Sight & Sound

[spectre]

Re: furbicide on Portrait of a Lady on Fire being the best of the 2010's: I don't think any film from the 2010's deserves to be in the top 100 films ever made. At least not necessarily. Put it high on the best since 2000 list, sure. But this is excessive.

I guess others have already made this point, but if we’re doing the top 100 films from an artform that’s ~125 years old, I see no good reason why in theory there shouldn’t be a roughly proportionate number of films from recent years (that’d be around fifteen films since 2002, instead of the five we got). There’s no particular justification not to other than deference to the existing canon and an overcautiousness that prevents us from giving new work its due.

Having said that, I kind of feel like a hypocrite here because there was nothing newer than 1988 in my top ten! But if I were doing a top 100 I would absolutely find space for films like Poetry, Post tenebras lux, Moonrise Kingdom, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (the real "milkshake duck" film of the 2010s, RIP!), Roma and, yes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Others’ mileage will vary on those specific titles, but you get the point. People haven’t forgotten how to make cinematic masterpieces, and we shouldn’t need to wait around to see what everyone else thinks before assessing them as such.

[Red Screamer]

Lots of questionable assertions in this thread, but calling Jeanne Dielman theoretical is pretty misleading. It’s a simple, concrete movie—extremely concrete, in fact. If this was the first movie someone ever watched, I don’t think it would bewilder them the same way that Weekend or Mirror might. A detailed portrait of a particular person in a particular situation for a few days seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a movie to be about. The challenge of Jeanne Dielman in the medium’s history is not a question of theory, but instead is about Akerman’s film drawing more from painting, dance, and real life(!) than the conventional fiction feature film, which tends to have its roots in theater and the novel/short story.

@heartthesilence The comparison to Ulysses is a good point and Ulysses is absolutely a more extreme version of what people are claiming about the academic and aggressive leanings of Jeanne Dielman. Actually a good description of the action of Jeanne Dielman could be “all of the everyday activities Joyce didn’t think to include in Ulysses”. No one cooks, cleans, does the dishes, makes the house, etc. in Joyce’s novel as far as I can remember.

[domino harvey]

Theoretical here seems to mean “The pleasures of the film and what makes it important or interesting can be described as well as they can be depicted.” You say the film is easy to understand on a narrative level, but you gloss over how engaging or entertaining or aesthetically pleasing or any other conventional charm a film typically contains. I think many would be served just as well by reading the plot summary based on a lot of the defenses I keep seeing

[pistolwink]

so who's going to start sharing the selection of individual ballots published in the print edition of the magazine out today?

[beamish14]

Denys Arcand?

I do not believe you or anyone else in the entire world sincerely expected Arcand to make the top 100. Gimme a Breaksville

Oh, absolutely
Just playing Devil’s advocate a bit. I would never expect him to appear on any lists from American or British critics

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

@heartthesilence The comparison to Ulysses is a good point and Ulysses is absolutely a more extreme version of what people are claiming about the academic and aggressive leanings of Jeanne Dielman. Actually a good description of the action of Jeanne Dielman could be “all of the everyday activities Joyce didn’t think to include in Ulysses”. No one cooks, cleans, does the dishes, makes the house, etc. in Joyce’s novel as far as I can remember.

I mean, chapter four begins with Leopold Bloom preparing breakfast for himself and his wife, as well as some tidying up, but Ulysses is not a domestic novel, it's explicitly about the hope to return to the home. And the entire last chapter is partly prompted by Bloom's request for Molly to make him eggs the following morning. Slightly tangentially, Finnegans Wake does have a "description" of doing laundry anyway. Besides, Joyce's vision of the domestic isn't burdened by the same idea of how miserable the domestic is – Molly Bloom gets to sit at home, be pampered and fucked all day without doing much of anything, whereas Jeanne Dielman is a horror epic of domesticity, about how the ennui of this existence spirals into hysteria.

I think it's also important to remember that Dielman represents the conclusion of Akerman's structuralist filmmaking, that form so obsessed with repetitions. It seems to me to be integral to the project that the feminist critique and the formal lineage dovetail as they do.

[pistolwink]

I think Toute une nuit is also a film pretty obviously informed by structuralism, although it offers more obvious surface pleasures than Jeanne.... It's an underseen film, though.

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

I don't mean to suggest that she never worked with the form again –– rather that Dielman just represents the fullest and furthest fruition of her use of it.

[MV88]

Lots of questionable assertions in this thread, but calling Jeanne Dielman theoretical is pretty misleading. It’s a simple, concrete movie—extremely concrete, in fact. If this was the first movie someone ever watched, I don’t think it would bewilder them the same way that Weekend or Mirror might. A detailed portrait of a particular person in a particular situation for a few days seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a movie to be about. The challenge of Jeanne Dielman in the medium’s history is not a question of theory, but instead is about Akerman’s film drawing more from painting, dance, and real life(!) than the conventional fiction feature film, which tends to have its roots in theater and the novel/short story.

@heartthesilence The comparison to Ulysses is a good point and Ulysses is absolutely a more extreme version of what people are claiming about the academic and aggressive leanings of Jeanne Dielman. Actually a good description of the action of Jeanne Dielman could be “all of the everyday activities Joyce didn’t think to include in Ulysses”. No one cooks, cleans, does the dishes, makes the house, etc. in Joyce’s novel as far as I can remember.

I don't know if any of the assertions I've made are among those you find questionable, but I actually agree with most of what you've said here. My mixed feelings about Jeanne Dielman topping the list don't come from thinking it's too theoretical or challenging to be called the greatest film ever made, but rather from my acknowledgment that that's how the vast majority of newcomers to the film will view it, which I worry may end up hurting its reputation somewhat in the long run. It's a film that has very special meaning for me, so while part of me is thrilled to see Chantal Akerman getting this level of acclaim, I'm also just glad I'm not on social media to see the reactions of people who will be watching it for the first time because of its placement on this list. As I said in an earlier comment, any film being proclaimed "The Greatest Movie Ever Made" automatically puts a target on its back, and just to put it in perspective, there were a lot of people who were baffled for decades as to how anyone could possibly enjoy Citizen Kane, so I can't even imagine what they're going to think of Jeanne Dielman. This is a film that is decidedly a Capital-A Art film, the sort of thing I suspect most "normal" (i.e. non-cinephile) people will have a viscerally negative reaction to it should they decide to check it out.

I'm definitely not saying that makes it any less of a masterpiece (which I do think it is), but it's clearly the least accessible film by a wide margin that's ever topped the Sight & Sound poll, and the spotlight this puts on it will likely lead to it developing another reputation altogether with probably a majority of people who discuss movies online. I'm already anticipating a "how long can you last trying to get through Jeanne Dielman?" TikTok challenge and countless reductive parodies of people filming themselves cleaning dishes in silence with sarcastic "the greatest film ever made according to Sight & Sound" descriptions. Not that any of that should deter us from celebrating it, but I also just have to accept now that there's a distinct possibility that bringing up Jeanne Dielman may result in a lot of eye-rolling and guffawing from now on, as it's probably going to become the go-to punchline for "pretentious arthouse film" jokes from now on. The bottom line is that, regardless of its merits, it is objectively not a film that the vast, vast majority of people will even be able to get through, let alone enjoy. My own feelings about the film don't blind me from the fact that, outside of the ultra-cinephilic bubble that we occupy here and viewed in the larger context of all general audiences, its appeal is extremely niche, and to virtually everyone just now hearing of it thanks to the attention placed on it by this poll, it being called the best film ever made is going to register as baffling at best, if not aggressively contemptuous of the "average" moviegoer. It's a double-edged sword in that I actually think it does deserve this level of attention *within the cinephile community* (key context), but since this list is reaching far beyond those horizons, sending it out to the rest of the world is just asking for it to become the target of mean-spirited and reductive memes.

To your point about how it wouldn't be at all bewildering to someone whose first movie ever was Jeanne Dielman, I agree with that assessment completely, but that's kind of the issue because if anything, it actually requires a lot of un-learning of cinematic conventions in order to appreciate. Perhaps that's what others here meant by it being theoretical, because it does demand to a degree that the viewer reconsiders their concept of what a film is. That may be less of a challenge to those who have already seen the works of Ozu (Akerman's primary influence on this film) or any of the subsequent adherents to slow cinema, but it's a big ask for most people. It's not that it's challenging in and of itself, but it most certainly is in the context of what the general population has come to expect from a movie. It completely upends conventions and expectations, which is likely a big part of why it's so acclaimed, but it's also why most "average" movie watchers will absolutely despise it. They'll react the same way as they would if a list of greatest painters were topped by, say, Jackson Pollock -- not that I'd compare his aesthetic whatsoever to Akerman's, but since it exists so far beyond their concept of what art is, they tend to viscerally respond by dismissing the notion that it is art at all.

[Finch]

I have not seen Jeanne Dielman (yet) so I'm not going to comment.

I think the placements of In The Mood For Love and Mulholland Drive are fair but understand the gripes about recency bias for Portrait of a Lady on Fire in the sense that the high placement in the list feels a bit too hasty for a film this new (I liked it but it wasn't Top 5 material for that year for me and I found Petite Maman superior). But who knows, maybe it'll place even higher in 2032.

A big meh to three Wilder films on the list but no Lubitsch and Hawks.

Blue Velvet does feel like a safe consensus choice for any Lynch that's not Mulholland Drive. I'd have gone with FWWM myself.

[rde]

I'm going to be interested to see the break-down of voters, because I have an instinct that the changes in the list are reflective of the structural shift in writing about film over the past ten years: print film criticism is in serious decline, while academic film studies has been maintained and perhaps even slightly expanded. So now most writing significant on cinema is by someone with an academic posting and combined with the expansion of the voting pool leads to the 'theory over pleasure' trend identified above. That probably explains the diversity of the list, too, the appearance of non-US and non-European cinema to a greater extent than before and the relatively even distribution of films across the decades.

I'm sad to see the de-emphasis on classic Hollywood studio cinema, which means musicals, film noir, comedies, and so on either tumble down the list or are absent entirely. The availability bais (much more significant than recency bias) that has been discussed is unsurprising and shows actually how significant Criterion, Second Sight, Masters of Cinema, still are to film history - Black Girl would, I wager, not be on the list if it had been dumped on Netflix. The careful curation and presentation of unseen cinema by boutique labels still has an impact, which is heartening.

The individual placement of films is perhaps misleading - it's the overall trends that are most interesting, which filmmakers are newly canonised, which ones have fallen out of view. Akerman, Varda, and Denis' strong showing reflect the explosion of writing and viewing of their work in the past decade - part of a push to feminise the canon and an attempt to arrest the astonishing disproption in who makes films. Asian cinema (not just Japan, but Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, and Hong Kong) have made perhaps an even greater showing, at the expense of Italian arthouse cinema and French nouvelle vague.

Orson Welles places high, but only one of his films is there now, all of his others are perhaps too 'obvious' or not enough in the critical conversation to place. I know it would go against how the list has always been constructed, but only one film by one director in the Top 100 would be fun, because my main gripe is the multiple Wong Kar Wai, Billy Wilder(!), Miyazaki, and Kubrick films (The Shining, really? I like it, but that actually seems the most egregiously overrated film here in the context of the overall list).

If voting for this list always has a twist of the polemic to it, perhaps I would only vote for films that feature at least one musical performance in them...

I once heard someone point out that the so-called 'male gaze' and the straight female gaze are pretty close to the same thing. Straight women gawk at women, too. The same type of women that men gawk at. Sex pots, often enough.

And so maybe that explains why this film, taking that line, is about two gay women? Because I don't think many women have much of an instinctual problem with the 'male gaze'.

rde I would gently suggest it might be helpful to read Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', that coined the idea of the male gaze, but also addresses how it constructs the straight female gaze. The PDF is freely available online and it's very short (and well-written).

Well give me time to read it, but what if straight women see the world that way, and are fine with it, and continue to see that way? Are they simply in error because there's a theory that explains all the things that are 'wrong' with seeing that way?

I personally can't stand Marilyn Monroe, lol. It's not my ideal of womanhood (then again, neither is Jeanne Dielmann, and I think most mothers would agree with me). The cinema has a lot of exaggeration in it, and people go to it for that. I mean, hell, I keep seeing young girls wearing Playboy hoodies, of their own free will, and I can't, for the life of me, understand why they would want to do that. Are they being had? Brainwashed? Maybe. But I am acknowledging what a lot of them like, even if it runs contrary to my taste. (I mention Playboy because, well, that was a big deal for Monroe.)

Will report back if I manage to read it.

[MichaelB]

Apparently the individual lists (which are infinitely more interesting than the combined lists) is going to be released next month.

The individual lists aren't in the same issue? That's really irritating as I've ordered this edition of Sight & Sound mainly for that reason. I'm sure the last two lists, in 2002 and 2012, included those in the same issue.

Nope, a selection in both cases. I've just looked up the September 2012 edition, and they picked a sample of 100 out of 846, unsurprisingly biased towards the bigger-name contributors.

The 2012 poll has double that number of contributors, so it simply wouldn't have been practical to reproduce them in print. The issue I have in front of me averages fifteen lists per page, in text that I imagine is as small as they can comfortably go, so with 1,600-plus lists this time round they'd need another hundred pages just for the text alone, never mind accompanying stills etc.

But all lists were published online back then, and this is going to happen this year too.

[scotty2]

Theoretical here seems to mean “The pleasures of the film and what makes it important or interesting can be described as well as they can be depicted.” You say the film is easy to understand on a narrative level, but you gloss over how engaging or entertaining or aesthetically pleasing or any other conventional charm a film typically contains. I think many would be served just as well by reading the plot summary based on a lot of the defenses I keep seeing

Your objections seem to come down to "why didn't they select a film that I like?" I found the film to be engaging, entertaining, and aesthetically pleasing. It reordered my sense of cinematic time, allowed me to live in the mis-en-scene to the extent that small changes in the routine--and in Dielman's sense of control--registered like earthquakes, and had me thinking and talking about the film for days afterward. As much as I love Hawks (no His Girl Friday or Only Angels Have Wings?), noir, westerns, Chinatown, and the rest, I have to confess that few of those films have had that kind of impact on me.

But of course neither your preferences nor mine have anything to do with whether it is the greatest film of all time. It is only designated as such because a lot of the 1,600-plus people in a poll put it on their ballots. Clearly, the doubling of the number of ballots extended the vote to many more people with less allegiance to the established, Classic Hollywood and Janus Films-based canon. How many voters could have included Akerman's film knowing it would garner the most votes? Unlike this forum's lists, the ballots do not rank the films--only the final tally does. Criterion's release of the film increased awareness of it but the fact that a second Akerman made the list means that she is not necessarily being watched by the masses but is being researched, written about, and taught. I'm guessing the gender balance of the critics has shifted dramatically and to the extent that the list simply reflects the tastes and interests of the voters, here we are. A larger international contingent surely also played a role in a non-US film topping the chart.

As surprising as much of the list is to me, my only other thought is that the greatest criticism of the poll in previous decades was how static it was over time once a canon had settled in, and now I see outrage everywhere over the loss of old canonical titles (as if not being on this tiny list has killed them off somehow--I'm sure many hundreds or maybe a couple thousand films received votes--we'll soon see I hope). I see charges of recency bias and of a generation of critics who don't really know the canon (really? in the age of dvd/blu/streaming?). Bicycle Thieves and L'avventura ranked very high only a couple of years after their releases. In the past, Sight and Sound commissioned critics to make the case for recent-ish films such as Kieszlowski's Blue to make the list, all to no avail--the big news in 2012 was that Vertigo finally climbed to the top and unseated Kane. There is a lot more news in this list, and as much as I could ask "why no Hawks, why only one Bergman?" it does reflect a lot of the energy in film studies and in conversation about film as an art form (and an industry) generally over the past decade. I'm fine with that.

[diamonds]

so who's going to start sharing the selection of individual ballots published in the print edition of the magazine out today?

Martin Scorsese

Bong Joon-ho

[domino harvey]

I once heard someone point out that the so-called 'male gaze' and the straight female gaze are pretty close to the same thing. Straight women gawk at women, too. The same type of women that men gawk at. Sex pots, often enough.

And so maybe that explains why this film, taking that line, is about two gay women? Because I don't think many women have much of an instinctual problem with the 'male gaze'.

rde I would gently suggest it might be helpful to read Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', that coined the idea of the male gaze, but also addresses how it constructs the straight female gaze. The PDF is freely available online and it's very short (and well-written).

Well give me time to read it, but what if straight women see the world that way, and are fine with it, and continue to see that way? Are they simply in error because there's a theory that explains all the things that are 'wrong' with seeing that way?

I personally can't stand Marilyn Monroe, lol. It's not my ideal of womanhood (then again, neither is Jeanne Dielmann, and I think most mothers would agree with me). The cinema has a lot of exaggeration in it, and people go to it for that. I mean, hell, I keep seeing young girls wearing Playboy hoodies, of their own free will, and I can't, for the life of me, understand why they would want to do that. Are they being had? Brainwashed? Maybe. But I am acknowledging what a lot of them like, even if it runs contrary to my taste. (I mention Playboy because, well, that was a big deal for Monroe.)

Will report back if I manage to read it.

Probably easier to just read what is arguably the most influential and well-read essay about film ever written rather than continuing to speculate on what it might contain, but okay, keep going

[swo17]

Do we know how many lists the top placing films appeared on? Are we talking like 100 people that listed Jeanne Dielman, or is that figure way off?

[yoloswegmaster]

[soundchaser]

Well give me time to read it, but what if straight women see the world that way, and are fine with it, and continue to see that way? Are they simply in error because there's a theory that explains all the things that are 'wrong' with seeing that way?

I personally can't stand Marilyn Monroe, lol. It's not my ideal of womanhood (then again, neither is Jeanne Dielmann, and I think most mothers would agree with me). The cinema has a lot of exaggeration in it, and people go to it for that. I mean, hell, I keep seeing young girls wearing Playboy hoodies, of their own free will, and I can't, for the life of me, understand why they would want to do that. Are they being had? Brainwashed? Maybe. But I am acknowledging what a lot of them like, even if it runs contrary to my taste. (I mention Playboy because, well, that was a big deal for Monroe.)

Will report back if I manage to read it.

Mulvey's piece is really far more deeply rooted in a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework than its popular conception (and simplification) would suggest; there's not a ton of sociological analysis in it. Honestly, I don't think she'd disagree with anything you suggest here.

[diamonds]

Ha, looks like despite Hawks' absence from the list the Hawksians were out in full force!

Dan Sallitt

[rde]

I once heard someone point out that the so-called 'male gaze' and the straight female gaze are pretty close to the same thing. Straight women gawk at women, too. The same type of women that men gawk at. Sex pots, often enough.

And so maybe that explains why this film, taking that line, is about two gay women? Because I don't think many women have much of an instinctual problem with the 'male gaze'.

rde I would gently suggest it might be helpful to read Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', that coined the idea of the male gaze, but also addresses how it constructs the straight female gaze. The PDF is freely available online and it's very short (and well-written).
[/quote]

————————

Alright, well, I read a little of the PDF, and it was more or less what I expected. You can guess my response. I typed one up, deleted it. I'd really rather somebody else explain why they think that essay is valuable, in itself, and for viewing the cinema.

Or what it means, lol. I get what it means if you accept twenty Freudian priors (women are penis-less creatures that fill men with a terror of castration!!!). But I'm convinced that nobody believes this stuff. But convince me otherwise, lol. And relate it to film, if you could.

[Maltic]

Spoiler

An honest list would've had Quatermass and the Pit

[rde]

rde I would gently suggest it might be helpful to read Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', that coined the idea of the male gaze, but also addresses how it constructs the straight female gaze. The PDF is freely available online and it's very short (and well-written).

Well give me time to read it, but what if straight women see the world that way, and are fine with it, and continue to see that way? Are they simply in error because there's a theory that explains all the things that are 'wrong' with seeing that way?

I personally can't stand Marilyn Monroe, lol. It's not my ideal of womanhood (then again, neither is Jeanne Dielmann, and I think most mothers would agree with me). The cinema has a lot of exaggeration in it, and people go to it for that. I mean, hell, I keep seeing young girls wearing Playboy hoodies, of their own free will, and I can't, for the life of me, understand why they would want to do that. Are they being had? Brainwashed? Maybe. But I am acknowledging what a lot of them like, even if it runs contrary to my taste. (I mention Playboy because, well, that was a big deal for Monroe.)

Will report back if I manage to read it.

Probably easier to just read what is arguably the most influential and well-read essay about film ever written rather than continuing to speculate on what it might contain, but okay, keep going

Fair play, domino.

So, what's the essay mean to you? How has it deepened your appreciation of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or Jeanne Dielmann, or, to go in the other direction, Hitchcock?

[Eric]

2022: The Year Politics Became a Factor in Evaluating Art

JRo would like a word.

[Red Screamer]

I mean, chapter four begins with Leopold Bloom preparing breakfast for himself and his wife, as well as some tidying up, but Ulysses is not a domestic novel, it's explicitly about the hope to return to the home. And the entire last chapter is partly prompted by Bloom's request for Molly to make him eggs the following morning. Slightly tangentially, Finnegans Wake does have a "description" of doing laundry anyway. Besides, Joyce's vision of the domestic isn't burdened by the same idea of how miserable the domestic is – Molly Bloom gets to sit at home, be pampered and fucked all day without doing much of anything, whereas Jeanne Dielman is a horror epic of domesticity, about how the ennui of this existence spirals into hysteria.

I think it's also important to remember that Dielman represents the conclusion of Akerman's structuralist filmmaking, that form so obsessed with repetitions. It seems to me to be integral to the project that the feminist critique and the formal lineage dovetail as they do.

Good point, but Joyce elides the actual preparation and cooking of the meal, beginning with the arrangement of the tray as Bloom prepares to serve it. That’s pedantic, but my larger point is that in the history of art based around everyday life, there’s a clear distinction between what various artists think is interesting, normal, or essential, which is part of the experiential impact and historical importance of this film. I agree with your analysis though (except I'd argue Molly Bloom is dealing with ennui and loneliness too, she just expresses it differently), and I’ll clarify that I was not criticizing Ulysses on that point, merely pointing out the different boundaries of the two works and artists.

Theoretical here seems to mean “The pleasures of the film and what makes it important or interesting can be described as well as they can be depicted.” You say the film is easy to understand on a narrative level, but you gloss over how engaging or entertaining or aesthetically pleasing or any other conventional charm a film typically contains. I think many would be served just as well by reading the plot summary based on a lot of the defenses I keep seeing

Pleasure and engagement are personal, so I’m not sure it will mean all that much to you to tell you that I personally find Jeanne Dielman very engaging—viscerally, emotionally, and intellectually—for its compositions, its documentary aspects, its ASMR aspects, its use of structure, its choreography and pace, its resonances with my life, &c. No, it's not conventionally charming or exciting, but aesthetically pleasurable? Absolutely. Ambient music isn’t unpleasurable just because it’s not catchy. But, again, it’s personal. I don’t know how to respond to your last point, because I’m not sure what someone would get out of a plot summary of Jeanne Dielman, when the experience of seeing it, of being skillfully placed in the particular mood, structure, mindset, material, and rhythm of the film, is paramount. You didn't ever feel a little like Jeanne Dielman during Covid lockdown, repeating actions day after day, your life guided by unseen structures? You don't think the final shot of the film has an extraordinary and effective use of composition, lighting, movement/stillness, and ambient sound? Maybe not. It doesn't sound like it. But as for me, I'm not exactly going to get the same responses and experience from the plot summary.

[domino harvey]

I think it might be important to note that I gave the film a lot of latitude until the ending, which completely betrayed all my good will. I had a similar reaction to a much more recent, very long two part film that similarly resorted to extreme provocateur melodramatics at the finish line (though that movie certainly had a steadier clip of absurdities on the road to the finish). I don’t think what came before merits where it goes. I don’t hate the film, I get what it’s doing and where its aims are. I think all the accusations leveled at me for what is admittedly a pretty typically colorful (read: dickish) response from me to the placement on the list miss the possibility that I am perfectly capable of understanding this film’s appeal for others and its intents but still not buying it and still unhappy by the shift of weight it now carries (and much of this is my own fault for not extrapolating further in this thread, though I already touched on this in its dedicated thread)