The films I love seldom win prizes. Throughout the years I became increasingly frustrated to see different academies or juries and different voting methods ending up making the same errors and taking the same wrong decisions, prefering ephemerous flashing successes to true and enduring works of art.
Grand Hotel instead of Scarface (Oscars 1932)? Bille August twice (Cannes 1988 and 1992)? La balance instead of Une chambre en ville (Césars 1982)? Ugh!
Critics lists tend to be more insightful, but even so... time sometimes do not make them any favours: The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer) was the best film of 1958 for the New York Film Critics over... Vertigo or Touch of Evil.
Can you imagine a global awards ceremony where Mizoguchi would be competing for best director "against" John Ford, Ozu and Fritz Lang? And actually winning? Where a film like The Flowers of Shanghai would sweep most of the categories of a particular year?
Well, I decided to create such awards.
They are the result of a lifetime watching films, analysing them, discussing them, loving and hating them, secretly rating them in my private pantheon and enjoying immensely everytime I felt my feelings for some hidden treasure shared.
The rules of the game
This is a game I play alone; despite that it has some rules.
The awards are given yearly. Every year I choose the Ten Best Films (classified from first to tenth) and the best in a number of "artistic/technical" categories (picked from up to five nominees in each category). All feature films (long-metrages) from around the world released that year (see section "dates") are elegible.
NO, I have not seen all the films in the world (yet...), but YES, I have seen all the films mentioned in the lists.
Presentation
Each year entry includes the nominations and the awards lists.
Nominations
Up to ten categories lists:
- Director
- Original Screenplay (screenplay directly written for the screen)
- Adapted Screenplay (screenplay based on material previously released)
- Actor (performance by an actor in a leading role)
- Actress (performance by an actress in a leading role)
- Supporting Actor (performance by an actor in a supporting role)
- Supporting Actress (performance by an actress in a supporting role)
- Cinematography
- Production Design (or Art Direction)
- Music (mostly original)
In each category, a maximum of five nominees are displayed in alphabetical order.
Awards
Two lists:
- Ten best films of the year, in descending order of preference (I try to complement this with a list of other relevant films in a maximum of 15)
- Winners in each category
A lot can be said about what should be considered the date of a film. Is it the shooting date? The date of copyright registration? The release date? Each one has its pros and cons.
I adopted what seems to be the most widely accepted, which is the date (year) of the first public screening of a film (the release date for the great majority of the films, or the screening at a film festival, the screening – avant-première - at a special event, in a cinemathèque or elsewhere, etc.). This works in the case of, let’s say, 99% of the films.
The problem nevertheless persists in a few films, and in some of them it is of the utmost importance because they are included in my lists (sometimes even at the top!). It’s difficult to apply the same rule in all "problematic" cases, as each one presents a different problem.
A few examples follow:
- An easy one – Beau Travail was released in 2000 but had been shown in 1999 in several festivals. So I have to consider 1999 as the date of this film.
- After a tumultuous production, Heaven's Gate was released in the end of 1980 to a disastrous reception, was shelved immediately after, recut and re-released in a much shorter version in 1981. A restoration of the longer version, which became the definitive one, was presented more than 20 years later. 1980 was de facto the date of the film.
- Fanny and Alexander had its theatrical release in Sweden 1982, in a 188 minutes cut, much shorter than the originally intended (312 minutes). The longer version was shown internationally in 1983, first theatrically and then on television. Thus, 1983 was the year of the first screening of the definitive version of the film.
- The Marriage of Maria Braun was screened for the first time during the 1978 Cannes Film Festival for a selected audience of members of the industry. Then it was shelved until February 1979, when it was screened in the official competition of the Berlin Film Festival, eventually winning the Golden Bear. It’s difficult to ignore that a larger than usual corporate audience had already seen the film in its finished version in Cannes, so I have to consider 1978 as the year of its first public screening (nevertheless this is one of cases where I hesitated a lot).
- Russian films gave me a few headaches. During the Soviet era (and even after), several films were censored in different ways. Some of them were simply banished, very often films saw their releases delayed, a number were shown on festivals abroad but denied domestic public releases, others even had limited domestic releases but were not considered “fit” for export. In at least one of the above-mentioned situations are films as important as Ivan the Terrible, Andrei Rubliov or The Asthenic Syndrome.
Comments
Comments and suggestions from readers are welcomed.
Work in progress
The big advantage of the Lisztomania awards over all the others is that they are a «neverending story». Not only I am always adding newly seen films to the lists, but also I can revise/modify/correct old lists according to my own reassessments. Even though I am not always changing my mind, I may also make errors and take wrong decisions. The thing is that I can correct them with a simple click. So don't be too surprised if you find slightly changed a particular list of awards or nominations the next time you visit «Lisztomania».
No comments:
Post a Comment