The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

More canon fodder, courtesy of the New York Times. The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made! As these sort of lists go, it's a fairly inoffensive and safe one, covering all bases with popular and critical favorites, domestic and foreign classics, but like the AFI top 100 American list from some years back, it gives the silent era the cold shoulder. Films not included: Keaton's The General (although Boorman's is), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, Man with a Movie Camera and The Birth of a Nation (which people usually shy away from including in lists like this for its incendiary racism, but you can usually replace that with Intolerance so at least Griffith's influence can be acknowledged). I'm not exactly a silent movie maven, but anyone with a cursory knowledge of film history and its evolution knows of the importance of these films. Have silent films fallen so out of favor with critics and the popular consciousness that they are no longer acknowledged, much less considered part of the canon? In a half-hearted defense of the list, these films were probably never reviewed in the pages of the Times as, in those early days, "the paper of record" considered movies an amusement and not as an artform worthy of serious discussion (that is, if I'm assuming correctly that a review in the Times is a prerequisite for inclusion).

It's also interesting to note that George Romero's gut-chomping classic Dawn of the Dead was included in the hot 1000, as its original review in the Times by Janet Maslin is (in)famous for its snide and dismissive tone and the fact that Maslin, sickened by the film's brutality, walked out of the movie after only 15 minutes. It's also interesting that this original review is not directly linked from the best 1000 list, only this laudatory appraisal by Cavett Binion from the All Movie Guide.