Abstract
Traditional measures of success for film, such as box-office revenue and critical acclaim, lack the ability to quantify long-lasting impact and depend on factors that are largely external to the craft itself. With the growing number of films that are being created and large-scale data becoming available through crowd-sourced online platforms, an endogenous measure of success that is not reliant on manual appraisal is of increasing importance. In this article we propose such a ranking method based on a combination of centrality indices. We apply the method to a network that contains several types of citations between more than 40,000 international feature films. From this network we derive a list of milestone films, which can be considered to constitute the foundations of cinema. In a comparison to various existing lists of ‘greatest’ films, such as personal favourite lists, voting lists, lists of individual experts, and lists deduced from expert polls, the selection of milestone films is more diverse in terms of genres, actors, and main creators. Our results shed light on the potential of a systematic quantitative investigation based on cinematic influences in identifying the most inspiring creations in world cinema. In a broader perspective, we introduce a novel research question to large-scale citation analysis, one of the most intriguing topics that have been at the forefront of scientific enquiries for the past fifty years and have led to the development of various network analytic methods. In doing so, we transfer widely studied approaches from citation analysis to the the newly emerging field of quantification efforts in the arts. The specific contribution of this paper consists in modelling the multidimensional cinematic references as a growing multiplex network and in developing a methodology for the identification of central films in this network.
Highlights
Cinema plays a key cultural, creative, and industrial role in today’s society
Measures that quantify the success of individual films focus primarily on two divergent aspects of success: 1) commercial appeal by considering economic aspects and distinguishing blockbusters, and 2) artistic excellence by adopting an aesthetic point of view and favouring experimental art house films [10]
Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been an approved playground of network research ever since the early papers on small worlds [32,33] and on scale-free networks [34,35]. While these studies analysed the collaboration network of actors, subsequent endeavours extended this to additional information that is available on IMDb such as genre, director, producer, and studio [36], plot keywords [9], and user rating data, budget, and box office revenue [15]
Summary
Cinema plays a key cultural, creative, and industrial role in today’s society. In addition to providing the foundation of an extensive economy [1], it is widely regarded as the seventh art form [2]. Despite the vivid discussions concerning these widespread measures of market success and creative excellence [13], none of them are able to offer a quantitative account of a production’s importance within film history or the role that a film plays in shaping cinematic paradigms. This key aspect of success is expressed in the inspiration that a film provides to others, for instance due to its innovative style, creativity, and ingenious storytelling [14], even decades after the initial release. Efforts to quantify this long-term impact, which is indicated by the inspiration of subsequent films, are still missing
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