100 Films of the Century

Gareth Higgins on THE BEST FILMS OF THE CENTURY

The New York Times’ 100 Best films of the Century (one by industry people, the other from 200,000 readers) is an interesting exercise, falling somewhere between “high brow” and populist endeavors. It’s well worth your time. Such lists can be a form of gatekeeping - they might exclude those of us who haven’t seen (or don’t think we could make sense of) a Belgian film about a woman and her household drudgery, a Russian soul epic about a 15th century monk, or a Colombian jungle pilgrimage about a shaman re-finding his magic. (Although two of those - Andrei Rublev and Embrace of the Serpent are among my favorite films. I just needed someone to invite me in.) The mainstream lists erect fences too - for a while it seemed that if you didn’t think much of Pulp Fiction that movie nerds wouldn’t think much of you. I always felt like an outsider to the lists, as I hadn’t seen enough of the less accessible selections, but I didn’t like too many of the popular choices either.

I needed a tour guide more than a gatekeeper. I was lucky to find one in the form of Michael Open, a wonderfully eccentric - in the best sense of the word - Englishman who ran Belfast’s only arthouse cinema from 1967 through the bleakest days of the Troubles until 2002, four years after the peace agreement. Michael and his small staff kept the Queen’s Film Theatre (we always called it the QFT) open when much of the city was closed - either voluntarily because there were no customers, or by the imposition of a security threat. This was no small matter - one of my dearest friends was evacuated from a cinema along with the rest of the audience one night in the early ‘70s. Standing on the other side of the road, she felt frustrated at another distressing inconvenience becoming a regular fact of life. But then the cinema exploded. She had been saved along with dozens of others by a police officer who had spotted a suspicious-looking vehicle parked outside the cinema, and got everyone out unscathed. I was never in a cinema that blew up, but I do remember the Ormeau Road Curzon sometimes placing a glass transparency in front of the projector light, printed with instructions for drivers to move their cars lest they be damaged in the controlled explosion about to take place round the corner, where another suspicious object had been found. The Curzon was where I saw Gandhi when I was eight years old, initiating my consciousness into the fourfold and now lifelong gifts and challenges: the necessity of responding to the world, the imagination of creative possibilities, the vastness of the earth and our place in it, and the dreamworld of cinema itself.