Sight & Sound

[colinr0380]

The thing I am most curious about with 2010s nominees is: did anyone have the guts to vote for The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)? That might sound as if I'm joking, but it was one of the most audacious films of its decade (kind of Jeanne Dielman-esque in itself in its focus on the grueling minutiae of process and those times of trying somewhat unsuccessfully to make do and mend when things just don't work according to plan), albeit bookended by two films that were just passable at best.

[MichaelB]

I had to watch the first and third for professional reasons and so understandably didn’t have even the tiniest desire to watch the middle one voluntarily.

[colinr0380]

I had to watch the first and third for professional reasons and so understandably didn’t have even the tiniest desire to watch the middle one voluntarily.

That's a shame because its by far the best, although certainly should be approached with caution due to the content being uncompromising. Surprisingly (albeit blackly) funny too in the interactions between the mother and son. I would definitely stand by the assertion that it all plays out like a Mike Leigh film gone horribly, horribly wrong!

EDIT: I mean, the part where the mother bangs on the kitchen ceiling with a broom to enrage the skinhead blaring music from the flat upstairs to storm into their kitchen and then violently confront the son about why he was banging (or the moment where the mother wanders into the son's bedroom and stabs the shrouded bundle underneath the blankets with a knife, only for the son to walk in from the bathroom and she finds she has only been stabbing the pillows! Then he gets back into bed and lies there patiently waiting for her to do the deed, before she throws the knife aside in disgust at him!) could easily have fit into a twisted blackly comic version of Jeanne Dielman!

[The Curious Sofa]

I just got drawn into a discussion about The Human Centipede, apparently because Kevin Smith's Tusks is trending on social media and is getting compared to it. And I just made the same point that The Human Centipede 2 is the only one of these films worth watching, it's also the only one which I found in any way disturbing.

[brundlefly]

Quite open to seeing your list?

Feels apt to point out that Sciamma's Portrait... is at the very top of that list, with a significant margin of 125 points between 1 and 2, which feels doubly significant when you notice that 125 points covers the spread from 2 to 16.

And of course Portrait is a film whose classical digestibility and passionate concerns (who gets to represent, who gets to be represented, negotiation and collaboration between subject and artist) are also arguments to march right up that survey. I think if you're asking what great directors are working at the top of their game right now, it's hard not to mention Sciamma, whose last two movies are very different and both all-timers. Even when her earlier work was engaged, there seemed a struggle to find a balance between formal control and freedom; Portrait and Petit Maman have found that and mine their different-sized stories for rich intimacy and deeply felt meaning. Left the theater after each wowed and convinced she'd made exactly the movie she'd meant to make.

If you're only going to be able to engage with new work that's been shot on film and is being shown in a cinema, you're handicapping yourself. As I'm sure you must realize. No wonder everything after 2009 seems awful. Theaters weren't even open for a year! But kudos for wanting to keep searching, that's all that matters.

[MichaelB]

Coincidentally, Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the last film that I saw on the big screen before the lockdown shutters descended.

[brundlefly]

Same! The Green Knight was my first one after they reopened and was a deliciously cold welcome back. Magic coming and going.

[rrenault]

I have an easier time understanding why Portrait of a Lady on Fire has been so well-received than why the backlash is so vicious. #30 may be a bit high, but I sincerely think the bottom fifth of the top 100 on a more "conventional" S&S critics list would be perfectly reasonable for it.

I'm also a bit befuddled that The Shining's placement in the top 100 has been so polarizing in some corners. It seemed pretty obvious to me that was on its way to being a mainstay in these types of lists.

I think part of the reason 'Portrait' has been so well-received is it sort of kills two birds with one stone. The LGBQT subject matter lends it appeal in the contemporary zeitgeist, but it also displays the first-rate craftsmanship of a 'traditional arthouse film' in the Bergman/Bresson/Antonioni vein, giving it that quasi-Partisan Review "traditional arthouse appeal".

[Aunt Peg]

I used to look forward to the S&S polls but I've reached the stage where I'm not really interested. I basically stopped reading most of S&S since about 2014 and the pandemic gave me the final push to cease purchase altogether (ditto Film Comment). It is simply not the magazine that it used to be but it also covering an industry that has dramatically changed over the last decade.

I also throw out all my all my back issues of S&S and Monthly Film Bulletin along with other magazines. Movie memorable (some of it extremely rare) is heading for the recycling bin in the near future.

Moving forward maybe S&S should have a top 1,000 and group the films in groups of about 50 rather that the top ten. There are simply so many great films and these lists are limited by what people have seen and are all subjective anyway.

[MV88]

Moving forward maybe S&S should have a top 1,000 and group the films in groups of about 50 rather that the top ten. There are simply so many great films and these lists are limited by what people have seen and are all subjective anyway.

There are enough ties on the existing list anyway that presenting the list in tiers as you suggested rather than traditional ranking would make a lot of sense and would eliminate the quibbling over exact placements, but unfortunately I’m afraid we’re probably in the minority for preferring that. I feel like for a lot of people, the main appeal of a list is getting to argue over the rankings, which I know a little bit from personal experience given that the only list I ever published back when I was a more active writer was unranked, and it generated quite a few “what’s the point if you’re not gonna rank them?” responses. People do seem to like the “movie ranking as sport” aspect of it all. And I suspect Sight & Sound likes it too given how many clicks they get due to so many people wanting to obsessively argue over this film being #30 while that one is only #38.

I do agree completely, however, that a tiered list — 50 in each tier would work just fine — would be a good compromise if there is no possibility of just releasing an unranked reference list of 500 or 1,000 films.

[Maltic]

Spoiler

So will you be maintaining your inane 2009 deadline in thirty or fifty years' time, or will all the films you ignorantly dismissed have got magically better by then?

Some people might say classical music peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries, cinema and jazz in the 20th, and so on. Not saying I agree, but I wouldn't call it ignorant.

That’s a false equivalence. If those same people were claiming that MUSIC peaked in the 19th century, and no music worthy of being considered “the best” had been made since, it would be just as asinine.

I guess if one considers cinema to be as broad a category as music, but even then, "everything is the same" is not necessarily a less problematic perspective than "everything is better" or "everything is the worse"

[Mr Sausage]

Spoiler

Some people might say classical music peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries, cinema and jazz in the 20th, and so on. Not saying I agree, but I wouldn't call it ignorant.

That’s a false equivalence. If those same people were claiming that MUSIC peaked in the 19th century, and no music worthy of being considered “the best” had been made since, it would be just as asinine.

I guess if one considers cinema to be as broad a category as music,

The broadness has nothing to do with your false equivalence. Music is a subset of art, and classical music is a subset of music. Film is a subset of art; it is not a subset of itself. A proper equivalence would be to compare film noir with classical music, since many on this board and elsewhere think film noir after the classical period to be inferior to what came before.

Honestly, it's easier to just admit a mistake than to equivocate.

[Maltic]

I wasn't trying to be cute. If a genre of a certain art form can have highs and lows then so can an art form as such, I would think.

[Noiretirc]

This got me thinking about all of those Greatest Albums Ever Made lists which are very genre-centric, ie rock pop and soul, mostly. I'm sure there are lists for jazz, classical, "modern composition", etc, but no music list encompasses it all, in the way that S+S and other lists encompasses all film.

[FrauBlucher]

I would always loved when Rolling Stone and Q (from the UK) would release their greatest albums editions every once in a while. I even bought the Rolling Stone coffee table book of the 500 greatest albums. I often found the RS list and the Q list to be so different. I enjoyed both. The best thing is they made me seek out bands and albums I wasn't familiar with, like Captain Beefheart for example

[soundchaser]

This got me thinking about all of those Greatest Albums Ever Made lists which are very genre-centric, ie rock pop and soul, mostly. I'm sure there are lists for jazz, classical, "modern composition", etc, but no music list encompasses it all, in the way that S+S and other lists encompasses all film.

Reminds me of when Playboy, in the lead-up to 2000, asked Richard Thompson (among others) to name his favorite songs of the last 1000 years. So he started with "Sumer is Icumen In" and went from there. The live DVD is fantastic (and may be available in full with a quick search on a well-known video sharing site.)

[MV88]

This got me thinking about all of those Greatest Albums Ever Made lists which are very genre-centric, ie rock pop and soul, mostly. I'm sure there are lists for jazz, classical, "modern composition", etc, but no music list encompasses it all, in the way that S+S and other lists encompasses all film.

I think that’s mostly because cinema is still a very recent art form in the larger context of art, so the idea that one can be familiar with its entire history — while still quite foolish given we all have our blind spots — is at least somewhat feasible, or certainly more so than it is for music, painting, literature, theater, etc.

But I completely agree that cinema is not just one thing, nor should we treat it like it is by insisting that all films can be compared to and ranked alongside one another. It’s not just that there are different genres, styles, and eras of film, it’s that different films are made for different reasons to serve different purposes to different audiences. Chantal Akerman’s purpose in making Jeanne Dielman was so different from what, say, James Cameron does with his films that although they both fall under the impossibly broad umbrella term of “cinema,” to even call it the same art form is a bit misleading, I think. They serve totally different functions and are meant to be experienced in totally different settings and ways, to the point that it seems rather silly to think they’re inherently comparable simply because they both utilize a moving image. I mean, are video games cinema? Is TikTok? Maybe there are some decent arguments to be made supporting those ideas, but ultimately I’m just not convinced that the use of the moving image in and of itself makes it belong the same art form any more than the use of recorded sound makes podcasts and classical symphonies intrinsically related, which is to say it feels like a reductive technicality at that point.

I don’t think anyone professes to have devised a comprehensive list of the greatest music in history that includes all genres, styles, and eras, because while I understand the “I listen to a little bit of everything” approach, listening to a little bit of everything means you don’t listen to a lot of any one thing and thus can never achieve a significant amount of expertise in any particular subset. While that principle may not apply quite so fully to cinema just because of the relative age of the art form, we’re still well past the point, I would argue, where we still need to be pretending that cinema is just one single interest rather than a series of different interests connected only by the use of moving images (and sometimes not even that since plenty of films have used still photography).

Someone commented on a blog I follow to express their absolute indignation that a film could possibly be voted the greatest of all time when they, a self-professed cinephile who went to film school and has been watching movies obsessively for decades, had never even heard of it. It’s probably because Jeanne Dielman, as acclaimed as it is, is still a film that is only intended for an extremely niche audience and doesn’t even fulfill most of the basic functions of what a “normal” movie is expected to do in the popular consciousness, so it’s understandable and maybe even expected that it had flown under even a lot of movie buffs’ radars until the new Sight & Sound poll was unveiled. But of course, now that it’s been put on that pedestal, it’s only natural that a lot of people are reacting with complete bewilderment, because it’s like if Rolling Stone’s greatest albums list had been topped by a John Cage album or something like that. It’s not that it isn’t “deserving” of the spot, whatever that means; it’s just that the context in which it places it is an uncomfortable fit.

But you know, maybe this is a conversation we need to be having, because by design or not, Jeanne Dielman being presented to the masses as the best film ever made is causing people who might otherwise never have even thought about it to debate what cinema is and what it should be. And maybe that’s the first step towards what I view as a necessary schism between different types of cinema and cinephiles.

[Noiretirc]

Putting Jeanne Dielman at number 1 might be as shocking as some music mag proclaiming Trout Mask Replica as the greatest. When I'm in the middle of that album, I often think it is the greatest!

Sound recording and Sight recording (see what I did there?) are about the same age. Sure, there is music from hundreds or thousands of years ago. But didn't Shakespeare make movies?

I love this discussion. These lists are simply a wonderful starting point. What does "greatest" mean, really?

[swo17]

How many films does one need to see from any given decade to be qualified to write that decade off?

[Maltic]

Someone commented on a blog I follow to express their absolute indignation that a film could possibly be voted the greatest of all time when they, a self-professed cinephile who went to film school and has been watching movies obsessively for decades, had never even heard of it.

I'd be interested to see this blogpost

[Noiretirc]

It could even be argued that the S+S list is still rather conservative, consisting of a great many "mainstream" films. ie Films that are 2 hours long, made by established directors and studios. There's really not that many "out there" films on the list.

I got so fucking tired of seeing the same old albums at the top of the lists: Pepper, Exile, Dark Side, etc. I was beginning to feel the same way about Kane, Vertigo, 2001, etc on the film lists. I love all of those films, but there is often something "safe" about their placings. "Greatest" still does seem to imply a certain set of strict parameters.

Isn't Satantango the greatest ever when you are completely immersed in it?

[rde]

Quite open to seeing your list?

Feels apt to point out that Sciamma's Portrait... is at the very top of that list, with a significant margin of 125 points between 1 and 2, which feels doubly significant when you notice that 125 points covers the spread from 2 to 16.

And of course Portrait is a film whose classical digestibility and passionate concerns (who gets to represent, who gets to be represented, negotiation and collaboration between subject and artist) are also arguments to march right up that survey. I think if you're asking what great directors are working at the top of their game right now, it's hard not to mention Sciamma, whose last two movies are very different and both all-timers. Even when her earlier work was engaged, there seemed a struggle to find a balance between formal control and freedom; Portrait and Petit Maman have found that and mine their different-sized stories for rich intimacy and deeply felt meaning. Left the theater after each wowed and convinced she'd made exactly the movie she'd meant to make.

If you're only going to be able to engage with new work that's been shot on film and is being shown in a cinema, you're handicapping yourself. As I'm sure you must realize. No wonder everything after 2009 seems awful. Theaters weren't even open for a year! But kudos for wanting to keep searching, that's all that matters.

The themes you're talking about usually flop for me. I guess I don't see the artist-muse relationship to be nearly as fraught as people make it out to be. Madeline's Madeline covered similar ground and while I had to admire the anarchy and camerawork of that film, it just didn't add up to anything (kind of like mental illness, so I guess that's true to theme).

Who are the other great directors working now that I may not have heard of?

Oh, no, I watch films shot digitally. I just don't like how digital looks in the hands of most directors. Without care, it can look like daytime TV, or filmed theater. Is this not a commonly held feeling? And I suppose that fact makes it harder to be a director now.

Having just been sent over the sites' best of 2010s list, I did manage to see most of those in theaters, or at least they were playing. Earlier someone called the films I had listed from those years to be 'mainstream' yet I'm a little puzzled when most of the lists I encounter have... pretty close to the same films at the top. Still waiting...

Thanks for being friendly.

[diamonds]

For those wailing about recency bias, here's the decade breakdown:

Pre-1919: 0
1920s: 7
1930s: 5
1940s: 8
1950s: 20
1960s: 20
1970s: 14
1980s: 9
1990s: 8
2000s: 5
2010s: 4

As an addendum to this, here's a chart (via Kevin B. Lee) which breaks down how the decades fared from the 2012 list to the 2022 list.

Spoiler

[Noiretirc]

It's still very strange to me that both the 2012 and 2022 polls basically state that most of the greatest films ever made come from the 50s, 60s and 70s. ie The opposite of recency bias. The inching towards some recency in 2022 pleases me. But I really don't think anyone can claim that there is a recency bias when more than half of the films still come from those 3 decades - 43 to 72 years ago.

[swo17]

Very telling that the 2010s went from precisely zero films to four. That's an infinite increase. Clearly a sea change of some kind