Books, movies and records of the year
Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2019 3:59 pm
I've been digging lately on the TSPDT (They Shoot Pictures Don't They) Top 1000 list. I've found there a list of the best movie of every year and I'm currently watching these movies in a particular order (first the years ending in 0, then in 1, so 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 1901, 1911, 1921, etc). Doing this I've discovered so far excellent movies ("The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Rashomon," "Breathless" or "In the Mood for Love") and I enjoyed again some wonderful movies I already knew and loved ("His Girl Friday," "Goodfellas" or "Citizen Kane"). Later I began to check also the "book of the year" on The Greatest Books.org and I'm right now in Combray with Marcel Proust, going Swann's way "In Search of Lost Time." So I thought... why not combine the highest positions of every year in a common thread? And here it is , this is the resultant thread combining the three best cultural meta-lists on the Internet, The Greatest Books.org, They Shoot Pictures Don't They and Acclaimed Music.net.
The Greatest Books (https://thegreatestbooks.org/) in an excellent meta-list about literature, the best resource you can find on the Internet to know the 2091 best books ever written based on 119 lists. The web page is developed and maintained by Shane Sherman (with the last update on May 24th, 2018) who states on the front page: "This list is generated from 119 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists." The page include two different main lists, one for fiction books and another one for non-fiction books. It is a very informative page, including comments about the books, cover arts of almost every book and links to other pages to obtain more information or even buy the book. It also includes a very useful tool that allows to filter the best books for time periods.
They Shoot Pictures Don't They (http://www.theyshootpictures.com/index.htm) is another excellent meta-list, in this case about cinematography. It includes two main lists, a Top 1000 list of all-time compiled from over 9,800 film lists (with a secondary list from 1001 to 2000) and a Top 1000 of the XXI Century. It also includes other lists like Top 250 Directors and Top 1000 Noir-Films. The web page is created, developed and maintained by Bill Georgaris (with the last update on January 21st, 2019) and it's in his own words "part-time folly, with kind (and important) assistance from my partner Vicki Platt. We are both life-long film lovers based in Adelaide, Australia. TSPDT is a completely hobby-driven enterprise which merely aims to provide a reasonable cinematic resource for fellow enthusiasts." The page is absolutely fantastic, both in form and content, including an amazing selection of movie pictures and well-selected comments by critics. A very useful feature is the sortable tables for the full list and the 21st century list.
Acclaimed Music (http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/) is, as all of you know, the best meta-list on the Internet about music. It includes three main lists, a Top 3000 for albums, a Top 10000 for songs and a Top 4000 for artists. The web-page was released in 2001 by Henrik Franzon, an statician from Stockholm, Sweden. The last update on the list was made on July 15th, 2018. He uses thousands of critics lists, both all-time and end-of-year, not including readers or listeners polls. The algorithm works matching all albums/songs against each other in pairs and summarizing these match-ups into a score for each album/song (as explained on the "about" section). The layout is user-friendly, making easy to explore it by decades or years. It also includes lists by country and music genre. And it includes, of course, a lively, friendly and ever-growing forum with users from all around the world.
With these 3 wonderful sites it could have been enough but when I began compiling I quickly noticed that I should include some Classical works in order to give the proper weight to the music of the first half of the XX Century. The problem is that there is not a web page like the other three for Classical music, so I've used a poll of the Australian radio station ABC Classic FM held in 2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_1 ... tury_(ABC)). It's a quite good sample of Modern Classical, even if it has notable absences and questionable choices like any other readers (listeners in this case) poll.
The structure of this thread will include lists from every year from 1900 to 2018 including:
- Book of the year (plus a top 3).
- Movie of the year (plus a Top 3).
- Record of the year (plus a Top 3 for albums and a Top 3 for songs).
- Top 3 classical works of the year.
Moreover I will include lists for the decades, in this case including a Top 5 instead of a Top 3.
Every entry will include (separated by vertical bars):
a) Position on the year or decade list.
b) Name of the book, movie, record or classical work, first on the original language (with transliteration to Latin alphabet) followed by the English translation between brackets.
c) Name of the book writer, film director, music act or classical composer.
d) Nationality, the country in which the work was first published (book), produced (movie), released (record) or premiered (classical work).
e) Nationality of the writer/director/act/composer if it's different than the first.
f) Record format (album, single), only for records.
g) Year (only on decade lists).
h) Exceptions (compilations, documentaries).
i) All-time position on the source list (Greatest Books, TSPDT, Acclaimed Music, ABC Classic).
Every web page has its own criteria to select the correct year but I've chosen:
- For the books the date of the first publication on book format, while on The Greatest Books.org the publication on magazines or serial format is occasionally chosen.
- For the movies the date of the premiere, just like on TSPDT.
- For the records the date of the album or single first release, just like on Acclaimed Music.
- For the classical works the date of the premiere unlike on ABC Classic that chose the date of composition (well, at least on the Wikipedia page).
In order to give some homogeneity of the criteria I've included some restrictions to make the lists more compatible:
- On Acclaimed Music the compilations are not included but The Greatest Books include some "compilations" (I think "collections" is a more correct term talking about literature). I've decided to leave out these collections on the category of "book of the year" but it will be mentioned on the Top 3 of the year. I'm doing this because otherwise excellent books of short stories or poetry won't get mentioned. The problem with the release dates of these short stories and poetry collections is that in The Greatest Books.org the votes for the original collections are usually gathered into a wider, more inclusive, collection. As an example, the votes for Jorge Luis Borges' original "Ficciones" ("Fictions," 1944) has been assigned to "Collected Fictions" (1998), that include the complete "Fictions" along with another original collections.
- On The Greatest Books.org there are separate lists for fiction and non-fiction books while in TSPDT both fiction and documentary movies are included together. So I've decided not to include documentaries as movie of the year (something that is going to happen on 6 occasions) while it will get mentioned on the Top 3s.
Hope you enjoy the thread. My plan is to include a new year/decade every day (so it will take a few months to unfold it completely). When the complete list is posted I could include some stats. One thing I wanted to mention beforehand is that I detected differences on the bias of the critics regarding books, movies or records. While on the music list is easy to detect a bias against women and non-English speaking countries but there was no detectable bias against black musicians (I talked about this on a previous thread) on the other lists the bias change. On the book list there is a relevant amount of women writers getting the #1 position, especially on the last 50 years, while the books written in English are much more represented than the books written in other languages. On the movie list the representation of women and black filmmakers is not too high but there are movies from all around the world, with almost half of the movies of the year filmed and released in languages different to English.
The information will appear in two identical threads, this one on the "Music, music, music..." section intended to be a more participative thread and another one on the "General Discussion," a kind of "official" thread only with information intended to be linked from the three main sites. So please, feel free to include your comments but only on this thread and not on this one.