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

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

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?

The Godfather Parts II & III as one entry, just to fuck with them

I'd probably exclude all three movies as one entry.

is there any particular criteria for the ballot?

Someone put a TV commercial on their ballot in '02, so I'd say not.

depressing as hell and sign o the times to think anyone here could vote in the sight and sound poll (is this how vertigo leapfrogged rules of the game???)

if i was voting i'm pretty sure my ballot would be very conservative (serving the poll's purpose - establishing film's canon - and usefulness - for 13-15 year olds who care about film criticism). it would give a somewhat misleading picture of my taste (if not my judgment) and i'd be amazed if two movies post-1970 made the list.

tokyo story
stalker
celine and julie go boating
the apu trilogy
ordet
8.5
dr. strangelove
persona
written in the wind
vertigo

a combination of movies i love, but arent necessary perfect and movies which i (and not only i of course) think are masterpieces and i might love them a little less - those couldve been 2 completely different lists!

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

haahahaha

mmm.. on 2nd thought all of them are masterpieces i love, except from the Sirk one maybe.
here is an alternative list of favourites, who aren't the best:

stroszek
written on the wind
love streams
claire's knee
mullolland drive
bande a part
los olvidados
rio bravo
peeping tom
touch of evil (kane is better but i love this one more)

My pretend ballot:

1. Nashville (1975)
2. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
3. The Godfather I & II (1972/74)
4. Double Indemnity (1944)
5. Spellbound (2002)
6. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
7. Goin' Down the Road (1970)
8. The Conversation (1974)
9. Boogie Nights (1997)
10. Zodiac (2007)

I’ve been circulating variations on this list for a long time. I tend to reshuffle the same 25 or so films, adding a couple of new ones every few years, and I often end up listing things past the point where I’m actually sick of them. So while I know the last two picks especially wouldn’t endear me to Ozu lovers, at least they’re sort of new.

8.5--I love the look of that. It’s like making reference to 84/7 Angry Men.

ok slight digression - can anyone explain to me 12 angry men's continuing high placement on imdb's top 250. i can only figure that it's not prominent enough to draw challops or ppl determined to take it down a peg but widely seen enough to get votes (i'm picturing a huge segment of it's high ratings coming from high schoolers who had to watch it in class and were surprised they actually liked it) but this describes A LOT of movies and every other old movie there - casablanca, some hitchcocks, citizen kane, to kill a mockingbird, etc - is pretty much what you might guess would pop up if you polled a million or so people on the internet.

Zeno, your more personal list is predictably much better and more interesting than the canon-hewing one.

Without thinking too long:

Playtime
Out 1
Showgirls
Nostalgia (Frampton)
39 Steps
Poto and Cabengo/Routine Pleasures/My Crasy Life
Le joli mai
Platform
Jeanne Dielman
Man With A Movie Camera

first ten that came to my head:

cries and whispers
dead presidents
five easy pieces
interiors
jules et jim
all above eve
rope
taxi driver
birth
rosetta

Sherlock Jr.
The Mirror
A Moment of Innocence
2001: A Space Odyssey
L'Atalante
Vertigo
Europa '51
Black Girl
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Fires on the Plain

and about 200 others, rotating

It's really an indefensible process. I mean, I left Rose Hobart and The King of Comedy off.

Eraserhead
The Seventh Seal
2001: A Space Odyssey
City Lights
Seven Samurai
The Thin Red Line
Crash (Cronenberg)
Battleship Potemkin
The Godfather
The Brown Bunny

you guys ... you guys know you have to vote for kane, right

(serving the poll's purpose - establishing film's canon - and usefulness - for 13-15 year olds who care about film criticism)

is this based on anything specific, out of curiosity?

blanche
playtime
the conversation
michael clayton
the thing
floating weeds
thin red line
le samourai
crank
l'atalante

crank!

think it's based on what's-his-nuts's intense, unexplained rage/resentment issues?

the point is simply that I don't see enough fun action films

so this thread is "pox: movies of ALL FUCKING TIME"? I'm not even going to take a stab at it.

oh wait, it's if you had a ballot. I see.

The Seventh Seal
Days of Heaven
Le Samourai
The Third Man
Kings and Queen
Once Upon a Time in the West
2001
Passion of Joan of Arc
Rushmore
Taxi Driver

where's gamer?

Mine:

The Rules of the Game
Early Summer
The Lady Eve
The Leopard
The Naked Gun 2 1/2
McCabe & Mrs Miller
Mulholland Drive
Rear Window
Only Angels Have Wings
My Own Private Idaho

Hmmm I hate lists

M
Mishima
Simon del Desierto
1st verzh of Man Who Knew Too Much
1st 2 Godfathers
For a Few Dollars More
A Canterbury Tale
Zodiac
Zéro de conduite
Carry On At Your Convenience

Five Easy Pieces, Taxi Driver, Rushmore, and Rear Window are all part of that revolving-door group of films that go onto and drop off my Top 10. (McCabe & Mrs. Miller also, to a certain extent, although there are three other Altmans ahead of it.) I'm very happy to see Zodiac on someone else's list, but I'd be very surprised if it gets a single vote in 2012.

Sans soleil
Showgirls
Do the Right Thing
Dressed to Kill
Un chant d'amour
Inland Empire
Women in Revolt
Make Way for Tomorrow
The Rules of the Game
Satantango

Obv, I want to see Rules of the Game ascend back into its place position, after showing in '02.

Night of the Hunter
Touch of Evil
Harold and Maude
Nosferatu
Psycho
The Royal Tenebaums
Patton
Dr. Strangelove
Natural Born Killers
Videodrome

finished tied for 4th in the voice's best of decade poll so i could imagine it getting a vote though yeah no way it's hitting the top ten.
re: purposes of poll, along w/ of course the intense and unexplained rage and resentment i feel towards the british film institute apparently, i think these kind of polls can have a certain usefulness as a taking stock of criticial cw, tracking of cw over the years (bicycle thieves was #1 in the first poll and hasn't appeared in the top ten in decades), but most esp as establishing as a sort of guide to adolescents just picking up a love for film - 'seek out and familiarize yrself w/ these movies'. the first time i watched the rules of the game i know it was because of the sight and sound poll. caring a very great deal about the sight and sound poll, giving it a LOT of weight when you're 14 = understandable, maybe something to be encouraged. caring a very great deal about the sigh and sound poll, giving it a LOT of weight when you're an adult = being the filmnerd version of the type of person who freaks out for days that 'gold soundz' won the pfork poll, unbecoming. when you're an adult the individual ballots are where the fun is (there isn't a list here that's not gonna be more interesting than the actual top ten), when you're an adolescent the main poll is what matters.

dur xpost

Absolutely, which is why, had I a ballot, I have to assume I'd be way more idiosyncratic and personal about my picks than strategic (i.e. putting Rules of the Game on my ballot and snubbing Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Potemkin in order to hopefully push the Renoir up in the rankings).

(meaning "absolutely, it's all about the individual lists for me now")

Absolutely, which is why, had I a ballot, I have to assume I'd be way more idiosyncratic and personal about my picks than strategic

Am I reading this wrong, or did you mean the opposite, that you'd be more strategic if you had a ballot? Even if I did have a ballot, I'd just vote for my favorites. The Godfathers would do quite well with or without me, and I don't know that there's anything else from my floating group of 25 where a single vote would make a difference. To impact the results, I'd literally have to start voting for stuff I like rather than love.

Okay, now I see--the parentheses explain what you wouldn't do.

"The Sigh and Sound poll"--nice Freudian slip about how little the Top 10 changes from decade to decade...

what i thought at some point in 2002

if i was voting for reals i'd probably do some dumb mix of love and strategy so let's say

the rules of the game
pierrot le fou
the big sleep
bringing up baby
vivre sa vie
only angels have wings
weekend
red river
breathless
madonna: truth or dare

the red and the white
vertigo
sansho dayu
the magnificient ambersons
andrei rublev
god and the devil in the land of the sun
eureka
dead man
red desert
the shining

These lists are all really good imo.

could see vertigo getting #1 in 2012

One can fucking hope.

tokyo story will be higher too, i guess and hope.

These lists are all really good imo.

Yup -- good job, guys.

especially at the expense of

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) 692 to 836 (down 144)

People love that movie ironically? News to me.

xp nearly as satisfying

The sum running time for all the films in the first list put together is 777 min; still shorter than Alexanderplatz and Heimat.

A "two-reeler" in the literal, trad sense is about 16-20 minutes. Sherlock Jr was five.

Right, I was going off of what current (i.e. before digital made the term antiquated) standards for reel length were.

i actually don't remember if i've seen Number Seventeen, but Jamaica Inn is significantly better than Topaz and a few of the silents. (I have about five extant Hitch features to go, all pre-'34.)

you guys seen Heimat?

Sheesh I've seen a lot of films that are longer than Gone with the Wind this must stop.

no, but i said heimat when i saw matt

Those top ten rankings are adamantine.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Lifeandhealth/Pix/pictures/2009/6/10/1244622031353/Adam-Ant-in-1981-001.jpg

> 550 Dekalog Kieslowski

this is cheating

> 440 Vampires

this too

They were made for TV? If so then Berlin Alexanderplatz and Doomed Love (which is Oliveira holy grail). Maybe Histoires du Cinema. I think La Commune began as a project for TV.

Hitler: A Film from Germany is also TV.

The version of Out 1 in circulation is also the slightly revised/shortened 'tv version' (Rivette divided the film up into chapters for a possible television sale, but I don't think it was every broadcast in that or any other form)

the heimat prequel this year was good imo

more that they were filmed in episodes, released as parts. if vampires is in then why not "flash gordon" tv series? why not "rocky"?

bbc4 showed Shoah for holocaust memorial day, well, spread over two sundays. took me about a week to watch in stages of about an hour each.

who knows - this list would never include "rocky" because its shit :-)

I didn't include Out 1 because it got a cinematic release => well that magical day in 1971 when one cinema in Paris gave it a go LOL.

Not sure if I can be arsed to see part 2 of Shoah. I'll boast now I sat through 4.5 hours for the 1st part, but I got all pissy at Lanzmann that bullying idiot so I might have to youtube the barbershop episode instead.

oh cool its on iplayer. I'll probably just watch the first hour then lie and say I saw the whole thing.

is the german guard singing the Treblinka song in the first part?

the polish bloke's *1 account of his trip to the ghetto is worth a watch too. as is the the other bloke's *2 account of his trip out of the warsaw ghetto (to get arms for the uprising) and back in again.

*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski
*2 http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/interviews/kazik.asp

i'm pretty sure "arrival of a train" could fit on one reel in any era :)

technically lang's dr mabuse was released as two separate films, so there's more cheating going on, but who cares. at least they were produced of a piece

so this is like a list of lists? what's their arithmetic?

To think, already halfway to the next one.

Over the last few years I've made a point of watching the films I hadn't seen in the S&S top 250. I now only have the following still to watch:

Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
Intolerance (Griffiths)
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
A City of Sadness (Hou)
Tabu (Murnau)
Chelsea Girls (Warhol)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Bing)
Wanda (Loden)
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang)

Have viewing copies of all of the above apart from City of Sadness, Chelsea Girls and Wanda (which I think is caught up in a rights issue at present).

City of Sadness is incredible, it is probably my fave Hou next to Flowers Of Shanghai.

Do you know his film Daughter of the Nile at all, Calzino? Just had a legit release from Masters of Cinema and I'm v tempted:

https://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/daughter-nile

i also saw The Travelling Players recently, but more often i go off the They Shoot Pictures Don't They 1000.

The top-listed films I've never seen tend to be The Exorcist and The Mother and the Whore.

xp
not seen that WF, and it isn't even on the type of places* I go looking for movies.

The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
A City of Sadness (Hou)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)

^^ You're in for a treat.

Really want to see the Bing. Maybe Warhol, one day I'll catch a screening at the ICA (where else?)

I have actually attended a 'live' screening of Chelsea Girls at the Scala, with two screens running, but I'm afraid I only lasted abt an hour. Also think C4 screened it once, so there are probably bootlegs of that out there (the bootlegs of Ranaldo and Clara - unaccountably missing from the S&S list! - are derived from a single screening on C4 in the 1980s).

And I've tried to watch The Travelling Players at home a couple of times, but have never managed to get very far with it - all the spatial/temporal play seems to demand a cinema viewing.

The other film on the S&S list that took me a few attempts was, oddly, Cassavetes' Faces, which really is exhausting viewing.

I saw Travelling Players on a laptop screen. I loved it and yes I'm sure its even more of a trip on the big screen.

The ICA have screened Chelsea Girls a few times but I could never turn up on those days.

Faces is exhausting and I would've said my favourite by him however I caught a screening of Love Streams recently and that's better, the heavy emotional range is presented in a more even manner (if such a thing can be said about a Cassavetes film).

There is something quite magic about the period feel of City Of Sadness, sort of like an epic colour addition to Rossellini's war trilogy or summat. it really is a great movie.

Interesting sidebar to the directors' poll I just found out about. Directors have been choosing their top 50 films for La Cinémathèque des Réalisateurs for some time now, and the results are a dead tie between Vertigo and Sunrise, followed most closely by The 400 Blows.

https://www.lacinetek.com/en/the-top-of-the-lists

Not thrilling results: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181029-the-100-greatest-foreign-language-films

i.e. Amelie is higher than Taste of Cherry

i.e. Amelie is higher than ANYTHING

82. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
76. Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
26. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)

Man With a Movie Camera is on there despite being silent and having no intertitles.

While speaking in English haltingly or with an accent or not at all, foreign language films address us all too fluently in another tongue... the tongue of cinema.

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) October 31, 2018

This is back:

ok guys, it's that time again: the 2019 SHMIGHT & SHMOUND POLL, film twitter's 4th annual poll of the best movies ever made. doing things different this year... feel free to still tweet out your ballots, but PLEASE submit them here: https://t.co/E9hNkTlnB6

— nathan escar smith (@trillmoregirls) June 12, 2019

what i ended up voting for:

La Regle du Jeu (1939)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Apartment (1960)
Late Autumn (1960)
Lancelot du Lac (1974)
Le Rayon Vert (1986)
Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
The Gleaners & I (2000)
Happy Hour (2015)

Nice! Here's what I gave them (bold are repeats from last year ballot):

DAISY KENYON (Preminger)
UN CHANT D'AMOUR (Genet)
DUCK AMUCK (Jones)
THE LADIES' MAN (Lewis)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (Kubelka)
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Hooper)
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Yang)
TASTE OF CHERRY (Kiarostami)
OUTER SPACE (Tscherkassky)

I don't follow Twitter, Film or otherwise, but does anyone ever go all Paul Westerberg with this and submit a ballot that's all Police Academy movies and then one by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or something like that?

former ilxor nrq put "ferris bueller" on his ballot along with some standard choices, iirc

i think mark s may have had a ballot at one point too?

always cheers me up when i remember tsai ming liang put goodbye, dragon inn on his s&s ballot

I'm not on Twitter, but pretending I have a ballot,

Ugetsu
Yi Yi
The Green Ray
The Rules of the Game
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Kiki's Delivery Service
Night of the Living Dead
Sans Soleil
Pather Panchali
Pas de deux

goodbye, dragon inn is one of my favorite films of all time

if I had a vote I might say

Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Red Desert (1964)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
My Night at Maud's (1969)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Blue (1990)
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
Tropical Malady (2004)

looking at that I guess the 1968-1972 era meant the most to me

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