What is a great movie? Part One: Less Than Zero

We suggest that you turn off the sound on your computer for a moment. Then play this clip.



Now turn your sound on. Playing it again reveals a piano accompaniment, music that attaches itself immediately to the visual and reduces it to quaintness, allowing the mind to sort it into a category: an old silent movie. Our mind's eye then sees Chaplin twirling a cane and Lillian Gish crossing an ice floe. Turning off the sound allows us, paradoxically, to see Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat not as a silent film but as film. It allows us to see it, period, and perhaps understand for a moment the impact of watching projected images on a screen in a theater for the first time, ever.

This list, by theyshootpictures.com, of the "1000 greatest films" is far better than the vast majority of these lists that we have seen -- a very high percentage of the films mentioned are indeed worthy of interest. One need only compare that selection to the IMDB's quasi-democratically-arrived-at list of the 250 best films to understand the problem. Both lists, however, are are products of a need: the first one, to establish an artistic standard that perhaps has ceased to exist, the second, to establish the populist creed that spectacle trumps meaning.

After some thought, our staff have concluded that Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, made in 1896, begins, unintentionally, to lay a trap for reality. It demonstrates, "Reality can be captured and projected for your interest and entertainment." Citizen Kane, tops on the theyshootpictures list, demonstrates, "Reality can be shaped into a comment on reality." The Trap, part 2. By the time of The Godfather, tops on the IMDB list, movies have become primarily about moviemaking itself -- "Reality can be replaced and made more attractive" -- culminating in number 4 on that same list, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which reality is so far out of the mix that the movie is in fact about absolutely nothing -- which is what many modern filmgoers would say about the plotless, seemingly "meaningless" Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

These days, especially in the political arena, reality seems infinitely shapeable. We will go a step further. In a technoexistence in which reality can be presented, denied, and forgotten as rapidly as smoke can be blown away, reality -- which is to say unmediated, unfiltered reality -- simply does not exist, in any meaningful form. So we here at DHAIP ask a question -- what is now a greater work of art: to conjure a vision that has replaced reality, or to a record a "reality" that has vanished from before our eyes?

Tell us: which one is real?








"I don't know where he [bin Laden] is. I don't spend much time on him... I repeat, I'm not that concerned about him."
--George Bush, March 13, 2002.

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."
--Guy Debord

"They think that I got no respect, but everything means less than zero."
--Elvis Costello