They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? The 1,000 Greatest Films (In Chronological Order): The Story So Far
An introduction to the gargantuan cinema project that has occupied my time since the halcyon days of Covid lockdowns: going through film history, year by year, to get the Full Story
On October 22nd 2019, driven by an insatiable desire to simply become cinema – as I so wisely defined it at the time – I watched the first of a thousand films on the legendary ‘They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?’ list, in chronological order. Ah, so you’re finished then? No, I’m afraid this isn’t a declaration of completion. Half a decade later, I’m sitting at six hundred and twenty two, so I guess I’m well on track to finish this colossal task within, ahem, ten years. Now why the fuck would anyone ever do this, and what even is this list? Well I’m gonna get to that, but the main points to make up front are the aforementioned insatiable desire for ultimate cinematic knowledge, and the small matter of an undiagnosed mental condition or two (with the deepest respect to my friends who suffer graver symptoms from Mental ‘Ealth than simply trying to watch every movie ever).
So, what’s this list, then? Well, have it straight from the horse’s (haha) mouth:
“They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (TSPDT) is a modest but growing film resource dedicated to the art of motion picture filmmaking and most specifically to that one particular individual calling the shots from behind the camera - the film director. Amongst other content, TSPDT currently houses two of the most referenced film lists on the internet (The 1,000 Greatest Films and The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films) along with a growing set of director profiles.”
Basically, Bill and Vicki’s passion project (if you want to call it that) has become one of, if not thee definitive cinematic canon in the age of the internet. And I’m not saying this just because I really like what they’ve done, it’s sort of mathematically guaranteed – their top 1000 list is the result of some painstaking work to integrate and combine basically every available “best of” list from critics and directors alike, forming one ultimate list of the greatest films of all time. You can check out the complete list of sources here.
Naturally, BFI’s legendary once-per-decade top 250 has a particularly strong influence.
It’s harder than it should be to cast my mind back 5 years and remember just why the hell I decided to put myself through this, but I guess I’d always struggled to fully appreciate and evaluate capital-C Cinema without a properly learned background in the medium’s history. Silent cinema, for example, was a major blindspot. Like most budding cinephiles, I adored the French New Wave, but its referential attitude towards classic Hollywood — its re-interpolation of Film Noir’s formalism — sailed completely over my head. In fact, my knowledge of anything before the 1960s was patchy at best, and I didn’t feel that watching a few films from the 1930s or 40s in isolation did much to enrich my understanding of the context from which those films emerged. So I decided to watch all of them. (Not really, my “films that didn’t make the top 1000” watchlist is already just as long… sigh.)
As someone who strives to be a sort of all-round cultural encyclopaedia/final boss of University Challenge in not just film, but all of the Arts, man, a bit of compromise and pragmatism is sadly necessary. Ten lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to read Bloom’s western canon; it feels like it’d take a few decades to become properly well versed in either classical or jazz music — before you even consider ✨popular✨ music from 1960 till now — and art, you know, paintings and that, I don’t even know where to fucking start, mate. Cinema, however, is such a young art-form that I thought, yeah, fuck it, I could study its entire history in a reasonable amount of time.
Not to say that methodically ticking off films on a Top 1000 list makes me the ultimate expert on cinema – far from it – but the idea of going through the canon chronologically appealed to me in the sense that I could more fully appreciate the developments of each era after properly submerging myself in them for an extended amount of time. Like anyone, I always loved Citizen Kane, but it’s quite another experience to watch it immediately after the years of Hollywood that preceded it. With that context in mind, its technical innovations are all the more mind blowing and rewarding. The fading world of Sunset Boulevard is a hell of a lot more potent when you have properly delved into the glamour of silent cinema’s golden age at its peak, before the pictures got small, as Norma Desmond said.
The same principle applies to discerning the national styles of each country’s output. For example, there’s a clear dialogue between the American western and the Japanese Jidaigeki, a full awareness of which means that you can annoy your pals with how there’s a direct line between Seven Samurai and A Bug’s Life. Then there’s the kinetic cinema of the Soviet Union, which contributed the very idea of the cinematic montage through their innovations in editing, evidenced by the likes of Battleship Potemkin, something that has become so integral to the American way of making films, today more than ever. Did you know that there was a link between the political films of the Soviet Union and Fast & Furious? Now you do. You can feel the palpable influence of German Expressionism on the Universal horror pictures of the early 30s, and really, Hollywood thrillers in general, as more German directors fled the rise of the Nazis.
Speaking of those bad Nazi bastards, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this endeavour has been following the development of film alongside the historical events of the 20th century. The World Wars obviously loom over the entire century, inescapably so, with the post WWI Depression masked in America by the decadence and glamour of the Pre-Codes, while France often faced it head on with the Poetic Realism of Renoir, Cocteau and more. The inter-war period is a nervous time in Hollywood, with, again, bold attempts to uphold optimism and solidarity. The same can be said of British cinema, which enjoyed a particularly fertile period from the late 30s through to the early 50s. The post-war baby boom reflected itself in technicolor splendour as the Hollywood studio system enjoyed a final hurrah before its eventual collapse and reformation, while the Japanese looked to the past in search of a broken identity. The cinema of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe continued to innovate in the fields of technical direction and abstract poetic expression, distinct from what we now know as traditional ‘arthouse’ in the western European sense: Italy, France and the Nordic countries were particularly prevalent in this era, truly pushing the boundaries of the moving image as an art-form.
The decade of the 1960s speaks for itself – I really don’t think we need another writer talking about how social experimentation and revolutionary spirit reflected itself in the arts. We’ve all been through The Beatles discography. The point is that, as some guy (probably) once said: everything I know, I learned from the movies, and from going through the story of cinema from the beginning, it has enriched my understanding of basically everything I know anything about. That’s not to mention developing my empathy, and movies are, after all, like machines that generate empathy, as a very, very wise man definitely once said.
Am I saying that watching films can make you a better person? Not for me to say, but if that were the case, I must be well on my way to being the best guy ever, at this point. And so, 622 films deep, with the 1970s (just about) finished, I’ll be diving into the wilderness of 80s cinema one year at a time. The 1970s took me about two years to get through, on and off, and honestly, when I started this project in late 2019, it’s as if I had the foresight of what was coming with Covid and its subsequent lockdowns. I watched an insane amount of films in 2020, and it’s difficult to reconcile myself with the fact that I’ll never have that amount of free time for films again. Adult life is basically just one big inconvenience that comes between me and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman.
Given how long it took me to slog my way through the 1970s, I’m sort of giving myself a kick up the arse to lock the fuck in and fly through this project at a much more dedicated pace from here on out. It only took me five years and six hundred and twenty two films to actually get the finger out and make a blog for writing about them. Never too late, I guess. So this will be my companion for the remaining 378 films, and I’ll try to stick somewhat religiously to a monthly update of what the hell I’ve been watching, and my Very Important Opinions on everything I’ve watched. If you’ve listened to me ramble about movies and don’t want to murder me with an axe yet, tune the fuck in. I’ll have become cinema in no time.
If this sounds like a cool idea but you don’t want to read all these daft fancy words, you can follow the list’s progress on Letterboxd. Or you can just do that anyway, if you’re on Letterboxd.
You’re going to have to expand on the connection between Soviet Union cinema and Fast and Furious to me later! Lovely writing, combining two of my favourite things: history and cinema x