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

mann's always had a mancrush on inarritu, idgi either, i think they're close buds too

Joe Swanberg
V/H/S; LOL
US

You do mean Manncrush, right?

nice.

amores perros and 21 grams are pretty good but he just gets more lugubrious and pretentious

also a fetish for cancer ridden christ-figures

yeah i thought biutiful was pretty crummy

paul greengrass' list is just what you'd expect - watkins, loach, gavras, battle of algiers

imagine if there was a special S&S night at the Democratic Convention:, clemenza nirvana.

lmao

I think 21 Grams might be my least favorite film of all time.

sean durkin voted for the goonies

With free Abstracts for everyone...I don't think I've been quite alone in anticipating these lists, Morbius--not even on this thread.

I was worried about your possible anxiety attack over the late directors' list posting.

Much to my disappointment, there isn't a late directors' list--nothing from Wilder, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Chaplin, etc.

Fassbinder tells me he endorses Happy Together and Far from Heaven

I don't know how they arrive at their voting list for directors, or how many are invited and decline, but thinking of my own favourite films, I wish there were lists from the two Andersons, Noel Bambauch, the Coens, and Terry Zwigoff.

wanted 2 see the wachowskis vote so there'd be some suspense in the m/f column

my favorite comment: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/883

Seems that Mike Figgis, Mike Hodges, and Mike Newell are all different people. I never knew that.

i always get them mixed up too

I like Apichatpong's list.

Also, siren.gif filmmaker voting for own film alert:

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/1187

i was surprised by FMJ on 'pongs list

he picked the right Antonioni film

lmao at tsai

Another self-love ballot: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/1034

well it's better than Fitzcarraldo anyway.

i love Tacita Dean for including The Quince Tree Sun

http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/1179

So why did Goodbye, Dragon Inn do better in ballots than other Tsai films -- because It's About Watching Movies?

well, it only got 2 critics votes and 2 directors votes if you discount Tsai's vote for himself.

the other ones kinda run together cept the OMG Dad climax to The River

So why did Goodbye, Dragon Inn do better in ballots than other Tsai films -- because It's About Watching Movies?

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 24 August 2012 00:22 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

vive l'amour seemed to crop up a lot, iirc, & always does, surprising me - i think historically it was his cannes breakthrough but it seems minor tsai, to me, in retrospect, & i feel like maybe survives as people's memorable gateway into his work. i think goodbye did well because it's maybe his most austere - like isn't it something ridiculous like seventeen shots - & so can mathematically be seen as the purest distillation of his aesthetic, ditto vive on account of its one famous long-ass scene. this is worth tearing up wrt a bunch of newer auteurist stuff on the list, i think - like with kiarostami, in which outside of close-up there isn't a consensus pick, & it's hard to settle on objective favourites from a body of work that runs together or works together, like the koker trilogy. i'm sure there are some interesting pie charts to be made exploring how well things did in broader terms than just film by film.

(nb neither is premium tsai for me, & WTIIT would make my ballot)

WTIIT would be my pick, yeah.

i think goodbye did well because it's maybe his most austere - like isn't it something ridiculous like seventeen shots

as many chapters as the DVD's got -- eighteen or nineteen!

lol directors trolling Morbz

A friend sent me a pdf of the '52 poll; here's a link for anyone who wants to look at it. (I should be able to do the same with the '62/'72/'82 polls.)

Watched Au Hasard Balthazar this weekend. Really great! My first Bresson.

I watched it once, bought the Criterion edition thanks to a crazy sale, and haven't been able to rewatch it.

63 ballots total, huh? (Really fascinating, though. Thanks!)

I love some of the names on there: Lindsay Anderson, Rudolf Arnheim, Alexandre Astruc (the "camera-stylo" guy), Bazin, Lotte Eisner, Penelope Houston, Siegfried Kracauer, Gavin Lambert, Henri Langois, Karel Reisz, Paul Rotha. Some of them account for some of the first scholarly books ever written on film.

Here's a pdf for the '62 poll. A lot of repeat voters from '52, but a few new names: Arthur Knight, Dwight Macdonald, Jonas Mekas, Rivette, Rohmer, Richard Roud. I know Sarris voted, but I guess he wasn't a big enough name at that point to get his list published.

Jeez, I didn't even realize L'avventura was 2 votes away from being #1 in '62.

I watched the current 377th-place finisher Outer Space recently. HEADACHE

Almost a three-way tie at the top. Only 70 voters, so over 30% of them voted for the #1; Vertigo was under 25% this year, but if you consider how many more films have been made in the interim, that's even more impressive, I'd say.

xpost aren't you on some wicked painkillers right now?

Would Jonas Mekas' selections (Potemkin, Chaplin, Flaherty) have been considered conservative in taste back then?

I wish, do you have a connection? xp

Jean Douchet's list seems pretty much on the vanguard of new wave auteurism... Preminger, Hawks, Walsh, Ray, Cukor and I'm guessing the first S&S mention of Vertigo.

I probably do, Morbs. But I'm not mailing that stuff.

I think Chaplin, Eisenstein, Flaherty were considered untouchably canonical by most in '62.

I guess I'm mostly thrown because I would've thought Mekas would've been a canon-smasher rather than a canon-builder, but maybe the former wasn't even a thing yet.

I'm just guessing, but maybe harkening back to early silents was somewhat insurrectionary at a time when, with scattered exceptions like Macdonald or Farber, most American film writing (sometimes not even bylined) was still devoted to Doris Day films in general-interest magazines and daily newspapers. I don't know, though.