To those who are new to Tativille, one of the noteworthy, on-going features of the site, in the opinion of its creator, are the annual "ten best lists" stretching from the beginning of the sound era in 1930 to the present (available here). While I could feign modesty when discussing the purpose behind these lists, truly the idea is to construct a canon of the best in world cinema, making as few allowances as possible for anything other than what I would argue is (controversially, of course) their objective quality. Obviously, limitations abound -- not the least of which are the relative availability (or unavailability) of certain national cinemas, periods and auteurs. As an example, I still have not seen anything by Lino Brocka or from the Filipino cinema generally, which from the reputations of each, I suspect, would alter the make-up of a number of the lists. Then again, the point of these lists is to give recommendations of excellent film art, which a blindspot here or there I would argue does not militate. Indeed, it is for this reason that I am committed to changing the lists whenever I see something worthy of inclusion, which believe me happens less than one might think. (In future, I am considering highlighting new inclusions in bold so that my readers can follow the evolution of the lists. For instance, I will be seeing L. Shepitko's The Ascent (1976) and a number of 1968-era films for Yale's 1968 conference during the coming week, so look for changes in these two spots in particular.)
As to recent alterations to my entries, I have just added my 'ten best' English-language films from the years 1990 to 1994. To do so, I vetted a number of films from the era that I had not seen before -- Michael Tolkin's The Rapture made it, for example, and Oliver Stone's JFK (both 1991) most certainly did not -- while rewatching others for which I could not trust my prior judgement: to this end, I am finally on the Pulp Fiction (1994) bandwagon that every one else climbed aboard a dozen years ago. (It really just occurred to me that Pulp Fiction anticipates everything else Tarantino has done since, in much the same way Paisan [1946] fulfills a similar position in Roberto Rossellini's corpus. This is to say that it has the heart of the underrated, second-best Tarantion feature, Jackie Brown [1997].)The point behind including specifically English-language lists (from 1990-present, available here, and for each year since 2000, in the annual entries accessible on the site's right side bar) is that for many of my readers, a number of the international titles I have selected for each year are simply unavailable, in addition to the fact that I, again like most of my readers, see more films in the English language annually -- especially among newer films -- than I do in any other language. I guess you could say that the purpose behind these separate lists is to give additional recommendations which are available to the bulk of my readership.
That should be enough explanation concerning that feature of the site. In closing, let me direct your attention to Scarlett Cinema, whose first post was, as it happens, earlier this afternoon. The all-female film criticism site's genesis, according to co-founder Pamela Kerpius (of Seen Film notoriety), was as follows: "The idea for the blog began over a year ago as I spoke with a friend who was frustrated, like me, with being talked over or ignored when in
conversation with certain men." I really hope they weren't talking about me -- which hopefully my status among their links of "A Few Good Men" (not one of my choices for 1992, though still fairly good, if memory serves) confirms. Either way, I wish them the best of luck and look forward to their contributions to the film blogosphere. Who knows, maybe they'll have something to say about An Angel at My Table (English-language #1, 1990), Ruby in Paradise (English-language #6, 1993) or Little Women (English-language #4, 1994), let alone Pulp Fiction, The Ascent and Lino Brocka?
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