Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

i was looking through some of the 2002 ballots and this one probably comes closest to my taste:

Peter von Bagh
director of Il cinema ritrovato festival
Finland
Top Ten

The Wedding March (von Stroheim)
Okraina (Barnet)
Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey)
A Canterbury Tale (Powell, Pressburger)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Rio Grande (Ford)
Édouard et Caroline (Becker)
Bigger Than Life (N. Ray)
Man of the West (A. Mann)
And Life Goes On... (Kiarostami)

the japanese know where it's at too:

Li Cheuk-To
Chairman of the Hong Kong Critics Guild
Hong Kong
Top Ten

Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
The General (Keaton)
Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Pather Panchali (S. Ray)
The Puppetmaster (Hou)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei)
Tabu (Murnau)
Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Godard)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)

Yomota Inuhiko
Meiji Gakuin University
Japan
Top Ten

Kaagaz ke phool (Dutt)
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
A Touch of Zen (Hu)
L'Age d'or (Buñuel)
Le Vent d'est (Godard)
Accattone (Pasolini)
Vampyr (Dreyer)
Napoléon (Gance)
Il deserto rosso (Antonioni)
Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)

L'Age d'Or (Bunuel, 1930)
M (Lang, 1931)
Kikujiro (Kitano, 1999)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
Mishima (Schrader, 1985)
A Canterbury Tale (Powell & Pressburger, 1944)
Days and Nights in the Forest (Ray, 1970)
Zero de Conduite (Vigo, 1933)
For a Few Dollars More (Leone, 1965)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock, 1934)

I don't know if I expect Joel David's list to ever be topped.

Salò (Pasolini)
Manila by Night; City after Dark (Bernal)
Khalnayak (Ghai)
The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Metzger)
Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas)
La Règle du jeu (Renoir)
God Told Me To (Cohen)
La Région centrale (Snow)
Olympiad Berlin 1936 (Riefenstahl)
The Devil in Miss Jones (Damiano)

And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "significance."

Yeah, one of the major reasons I've never been able to get with the deification of screwball ethos.

how is screwball (which you sometimes broaden to mean "wacky comedy," but let's lay that aside) inherently less significant than horror? Both offer a vision of human trials that aim to reveal character.

to argue that either Godfather is top-10 when Coppola can't figure out what to do with Diane Keaton, that's a problem.

We've argued this before...My problem with Keaton is more the woodenness of her performance (sometimes she's okay) than Coppola not knowing what to do with her. But to me, there are supporting performances just as wooden in The Searchers and Vertigo.

Both offer a vision of human trials that aim to reveal character.

Horror offers a representation of a universal human emotion, one which is easily transmuted over to experiences (i.e. mechanized dehumanization) not necessarily closely related to the thing being represented (i.e. chainsaw massacres). Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh, which is fine, but usually it's better when my friends do it to me.

I see way more of my life in comedy. And invariably find comedy in the best horror too.

(I guess I won't quote Michael O'Donoghue's "Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy" again. Oops! Jerry Lewis's best films don't make me laugh that much.)

Agreed, I like Jerry Lewis movies because they are basically horror movies.

I wonder whether Criterion reissues of his later films have made L'Avventura less an obvious choice for inclusion. These days I'd rank L'Eclisse over it.

^^^ me, on all days

In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "significance."

Kael cited Woolf, Mann, Joyce, and James in her review ("In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "'significance.'")

Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh

almost never, if you're talking about the people on the screen.

I'm always surprised when I remember Kael actually liked L'avventura.

Wacky comedy reveals people trying to make people laugh, which is fine, but usually it's better when my friends do it to me.

You're too short for that gesture.

I'm also too pale for Miami, but I still look forward to having a face-to-face with you in which we trade nothing but AAE lines. Some snowy night, in front of the fire.

Killer to killer!

Very effective. But why take it out on me?

this whole "which genre is more profound" is a pretty stupid exercise.

Everybody has pretty stupid exercises, except some people.

pretty stupid exercise vs reverse massage

remove bookmark

One good bookmark removal and you'll be rid of that Miss Caswell forever.

Back to the Copacabana.

no way are there any wooden performances in 'vertigo'!

if jerry lewis counts as horror, surely 'bringing up baby' does.

It's not like the Tom Helmore villain in Vertigo is supposed to evoke (or display) passionate feelings, he's just an enigma / agent of chaos.

Yeah, the spectacle of Cary Grant leaping gay is sort of a horrorshow.

it's 'night of the living dead' with hepburn starring as the zombies

Kael cited Woolf, Mann, Joyce, and James in her review ("In any case I see Antonioni et al as heir to a certain strand of 19th century novel. Like the whole "novel of ideas" thing. Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And fwiw I find the "visionary" approach far freer than the evasion of "'significance.'")

The films are visually incredibly exciting but the narratives are often so lacking (not in a bad way -- always feel they are giving way to more important things), and what they have to say about anything so thin that I can't quite see this comparison coming off.

Well, she meant that the film approaches on visual terms the "heft" of what the modernists attempted.

Yes and for my part i think the comparison holds in the sense of that those novels were kind of an arena for entertaining philosophical ideas.

Why not compare it w/modernist painting, sculpture and architecture then which also perhaps entertain ideas that might be of a philosophical bent?

OK, guess she was a writer but still..

Those prob are better forms of comparison!

Theater too

I think she mentions painting in her review.

no way are there any wooden performances in 'vertigo'!

If you agree that it's as great as its reputation, I'm sure that's true.

so weird that Kim Novak was a star

I'm sure her tentativeness was part of her charm

Have you read Truffaut's Hitchcock book? I think he was mostly charmed by her sweaters.

that doesn't excuse Hitchcock though

no way are there any wooden performances in 'vertigo'!

If you agree that it's as great as its reputation, I'm sure that's true.

i kinda think that the whole distinction between 'wooden' and 'non-wooden' performances is flawed when you're talking about a director like hitch, who manipulated his actors to such an extent that they almost have a purely functional role in most of his films. it's a bit like the weird kids' performances in 'night of the hunter' -- they're not miscalculations on the director's part, they're part of the texture of the film. given what kim novak is asked to do in 'vertigo' i honestly cannot imagine any other actress doing a better job. whereas i don't think even ppl who think 'the searchers' is top 10-worthy think that jeffrey hunter and vera miles and, hell, half of the cast give particularly good performances.

but what the performance of Natalie Wood's makeup?

I know this is a minority (and then some) opinion, but I find everybody in Vertigo bland to one degree or another. I like its weirdness, like the music and the direction, and love the dream sequence. Because of the performances--whether they're functional or not--there's a limit to how much I like the film overall. (It's abstract speculation, but I can imagine a number of better actresses filling that role.) I realize no one who loves the film is going to agree.

ward bond gives a perfect performance in the searchers. i find the 'texture of the film' argument unconvincing

Vertigo is not one of my top five Hitch films.

i find anti-'vertigo' sentiment much more bewildering than any other kind of great fillum challops so there's prob no place for me in this argument

I don't dislike it but it's not one I rewatch it and when I do my attention wanders, notably during Madeleine's zombie moments.

chris marker's long essay on vertigo ends...

"Obviously, this text is addressed to those who know Vertigo by heart. But do those who don’t deserve anything at all?"

which makes me smile.

ps, i have not seen Vertigo.