The Sight & Sound 2012 poll: My hypothetical ballot(s)

Yesterday, the BFI made available an interactive list of every film tallied in its most recent poll of critics of the greatest films ever made. One of the most common complaints about this list (and every other like it) is the stuff that gets left off. When you’re looking at a list built from consensus, it’s not so much that stuff has been completely ignored so much as that the final result cannot possibly reflect the diversity of the selections — which is why I always look forward to the individual ballots so much. They probably more accurately reflect the diversity of taste and aesthetic priorities of those polled than the official top ten. Yet even creating an individual ballot is a challenge in itself. How does one decide on the best ten films one’s ever seen, let alone the best ten films ever made?

The Sight & Sound 2012 critics poll: disappointment and hope

Plenty of analysis has already been done on the top 50 films from Sight & Sound’s 2012 critics poll. Indiewire has a whole series running on the poll, including a lament about the lack of female representation. As I mentioned in the comments in my previous post, I had three big disappointments in this year’s list, which was compiled from the top ten lists of 846 professionals.

 

Newbies but goodies

The most recent film in the top ten is from 1968, indicating that virtually no consensus has had time to emerge in the last 40-odd years about what constitutes great contemporary cinema. It’s also disappointing that the most recent film from the top 50 is Mulholland Dr. (not a favorite, though at least it wasn’t Inland Empire), and that it came in at 28 (with 40 votes). By contrast, many analysts have already noted that the silent era is well-represented, with three of the top ten films being silent films made between 1927 and 1929, though only five of the top 50 (if I understand the list correctly), are silent, and they are, ironically, clumped up into the top twelve slots, with Battleship Potemkin missing the tenth slot by one vote, and L’Atalante close behind.

I’m very glad that the silent era is well-represented, and I don’t know that newer films are more or less deserving of the distinction of being in the top ten (or 50), but it does seem to be such a shame that four decades of wonderful cinema are barely represented, once all the votes have been tallied. Here’s the tally of films in the top 50 from each post-60s decade:

Sight & Sound’s 2012 Greatest Films of All Time

From BBC News.

Critics’ Top Ten:

1. Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
2. Citizen Kane | Orson Welles, 1941
3. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Ozu Yasujiro, 1953
4. La Regle de jeu (The Rules of the Game) | Jean Renoir, 1939
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans | F. W. Murnau, 1927
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick, 1968
7. The Searchers | John Ford, 1956
8. Chelovek s kino-apparotom (Man with a Movie Camera) | Dziga Vertov, 1929
9. La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) | C. T. Dreyer, 1927
10. 8 1/2 | Federico Fellini, 1963

Directors’ Top Ten:

1. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) | Ozu Yasujiro, 1953
2. (tie) 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick, 1968
3. (tie) Citizen Kane | Orson Welles, 1941
4. 8 1/2 | Federico Fellini, 1963
5. Taxi Driver | Martin Scorsese, 1976
6. Apocalypse Now | Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
7. (tie) The Godfather | Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
8. (tie) Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
9. Zerkalo (The Mirror) | Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
10. Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) | Vittorio de Sica, 1948

The BFI’s intro to the updated list on the S&S site. The dates I’m most looking forward to are the 15th and 22nd, at which times S&S will reveal the ballots of all the critics and directors, respectively. Stay tuned.☕

A few remarks on Ebert’s top ten films of all time

Most of us nerds make lists; few of our lists will actually have some measurable form of cultural impact.  Roger Ebert has submitted his list for the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll.  As most of you probably know, this poll is conducted every ten years.  Prestigious filmmakers and critics around the world each submit their top ten films of all time; the results are tallied, and the results are published in as close to a “definitive” generational top ten as you’re likely to get.  His blog post, in which he ruminates on listmaking and his decision process is therefore of some interest to those of us who a.) like making lists and b.) are interested in the thought processes of people who make lists that matter.