Pretend you have a ballot for the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

I am not devoted to film but mostly because I am a dilettante who spreads himself too thin to claim devotion to any of his innumerable areas of interest. But I do like me some movin' pictures!

That really pushes a button with me. "Devotion to film"?--jesus. Please explain what that means. I've been watching films for 50+ years, have a degree in film, have contributed to film magazines, and have zero international films in my Top 10. Am I not sufficiently devoted?

― clemenza, Thursday, February 27, 2020 9

Ah! I swear I didn't even see your list. But you're the writer from whom I wouldn't expect the total exclusion of those films because of your pedigree, which, yeah, I do find peculiar, in the same way I'd find it peculiar if a rock critic included not one R&B/hip-hop album in a top ten or twenty. We'd still get drinks and talk, though, as I press Dreyer and Ohio Players.

Uh, you have ten international films in your top ten, clemenza

They haven't been excluded--they're just not among my 10 favorite. A few are close, but so what? You're trying to quantify something that can't be quantified. If I move one from just outside the top 10 (or top 20) into the top 10 (or top 20), that's the magical key that changes everything? Suspicion of my devotion is lifted? I'd be a lot more suspicious of one of those some-assembly-required lists under discussion last night. But as I get older, I try not to waste time even doing that--people list what they list.

I probably shouldn't have a drink in my hand in this scenario, Alfred.

Qualification for inclusion in my top ten was extended to films that made me say 'wow' or 'whoa' or 'gee' or left me speechless or made me weep like a newborn infant. There are more than ten of those films, my apologies to those excluded.

This is why I ask the question in the first place. The thing about me and lists and this exercise in particular which seems to me should be self-evident is that what's exciting to me about making this list is how it can be used to communicate the crucial bigness of the medium, how many movements, genres, eras its explored in just 125 or so years. To do that in only 10 movies requires, yes, some strategizing.

I have no qualm with doing the entirely rational thing of just instinctively grabbing at the 10 titles that most float your boat. Just as I would assume my opinion that doing so can potentially communicate ossified provincialism is no skin off your nose.

Come and See (Klimov)

I just watched a trailer and this is going to ruin me.

clem, I'm sorry for impugning your tastes, which was not my intention. Like I wrote, I hadn't even seen your list. I had in mind far younger fans for whom films not in English are like eating cauliflower or spinach.

I love list-making because doing so is a mix of instinct, posturing, and calculation. When I participated in P&J I'd on occasion omit favorite albums of the year because I knew they'd place anyway and I wanted to prop up something cool. In my state film critics circle's second ballot I'll form ad hoc coalitions with others to rally behind performances and films we may like a little less than what made our own lists but are way better and less predictable than the consensus picks. This is fun.

(xpost) If you treat your list as a project, then I guess I can see that...I just don't know why you'd want to do that--or even try to do that--in a list of 10 films. People write books when they want to communicate all those things. To me, it's a list of your 10 favourite films, the 10 films you most want to see right now. And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before. I don't get any sense of the person, and I don't learn anything.

(xpost) Don't worry--I've been impugned before, and will be impugned again.

It's just different for different people, I guess. My ten favorite films definitely aren't the ten films I want to see right now.

I picked ten films I quite like and would happily argue each one is Great if pressed.

I’m def the least knowledgeable “voter” itt so far!

If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

This is a valid point: the greatest hits tossed around a bit. But! Lists are educational too. If, say, Chimes at Midnight or French Cancan appear on a list instead of Kane or Rules of the Game, I might, depending on the person, be tempted to give those films a second look.

Anyway, when I look at Eric's list right at the beginning of the thread, it's a very idiosyncratic, interesting list--reminds of the one B. Ruby Rich stuck in the middle of all the Godfather-Nashville-Taxi Driver lists in James Monaco's American Film Now--so I'm not sure what we're arguing about.

And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

On this I agree.

I'm still unclear as to how a mindset that elides Dylan/Beatles/Velvet Underground/Chuck Berry/Creedence Clearwater/Neil Young results in "horribly rote greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists" when those are exactly the artists that used to clog greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists when Rolling Stone was relevant, but I'm fine letting it be.

Sherlock Jr.
Simon of the Desert
Andrei Rublev
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Commando
Cobra
Robocop
John Wick
Paddington 2
Mandy

Mandy I feel is one that we can expect to see creeping into more and more of these lists. Might be in my 11-20.

the first list with two films by father and son!

Mandy would be on a longlist of mine too but I think Cosmatos Jr has even greater things to come

(Just checked, and it wasn't B. Ruby Rich, it was Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise. They had Coogan's Bluff and Petulia and The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; that list used to fascinate me.)

I'm not arguing that you should have those albums on your list; I'm saying that I know (from my sense of your ILM posting) that you wouldn't, but that I therefore wouldn't deem your list "suspicious." And that including such albums on a list because it's the "correct" way to approach pop-music history is what produces those Rolling Stone lists. "We're the gatekeepers of official pop history."

sometimes filmmakers are in a 'canon' cuz most devotees think they belong there

(or a plurality, BernieBro style)

OK, I did misread you on that one then.

I still think that Morbs is right that lists of the top ten movies "of all time" at least owe a debt of consideration to the full span of time.

xp

and to the full span of the globe xp

zero international films (or none before 1980) in your Top 10 just means i'm not interested in it

xp and space! Do they owe a performative gesture to prove you've made that consideration, though?

If filmism is the movie equivalent of rockism, I'd say there's a lot of filmism in this thread about list-making and canon.

Roughly how many Bollywood films are we expecting in the theoretical rollout?

Oh most of my favorite films perform, alright.

"We have returned your ballot as you have not ticked the box to indicate that to the best of your knowledge and/or recollection, these films fuck"

Depends what you mean by Bollywood, but I could see some classics from the forties-fifties make it in. As in studio classics, not Pather Panchali etc

All ballots for this scale of poll should be at least 25 films long tbh

The longer the exercise goes on, though, the more interesting the challenge becomes.

Gripe & Frown

10 is plenty, adapt to constraint.

An all-time films poll, as opposed to carving out a genre or era to focus on, seems impossibly broad. We'd need a hell of a lot of voters.

the essential problem is that ten (or 12) is a very restrictive number

this board would be poisoned with recency bias, as always

xp S&S thought so too, which is why it went from about 140 ballots to, like, 850 in 2012.

xp as opposed to your anti-recency bias?

read that as "anti-decency"

S&S thought so too, which is why it went from about 140 ballots to, like, 850 in 2012.

S&S OTM

c'mon Eric i'd likely include MOMENT OF INNOCENCE and MULHOLLAND DR. Fairly recent as these things go.

More recent than that, i need to let them marinate another decade.

I *really* have considered if any films i've seen since '01 could generously be called one of the ten greats, and i'd just be lying if i pretended i thought so.

I do think if we made any attempt at an all-time poll, ballots of up to 50 (or more!) would produce more interesting results

yes

what about weighting though

As the poll runner-elect, I would probably resist my inclination to NOT consider weighting (as S&S doesn't). But this is ILX and ties are boring, so.

also, rather than a poll with a final rollout, what might be better if workable would be a mutable, ever-changing tabulation of our aggregated top 50s, which we could go back to and change at any time. is there some sort of data aggregation service which could serve such a purpose?

but yeah a poll is easier haha

I suggest we all submit detailed ballots and blurbs, and then Eric just chooses the noms he likes best and reassigns the blurbs to totally different movies

Letterboxd API is in private beta but once it’s public an easy way to do a perpetual poll would be to have people make ranked lists and then scrape and tabulate those lists. Takes care of data quality issues.