What elements make a movie a classic?

by TM Maria Be a king in your own kingdom

In the records of the cinematographic history, films that are classified as 'classics' stand out. The label makes the tapes remain in the collective memory and continue to be revisited year after year.

While there is no recipe to bring a classic to life, films with three main ingredients are more likely to enter that category. Memorable characters, director's vision and innovation are the elements that have marked this cinema.

For the filmmaker Javier Andrade, the creation of memorable characters allows schemes to be broken. Protagonists of a strong narrative load help make them difficult to forget.

Andrade explains that Hannibal Lecter from 'The Silence of the Lambs' exemplifies this. Lecter "is an ambiguous villain, a charming monster, who intrigues, and that seduced the people".

With this reading also appears in the classics 'The Godfather' , where Michael and Vito Corleone personified the Italo-American mafia in a saga that remains a favorite of both critics and the public.

'What the wind took away' brings together these first two characteristics. "Scarlett will always be a modern woman, no matter the era in which she is exhibited," says Jorge Suárez, a film critic and historian.

The script of an affair in times of the Civil War is sustained -according to Suarez- for being impeccable "whose history walks with time". According to Andrade, this film is also told from a point of view close to the viewer - through Scarlett - which allows it to become a classic.

The third element is perhaps one of the most important, innovation. Santiago Castellanos, professor of communication and film at the USFQ, indicates that the classics must mark a before and after in the History of cinema, whether in narrative or in form.

In this sense, films such as 'Breathless' have permeated his way of using tools in editing. The use of the 'jump cut' or editing jump in a band of young rebels in a context of gangsters "is to see a revolution happening", Andrade mentions.

Why is a movie considered a classic?

Let's see, there are several considerations on that very general question.

When we talk about classic movies, we usually talk about classic Hollywood cinema, that is, the cinema of films and the star system from the beginning of the cinema until the end of the 60s, a peak period in the production of films from which it derives, in one or another measure, all the keys and models of the seventh art.

When said movie is already a classic (at any time and of any nationality) is that its quality or any significance in terms of impact on a genre or a theme, transcends its time and is unavoidable its knowledge by the interested party deepen in such art.

The classic in art is timeless, its quality does not lose value with the passage of time, and sometimes even increases.

Quite the opposite of fashions, which today may be very popular, but their value, sublimated in their period of invoice due to causes and interests, does not go beyond time and may be seen in the future as something kitsch or something pretentious. Not to say anything worse.