vile.
Battleship Potemkin (1925) - This Soviet propaganda film fomented modern editing and unlocked some of the potential of juxtaposition, one of the film's great strengths as an art form. Editing was wrongly considered mindless busywork in Hollywood at the time (so lowly that studios let women do it, enabling a number of unheralded artists) but Potemkin elevated it to the level of creative genius.
The Jazz Singer (1927) - Here comes sound. Like all technological advancements, Jazz Singer's introduction of sound was a Pandora's box, freeing up new avenues of storytelling but setting back visual invention a generation.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) - The movie that Battleship Potemkin's director called the greatest every made, Disney and company proved what no one thought possible—a full-length cartoon. And what an inventive one at that.
Citizen Kane (1941) - Kane fulfilled the promise suggested by The Jazz Singer, unlocking the potential of movies as synchronized audio visual art form. No movie has balanced depth and fun, invention and substance—though they're still trying.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) - From its violence, its French New Wave energy and its iconoclastic editing (by Dede Allen, one of those aforementioned female artists, who received an onscreen credit on this film, the first in history), Bonnie and Clyde is still exerting its influence even as the film is dated and falls further out of critical favor.
Jaws (1975) - Along with Star Wars, Jaws ushered in the age of the summer blockbuster which still reigns even as the summer gets longer and longer. Almost as critically, by ignoring hard-hitting social commentary of the novel its based on and focusing on action, Jaws closed the door on the New American Wave of personal, pessimistic art movies that dominated the late-60s and early 70s, which have yet to regain the mainstream.
Top Gun (1986) - Welcome to the era of the marketing-driven film, brought to us by, of all things, a movie about gay fighter pilots in peace time. Everything you need to know about Top Gun can be told to you in a few sentences or through a trailer, seeing the movie is almost an afterthought. It took 90 years for sellability to become the driving force of new movies and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere for a while.
Toy Story (1996) - Movies made with computers? What will they think of next. As it turns out, more movies made with computers. Pixar's initial triumph was both influential for children's films (which have more or less abandoned traditional animation) and visual invention, which is only limited now by the imagination.
Iron Man (2008) - This could change. For a long time, I reserved this most recent spot for The Blair Witch Project (1999), which not only totally changed the horror genre but regenerated interest in hand-held, photography. Many recent movies appear to be influential until its proven they are not (Avatar's prophesied 3D revolution didn't really happen, did it?) and even while the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the world's most profitable franchise, other cinematic universes have yet to take off. Still, we live in an ironic super hero world, a world that doesn't feel like changing, and that is very much because of Robert Downey Jr., and his quippy metal playboy.