Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2001 11:01 pm
Posts: 2070
Location: Toronto, Canada
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A "masterpiece" shouldn't always necessarily be judged based on it's consistent technical features. I think a lot of great art is simply ahead of its time, and I also think that artistic (not commercial) success is a highly personal matter.
My definition of a Good Film would be one that, in some way, expands my awareness of life, the world around me, or cinema. A Great Film, in my estimation, is one that expands the boundaries of cinematic language in order to communicate something new and interesting about life and our world.
Ramesh Sippy's Sholay, for instance, fits comfortably within the canon of India's prime classic film today and a film that wouldn't provoke any sense of radical challenge in your average film buff today. But, in its time, it was a work of such bold invention that it literally caused a craze up on its debut! Such Films, are at its most effective, in my opinion, when it engages with the viewer with a full-on active aesthetic experience. When I pay money to sit in a theatre for two-three hours and watch a film I want something out of it beyond a casually enjoyable, but uninvolving and forgettable time. The difference here may well lie in what I expect for my ten bucks as opposed to what others expect out of theirs. My time is valuable and money, to be trite, certainly doesn't grow on trees. I want, ideally, to see a movie that uses film as a medium to its fullest potential in order to, one way or another, communicate something to me that will potentially enrich my life. That's a lot to ask, I realize, but why should I settle for less when there are indeed filmmakers out there today (Benegal, Bhansali, Nihalani, Ratnam, Sivan, Godard of course, Gulzar, Vinod Chopra, Lynch, Scorsese) who do consistently provide such worthwhile filmic experiences.
Similarly, James Joyce's A Patriot Of An Artist As A Young Man, while still probably a rather difficult read for, say, an average high school student, has gradually become accepted alongside the works of the Old Masters as a seminal piece of literature, but in the 1930s, both its style and subject matter sent heads spinning among the literary acedemia, not to mention the average reader.
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). But really, it's quite subjective.
