The Sight & Sound "greatest films" poll is conducted once every ten years, and has been going strong for eight decades, with Citizen Kane sitting atop the list for 50 years. That changed today, but yet other changes in the list were radically more exciting and interesting to me.
Sight & Sound Magazine is published by the British Film Institute. For a long, long time, the poll has been considered a definitive critical measure of the greatest films of all time, even though that honored status is oft-debated. This year, they instituted new guidelines and broadened the list of those invited to submit lists to 1000 critics, receiving 834 responses. This was designed to shake things up and greatly advance the list's relevance. In my opinion, they massively succeeded.
These will not be your garden variety pop favorites. They're art with a long rather than rolled "r" pronunciation. I wish we could de-stigmatize the notion of "arthouse cinema" having to mean that something requires too much brain...work.
Yes, the lead story everyone is going with is "Vertigo Defeats Citizen Kane, New Greatest Film of All Time Crowned". If this had happened 20 years ago, it'd be an enormously bigger story than it is now. It's a big deal I gues, but not the biggest deal.
The bigger changes are in a couple of high-profile drops, various delightful first appearances, and skyrocketing surprise gains.
The Big Drops
The first two Godfather movies and Kurosawa dropped completely out of the top ten, and the greatest shock to me was that Charles Chaplin has only one movie in the top 50 (City Lights), and it's tied for 50th. The touching story of a pretty blind girl falling for the Little Tramp, not knowing he is of humble means, is one of Chaplin's best among various greats, like The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, Modern Times, and others...none of which are anywhere to be found.
Anyone accusing the voters of dweebiness should note that none of the following film dweeb favorites from the 2002 top 50 are anywhere to be found in the 2012 list's top 50 (bolded a few for melodramatic effect):
Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion
David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia
Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim
Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander & Seventh Seal
Orson Welles' Touch of Evil
Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
Billy Wilder's The Apartment
Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible
Fritz Lang's M
Carol Reed's The Third Man
Michael Curtiz's Casablanca
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance
David Lynch's Blue Velvet
Roman Polanski's Chinatown
"Forget it, Jake, it's Sight & Sound." We'll see if any of these show up in the back 50 of the top 100.
Man With a Movie Camera
First Appearances
Out of nowhere, Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1939) appeared at #8. It's an experimental, silent documentary. It's cheap enough on DVD or easily and cheaply streamable.
Romance-soaked and sumptuous, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) makes a very deserved appearance at #24. It's one of only two post-20th century films in the top 50.
I'm determined to write about as many of these as I can in the coming days and weeks. This whole list inspires such unreserved joy.
Ozu's Late Spring, whose father-daughter domestic drama begins the Noriko Trilogy ended by Tokyo Story, makes its top 50 debut at number 15. It's marvelous, nuanced, and powerful. I wonder if, in ten years' time, the odd man out second installment, Early Summer, will show up?
In the Mood for Love
Chantal Akerman's feminine masterpiece Jeanne Dielman and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma also make their debuts. The Godard was completed over the course of eight parts across 18 years, and runs 266 minutes. The title is almost always used in its original French, which produces a triple or quadruple meaning phrase. The top 50 is not scared of long, challenging films. Where is The Human Condition then?
For me, the two biggest surprises of all new additions are Bela Tarr's seven-hour agrarian epic Sátántangó at #35 and David Lynch's 11-year-old Mulholland Dr. at #28.
The most poignant new placement of all was the very recently departed Chris Marker's La Jetee tied for #50. It would be well-deserved placement had Marker lived another ten years.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
The Big Gains
Ozu's Tokyo Story made a relatively massive leap in terms of prominence from #7 to #3, now holding the honor of the next-to-greatest film of all time. With that comes the possibility that thousands more may very well become acquainted with this heartbreaking story of family and transition. If you've known me for long, you know that I'm an enormous fan of Japanese auteur Ozu Yasujiro. I started an unrealistically ambitious chronological Ozu career retrospective a couple of years ago when I was still writing at Hollywood Elsewhere. It's a series that I've decided to move forward "remastering" (as I previously announced) sooner than later thanks to the results of the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll.
F.W. Murnau's evocative, haunting Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans moved up from #13 to #5. Of the two first Academy Award winners for Best Picture, it's the only one on the list. Suck it, Wings! I'm starting to think that the polled critics took my taste into account when composing their lists.
L'Atalante
Jean Vigo's magnificent L'Atalante likewise jumped up to #12 from #25, and I am thoroughly convinced that Criterion's Complete Jean Vigo set is entirely to thank for that placement. L'Atalante is viewable on Hulu Plus. Do the one-week trial if only just to watch this supremely romantic, moving film.
One of the largest jumps was Bresson's donkey POV classic (I'm not joking, it's AMAZING) Au hasard Balthasar, going from #39 all the way up to #16. I'm dying for a Blu-ray of this thing.
Pierrot Le Fou and Shoah jumped into the top 50 from being past #100 in the 2002 poll. There's been a long-rumored Shoah release from Criterion. Speaking of...
Final Thoughts (For Now)
I don't look at this list as a definitive list of the greatest films ever in order. The order indicates the great films that the greatest volume of critics believe to be one of the ten best. I love the Sight and Sound lists because they do two things for me: 1) they provide a barometer of where the polled critical establishment's tastes are moving over time, and 2) they inspire myself and others to seek out great films that they may not have known existed.
I'll be revisiting the films on the list released today and digging in further when the full list and spread of data is released. For now, I'll leave you with a trend that I noticed: 25 of the 52 movies listed in the top 50 are available on Blu-ray or DVD in the US from The Criterion Collection (with some out of print, admittedly). There's an undeniable link between the two. Criterion is the mark of importance and greatness.
That must count for a few dozen feathers in their cap.
Here are the top 50, since the BFI site has been up and down all day:
They also released a top 10 list voted by filmmakers, which I will write about tomorrow.