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

Even those among us who, you know, actually may get one.

Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list
Pick only one Sight and Sound Top Ten Poll.
Which Sight & Sound all-time top 10 list is the best?

Like how conservative or how totally idiosyncratic would you let your list get?

I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years, just because recent movies have been underrepresented since the 1972 poll.

I continue to wear out my favourite films--last time I watched Nashville, I knew I'd crossed the line (which doesn't mean I think it's any less great, I just lose that feeling of discovery or elation or whatever)--so I'd have to think about this. I know for sure Zodiac would be very high this time.

Based on my two ballots for Film Twitter's annual "SHMIGHT & SHMOUND" polls, I'd likely be culling from this shortlist:

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (McCarey)
DAISY KENYON (Preminger)
UN CHANT D'AMOUR (Genet)
DUCK AMUCK (Jones)
THE LADIES' MAN (Lewis)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (Kubelka)
FEMALE TROUBLE (Waters)
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Hooper)
TANGO (Rybczynski)
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Yang)
SHOWGIRLS (Verhoeven)
TASTE OF CHERRY (Kiarostami)
OUTER SPACE (Tscherkassky)
YI YI (Yang)
INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch)

Aside from there being no Sirk or Dreyer there.

THE LAST LAUGH (Murnau)
CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin)
THE MIRROR (Tarkovski)
JEANNE DIELMANN (Akermann)
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (Godard)
CLOSE UP (Kiarostami)
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Tarr)
UNCLE BOONMEE (Weerasethakul)
STRAY DOGS (Tsai)
AMOUR FOU (Haussner)

w/out thinking much, first draft;

SHERLOCK JUNIOR
DUCK SOUP
L'ATALANTE
THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK
FIRES ON THE PLAIN
THE LEOPARD
BLACK GIRL
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
TRISTANA
THE MIRROR
A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE
MULHOLLAND DR.

I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years

I wouldn't, bcz narrative filmmakers are kinda out of ideas.

A list of non-narrative filmmaking from the last 20 years would be awesome, though

Duck Amuck 💜

This reminds me of some ilx polls with 50 options, of which 32 each receive one vote and the poll winner receives two votes.

FIRES ON THE PLAIN

Good choice, but I was thinking The Burmese Harp would get my Ichikawa spot.

my list would be absolute nonsense

This reminds me of some ilx polls with 50 options, of which 32 each receive one vote and the poll winner receives two votes.

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, February 24, 2020

more like seeing ilxors' individual choices in the year-end polls, which I think is interesting

Duck Amuck 💜

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Monday, February 24, 2020 2:49 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The best film mentioned in this thread thus far.

really like Tscherkassky's Outer Space

alternate list bcz really, no Hitchcock on the last one

THE CROWD
LA CHIENNE
MODERN TIMES
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
EUROPA '51
NORTH BY NORTHWEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
POINT BLANK
CHINATOWN
FOX AND HIS FRIENDS
MIKEY AND NICKY
THE KING OF COMEDY

idg Duck Amuck, or why anyone would particularly care about it, fwiw.

Tscherkassky, yes!

/I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years/

I wouldn't, bcz narrative filmmakers are kinda out of ideas.

Sorry, 18. Point taken.

BAD TIMING
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
NEWS FROM HOME
TASTE OF CHERRY
CALIFORNIA SPLIT
IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS
SHADOW OF A DOUBT
LIFE IS SWEET
DISHONORED
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
THE DEER HUNTER
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (Schrader)
PERSONA (Bergman)
REPULSION (Polanski)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
STALKER (Tarkovsky)
LA RÈGLE DU JEU (Renoir)
MELANCHOLIA (von Trier)
LIQUID SKY (Tsukerman)
UNDER THE SKIN (Glazer)
THE WHITE BALLOON (Panahi)
ORPHÉE (Cocteau)
BLACK NARCISSUS (Powell and Pressburger)

Oh look, we only have three films in common! But one of them is Liquid Sky and that's what counts

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arabian Nights
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Hard To Be A God
Liquid Sky
Penda's Fen
Rear Window
Stalker
That Obscure Object Of Desire
The Rules Of The Game
Toni Erdmann
Watership Down

Penda's Fen! right on

ty ty but as is clear, tt is the film expert in our house

yes Eric, you see more recent greatness than I do*, that's why youre still in the arena

*do you? really? I can't even call Certified Copy great. It's... enough already.

I don't understand why you *wouldn't* make an idiosyncratic list

Mishima is more or less my favourite movie so good work tt

A Brighter Summer Day
Lancelot Du Lac
Kiki's Delivery Service
Johnny Guitar
Le Rayon Vert
Late Autumn
Stray Dogs
Workers, Peasants
Rio Bravo
No Home Movie

prediction for the poll: the searchers falls out of top 10, a brighter summer day enters the top 30

Jeanne Dielmann should be top ten, more Akerman should enter the top 100

Are all your 'ballots' ordered? Mine's alphabetical

Good old Lancelot would be on my longer list, nice choice

Rewatched Andrei Rublev the other night and it's right up there

Andrei Rublev
Mishima
The Assassin
M or Mabuse the Gambler
For a Few Dollars More
Weekend
The Big Sleep
The Gospel According to St Matthew
Vertigo
Kikujiro

I dunno, top of my head, not ordered

Mine was attempted chronological. I only now realized I forgot A Matter of Life and Death. So delete either Boonmee or Amour Fou, I guess. Good thing I still have a couple of years.

Jeanne Dielmann should be top ten, more Akerman should enter the top 100

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna svp

If I'd put any thought in there'd probably be a P&P in there, Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes

News From Home and No Home Movie could as well

Eh, it'll change tomorrow/five minutes from now but fuckit:

Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
Tree of Life (Mallick)
Hausu (Obayashi)
Possession (Zulawski)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman)
Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma)
Stop Making Sense (Demme)
Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson)
The Innocents (Clayton)
Robot Monster (Tucker)

mine was unordered

Mine was unordered too, but yeah - Mishima pretty much top of the pack.

Le Rayon Vert v. close to making mine

I've watched Mishima more than any other film and I will never tire of it

Summer Hours
Vagabond
The Turin Horse
The Lady Eve
Los Olvidados
Early Summer
Dead Ringers
Certified Copy
Strangers on a Train
The Merchant of Four Seasons
Pandora's Box

Oh shit I missed out L'Age d'Or and an Ozu to be decided

Late Spring?

Rublev and The Assassin are amazing to me in their ability/attempts to recreate the texture of the past, presentation of other worlds without trying to mediate them for modernity. Really love King Hu's Legend of the Mountain for similar reasons. They are transportive in amazing ways.

oh what the hell

Sunrise
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Grave of the Fireflies
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna
Inland Empire
The Long Goodbye
Stalker
Point Blank
The Thin Blue Line
Audition

this is a ludicrous mind game

New board/life description

Lol, exactly

Also, merry Sicilian.

This reads like this guy got divorced by cinema and now cinema won’t let him see the kids

omg

Savage.

lol of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it.

I want to be on this guy's side, but I also think that the main point of doing these polls every 10 years is to track how tastes change with time. And he's really not selling that.

Yeah I wasn’t trying to be mean, I think his perspective is potentially interesting & would like those reminiscences without the note of sadsack self pity; it’s especially rich because he’s basically like “I guess there’s just no room on this ol’ rock anymore for a guy who votes for vertigo and citizen kane in decadal polls” and come on

I hope they let him vote so he can immediately disappear among all the indistinguishable ballots. You can do it Tony!

Yeah but also...

of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it

This.

Yeah that sucked & it was a rather cowardly sort of weighing in too

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.

He's 84 so the only film that predates him on his list is The General. I have to admit, on my own list, I probably have at least as many films older than me than not, so I can't point fingers about being out of touch with film culture.

I kind of want to defend him too, although "weird" in my original post may suggest otherwise. I found it weird he would publically lobby for a ballot. I hope he gets one, though. "Hey, I founded Film Heritage"--I guess only someone as stuck in that moment (when it comes to film critics) as I am would find that touching. I also wonder if Andrew Sarris's ballot, if he were alive, would be appreciably different.

Here's the Agee piece on Griffith. Only the first two pages are on Birth of a Nation. Their final paragraph:

(Today, The Birth of it Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 31, 2021 9:53 AM (forty-eight minutes ago)

"Who could ask for anything more? It's a film for a Philly guy -- and a human being."

I can read between those lines, old man.

Having watched the full, unexpurgated version of Birth of a Nation last year, can I just say fuck DW Griffith, fuck Jim Agee and fuck Tony Macklin.

D. W. Griffith - "Accidental Racist"

What's o_O about BOAN defenders is that it was widely perceived as provocatively racist in *1915*. To be fair, I didn't know that when first getting into film history in the 90s, but it's a fact that has been broadly established by now (even something as popular-history as Longworth's You Must Remember This mentioned it briefly in the most recent series)

The most amazing leap in that Agee piece is that it's supposedly "contemporary abolitionists" who would "cause trouble and misunderstanding" around the film.

To be fair to Agee, they're still doing it to this day, to hear some tell it.

(Disclaimer: I am being facetious there. It's definitely revisionist history to paint Birth of a Nation as some sort of guiltless artifact that in only the last 40 or 50 years or so has been unpacked for its racism.)

Clicked a few of the reviews on the homepage and got a kick out of his two-star assessment of the PBS Hemingway.

The Old Man and the Sea is a profound, personal vision.

But there's little recognition in the documentary of the importance of going beyond the surface into the art.

Androgyny and suicide are more important in the documentary.

Glibness trumps credibility. It is as though the film was made by the tourists on the shore.

Such is Ernest Hemingway in 2021.

The Old Man and The Old Man and the Sea

Happy New “we get a new S&S fill poll this year” Year!

Went to a screening of City Lights this afternoon and was wondering when exactly this thing comes out.

Starting to feel like later than last time, maybe even December

Obviously, please post here when it does; I never check magazines anymore, and--at least where I am--getting one won't be easy.

I mean, some of us might not have to pretend after all:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/poll-position-kaned

We invited more than a thousand people last time; the ambition is to at least double that number in 2022.

Gonna go on the record in saying 2001 will win this time around.

The callout for ballots dropped today

hope you will be able to get and submit one, we should have someone to represent us here

Eric, I think your and our collective posts in the last two all-time poll threads (directors, films) have been a significant contribution to the discourse about great films, more than any individual reviews I've read in highbrow publications

S&S voters should read them, and you should vote in this poll

You too Alfred

besos

oh lol I think I misread you. I thought I had contributed.

if you haven't already, you should lobby for a S&S ballot! I mean, you have to qualify

as long as you don't make your top ten all Buñuel films, I mean one is enough

2001: A Space Odyssey has ascended over time in the rankings, and was #6 on the 2012 list. It would be surprising for it to suddenly jump to #1, I don't expect it but I would love it if it did.

It seems like the critics only come around to agreeing what the best films of all time are 50 or more years after they are released. I don't see any other films above or below 2001 on that S&S list that are likely to rise in prominence at this point

The window's less than 50 years, I think. 2001 came out in '68, was tied for 11th 24 years later. Mulholland Drive was 28th in 2012, 11 years after release, probably higher this time. If you really go back, L'Avventura was #2 a year after it was released. Obviously, something like that isn't going to happen anymore, but I'd say the window for ranking high today is more like 20-30 years.

What I'm saying is, School of Rock could be really high this time.

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10.

air bud
air bud 2
michael jackson thriller video
david at the dentist
field of dreams
barely legal #15
citizen kane
bringing up baby
esteban buttez: the first ten posts
goonies

― ice cr?m, Sunday, 12 September 2010 02:47 bookmarkflaglink

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out

zizek only placed second as troll but i no longer write for S&S

(this isn't actually official and is mainly a consequence of my indolence and detainment elsewhere)

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out

Agreed.

https://www.facebook.com/1631212662/posts/pfbid02exzLDGsJPE6poE1yLMmgxwYQX3Bwh8izRiPGwDCUTrKHPRRvEyhds3jLWx6K4Tpjl/?d=n

Paul Schrader denied a ballot?!

they told him they would contact him when they were ready for the directors' poll

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2012 votes (ten ghosts)

A Brighter Summer Day 1991 Edward Yang
The Conversation 1974 Francis Ford Coppola
La Captive 1983 Chantal Akerman
Empire 1964 Andy Warhol
Full Metal Jacket 1987 Stanley Kubrick
The General 1926 Buster Keaton
Goodbye, Dragon Inn 2003 Tsai Ming Liang
Rain 1929 Joris Ivens
Sátántangó 1994 Béla Tarr
Valentin de las Sierras 1967 Bruce Baillie