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

this will be a massive poll, hope we will take our time and will get everybody involved

If it's favourite films, would you need nominations? Everything ever is eligible.

"Nominations" are mostly a courtesy, in any ILX poll, and people are free to vote for what they want. And while I have reservations over voting for, say, a TV series in its entirety, I also admit I have no problem with that 2002 S&S voter's citation of the British Airways commercial, so.

On a related note, Joel D's defense of his immortal 2002 list has somehow slipped by me until now: https://amauteurish.com/2014/05/30/sight-sound-2002/

(Takeaway headline, S&S apparently came close to rejecting that ballot, until he swapped out his Michael Snow selection for a third porn title.)

putting a riefenstahl film in your top 10 is more indefensible than voting for three porn films imo

I wonder how Leni Riefenstahl's technically accomplished porn movies would be assessed today she'd gone in that direction.

That Joel David blog post links to our previous S&S thread as an example of the discussion that his list generated at the time, though oddly I only see like two mentions of it in the thread (both by Eric).

You're welcome.

Whether it gets counted or not--the final list in any poll always interests me, but is never important to me (why would it be, to me or anyone else?)--I'll definitely vote for one television series.

if there is any 'television series' included I hope it will be Twin Peaks: The Return

That did get theatrical screenings, so people who normally wouldn't go near TV will be okay for voting for it. Mine is a straight-up TV show.

I validate Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

sticking with Dekalog, you apostates

Dekalog was pretty great

2001: A Space Odyssey, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Taxi Driver, Close-Up, Sátántangó, In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, Uncle Boonmee, Twin Peaks: The Return, Zama

films I will love forever

I don't see Zama or Twin Peaks: The Return on the pastebin list, they should be included. Or Burning, such an incredible film

Added all three.

It's time: It's the ILX All-Time Milm and Foovies Poll! -- Nominations Thread

Found this weird and interesting: a guy who voted in the '72/'82/'92 polls asking for an invite to vote in 2022.

http://tonymacklin.net/content.php?cID=936

Fucking Shane.

Movies in which Jean Arthur is oppressed/depressed/repressed.

haven't seen Shane but I really like westerns from the 1948-1960 era

Leone's films were a few years after that but were all pretty great

I like Shane, don't love it, consider it part of film history--it's almost simultaneously a revisionist western itself and the context against which revisionist westerns from The Searchers to the later ones in the '60s and '70s make sense--and it doesn't seem to be particularly out of place on that list. (Philadelphia strikes me as the anomaly.)

> In 2022 there's a new world

and then doesn't list anything that's not ~30 years old

I appreciate him giving us his rationale for adding and subtracting films from previous lists, but that is very much the list of a man who once made a list in 1972.

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