The magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema (literally, Notebooks on the Cinema) was founded in 1951 and in its heyday promoted the French ‘New Wave’ movies. Ever since, it has struggled to sustain its circulation, frequently falling back on lists of film greats to court controversy. However its latest special publication of allegedly the 100 best films ever has caused a real furore.
Les Cahiers enlisted 76 film critics and historians, all French, to make its choice. In a frenzy of Anglophobia, they failed to find a single British-made movie worthy of a place. Yes, not even The Third Man, with its brilliant screenplay by Graham Greene about the decadent life of post-war Vienna, or David Lean’s epic, Oscar-winning portrayal of Lawrence of Arabia.
Nor was there any room for Alfred Hitchcock’s definitive 1935 version of The 39 Steps starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, although Hitchcock did make the list with some American-made movies, notably Vertigo in eighth place. The winner, unsurprisingly, was Citizen Kane, the story of a media mogul made by Orson Welles, in his directorial debut at the astonishingly young age of 25.
Predictably, French films feature prominently in Les Cahiers list, including three in the top ten. La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir’s look at bourgeois life in France on the cusp of the Second World War, took third place; L’Atalante, the ups and downs of a married couple’s life on a working barge, came fifth; and Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), the tragic tale of unrequited love, was ninth. Renoir is unsurpassed among French directors but Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, both out of the top ten, might have expected more support.
The definitive list of the best 100 movies is generally regarded as the one published by Sight and Sound in 2002. In it Citizen Kane narrowly beat Vertigo, with La Règle du Jeu third and the rest trailing in their wake. Les Cahiers list will soon be forgotten, as will its myopic, although scarcely new, approach to the UK film industry. In 1957 Truffaut, when editor of Les Cahiers, cryptically observed that “A film is a born loser just because it is English."
Les Cahiers’ top ten:
1. Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
2. The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
3. La Règle du jeu - Jean Renoir
4. Sunrise - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
5. L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
6. M - Fritz Lang
7. Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
8. Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
9. Les Enfants du Paradis - Marcel Carné
10. The Searchers - John Ford
www.cahiersducinema.com
From our December 2008 e-newsletter
