(Study) A New Hope second most influential film of all time.

It's definitely an alternate method of evaluating and defining the word "success"; though there doesn't seem to me anything really of consequence to it. It seems a bit like, proposing a new unit of measurement as an alternative to inches or centimeters, the rell. Now that length is not only X inches, but by our alternative measure, it is Y rell. It's basically saying, if we measure "success" by the criteria of "X", then movies "A, B, C, ..." are the most "successful" when evaluated by this specific algorithmic data. Which of course is reasonable. It's defining the term by its own specific set of objective criteria.

Box office take is also an objective criteria, and will certainly be influenced by marketing and the such in the final analysis. Critic reviews are subjective, but we can create an objective measure of "success" by using the objective data in relation to subjective criticism for a measure. Meaning, we can simply use RT critical aggregation as an objective measure of "success" - all of these are alternative measures, each reasonable within their own specific criteria.

So everything works in relation to the alternative evaluation criteria, and all results would be correct within the given system. I could propose several alterative methods for evaluating "success" and they will all work just as well as any measuring device, providing accurate results within the context of the system.

One problem I can foresee in this (and it is not a systematic problem but a linguistic problem) is that there will probably be people who want to reject the method because they want to reject the criteria for "success" as being invalid (and by extenstion "influential"). This is a problem that pops up a lot of the time when words are being defined. I don't know how may times I've proposed a hypothesis, and defined the terms; and a group of people want to begin debating the "veracity" of the definitions of the terms. They don't understand why that isn't an option. You cannot debate or disagree with the definitions, they are "facts" in relation to the hypothesis.

But people have a definition of a word in their mind, and they tend to think that is the only allowable definition of a term. The don't understand the concept of defining terms in relation to clarity of communication. So some people (perhaps even the authors of the paper) may want to think their definition of a term is "more true" than someone else's, but it isn't. It's just an alternative definition for clarity of communication in the systematic argument being proposed. All definitions (specifically of abstract concepts) are true within the context of their use in a given system.

For example, I recently listened to people arguing about whether or not musicians who only played other peoples music were talented musicians. One side said they were not talented because they were not writing music but only copying what others had written, the other said they were talented because they could play the music even if it wasn't written by them. Both sides were adamant about how the other side was wrong. But in the end, what was really going on was that both sides were right, in the context of their criteria for defining and evaluating the idea of "talent" - but they couldn't understand that there are alternate ways of evaluating the concept, and that terms are definied by criteria to allow meaningful communication of ideas, not to create a "monopoly" (even though both sides wanted their specific criteria to be THE one-and-only manner of evaluation).

At any rate in the end, I just said "How about just putting an adjective in front of the word 'talent'; so we say a musician who plays other people's music has no song-writing talent but has instrument-playing talen?" And everything worked out. The point being that by simply using the word "success" in the alterative evaluation invites miscommunication and the underlying implication (to some) that the alternative method is attempting to monopolize the definition of the word. I think the best thing to do in cases of variance of definition is simply to slap an adjective to the term, giving us "box-office success" "critical success" "influencial success" and so on and so forth.

In which case, yeah; that alternative method of evaluating "success" provides those movies as their most "successful" in relation, and by extension the criteria for the concept of "influential". But still it seems to me like someone inventing an alternate unit of measure, then measuring a length and stating "Twelve rells" and I nod and say "Great." But hey, maybe I'm missing something. Wouldn't be the first time.

 

why is this a travesty? seems to me a pretty good ranking for a film that's 40 years old.
especially compared to something like The Wizard of Oz, which is twice its age and has had double the years worth of opportunity to be influential.

when you also factor in that talkie film-making as an commercial art form is celebrating its centennial, that's pretty impressive.

 

It's a shame the Oz books haven't been given better treatment since the original film and Return to Oz. Every modern attempt to revive or reinterpret the Oz mythos has gone up like a fart in church.

 

I think the film is remarkable and should be very influential in the study of films.