A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the folks at Cinema Fusion and Movie Patron, to produce a Top 100 films list on behalf of the online film community. I was sent a list of 500 nominees, and was asked to narrow it down to my personal Top 100, ranked in order.

I didn’t end up getting that far. Poring over the nominees list, I just became completely overwhelmed. It was easy enough to narrow the 500 down to 100 (frankly, there were quite a few films on the Top 500 that felt like placeholders–Pirates of the Caribbean? Grease? Seriously?), but I didn’t want to just submit a list of My Top 100 Most Favorite Bestests with Barry Lyndon at the top and the remaining 99 in random order. I decided I needed to come up with an organizing philosophy that would allow me to rank the films on a non-arbitrary scale, based on artistic, entertainment, and socio-historical value. But while I was agonizing over theoretical point values, everyone else was ranking their movies, and yesterday the final Top 100 list debuted on Cinema Fusion.

Considering that this venture was at least in part a reaction to AFI’s recently re-released Top 100 list, I think it’s useful to compare the two. Sean at Film Junk notes that he’s “a little disappointed that [the online] list wasn’t very radical or ‘progressive’.” This is a bit of an understatement; this new list is in fact so similar to the AFI list that if you compare just the two Top 20s side by side, seven films appear on both lists, with one film actually winning the same exact ranking from both groups. It begs the question: how did this self-styled “alternative list” come to so closely resemble the institutional verdict? Is this just an instance of consensus necessarily producing mediocrity, and if so, would there have been any way to get around that? Below the jump, you’ll find both Top 20s, and my analysis.

Like the AFI list, the online list is very male. But whereas AFI was criticized for excluding the work of female directors, the online list is not only 100 percent male in terms of the directors represented, it’s actually even lighter than AFI on what could be termed “women’s pictures” — ie: genre films primarily associated with female audiences, such as musicals, melodramas, and romantic comedies. Whereas AFI put Singin’ in the Rain in the top 5, the online critics slotted it in at #43. Most of the films on the online list that do fit into one of the aforementioned genres are films that could be said to appeal equally to both genders, such as Annie Hall or The Princess Bride. There’s not a single film by Douglas Sirk or George Cukor on the newer list; though mid-century foreign films such as 8 1/2 and The Bicycle Thief make the cut, European male directors like Michaelangelo Antonioni and Pedro Almodovar, who have placed the psychological concerns of women at the center of many of their films, do not.

The online Top 20 is extremely late-20th-century auteur-oriented. It’s dominated by Hollywood-based name brand directors, with many of the same guys (Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock) getting the majority of the love. In this respect, the online list is far more conservative than the AFI list, which reflects an institutional attempt at historical diversity–even if their milquetoast, sum-of-consensus diversity only extends as far as including a handful of silent films and a wide variety of studio system genres.  AFI puts two silent classics in their Top 20; an extraterrestrial visitor looking at the online list would think that cinema started with Citizen Kane. And in some ways, that’s valid: the online list includes many contributions from fans/amateur critics, and a person’s awareness of/access to the first 40 years of cinema tends to increase in direct proportion to their access to traditional film education.

In other words: The AFI list is a work of educational activism; the online list is sheer populism. The AFI list is about the movies we *should* watch, like you *should* exercise and floss; the online list is about the movies people actually do watch, regardless of historical importance or intellectual nutritive content. You *should* watch Schindler’s List (#8 on AFI) but instead, you watch Jaws (#7 on online). Subject to no mandate beyond the tastes and habits of its compilers, this exercise reveals a dirty (but potentially fascinating) secret: even the most dedicated film lovers tend to watch the same movies over and over again, and those movies are the same movies that everyone else likes. In the final calculation, individual eccentricities are pushed to the margins, and phenomena that everyone can get behind (The Godfather, Star Wars) float to the top.

Is this good? Bad? I don’t know, probably both. But I do wonder if it would have made any difference if I had sent in my list, which surely would have been Spielberg-free and Lucas-free, and heavy on my own eccentricities: noir, melodrama, weird 70s musicals. Maybe at the very least, I could have helped push Blue Velvet out of the bottom 10.