Lao Ma: Hello, I’m Lao Ma. Welcome to Great Film Debate.

Ah Wu: I’m Ah Wu. This is not a regular episode, but a preview.

Lao Ma: We are introducing a new paid series called Classics of the Century, about landmark films of this century.The century in the title means the twenty-first century.We will review the twenty-six years from 2000 through 2025, a quarter century that now deserves reflection.

Ah Wu: It is a short film history that has only just happened and is still unfolding.

Lao Ma: It remains in progress. We choose one classic from each year and devote an episode to it: twenty-six films in twenty-six episodes.

Ah Wu: Exactly—one film for every year from 2000 to 2025.

Lao Ma: Cinema faces a severe crisis, and recovering the value of classics can help. We should improve films being made now while also returning to great works.New releases may disappoint us; classics never do.

Ah Wu: In a formula: stand in the present, review history, and look toward the future.

Lao Ma: That formula still captures the link between current creation and revisiting classics. Two earlier projects inspired our format. The British Film Institute published BFI Film Classics and BFI Modern Classics. Each short book, usually just over a hundred pages, examines one established or contemporary classic.

Ah Wu: BFI’s modern period ran roughly from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Together the two series now approach three hundred volumes.

Lao Ma: Chinese publishers translated more than a dozen. The project grew from an archival crisis in the 1980s, when deteriorating prints and negatives threatened to make films disappear. BFI first proposed preserving one hundred key works, then expanded the list to 360.

Ah Wu: The list ran from Italy’s Cabiria in 1914 to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986. It included several Chinese-language films, such as The Goddess, Stage Sisters, A Touch of Zen, and Yellow Earth.

Lao Ma: Its Western viewpoint limited Chinese films. BFI wanted pristine screening prints for year-round rotation at London’s NFT cinema—practical preservation through exhibition and curation.

Ah Wu: The plan began after BFI-funded The Draughtsman’s Contract became unexpectedly profitable. Chairman Anthony Smith invested the return in screenings, while NFT ticketing director David Meeker personally assembled the list after consulting experts.

Lao Ma: Inevitably biased.

Ah Wu: Critics asked why It’s a Wonderful Life was absent or Melville had three films. Meeker replied that anyone who disliked his list could make their own.

Lao Ma: A public institution serving personal taste is debatable, but every list attracts controversy. What mattered was advancing preservation. BFI’s books were initially designed to interpret those 360 films.

Ah Wu: BFI’s publishing department naturally connected the screening and book projects.

Lao Ma: Each book invites an author to discuss production, historical position, cultural meaning, aesthetics, and technique, while encouraging subjective judgment and emotional experience.

Ah Wu: Many early authors were not film scholars. Meeker preferred outsiders; novelist Salman Rushdie wrote about The Wizard of Oz.

Lao Ma: A very famous novelist.

Ah Wu: Labour politician and columnist Gerald Kaufman wrote about Meet Me in St. Louis. A film enthusiast rather than an academic, he naturally produced a different style.

Lao Ma: Later volumes became more academic, and some were revised. Charles Barr updated his book on Vertigo after it displaced Citizen Kane atop Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll—a major change in the film’s reception.

Ah Wu: Barr’s own view also changed. Sight and Sound itself belongs to BFI, so the activities reinforce each other.

Lao Ma: BFI earned authority by actively organizing such projects. Another model is critic Roger Ebert’s personal Great Movies series: essays longer than his daily reviews, totaling 364 before his death.

Ah Wu: One short of 365.

Lao Ma: Coincidentally close to BFI’s 360. Film history could easily sustain a thousand classics, so three hundred is not hard to choose.

Ah Wu: Ebert’s essays fill four books, all translated into Chinese; the fourth appeared last year.

Lao Ma: A curiosity: the website has 364 essays, but the four books contain only 362.

Ah Wu: Which two are missing?

Lao Ma: Cléo from 5 to 7 and The Life of Oharu.

Ah Wu: Why were they excluded?

Lao Ma: Nobody knows. Perhaps an editorial oversight, since Ebert especially loved both films.

Ah Wu: Why did Ebert begin the project?

Lao Ma: In 1997 he found contemporary Hollywood boring.

Ah Wu: Hollywood seemed highly creative then; comparison changes everything.Had Ebert lived through the 2010s to today, he might have been even more disappointed.

Lao Ma: He compared the 1990s with the New Hollywood golden age of the 1970s. Effects-heavy summer blockbusters were rising, and reviewing at least 250 releases a year forced him to write about too many mindless films.

Ah Wu: Such films leave almost nothing to say.

Lao Ma: With no time for older classics, he assigned himself a project: rediscover cinematic pleasure and introduce neglected works to young audiences. It was also cultural transmission.

Ah Wu: Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars likewise argues for a film canon. Sight and Sound’s 1962 top-ten poll first convinced him to take cinema seriously.

Lao Ma: In the 1960s, cinephilia and criticism were established in France but still unusual in America.

Ah Wu: At NYU, course materials valued stories without treating film as serious art. Sight and Sound’s elevation of Citizen Kane and Antonioni profoundly inspired him.Once film entered academia beside literature, music, and art, scholars began treating rankings as childish and surrendered canon formation to major studios.

Rosenbaum disliked the Oscars, box-office charts, and AFI lists as mainstream marketing tools lacking intellectual or aesthetic discovery. He therefore saw building a canon as meaningful.

Lao Ma: Commercial institutions must not monopolize it.

Ah Wu: Nor should film simply copy Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. Unlike literature, cinema crosses language barriers easily, so its canon cannot be confined to the West.

Lao Ma: Subtitles largely overcome language. Our focus, however, is classics of this century. Unlike generally accepted older classics, recent films remain unsettled.

Ah Wu: Older works have passed through selection by several generations of audiences, fans, and scholars.

Lao Ma: Adding ‘contemporary’ or ‘new century’ guarantees controversy.

Ah Wu: Some listeners will surely ask:Why omit that film? Why choose this one? Can this really be a classic?

Lao Ma: That dispute is part of the pleasure. To understand cinema’s future, we must actively evaluate it.

Ah Wu: Inevitably with strong subjectivity.

Lao Ma: It sets topics and agendas. Whether ours, BFI’s, or Ebert’s, every return to classics responds to a sense of crisis.

Ah Wu: Ebert’s crisis was more personal, a need to break through in his writing.

Lao Ma: Yes, but also dissatisfaction with Hollywood’s declining creativity.Our present crisis has two fronts. Production faces generative AI, as text-to-video grows powerful. Sora may have shut down, but technology will advance. Could directors and actors become unnecessary? Revisiting classics helps ask what great human-made cinema is.

Ah Wu: And we mean great films made in this century, not remote antiquity.

Lao Ma:The second crisis concerns consumption: audiences watch fewer films, interests shift, algorithms narrow taste. Discussing classics is a kind of zero-cost curation—using human taste and personal bias to establish historical reference and break algorithmic fatigue, even though we cannot screen the films.curation in action.

Ah Wu: We hope to rekindle passion and show that cinema’s attraction persists, even if temporarily overlooked.

Lao Ma: Listeners will also ask what counts as a classic. There is no absolute standard, and any year has ten or twenty worthy films. Our choice is not necessarily that year’s best.

Ah Wu: We must emphasize that this is not an annual best-film ranking.

Lao Ma: We balance quality with our interests, discussion value, and special significance, and try to select each director only once.

Ah Wu: Quality is the essential premise; then come personal interest, topicality, significance, and representativeness.

Lao Ma: Both of us must like the film. We can disagree in discussion, but the subject needs basic consensus, which excludes works only one of us loves.

Ah Wu: We also avoid directors and films already covered in depth, including Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, Denis Villeneuve, David Lynch, and Bong Joon Ho.

Lao Ma: The final list is not fixed. Early choices are Werckmeister Harmonies for 2000 and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for 2001.

Ah Wu: Black Hawk Down illustrates our approach. Mulholland Drive is clearly our favorite of 2001, but we already discussed it extensively.

Lao Ma: Some call Black Hawk Down militarist propaganda, a question we will examine, yet it remains classic in important respects. For 2002 we chose The Bourne Identity but will consider the whole series, especially the first three. For 2003 we plan Kill Bill as one work in two volumes. Choices may still change.

Ah Wu: Inspiration might suddenly make us choose something else.

Lao Ma: We have not published a fixed list because it may change. We nevertheless aim to cover major tendencies of the century, such as increasingly global art-film co-production across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Funding now also comes from Asia, weakening national-cinema labels.

Ah Wu: Cinema’s globalization truly began.

Lao Ma: Werckmeister Harmonies, for example, combined Hungarian, German, French, Italian, and Swiss funding, and three major actors are German. Whatever the casting reasons, it is not narrowly a display of Hungarian national culture.

Ah Wu: After the Cold War, Eastern European cinema gradually integrated into Europe. Besides Béla Tarr, Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy is hard to assign to one nation. Earlier East and West European cinemas were divided; Tarkovsky’s exile in Italy was a rare exception.

Lao Ma: Miloš Forman was another exile. A second trend is slow cinema, especially in Asia. Once reduced to ‘Eastern aesthetics,’ slowness is now understood more broadly.Ultimately, slowness resists the accelerating rhythm of life.

Ah Wu: Asian cultural traditions matter, but contemporary life cannot be ignored.

Lao Ma: Minority expression has grown from representing histories of suffering toward remaking communities’ own myths. Meanwhile high-concept art cinema and increasingly artistic genre film blur the boundary between the two, especially over the last decade.

Ah Wu: Art cinema also moves toward contemporary and experimental art. Festivals differ: Berlin accepts it, while Cannes insists on narrative cinema. Some films we discuss may have contemporary-art qualities.

Lao Ma: Cannes has reason to distinguish narrative art cinema from experimental work, whose audiences and industries differ. Museum films are not its main role.

Ah Wu: Cannes still defends theatrical cinema.

Lao Ma: American cinema remains central. This century shows overlapping generational change across at least four waves. Of the New Hollywood generation, chiefly Scorsese remains, and we may choose one of his films.

Ah Wu: His remarkable vitality matters, and we both feel strongly about his work.

Lao Ma: Next comes Quentin Tarantino’s video-store generation.

Ah Wu: Tarantino also represents the new American independent movement. We may select a Coen brothers film from that wave.

Lao Ma: Younger filmmakers born in the 1970s through 1990s include Sean Baker, the Safdies, Robert Eggers, and Greta Gerwig, distinct from Tarantino and Soderbergh. Another wave consists of foreign filmmakers working in Hollywood. It reminds me of the NBA.

Ah Wu: Basketball is foreign territory to me. Is the NBA like Hollywood?

Lao Ma: Foreign players have dominated recent NBA MVPs. Similarly, Nolan, Bong Joon Ho, Villeneuve, Lanthimos, the three Mexican directors, and Chloé Zhao have won major Oscars. Hollywood increasingly means a global concentration of top resources, accelerated by easier movement of capital and people.

Ah Wu: In football terms, Hollywood is the Premier League, far ahead industrially. Streaming seeks global control, while the Oscars internationalize and turn Cannes into a possible outpost, as Venice already seems to be.

Lao Ma: Cannes and the Oscars once remained separate but now overlap, producing the irritating label ‘precursor award.’ Though each episode centers on one film, we also want to trace cinema’s wider development.Film is not closed off; we want to relate it to changes in the world.

Ah Wu: That is our usual approach: aesthetics, technology, industry, and cultural-historical influence all matter.

Lao Ma: If the series succeeds, we could later expand to earlier periods, national cinemas, or genres.

Ah Wu: If film lovers enjoy it, we can discuss them all.

Lao Ma: That concludes our introduction. Thank you, and see you next time.

Ah Wu: Goodbye.