The Sight & Sound Poll

  

As for how people have been discussing the list, I don't have much to say about it that others haven't already said.  Basically, it matches the tastes of "Film Twitter" (whatever that is).  It's probably because over the last ten years, critics have been more immersed in the internet and have wanted to explore a wider range of films.  What surprised me most is how highly films from the last ten years ranked.  

Some people have been complaining about the "accessibility" of Jeanne Dielman.  Surely anyone who learns what Jeanne Dielman is can get a basic idea of how it's different from most movies and will not go in unprepared.  No one is forcing them to watch it.  In any case, I've discussed Jeanne Dielman with people who aren't film fans.  Some of them were interested, some were not, but none of them seemed to think that its existence invalidated the medium of cinema or the practice of film criticism.  

As for the films on the list: Jeanne Dielman is surprising, but it makes sense to me.  Armond White blamed its presence on the expansion of the voting base, which he thought reflected a marginalization of film criticism as a practice.  But if you only looked at the critics who voted last time, they still would have cast far more votes for Jeanne Dielman than in 2012.  Jeanne Dielman is a natural critics' pick.  Critics are often sticklers for medium specificity.  If you think about how to use the motion picture camera to give people unique experiences, Jeanne Dielman is one of the first films that jumps to mind.  It focuses on things that a movie would normally exclude for being uninteresting, so it becomes much more obvious how the editing and mise-en-scène are shaping your experience.  

I was surprised that A Brighter Summer Day didn't gain more in rank, since it was not watchable for most people at the time of the last poll but is widely available now.  Spirited Away and Totoro showing up without any other animated films suggests critics felt obliged to acknowledge animation and went for the most obvious picks.  Now, I would like to see both of those films even higher on the list, but more importantly, there should be traditions other than anime, and other directors like Oshii and Takahata.  Had I voted, I would have picked more than one animated film.

As for the existence of the list itself: the decennial Sight & Sound list has two chief purposes.  The first is to provide a snapshot of what film critics currently value, which can then be used to compare with previous snapshots and judge where we may be lacking in distribution and curiosity.  For example, the present top 100 features films from a greater number of countries than the last one, but as many have pointed out, it does not include any films made in Latin America.  Films like Entranced Earth, Memories of Underdevelopment, and De Cierta Manera are as good as any that appear on the list, and better than some of them.  They aren't shared and shown widely enough.  

The second purpose is to provide newer film fans with a list of things to watch.  This purpose is more contentious, because as we have just seen, the list has blind spots.  Some people object to making any lists for this and other reasons.  There are also debates over whether listing things makes the world more legible to capital, and whether exposing large audiences certain kinds of cinematic techniques is bad for society.  

But the trick is simply to not take it too seriously.  People are far too precious and dramatic both for and against listing.  People do silly little things, and they always will.  At the same time, people are not so simple that hearing a certain story or witnessing a certain type of editing style will automatically harm them or worsen their impacts on the world.  Art and arts criticism are surely important to the class struggle, but a lot of the attempts to explain exactly how strike me as wild speculation. 

I was never much of a film fan before 2012, when the previous list came out, and watching films off the list and off the individual ballots deepened my interest.  Now a lot of my favorite films are ones my friends and I sought out specifically because they were underseen or made in countries whose films we'd never seen before.  They are not just films that don't appear on the list, but films that likely will never appear on the list.  There are definitely some people who get obnoxious about lists and canons, but I hope most viewers are more flexible and less impressionable than them.

If that sounds like a rather simplistic perspective on what the list means and what it can do, well, yes.  Within my own experience of what the list does and how people respond to movies, it is simple.  And again, I've never encountered a claim that there's more to it than this that I didn't find tenuous or highly speculative.  I would like to see the evidence.

You may have expected that this post would include a list.  I've actually made three lists, each representing what I would have submitted had I adopted particular goals.  All are in alphabetical order.  Like I said, one must not take them too seriously, so I'll keep my comments on them brief.

The first is a list of films that did not appear on the top 100 this time or in 2012, and which don't often show up on other lists of the best films.  These movies aren't necessarily obscure, but they're ones film fans may have to put a little effort into finding.  A friend of mine would call this a "propaganda list," meaning not that these films are propagandistic, but that I'm propagandizing these films.  I love these more than many of the movies that did make the top 100.  Of these, only Entranced Earth received any votes in the last Sight & Sound poll, though one of them doesn't count because it came out after 2012:

Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)
Bush Mama (Haile Gerima, 1979)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1967)
The Night (Mohammad Malas, 1992)
On-Gaku: Our Sound (Kenji Iwaisawa, 2019)
Orochi (Buntaro Futagawa, 1925)
Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark, 1986)
Swing You Sinners! (Dave Fleischer, 1930)
When the Tenth Month Comes (Dang Nhat Minh, 1984)

Of course we have Awaara, the most successful film of all time.  I thought about including Only Yesterday or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya on this one, even though they're significantly more popular than the other films on the list besides Awaara.  Grave of the Fireflies was the only film by Isao Takahata to have received any votes in the last Sight & Sound poll, and it only got two.  It would serve viewers well for Takahata's films to get more recognition, but I figured if Spirited Away and Totoro can make the top 100 now, this list's picks for animation shouldn't be Studio Ghibli, and they shouldn't both be anime.  I also considered Agnès Varda's short film L’opéra-mouffe.

The second is a list of films that came out before 1925:

The Birth of a Flower (F. Percy Smith, 1910)
One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920)
The Curse of Quon Gwon (Marion E. Wong, 1916)
Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)
Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Alexandre Promio, 1897)
Tol'able David (Henry King, 1921)
Tunneling the English Channel (Georges Méliès, 1907)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)

I made 1925 the cutoff because the oldest film from the other two lists, Orochi, is from 1925.  I confess I haven't seen enough films from the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s.  Still, I think there's enough range here in subject and style that most people should be able to find something they like.  The Birth of a Flower is ones I would have liked to be there for when it first released.  It represents an early use of motion pictures to capture images we normally would be unable to see, and the results are rather beautiful.  But if a random person asked me to recommend them one, I would have to go with Häxan or Tol'able David.

This last list is just what I would pick as the 10 "greatest films" going purely off of intuition, except not including any that appeared on the other two lists:

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Duel to the Death (Ching Siu-Tung, 1983)
Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter, 1941)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata, 2013)

I could easily have listed another ten films.  Like this: A Brighter Summer Day; The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On; Grand Illusion; Letter from an Unknown Woman; The Manchurian Candidate; One Sings, the Other Doesn't; Real Life; Sambizanga; Spirited Away; The Young Girls of Rochefort.  I thought about making this post like Jonathan Rosenbaum's exercise of picking twelve films plus six texts everyone should read.  But I would have wanted to elaborate on the texts I picked, and each one of them deserves way more attention than I would be ready to give them in a post like this.

Minor update: I met my first cousin's 17-year-old son at a family party and he said he watched Jeanne Dielman because of the list and thought it was cool.  Go figure.