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

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.

A perpetual ranking would deflate the moment I think.

If we want to avoid ties, weighting and longer ballots pretty essential given how few people will be voting compared with S&S

Somebody explain weighted ballots to me; I've carefully avoided all polls that had them up to now.

Unless that just means ranked ballots like most ILM ballot polls are.

Yeah that's it

eliminating all cinema before 1960 or 1970 seems to be a thing; not cool, if it mattered

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Thursday, February 27, 2020 6:59 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whatever, my real list is above, starting with Bad Timing and ending with Domestic Violence.

they say he lived as he listed

tough to pick, skewing a bit more subjective than objective in some cases. Not in order:

Black Narcissus
Repo Man
Light Sleeper
Kiss Me Deadly
Two Lane Blacktop
Fallen Angels
Memories of Murder
Taxi Driver
Once Upon a Time In the West
Sherlock Jr.

there are several dozen other films i could switch out but i like to rep for a few underrepped

hell yeah, Two Lane Blacktop is probably my favorite movie ever, but didn't make my list cause I arbitrarily limited it to title characters for some reason.

arbitrary limitations are great, we should all have them

what are the ten greatest films of all time released in prime-numbered years

at some point I'll make a ballot of the ten greatest films I haven't seen

One of my favourite lists of this kind was the one Greil Marcus drew up for the second Top 200 Albums book compiled by Paul Gambaccini. It was all ground-level UK punk: the Adverts, X-Ray Spex, Wire, etc. I think the earliest thing he listed in terms of when it was recorded was a Buzzcocks bootleg from 1977. It was almost as if he didn't feel the need to assure everyone he'd heard Blonde on Blonde. (His list for the first Gambaccini book in '78 was much more in line with the conventional canon, although that first Gambaccini book was one of the things--along with the RS Record Guide and Christgau's '70s book--that helped create that canon, so that's something of a circular statement.)

(The second book came out in 1987.)

yeah, that's one of my favorite all-time top 10 lists also (similar, i think, to the list of the best punk records he gives in the prologue of lipstick traces). someone asked him about the list on his website and he said his personal favorite was when he'd just answered the question by listing 10 jan and dean records.

Come and See (Klimov)

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

I rented this last night. Incredible, I don't know why I'd never heard of it before.

I had no idea it existed until I started seeing it parked very high in every other all-time films list from the past like five years.

TCM aired it about a month ago, but I wussed out and didn't record it.

Come and See may be the only film Truffaut would consider anti-war.

It's also coming from Criterion later this year.

I will watch it one day. Its just one of those that I have to psych myself up for.

Yeah, it's the epitome of "great movie I hope I never see again."

it's really better to watch it with a supportive friend.

I can't believe I failed to put Distant Voices, Still Lives on my list.

Please distract from coronavirus, Biden-Sanders, and the market crash by launching this.

If I opened this poll this early, I'd have to leave it open for at least a year and offer people the opportunity to change their ballots throughout.

no more polls, ever

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.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 27 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I don't think the canon in cinema operates in the same way as in music at all. You never see it weighing down current efforts in the way it is with certain types of music or in criticism, which is one of the issues with rockism (?)

i would say canon in cinema gives ppl the wrong idea of what constitutes real cinema and what constitutes a bad movie, which is v similar to how the music canon gives people the wrong idea of what constitutes real music and what constitutes bad music

I don't really want to unpack that.

Do you mean seeing, say, Rear Window or a Sturges film beside a Tarkovsky or Bresson? xpost

idk i didn't put a lot of thought into that post beyond "when i look at a letterboxd page of a trashy movie i enjoyed i mostly see unthinking one star reviews"

just tryin to stay out of the politics threads folks

Maybe the situation has gotten more like music since Marvel films, but I always quite impressed (despite all the pre- and post- Star Wars/Spielberg whatever) at how convivial the discourse was between a lot of Hollywood output and arthouse. At least in the UK.

i think the solidification of a canon in film is a bit more understandable just in terms of the amount of time people have to watch films vs the amount of time they can listen to music, and how much more music is widely available vs the availability of films. i think for some people films are more accessible now, and for others maybe less so. less access to rental stores, for one, and despite streaming options i think a lot of films just get lost in the shuffle of algorithms.