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Quest for the best films
Jun 20, 2004
Picture this: A film crew is shooting outside the railway station at Ciotat, France in 1895. There is just one take, shot in the morning, processed in the afternoon and projected in the evening. It shows an express train pulling up in clouds of steam and a soot-nosed driver lustily waving. Then there are other such ‘moving pictures’ - workers leaving a factory, an infant being fed, out on a sunny day and picnicking by a shimmering river.
These popular events were neatly captured on a machine that could also play it back. Audiences were spellbound. People clapped and cheered with unbridled enthusiasm. The word spread like wild fire. The “greatest invention of the age” - moving pictures had arrived!
From that simple start at the end of 19th century, Cinema, has become one of the most influential art forms. Today the silver screen has virtually exploded with ‘dreams and fantasies, presented both glamour and universal issues, serving as our collective memory’. Thousands of movies have rolled out of studios around the world - since that train pulled into the French station. As per UNESCO reports the number of motion pictures made around the world from 1895 to 1990 was approximately 242,000. Several thousands have possibly been added to this list.
Serious students of cinema have been setting out to find the truly outstanding works of art among this mind-boggling number of films, that have ‘incredible performances, priceless scenes, flawless screenplays, marvellous direction, and tackle important issues of the day’, and those withstanding the test of time: ‘classics’ of the genre.
Like all works of art, films can't be measured scientifically, as their artistic merit can never be rated or quantified. Yet film industry around the world: critics, reviewers, and fans alike do just that, by making their private “best lists” - using yardsticks and benchmarks known to them.
One such organised list existing for half-a-century since 1952 is “Sight & Sound”, a magazine compiled by the British Film Institute. The list of best movies is being reviewed once in ten years, with new additions and deletions. A dynamic sample of film critics, writers, academics and film directors drawn from around the world are put together. Every ten years the sample constituents are changed. But care is taken by the BFI to include the most respected names in the field from across 40 countries to be on its panel.
The most recent listing - representing cinema’s most critically-acclaimed, ‘artistic achievements’ - based on ‘reasonable consensus’ of the panel was carried in the December 2002 issue of Sight & Sound. The results of the latest poll, the most ambitious to date, has the collective opinion of people from both in front of, and behind the camera. The panel comprised of some 145 film critics. Among the writers, academics, and 108 film directors was the noted film commentator from Bangalore, Mr M K Raghavendra. The magazine notes that the ‘results’ based on the panel’s consensus are intriguing, both for their certainty in choosing intense personal films as the best, and for their lack of agreement about which films of recent times can compete with the greatest’. Welles’ Citizen Kane continues to be No 1. Incidentally, one of the critics voting for it, Nasreen Munni Kabir, also puts Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa in the list of the ten all time bests. But other voters have a different opinion. As an upshot, the Indian masterpiece doesn't make it to the final list.
To be sure, many cinema buffs do not see eye to eye with the Sight & Sound findings. Why doesn’t the list have, for instance, Ray’s Pathar Panchali or DeSica’s Bicycle Thief! Or for that matter the popular all-time favorites such as Curtiz’ Casablanca or Seiznick’s Gone with the Wind?
Salman Rushdie sees Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz as one of finest movies. But it does not feature in the latest listing. Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain edges out the gripping Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to make it to the top ten - much to the chagrin of admirers of that classic 16 century Japanese saga, the inspiration for Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven.
Then again there is Cameron’s Titanic. Assuming ticket prices are adjusted for inflation, Seiznick's Gone with the Wind, the 1939 Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh southern saga blazes well past the ill-fated luxury liner movie in box-office takings. Yet both these movies are not in the present Sight & Sound list.
Commercial success is one way to gauge the mass appeal of a film. Over time, other factors too weigh in, to determine the value of a film. As cinema is an intensely personal experience, even artistic assessments are bound to generate a broad range of opinion and discussion and heat. But given Sight & Sound’s considerable integrity and credibility, the latest selection can be seen as today’s experts’ evaluation - that looks afresh at films, to reflect the current moods and ‘changing perceptions in taste and fashion’.
In that respect the new top ten remains consistent with BFI's goal to include films considered ‘classics, that break new ground in technique, subject matter or ideas, have phenomenal popular appeal, a lasting impact, and represent the greatest works of cinema’s most respected directors and performers’.
THE PROGRESS OF FILMS
* 1839: Louis Daguerre makes photographs on metal plates
* 1831: Electric power through electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry
* 1869: Celluloid, first plastic commercially successful by John Wesley Hyatt
* 1870: Incandescent light bulbs invented.
* 1893: World’s first film studio built at Thomas Alva Edison’s West Orange, NJ laboratory.
* 1894: Kinetoscope designed by Edison, premiered in Broad way, New York city. It played records.
* 1895: Birth of “cinema”. Cinematographe, machine demonstration by Louis and Auguste Lumeire. Short films including train arriving at Ciotat station shown.
* 1897: First fully dedicated cinema hall built in Paris.
TOP TEN FILMS
1.Orson Wetles’ Citizen Kane (1942) - USA.
2. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) - USA.
3. Jean Renoir’s La Regle du jeu (1939) - France.
4. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (l972)/The Godfather-II (1974) - USA.
5. Yasujiro Om’s Tokyo Story (1953) - Japan.
6. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - USA.
7. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) - Russia/ USSR.
8. Friedrich Wilhelm Mumau’s Sunrise (1927) - Germany.
9. Federico Fellmi’s 8 1/2 (1963) - Italy.
10. Stanley Donen’s Singin’ In The Rain (1952) - USA.
Earning goodwill since 1855!
jun 21, 2004
In the 19th century Bangalore, 'education' of young Indian girls was largely what was taught or learnt at home: watching, helping mother manage the home. Sometimes the father trained the girls in vocations such as cattle rearing or paddy planting. But a girl child going to a school? No way!
Young Yeshoda, the eldest daughter of a Telugu military officer stationed in the Cantonment, who would eye English girls in smart uniforms going to school, asked her mother if she could go school too. The parents were aghast. In a matter of days, Yeshoda was wed. She was 12 years old!
Not surprising for the times. Girls and women did not have access to education. "We were patronised and discriminated against in many ways," recalls Betsy Jemima Prasanna, now some 76 years. "There have been many changes since, but girl children are still being discriminated against, especially in slums and rural areas.”
To beat this type of discrimination progressive groups started schools for girls in the mid-1800s. They were set up to offer English education to children of British army personnel, to provide them the same opportunity to read and write as they had ‘back home’.
In 1855, one such institutional arrangement started by the Methodist Missionary Society, eventually became Goodwill Girls School. A certain Mrs Little with a handful of students founded the school on East Parade. A unique feature even those days was the in-house training and on-job training for teachers. Over the years the school began imparting knowledge to ‘native girls’ in their own language, to help them fit into their own sphere of work and life. They were also taught home craft such as knitting/ sewing.
By the beginning of World War I, Goodwill grew to become the first ever all girls’ high school in Bangalore. In 1888, the school moved to its current premises on Promenade Road. Many new additions have since been made to the original building - a spacious auditorium with a beautiful chapel on top, a well-stacked library named after the founder Mrs Little, three fully equipped science labs, etc.
Going back to Yeshoda, in 1930, some 22 years after she was denied schooling, she admitted her daughter, a bright-eyed Mukta Bai to Goodwill’s. The world had dramatically changed - some South Indian girls were now wearing salwar-kameez and sipping Coca Cola!
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Following Mukta Bai’s steps were other cousins from the family who went to Goodwill’s. Speaking of their 'school' days, the ‘old girls’ reminisce: “Can you imagine we were the first ones to read in three languages English, Tamil and Urdu?” “When Father was posted to Rawalpindi, our correspondence with the family was in Urdu,” laughs 85-year old Chintamani. “Even the slokas such as Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Deva…were learnt first in Urdu! In fact, when we had to say something important, we’d use Urdu - not English. What amazed many people were the Tamil magazines that were always in our house. There would be Kalki, Ananda Viketan and some Malar or the other, prompting guests to ask, 'How many languages do you young ladies know?’ ”
Says Mukta Bai, “It was Goodwill’s that made us adept at languages. Thanks also to the encouragement of Principal Miss Rogerson we were taught to be bold and forthright but dutiful and truthful.” “The discipline, values and sound grounding have definitely impacted our lives,” says Chintamani’s daughter, Pramilla, another old Goodwillian and now herself a principal of a school.
Today the school has over 1200 students in its imposing stone structure located near Coles Park, a lovely landmark in the cantonment area. “The school has now progressed to a junior college and full-fledged degree college comparable to the best in the city,” says Ms Ratnanjali Nicodemus, the dynamic, committed and amiable Principal. “It is important not to rest on our laurels but accept change. We have to march with the times. We will strive hard to continue the dedicated service of our predecessors and live up to the ideals of our founders."
And the school is doing just that: staying relevant to changing times, promoting girls’ education and their empowerment, as it races to its 150th year of educational service. Typical of these sweeping changes in our society is seven-year old Anu-sha, a domestic help and a daily wage mason’s daughter, who got into Goodwill’s thanks to a kind sponsor. She started with a piece of chalk, now she's ready to take on the PC.
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