Five-Film Lists: Only a Handful of Titles Repeated

Five-Film Lists: Almost No Agreement

The favorite film lists of participants should draw a canon. They draw an archipelago. Only a handful of titles are repeated —Mulholland Drive, 2001: An Odyssey into Space, Blade Runner, Vertigo— and everything else is a personal wilderness: twilight westerns, prison cinema, Berlanga's comedy, Una manola and Esteso’s work. When a heterogeneous group is asked to choose their best films of all time, the sum does not yield one list. It yields a fingerprint for each person.

The Titles That Are Agreed Upon When Asked for a Top 5

If there is anything that can be called consensus in this mêlée, it fits in two hands. Mulholland Drive is one of the most cited: it appears in very different lists without its authors agreeing on almost anything else. They share that handful: 2001, Blade Runner, and Vertigo, with Apocalypse Now, Cinema Paradiso, The Godfather 2, and Taxi Driver lurking behind.
The counterintuitive detail is this: the common denominator is not 1940s and 50s cinema, which some hold up as the golden age, but a handful of cult titles from different eras.

Which Was the Best Decade in Film History?

Here, agreement completely breaks down. One current holds that the best cinema was made in the 40s and 50s, when it earned its title as the seventh art, and that more gems were produced in those twenty years than in the last half-century. Another places the peak in the 60s and attacks current production, attributing to it labels of political correctness and a concentration of exploitation in few hands and platforms. A third defends the 90s as the last golden decade and dismisses everything after the year 2000 as rubble, with some exceptions. Three memories, three canons.

The Tension Between Auteur Cinema and Local Fare

Each list is also a declaration of identity. Facing those who sign with Tarkovsky, Bergman, or Berlanga, others unflinchingly champion A Todo Gas, Torrente, or Los Bingueros; one participant summarizes the gesture with sarcasm: picking the five films that are nothing.
In between, the classic warning that auteur sensitivity is not for everyone, and cross-recommendations —a South Korean masterpiece available on RTVE, black and white film from the 30s, an Italian classic of robberies and bicycles— demonstrate that exchange works better than consensus.

Kubrick, Tarkovsky and the Club of Essential Works

In terms of directors, Kubrick dominates: 2001, Barry Lyndon, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange appear scattered across entire lists built around him. Tarkovsky is the opposite: contemplative and cryptic cinema that some find dazzling and others, minority and difficult. Truffaut's quote—that there are two types of films: those that flatter the viewer by making them feel intelligent, and those that confront them with mystery—hangs over much of the exchange. Hitchcock, Ford, Kurosawa, and Lang also appear cited as titans of film history by some participants.

Bodyguards, Rocky and the Nostalgia Factor

Not everything is aesthetic hierarchy. Much of the material is pure biography. Someone recalls seeing Rocky when they were fifteen, accompanied and more attentive to other things than the screen, and having to watch it again later with neighborhood friends. Another vein of life dedicated to a known actor after a bad youth experience in cinema. And there are those who recognize that a film that bored them years ago deserves a revisit, because they are ready for it now. Film taste, it is said, is revisited more than it is fixed.

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With all the lists on the table, the temptation is to conclude that there exists an objective canon. The data says otherwise: four titles coincide, and they fight over three decades. So, do we choose films, or do we choose ourselves every time we make a list?