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Film

EDITORIAL

What makes a great film? No, not a really good film, but a work of art, the greatest of the great.

Take these ones, for example:

Doctor Zhivago (1966) - the experience of monumental personal dilemmas in the context of world events outside of our control, which totally reshape entire continents.

Ryan's Daughter (1970) - the experience of life in the constant scrutiny and demands and constraints of a small community and its narrowly defined values when in conflict with our personal wants and needs.

Papillon (1973) - the experience of confronting monumental injustice and the huge dilemma between risking everything in search of freedom, versus safe enslavement.

Gandhi (1982) - what it is like to make decisions which will change millions of lives, then those same decisions seen from the opposite end, in individual people uprooted by the consequences.

A great film must reveal some truth that has meaning for all time, meaning that remains unchanged through the generations. It must be an experience in itself, but the great films, like great novels, are more than our experience of them for the duration of seeing or reading them. They continue to affect us long after we have finished seeing or reading them, they change who we are, leaving a permanent mark on the soul.

As in all the arts, a great film, a work of art, does not just inform us, it must transmit the experience of having been through those events ourselves.

Film is the most complex of the arts, not in its essence but its production and execution. Hence it is the hardest to achieve the status of art in. It needs the co-operation of so many in so many different aspects, each of which may be a work of art in itself; but for the film to be a work of art, they all must reach art status.

OTHER EXAMPLES

What is missing from the above list are films which were great in a different way. Citizen Kane (1941), for example, was historically important and had great meaning but, due to the constraints of the time, seeing it did not constitute a great experience in itself. The likes of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter were powerful in conveying the horrors of war but no new truths were revealed. Barry Lyndon (1975), Straw Dogs (1971) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) all were a unique experience, in very different ways, but lacked the depth of meaning required from a work of art. La Traviata (1983) by Franco Zeffirelli both had meaning and was a great experience, but too much of that achievement was down to the original opera by Verdi. West Side Story (1961) gave us music which was a work of art in itself, the work of genius, and dealt with the conflict between man's basic needs versus his own powerful emotions and desires. However, the balance leaned more towards ephemeral entertainment rather than universal truth. And 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was no more than historically important for originality.

One could go on and, of course, there will be disagreements.

Then, more recently, everything changed in the world of film.

What happened to the film industry after the end of the great epics is a matter for proper debate. The world had changed and so did films. Television increasingly ate away at cinema audiences. Then came multiple digital TV channels, the internet and social media, smart phones and tablets. The great epics could only be watched on huge screens to be experienced as intended and there were few such cinemas left, so the films themselves changed.

In the last century we had Cinerama with its large curved screen. Now we got IMAX, sometimes with 3D spectacles added, which provided a great cinematic experience on a huge screen, but there are very few IMAX cinemas. Such technological innovations do not make a film into a work of art in themselves, any more than special effects which must serve meaning to be of artistic merit.

Star Wars and James Bond films may have been blockbusters and special effects pioneers but remained just simple entertainment; there was no greater meaning.

Some horror movies make for a powerful experience which is nothing more than a fright and possibly the release of laughter.

A good documentary can inform, even educate us, change our perceptions and therefore our lives. It may be profound, but if it does not convey the experience of being someone else, it is not art. You need to have both. Is it possible for a documentary to be a work of art? Yes, if it meets the criteria, but the constraints of factual accuracy make it hard. The difficulty lies in revealing universal truth for all time.

Film-making takes many different forms and new ones will be invented, no doubt. The idea of what makes art changes too, and there will never be agreement. But the principles of great art have not changed since ancient Greece; art must reveal essential meaning and must transmit an experience.

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