An ongoing effort to watch each of the film’s in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series. The Great Movie Project is, first and foremost, an excuse to watch (or re-watch) a set of films that more or less constitutes a canon — the frequently discussed, often-mentioned cinema that has come to define our collective imagination, for better and worse.
These are, by and large, the films that have formed a collective (Western) understanding of what cinema is, what’s important about it, and what it’s capable of achieving. As with any canonical construction, there are omissions and weird inclusions, but the general sense is that these are the films that have laid the groundwork for our wider understanding. By watching them, as much as availability allows, in sequence, I hope to place them in conversation with each other. In a further twist, I have a concurrent series called Great Movies: The Counter-Programming, which will hopefully expand that conversation even further.
Follow along! This is going to take a minute.
