Don’t say we didn’t warn you. This is our final word on this – at least for a decade.
The Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll – that once-a-decade reckoning of cinematic importance that in 2022 fell victim to the very political voting and intersectional point scoring that the whole idea of doing a poll every ten years is surely supposed to counteract – has been a continuing tale of gradual revelation this time around. A considerable expansion of the voting franchise has made the count a bit more of a kerfuffle this time around – I suppose that this is not just something that can be automated and so while we managed to get the Hot One Hundred before the end of the year, the top 250 took longer… and we’ve only just seen the publication of every single ballot. There still isn’t a chart that includes every single film voted for, which might be an even more difficult task – though enthusiastic Letterboxd users are already on the case.
Anyway: as one of the voters in the last two polls, I can say that the biggest frustration is finding just ten films to vote for. I mean, how is that even possible? It can only ever feel like an incomplete listing. This time around I switched up some of my choices – sometimes because there were titles that felt interchangeable in my affection, sometimes because I simply haven’t seen a particular film for so long that I can’t honestly say if it still hits the spot in the way it once did. It’s possible that these are not the films you might be expecting, but for the record, my choices in 2012 were:
Apocalypse Now
The Exterminating Angel
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
The Killing of America
Last Year at Marienbad
Le mépris
Paris, Texas
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Woman in the Dunes
In 2022, the list is slightly – but not dramatically – different:
Apocalypse Now
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Daisies
The Exterminating Angel
Last Year at Marienbad
Le mépris
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Paris, Texas
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
But suppose I had the option of submitting a longer list? Say 30 films instead of 10? Which movies would then make the cut? Well, obviously the ones that were bumped from the previous list would be there – nothing has so shifted in my affections as to be dismissed entirely. But what else? Well, here’s the next 20, once again in alphabetical order:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Almost Famous
Caligula
A Clockwork Orange
Confessions
The Colour of Pomegranates
The Company of Wolves
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Jaws
The Killing of America
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
My Favorite Year
Possession
Spider Baby
The Swimmer
Tracks
Umberto D
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
What’s Up Doc?
Woman in the Dunes
What do we take from this? Well, my Top Ten consists of films from a 30-year period, something I felt painfully aware of – some people moan that the Sight and Sound poll is a bunch of old farts voting for old movies and I do get that complaint. My Top 30 has a few more modern films – one as recent as 2010, which is probably still old enough to be ‘vintage’ by now, but still. I’ve also got several comedies in my Top 30. Comedy has a hard time in polls like this – few critics take the genre seriously unless it is from critically beloved directors or silent stars like Chaplin and Keaton. I’m aware that I’m as bad as everyone else in this – some of my favourite films are comedies but they are not, it seems, my absolute favourites. Or at least not the ones I think of as ‘the greatest’, and that’s the other issue here. I suspect that for some – even most – voters, ‘favourite’ and ‘greatest’ blur – but for better or worse, I can’t help but make a separation between the two. One of my favourite films is Bell, Book and Candle, a movie that has a great emotional connection for me. But I also see the film’s many faults and can’t say with any honesty that it is one of the greatest films ever. That’s just me and I don’t judge people who won’t make that distinction.
An outlier – and arguably a Top ten contender in itself – is Twin Peaks: The Return, which I decided against including because it is still a TV series – and while that distinction seems increasingly irrelevant, in situations like this it seems worth maintaining. Similarly, Mulholland Drive sits just outside the Top 30 and perhaps should be in there – or perhaps should be in the Top 10 – only I can’t think what I would remove to make room for it. You might wonder why not just list fifty films – or a hundred? Any cut-off point is somewhat arbitrary (though we are so used to Top Tens everywhere that it makes that a sensible number for Sight and Sound to request). But that’s the problem with lists like this – where do you stop? At whatever point, you end up losing great movies. Had I gone to 50 films, I might have included adult movies like Cafe Flesh, Sensations and The Devil in Miss Jones; more from Kubrick, Bunuel and Godard; films by John Cassavetes, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Walerian Borowczyk; King Kong, The Iron Rose, The Tin Drum and The Exorcist or even odd personal favourites but I’ll probably never know because have no immediate inclination to head down that road (though I’m sure I’m not the only critic looking at the list and thinking ‘hey, maybe there is a book to be written about my top hundred films of all time’…). Picking these was hard enough. At some point, there will always be a film that ought to have been included but wasn’t.
It does show that, ultimately, these lists are all pointless beyond being a snapshot of what a certain amount of people were thinking at a particular time. The individual lists and the full run-down of movies that someone, anyone voted for are always more interesting than the top 100 even if most people writing about the poll will stop at the Top Ten – it’s at the bottom end of the chart where the oddities appear and where you find critical kindred spirits. With no list of titles and 2000 voters (the critics and directors had their own separate Top 100 polls but are all included together in the list of voters) finding those odd, inspired or simply bloody-mindedly provocative choices is hard work. I can look at the people I know, the people I like and the people I loathe but it’s only going to give a small sampling. You can at least look at who voted for each film in the top 250. I’m glad to see that the potential outlier on my list, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has at least one other vote (thank you, Axelle Carolyn). Does that make me feel painfully unoriginal? Maybe. But the heart wants what the heart wants. I’m glad to see some voters, like former Shock Xpress man Stefan Jaworzyn, making radical choices like Andy Milligan’s Torture Dungeon – if some people do compile a list of every film that was voted for, entries like this will perhaps open people to films that they might not have otherwise heard of. There is a lot of talk about a ‘new canon’ but this still seems painfully elitist and pompous – the new generation of film critics are still as unlikely to be watching obscure horror movies, porn films and outsider cinema as their predecessors so any entry that points people towards the more esoteric is fine by me. I’m not sure that my 2012 vote for The Killing of America made many people seek that movie out – but if anyone watched that film as a result of it having a single vote on that poll, all the better.
But one good note to end on. No one that I know voted for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, apparently the best film ever made. So that’s a relief. I’d hate to have to disown anyone.
You can peruse the full voter list here.
DAVID FLINT
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Agree that comedy is still ignored too much by the critics; the best feature films of Chaplin and Keaton were considerable cinematic achievements, but were more like dramedies, as Laurel and Hardy for me will always be the masters of pure comedy in film via their short films, still the most revived and most celebrated in cinema history, yet most highbrow film critics and academics still take virtually no notice of them, very unfairly.