After doing the Muriels for a few years, it began to despair that the group was only really active for a month or so every year. Everyone would fill out their ballots, I’d tabulate results and assign written pieces, and we’d announce the winners. And that would be it for 10 months or so, when the next voting season rolled around. So for a few years, I pondered on the idea of how to keep willing voters active in the “off-season.” My first idea was to keep the blog going with regular exclusive content, but neither Steve nor I had the time to make that happen. For a year or two, we ran a blogathon at Our Science, but we didn’t keep it going.
Finally, after the Skuriels were over, it occurred to me – why can’t we do something similar every year? At one point a voter suggested that we do our own take on the cinematic canon in order to double back and recognize films older than the fifty-year anniversary award. Of course, this would be for Muriel voters only – D’Angelo was clear that the Skuriels were a one-off thing, and I’m OK with that. Nonetheless, I liked the idea of giving Muriel voters something else to vote on during the summer months, and giving them another shot at honoring classic cinema was even more appealing. So began the Muriels Hall of Fame.
Three years in, I think we’ve done a pretty darn good job. Naturally, we’ve picked off a lot of the obvious stuff – plenty of Hitchcock, Welles, Kurosawa and the like – but you’ll have that when you ask people to choose the best and notable films in classic cinema. And I’d say we’ve made a few unexpected choices as well. I know I wouldn’t have predicted that we’d include movies like Man With a Movie Camera, Sansho the Bailiff, and Duck Amuck in our first forty or so picks. And I’m genuinely proud that we’ve taken the opportunity to recognize a film by a female director fairly early in the game – namely Agnès Varda’s lovely Cleo From 5 to 7. I hope we honor more female-directed films in the next few years (The House Is Black always appears on my ballot), as well as more films from Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and East Asia countries other than Japan. But it’ll happen.
As for the Muriels themselves, they keep chugging along. 2013 was another strong year for us, and by popular demand we instituted the category of Best Documentary. Now that the technology necessary to make a movie has become more widely available than ever, there has been a surge in nonfiction filmmaking in recent years, and we wanted to honor that in a way we’ve never had the chance to do previously. I only regret that we were too late to recognize the great documentaries from the year 2011, particularly the game-changing This Is Not a Film, in which Jafar Panahi, one of the world’s great filmmakers, pushed against limitations that would have Lars von Trier salivating (both house arrest and a legal ban from directing movies) by shooting an intimate work in his home and partially using an iPhone, then piecing the film together and smuggling it out of Iran in a cake so that it could be seen by the world. It’s the other end of the spectrum from big-budget Muriel favorites like WALL*E and The Departed, but it belongs just as much in the world of cinema that the Muriel Awards seeks to recognize every year.
Coming tomorrow: my final Muriel memories piece. So what have we learned?
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