The Sight & Sound Poll

This week the British Film Institute’s magazine, Sight & Sound, released its latest “Greatest Films of All Time" poll. This poll has been conducted by the magazine every 10 years, since 1952.

In past decades, only a small number of BFI insiders and allied film critics voted, but this year the number of critics, film historians, distributors, academics, writers, and film archivists asked to participate expanded from a little over 100 to 846. Below is their tally for the seventh iteration of this poll.

The BFI Critics’ Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time:

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

This list is very much about critical fashion. It’s no accident that Vertigo now tops the list, given the euphoric reception of Hitchcock in the last decades, but this film wasn’t even on the list in 1952. But it also has to do with the restoration of the film in the 1980s by Harris and Katz, and subsequent DVD release, just as the ascendency of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is a function of the DVD release of that film. This is a point that English critic Phillip French made, having himself voted in the last five polls. I could also argue that Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc has stayed on the list because of the discovery and restoration of a complete version, but even my film students recognize immediately that it is a masterpiece, even if they don’t like silent films, as has every generation of critics since 1952.

I have to admit that I have limited uses for such exercises. Indeed, I’m always embarrassed when journalists or non-specialists ask me what my favorite film might be. How can I make such a decision, given that I love so many films and so many different kinds of films? However, I was a bit flattered to be asked to participate this year, having known about the poll’s legendary status.

So my own list looked like this:

1. Tokyo Story (Ozu)
2. L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1962)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles)
4. Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954)
5. The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
7. 8 ½ (Fellini)
8. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)
9. Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov)
10. Vertigo (Hitchcock)

I picked Tokyo Story because I have always loved Ozu, and in particular this film, because of the intensity of its emotions, suppressed into a quiet Japanese stoicism and a rigid, but also formally beautiful visual design. L’Avventura took several viewings for me to embrace because of its complexity, its blatant disregard for narrative convention, and its Italian de Chirico plazas. I love Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff for the same reason I love Ozu. Both films tell stories of families in dissolution and the pain of that event.

"I picked Tokyo Story because I have always loved Ozu, and in particular this film, because of the intensity of its emotions, suppressed into a quiet Japanese stoicism and a rigid, but also formally beautiful visual design."

2001: A Space Odyssey blew me the way when I was a senior in high school, still a couple of years away from any active interest in film, but on further viewings has only increased my sense of wonder. Citizen Kane has never bored me, even on the 25th viewing. Both Fellini, including 8 1/2, and Man with a Movie Camera were subjects for undergrad and grad student term papers, and I published my first review in a non-student publication on Fassbinder’s Sirkian melodrama that turns All I Desire (Sirk, 1953) into a meditation on love, family, and alienation, complicated by race. In point of fact, I saw every one of my choices as a graduate student, when I was still discovering and learning about the medium, and especially excited about understanding the experience of cinema. There is one exception: Vertigo, which wasn’t yet available.

And the fact that six of the ten films on my list are also in the top ten in the official BFI poll may have as much to do with the generation of film opinion leaders voting (including mine), as it does with lasting aesthetic values. Sic transit gloria mundi.