Sight & Sound

[Maltic]

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.

That all depends on how many of the best films were, in fact, made in those decades, doesn't it?

[thirtyframesasecond]

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

Doesn't seem insane to me, especially if one considers the relative volume of global film production in recent decades; surely there have been some all-time masterpieces produced in the last 10 or 20 years, and I'm not sure why we would expect critics or directors to turn off their critical faculties regarding those films until they've reached some arbitrary "do not open until" date. Bicycle Thieves was within a year as old as Portrait, Get Out, and Parasite when it topped the first iteration of this list, so I can't imagine the agitation back then.

No love for Yevgeny Bauer, Leonce Perret, Lois Weber, the early Lubitsch's, the Lumiere's, Chaplin's 'The Immigrant', Melies, Mitchell and Kenyon, etc. I suppose none of those films are going to be that well-known/develop a consensus around, etc.

[Peacock]

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.

“Mainstream” wasn’t meant to be disparaging. I just meant that the list of films and directors you named were big “well known” ones, which kind of implied to me that you hadn’t explored the likes of Hong, Jia, Bing etc yet.

You say that a lot of the lists for the 2010s feature the same films at the top. As do many of the Sight and Sound lists. If you polled everyone on their favourite silents I can bet you Metropolis would be high up there, because it’s the best silent Lang? The best German silent? No, more likely because it’s a canon film that many more people have seen than Der Müde Tod.

Your implication is that the most popularly high rated films must be the best and therefore if you’ve seen them and didn’t like them then anything ranking lower on these lists must be even worse. But that’s just not the case. Your being by tricked into thinking marketing and availability equals quality…

An example, before Rashomon Japanese cinema wasn’t known in the West. Kurosawa and Mizoguchi started getting played and became “big” names in the Western cinephile world. If you didn’t like Kurosawa or Mizoguchi did that mean no pre-1960s Japanese cinema was great? No it meant they hadn’t yet seen Yamanaka, Ozu, Naruse, Kinugasa etc.

My challenge to you is to check out some of the more obscure titles on people’s lists. You may be surprised that they blow your mind.

[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.

That all depends on how many of the best films were, in fact, made in those decades, doesn't it?

Well, yes. You made my point much better than I did.

Edit: Wait. No you didn't. I'm talking about what S+S opines.

[rde]

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.

“Mainstream” wasn’t meant to be disparaging. I just meant that the list of films and directors you named were big “well known” ones, which kind of implied to me that you hadn’t explored the likes of Hong, Jia, Bing etc yet.

You say that a lot of the lists for the 2010s feature the same films at the top. As do many of the Sight and Sound lists. If you polled everyone on their favourite silents I can bet you Metropolis would be high up there, because it’s the best silent Lang? The best German silent? No, more likely because it’s a canon film that many more people have seen than Der Müde Tod.

Your implication is that the most popularly high rated films must be the best and therefore if you’ve seen them and didn’t like them then anything ranking lower on these lists must be even worse. But that’s just not the case. Your being by tricked into thinking marketing and availability equals quality…

An example, before Rashomon Japanese cinema wasn’t known in the West. Kurosawa and Mizoguchi started getting played and became “big” names in the Western cinephile world. If you didn’t like Kurosawa or Mizoguchi did that mean no pre-1960s Japanese cinema was great? No it meant they hadn’t yet seen Yamanaka, Ozu, Naruse, Kinugasa etc.

My challenge to you is to check out some of the more obscure titles on people’s lists. You may be surprised that they blow your mind.

Yea of course I understand there's an unavoidable populist tilt to these lists. Still, they are polling critics...

I still feel like you guys are holding out on me, haha.

Anyway, let me make a defense of watching the well-knowns: lists like this have the job of building the canon. Generally the canon gets it right, I really believe, so that the 'big names' are the right names. It takes time. It's not exhaustive. Still, half those Japanese directors you named are easy to access through Criterion. Hopeful sign?

Also I chafe a little at the contest to always look for something more 'obscure'. Has all the best stuff been hidden? I had seen Akerman before this list was published. More than just Jeanne Dielman. Have I made the cut, haha? She's a speck on the moon for the people who live and die by Tarantino, et al.

He's a big name (among fanatics) too, but your profile picture: I've seen every film by Pasolini? A person might say 'you think Hawks and the Sparrows or Pigsty are obscure? But those films are definitely not... mainstream. Up until recently his work barely had gotten a serviceable DVD release...

[Red Screamer]

Out of the blue, my decidedly non-cinephile dad told me he’s watching Tokyo Story tonight because he saw something about the list on the internet. It’s probably the first Japanese film he’s ever seen and I’ll be curious to hear what he thinks. It does seem like he thinks Paul Schrader’s ballot is the official top ten from what he texted me, but I don’t know if it’s worth correcting him on that.

[MichaelB]

Edit: Wait. No you didn't. I'm talking about what S+S opines.

Sight & Sound doesn't "opine" anything - they merely collated individual contributors' votes and presented the aggregate totals.

[DarkImbecile]

That imposition of narrative and prescriptive motive onto a descriptive dataset remains the funniest part of this conversation

[Maltic]

Sight & Sound doesn't "opine" anything - they merely collated individual contributors' votes and presented the aggregate totals.

Did you end up with The General on your ballot? Your vote may actually have kept it in the top 100.

[Noiretirc]

They had an opinion on who to send ballots to, and how to aggregate/score. The resulting list is indeed an OPINION on the Greatest Films Of All Time by Sight And Sound.

(Trust me - I'll argue this one all day.)

[Noiretirc]

(Anticipating the arguments...)

Sight And Sound took leadership/organization of the votes. They initiated it. They worked it. They chose who to send ballots to. They own this outcome. Is there a plausible scenario where they say "This is not really our list at all. It's all about individual contributors." ?

Come on. I'm ready for this.

[Noiretirc]

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

Math. Lol.

[yoloswegmaster]

You're already creating counter-arguments despite the fact that no one has made an attempt to argue with you within the 2 hours of your last 2 posts.

Is this a bit?

[Noiretirc]

You're already creating counter-arguments despite the fact that no one has made an attempt to argue with you within the 2 hours of your last 2 posts.

Is this a bit?

Perhaps. But my pre-emptive arguments justify a post or two in my mind. Do you think MichaelB will rest his case? I feel very strongly about this point. Sight And Sound OWNS this. (And they should be proud of it, imho.)

This is not the first time that I have heard the suggestion that Sight And Sound is merely a passenger on a train with respect to these polls. They ARE the train.

We need to acknowledge this leadership/ownership role.

[Michael Kerpan]

Red Screamer -- I will be very interested in your father's response to Tokyo Story!

[domino harvey]

No, let’s stay on topic, we still need to officially recognize Sight and Sound’s legal culpability for acknowledging the existence of film as a medium and swear a blood oath to TSPDT

[Never Cursed]

domino harvey actually personally victimized me when he didn't send ballots for the Preminger List to the 100,000 strong Bonjour Tristesse Film Twitter Army. When will he acknowledge how much his actions shaped that conversation? How many budding cinephiles were misintroduced to Jean Seberg through such a minor work as Breathless because of his meddling?

[colinr0380]

Just in case everyone piles too much on Noireitrc, I think they are showing a really nice sense of enthusiastic engagement and obvious enjoyment of talking about the list rather than being a provocateur on this subject! I do agree that the Sight & Sound list is inevitably going to have had a selection bias to those asked to contribute, as any poll will, and they have to own that (it also depends as much on what their definition of 'critic' was, and how broad that definition goes to encompass those working in film curation and preservation, archives and academia, festival/cinema programming etc). It can be argued that they have moved to address that by doubling their voter base this time around to maybe counter those criticisms, although that weight of numbers itself risks calcifying a poll into just those few 'big name' titles that only the majority can generally agree on (or were recently in the discourse) whilst making it even harder for one single voter to push in a left field, much loved and championed if only by them, choice in their idiosyncratic ballot and have that blip register at all outside of someone taking the time to research and read through all of the ballots individually.

Someone earlier in the thread said that the Criterion forum's list would probably look a lot different, but I would bet if we had over 1,600 people voting each time around (and of course we could - or more! - since we're open to anyone who wants to send a ballot in for any one of our rounds of voting! #shamelessplug / attempt to drive the members tabulating the votes insane through over-work), it would end up looking somewhat broadly the same. So maybe being smaller in scale might let our community be a bit stranger and quirkier in tastes but also quicker to respond to certain trends than something as grand and feted as the once a decade Sight & Sound list can be, or is intended to be.

In some ways broadening the base achieves an initial function of increasing the diversity of inclusion, but ironically by sheer weight of numbers also simultaneously begins to start flattening out any individual idiosyncracies that may come through into a less exciting feeling monolithic consensus that may be just as calcifying (though for different reasons) as any previous 'elitist' list was.

[MichaelB]

Sight & Sound doesn't "opine" anything - they merely collated individual contributors' votes and presented the aggregate totals.

Did you end up with The General on your ballot? Your vote may actually have kept it in the top 100.

I did vote for a Keaton film, but not that one, or the other one that cracked the top 100.

[colinr0380]

The New York Times interactive gif rundown of the historical context of the critics list

And here's Silent London's silent film-based take on the result - "Perhaps the future is silent"

[martin]

That this thread has grown by more than 300 posts in less than a week is imo way more surprising than seeing Akerman at #1. It's still odd but I won't complain. I've always liked Akerman.

I watched a Belgian comedy (not by Akerman) on dvd a decade or more ago, and I probably misremember the exact events in the scene. But a character complained about the TV showing an Akerman movie - as if life wasn't miserable enough already! But the weird thing was how the English subs translated "Akerman" into "Antonioni"! The translator probably assumed that noone outside of Belgium would know who Akerman was. Now she's at #1...

[colinr0380]

The thing that most struck me on reading through some of the comments on Twitter was one talking about how Proustian Jeanne Dielman is, with its approach to time and memory held in the smallest details of taste and texture of an environment. Which probably makes sense since Akerman went on to adapt a volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in La captive.

[rrenault]

On a side note, I'm baffled by the absence of The Leopard on the directors list.

[MV88]

(Anticipating the arguments...)

Sight And Sound took leadership/organization of the votes. They initiated it. They worked it. They chose who to send ballots to. They own this outcome. Is there a plausible scenario where they say "This is not really our list at all. It's all about individual contributors." ?

Come on. I'm ready for this.

You’re not wrong, it’s just that it has ALWAYS been that way, so I’m not sure why some — not necessarily you, but others who have used the same basic argument elsewhere— are acting like they’ve been completely objective in the past and just decided this time to play a more active role in the results. Even Paul Schrader accused them of having their thumb on the scale by being selective about whom they sent ballots to. Well, yeah…haven’t they always? It’s true that there’s absolutely no way that Jeanne Dielman would have gotten the most votes if the sample size were expanded to all critics, and depending on what we’re defining as a critic, it might not have even made the list at all. But would Citizen Kane have topped the list for the first time in 1962 had Sight & Sound not been at least a little bit deliberate with its selection of voters?

The list is supposed to reflect where film discussion among a select population of cinephiles has shifted each decade. Sight & Sound absolutely decides which critics and directors are involved in that discussion, and in that respect the results are at least somewhat influenced (I would not say controlled) by their own assessment of whose voices are the most relevant. The list isn’t supposed to represent the tastes of ALL critics, but it never has. I mean, now that a majority of self-professed movie critics are actually just average moviegoers with blogs or YouTube channels, it’s unlikely that most of the films on this list are even on most of their radars. Which is why, as I stated in an earlier post here, we need to start acknowledging that cinema isn’t just one thing, and by extension, different types of critics, cinephiles, movie buffs, or whatever you want to call them are not only not talking about the same movies, they’re not even talking about the same thing in general.

[Noiretirc]

Precisely.

In music, Rolling Stone is not Kerrang is not Spin.

This is important to me, because discovering BFI/S+S was the culmination of a journey in my life. S+S does things their way, with "their" ctitics. (Sarcastic/witty posts about other lists to try to make the point that the organization involved plays a completely hands-off role in the outcome be damned.) There is always an "agenda". And politics.

So JD at #1 this time needs to be seen through this lens.