Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

love this list from another ilxor:

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/341

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 16 August 2012 13:25 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That list is some all-time challops.

― Eric H., Thursday, 16 August 2012 13:26 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...whose blurb doesn't mention Pirates of the Carribean....

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 16 August 2012 13:26 (9 hours ago) Bookmark

Oh, but it does.

Hmm. I've been following this thread with interest and intend to pick up the magazine, if I actually see it. By coincidence, I've very recently been discovering I completely adore the WW2 era Powell & Pressburger films, but I also mean to check out a lot of the other films listed. (non film nerd here)

One thing. Where is Mike Leigh? Is he not respected / known outside the UK? I would have thought Secrets & Lies or maybe Career Girls would have been nominated by one person, at least. Nuts in May? C'mon! I remember seeing Bleak Moments at the BFI a couple of years ago and was astounded by its, well, bleakness. Loved that film actually.

idn't know the fifth-place documentary, West of the Tracks, at all; going to see if the specialty video store I go to has it.

― clemenza, Thursday, 16 August 2012 18:56 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

advance warning in case you sit down to squeeze it in after a late tuesday night dinner it is nine hours long

Yeah, I was just surprised by the lack of Nuts in May. But then, Billy Liar only got one vote so the whole thing could surprise you all night.

Other surprises: Film Socalisme getting two votes, Chris Nolan only getting one (for Memento).

Interesting that four of the six people picking INLAND EMPIRE are Spanish

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/film/4ce2b8bf0cf11

re: Leigh

as far as i can tell, he got the following votes:

#377 Naked (4 votes)
#447 Topsy Turvy (3 votes)
#588 Secrets and Lies (2 votes)

imho, over time Topsy Turvy will become the default Leigh 'classic' - it won't date because of the period setting, the millieu means it avoids problems of class and caricature that always count against Leigh, and it is a rare comedy about artistic creation and the nature of collaboration that communicates some of Leigh's obvious fondness for actors and performers.

but it's at least superficially an aberration, "problems of class" are what define him.

Think Topsy-Turvy got 4 votes last time around (which was, in '02, good enough for the top 100).

I love Leigh, but I simply wouldn't put any of his on a top-10 alltime list, which is my problem with "Where is..." reactions.

The Big Lebowski
Where Is My Friend's House?
All That Heaven Allows
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Husbands
The Puppetmaster
All About Eve
How Green Was My Valley
Belle de Jour
Sicilia!
The Band Wagon
The White Ribbon
F for Fake
A Moment of Innocence
The Wind Will Carry Us
Rocco and His Brothers
Blissfully Yours
Flowers of Shanghai
Colossal Youth
Death in Venice
All About My Mother
The Cloud-Capped Star
Pandora's Box
Le Samouraï
By the Bluest of Seas
Stromboli
A nos Amours
Throne of Blood
Umberto D
Les demoiselles de Rochefort
Sullivan's Travels
Shadows

These films also had 7 votes and are ranked at 235. I wonder what the rationale was for leaving them off the main list.

A lot of awesome movies in that grouping. Boo on them getting the online shaft. (My hunch is that nothing outside of the top 100 is being published in the magazine itself.)

Also, I think Fear Eats the Soul was left off the top 100, though it tied for 93rd with 17 votes.

i feel you guys but i think it is a pretty big additional complication to decide in which order equal-ranking entries that crossover the various cutover points - ie 101 ->, or 251 -> should be listed. like what would be a good criteria for denoting hierarchy? i guess they could cross correlate with director votes or something, but it doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

effin' enrique w/ Ferris Bueller

possible schlump top ten contender
if it doesn't make it it's cause the breakfast club did

The other voter for Bueller gave votes to De Palma and J. Lewis, tho. :D

Another good list:

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/350

Thoughts on Lucia and Dodeskaden?

Maaaybe saw Dodeskaden long ago, don't remember.

Nic Rapold, hero:

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/film/4ce2b6b08035d

Dodeskaden is meh, but I can see how someone who listed Gleaners would also list that.

that warner list is terrible

Eniaios is made up of 22 sections, which, when printed in their entirity, will run for approximately 80 hours. Since Markopoulos’ death in 1991, his companion and heir, filmmaker Robert Beavers, has been printing it whenever possible, but only a handful of the film’s sections, or ‘Orders’, have yet been shown. I have seen all of Order II and Order V, and about half of Order III. Any one of them alone would be at the top of my list, so on faith I list the entire film. My inclusion of India is based on the Cinémathèque Française print I viewed in 1970, which had reasonably good colour. I don’t get much from the recent restoration. If the new print is all that will ever be shown, I would list Rossellini’s The Messiah instead. I constructed my list by first determining my favorite filmmakers, and then limiting myself to one film by each. My criteria have been entirely aesthetic. The focus in such lists on the value of individual films as separated from their makers’ oeuvres is, in my view, more than a little dubious, and is altogether too much of a piece with the object-oriented, consumerist nature of our culture. One gains much more from considering a filmmaker’s output whole, and it is considered this way that, I believe, my choices will make the most sense. Each great filmmaker uses film language in a unique way, and each film helps one learn how to see the others. A major filmmaker’s work also offers a more expansive vision than does any film taken individually. Thus I would prefer that an interested viewer see any ten films by a single filmmaker on my list rather than one by each. Mizoguchi’s Genroku Chushingura, for example, is not necessarily greater, and certainly not more emotionally affecting, than Sansho Dayu, but it has both a uniqueness and a perfection different from that found in his later films, a comparison that only becomes clear when one has seen many. Eniaios is perhaps the most purely cinematic of films. Other arts are major inspirations, to be sure, but the film itself, with its flash frames and solid blacks and whites alternating in amazingly architectural rhythms (I thought, among other things, of classical temple columns separated by sky) can stand for, and in some ways surpass, what is best about the greatest films: a rhythmically pulsating rectangle of light. It attains an all-encompassing hugeness unparalleled in any other film I know. Mizoguchi attains an ineffable spatial perfection, raising to sublimity the weight of human emotion, history and some sense of emptiness. Rossellini’s world-encompassing vision in India is unique in his work. Brakhage’s Egyptian Series attains a level of abstraction beyond even that of his ‘Romans’ and ‘Arabics’, shifting clouds of textured light conveying qualities that have no verbal equivalents. L’Argent is a terrifying mechanism, a vision of horrible inevitability, an emptying out that surpasses even other Bresson films. Schwechater, which is only one minute in length, is one of the most perfect, ecstatic and amazingly complex of constructions. Naruse’s late ‘Scope films are perhaps his greatest, being indescribably moving even while avoiding the emotionalised visual expressions of so many melodramas to instead create an unbiased openness to the world. It is hard to choose a best Hawks – his visual style seems to grow from the tiniest of character gestures to patterns of space and light that parallel the organicity of bodies in space. While Seven Women is in some ways the greatest Ford, The Sun Shines Bright combines a depth of vision with a perfection of narrative that perfectly matches Ford’s visual evocations of honour, community, memory and loss. As with most of the other films on my list, Robert Breer’s many short masterpieces have yet to receive their proper recognition, but he achieves a cinematic intensity unlike any other filmmaker, combining flicker, color, line and depth paradoxes that underline the artificiality of film space, together with a humour that underlines absurdities. The vision that he achieves is transformative.

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/598

fred camper does actually use paragraphs so forgive the formatting

anyway, he is by the most interesting critical outlier

a rhythmically pulsating rectangle of light

The Warner list has a couple of items that have my attention. No way its 'terrible', and chimes in with her interests.

Camper's one has more than a couple of items that I'll be interested in.

Cinema works for me as a charm’d magic casement, making possible in image and action all manner of impossible experiences, realised as if they could happen and are happening. I haven’t chosen surrealist films as such, as they convey inner worlds of dream. This list presents fantasy as lived experience, some of it extremely funny. The Varda is there, too, because she uses the camera with such deep empathy for her subjects, as does Kurosawa.

the sort of pablum one would expect of a british intercurricular academic who approaches film as a subsidiary to comparative literature

You couldn't infer that from the blurb unless you knew who she was.

Obviously she may not have watched as many film as spent time in the library, so what?

the relative lack of knowledge isn't a thing....deleuze or zizek or whoever presumably read more than they watched, yet have some understanding of its formal integrity beyond its aptitude for displaying dream-work, gender violence, subaltern complaint or whichever other tropes derived from literary studies

Detractors may carp about Attenborough presenting a roseate view of the Mahatma Gandhi and the omission of some negative facts about him, but his film remains a grand journey populated, literally, by a cast of thousands, and guarantees moist eyes by the end of it.

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/270

I wouldn't know about that: Zizek is going for 'guilty pleasures' on his.

i like that he thinks repping for dune is still a provocation in 2012

Preferable to Warner's narrow perspective? Its pathetic!

Question for those of you in Britain: do used copies of the '92, '82, '72, '62, and/or '52 poll issues ever turn up in book stores, and if so, for how much? I stupidly passed up opportunities to buy the first three of those, for probably not that much. I've been looking around online, and all I see are very expensive yearly sets.

you don't see any sight and sound back issues that often, tho' i don't think dealers wld partic charge a premium for the poll issues, i dunno - once you get into the 80s, you cld prob pick up old issues for a pound or two.

in the uk, these mags have always been reasonably easy to look at in the BFI archive, so perhaps there's less demand for them. also, until its incorporation with the monthly film bulletin, sight and sound has mostly been a p terrible mag

yeah i have no clue but their online archive opened this month, which might be the easiest solution if you want to investigate.

I'm actually hoping to get my hands on physical issues. If anyone, UK or otherwise, comes across one of the five poll issues listed above (I have 2002) in pretty good condition, and you can buy and mail it to me for under $10, please let me know.

Some interesting non-participant lists here too: http://torontofilmreview.blogspot.ca/2012/08/the-greatest-films-of-all-time.html

I watched Sunrise and Jeanne Dielman.

Dielman is kind of a slog, but a very interesting film. Delphine Seyrig is very good in it. I could see it as a double feature with Repulsion, or maybe Meshes of the Afternoon. It's a study of the rhythms of day to day life, but not without drama. Maybe a little affected? Her perpetual near silence seemed implausible. The scene where she preps the potatoes was great.

Sunrise was kind of amazing the more I think about it. It sets up like a noir, but then goes in a completely different direction. I loved Murnau's expressionist (?) visual style.

I love that Sunrise becomes everyone's new favorite movie for a short or long while after they first see it.

i wonder if nrq could be persuaded to return to ilx long enough to explain his 'ferris bueller' vote.

Didn't know he actually left. Wha' happa'?

nothing, he just had enough i reckon.

maybe those people on the toronto film rev iew link were given the bums rush from the official list because they couldn't count to ten without getting to fifty.

top ten:

list's 14

and here's another ten:

lists another twelve.

although chris kennedy and lev lewis's lists are genuinely good there.

The director lists are supposed to go up today. Thought they'd be up by now with the time difference, but not that I can see.

tomorrow

We don't know anything on that list outside the top 10, right? Still anticipating a Morbs-baitingly high placement for The Shining there.

I mean, apparently directors are much more fond of horror movies than critics:

http://twitpic.com/amehik

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/642289196.jpg?key=721745&Expires=1345638447&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=1PyS88ouf-EqtX-WPz9BtEpHEhvKWsa~ZK0Vft7wNG9IALq4ssaZQ3FiIVxQY~2mmocGZdwjjVruWjzpePubZ1CT8C~aVMW-vLV4YaEFzF2vhnH2Jd5rx-RL9mTdtcS5g2OVXnb6kWmaF6~Cn~bbIU98MFHw8wGLdvEnbFsgRlU_

well, they have a high pct of geeks among em

Now if only they could get over their twin fetishes for 8½ and the cinema du Biskand.