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

Those top ten rankings are adamantine.
― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane: If I had a problem and needed to talk to someone about it, would it be perpetuating a stereotype to actually select a bartender?
Sam Malone: It depends.
Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane: On what?
Sam Malone: On what you just said.

The list's two-reelers:

Minutes	Title	Director	Year
1	Arrivee d'un train a la Ciotat, L'	Lumiere, August & Louis Lumiere	1895
4	Mothlight	Brakhage, Stan	1963
7	Arnulf Rainer	Kubelka, Peter	1960
10	Outer Space	Tscherkassky, Peter	1999
13	Unsere Afrikareise	Kubelka, Peter	1966
14	Voyage dans la lune, Le	Melies, Georges	1902
15	Meshes of the Afternoon	Deren, Maya	1943
16	Chien andalou, Un	Bunuel, Luis	1928
20	Listen to Britain	Jennings, Humphrey	1942
20	House is Black, The	Farrokhzad, Forugh	1963
20	Sang des betes, Le	Franju, Georges	1949
26	Chant d'amour, Un	Genet, Jean	1950
27	Jetee, La	Marker, Chris	1962
28	Land Without Bread	Bunuel, Luis	1932
29	Tale of Tales	Norshteyn, Yuriy	1979
29	Scorpio Rising	Anger, Kenneth	1964
29	Seasons, The	Peleshian, Artavazd	1975
32	Night and Fog	Resnais, Alain	1955
32	Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, The	Brakhage, Stan	1971
34	Red Balloon, The	Lamorisse, Albert	1956
36	Maitres fous, Les	Rouch, Jean	1955
39	Elephant	Clarke, Alan	1989
40	Partie de campagne	Renoir, Jean	1936
40	Diary for Timothy, A	Jennings, Humphrey	1945
41	Zero for Conduct	Vigo, Jean	1933
43	Flaming Creatures	Smith, Jack	1963
43	Simon of the Desert	Bunuel, Luis	1965
44	Sherlock Jr.	Keaton, Buster	1924
45	Wavelength	Snow, Michael	1967

Longer than Gone with the Wind:

Minutes	Title	Director	Year
229	Once Upon a Time in America	Leone, Sergio	1984
230	Travelling Players, The	Angelopoulos, Theo	1975
235	Napoleon	Gance, Abel	1927
235	Ludwig	Visconti, Luchino	1972
237	Brighter Summer Day, A	Yang, Edward	1991
240	Belle noiseuse, La	Rivette, Jacques	1991
240	Grin Without a Cat	Marker, Chris	1977
245	1900	Bertolucci, Bernardo	1976
260	Sorrow and the Pity, The	Ophuls, Marcel	1969
260	Hour of the Furnaces, The	Getino & Solanas	1968
260	Doomed Love	de Oliveira, Manoel	1978
265	Histoire(s) du cinema	Godard, Jean-Luc	1998
267	Hotel Terminus	Ophuls, Marcel	1987
270	Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler	Lang, Fritz	1922
273	Roue, La	Gance, Abel	1923
288	As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty	Mekas, Jonas	2000
345	Commune (Paris, 1871), La	Watkins, Peter	2000
357	War and Peace	Bondarchuk, Sergei	1967
440	Vampires, Les	Feuillade, Louis	1915
442	Hitler: A Film from Germany	Syberberg, Hans-Jurgen	1977
450	Satantango	Tarr, Bela	1994
485	Empire	Warhol, Andy	1964
550	Dekalog	Kieslowski, Krzysztof	1988
551	Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks	Wang Bing	2003
566	Shoah	Lanzmann, Claude	1985
729	Out 1, noli me tangere	Rivette, Jacques	1971
894	Berlin Alexanderplatz	Fassbinder, Rainer Werner	1980
940	Heimat	Reitz, Edgar	1984

Grey Gardens (1975)… 625 to 379 (up 246 spots)!!!!!!!

Yeah, i've seen the trailer for the new 4K version 3x in the last week. Ironic fairies need to get a life.

especially at the expense of

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) 692 to 836 (down 144)

People love that movie ironically? News to me.

xp nearly as satisfying

The sum running time for all the films in the first list put together is 777 min; still shorter than Alexanderplatz and Heimat.

A "two-reeler" in the literal, trad sense is about 16-20 minutes. Sherlock Jr was five.

Right, I was going off of what current (i.e. before digital made the term antiquated) standards for reel length were.

i actually don't remember if i've seen Number Seventeen, but Jamaica Inn is significantly better than Topaz and a few of the silents. (I have about five extant Hitch features to go, all pre-'34.)

you guys seen Heimat?

Sheesh I've seen a lot of films that are longer than Gone with the Wind this must stop.

no, but i said heimat when i saw matt

Those top ten rankings are adamantine.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Lifeandhealth/Pix/pictures/2009/6/10/1244622031353/Adam-Ant-in-1981-001.jpg

> 550 Dekalog Kieslowski

this is cheating

> 440 Vampires

this too

They were made for TV? If so then Berlin Alexanderplatz and Doomed Love (which is Oliveira holy grail). Maybe Histoires du Cinema. I think La Commune began as a project for TV.

Hitler: A Film from Germany is also TV.

The version of Out 1 in circulation is also the slightly revised/shortened 'tv version' (Rivette divided the film up into chapters for a possible television sale, but I don't think it was every broadcast in that or any other form)

the heimat prequel this year was good imo

more that they were filmed in episodes, released as parts. if vampires is in then why not "flash gordon" tv series? why not "rocky"?

bbc4 showed Shoah for holocaust memorial day, well, spread over two sundays. took me about a week to watch in stages of about an hour each.

who knows - this list would never include "rocky" because its shit :-)

I didn't include Out 1 because it got a cinematic release => well that magical day in 1971 when one cinema in Paris gave it a go LOL.

Not sure if I can be arsed to see part 2 of Shoah. I'll boast now I sat through 4.5 hours for the 1st part, but I got all pissy at Lanzmann that bullying idiot so I might have to youtube the barbershop episode instead.

oh cool its on iplayer. I'll probably just watch the first hour then lie and say I saw the whole thing.

is the german guard singing the Treblinka song in the first part?

the polish bloke's *1 account of his trip to the ghetto is worth a watch too. as is the the other bloke's *2 account of his trip out of the warsaw ghetto (to get arms for the uprising) and back in again.

*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski
*2 http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/interviews/kazik.asp

i'm pretty sure "arrival of a train" could fit on one reel in any era :)

technically lang's dr mabuse was released as two separate films, so there's more cheating going on, but who cares. at least they were produced of a piece

so this is like a list of lists? what's their arithmetic?

To think, already halfway to the next one.

Over the last few years I've made a point of watching the films I hadn't seen in the S&S top 250. I now only have the following still to watch:

Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
Intolerance (Griffiths)
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
A City of Sadness (Hou)
Tabu (Murnau)
Chelsea Girls (Warhol)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Bing)
Wanda (Loden)
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang)

Have viewing copies of all of the above apart from City of Sadness, Chelsea Girls and Wanda (which I think is caught up in a rights issue at present).

City of Sadness is incredible, it is probably my fave Hou next to Flowers Of Shanghai.

Do you know his film Daughter of the Nile at all, Calzino? Just had a legit release from Masters of Cinema and I'm v tempted:

https://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/daughter-nile

i also saw The Travelling Players recently, but more often i go off the They Shoot Pictures Don't They 1000.

The top-listed films I've never seen tend to be The Exorcist and The Mother and the Whore.

xp
not seen that WF, and it isn't even on the type of places* I go looking for movies.

The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
A City of Sadness (Hou)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)

^^ You're in for a treat.

Really want to see the Bing. Maybe Warhol, one day I'll catch a screening at the ICA (where else?)

I have actually attended a 'live' screening of Chelsea Girls at the Scala, with two screens running, but I'm afraid I only lasted abt an hour. Also think C4 screened it once, so there are probably bootlegs of that out there (the bootlegs of Ranaldo and Clara - unaccountably missing from the S&S list! - are derived from a single screening on C4 in the 1980s).

And I've tried to watch The Travelling Players at home a couple of times, but have never managed to get very far with it - all the spatial/temporal play seems to demand a cinema viewing.

The other film on the S&S list that took me a few attempts was, oddly, Cassavetes' Faces, which really is exhausting viewing.

I saw Travelling Players on a laptop screen. I loved it and yes I'm sure its even more of a trip on the big screen.

The ICA have screened Chelsea Girls a few times but I could never turn up on those days.

Faces is exhausting and I would've said my favourite by him however I caught a screening of Love Streams recently and that's better, the heavy emotional range is presented in a more even manner (if such a thing can be said about a Cassavetes film).

There is something quite magic about the period feel of City Of Sadness, sort of like an epic colour addition to Rossellini's war trilogy or summat. it really is a great movie.

Interesting sidebar to the directors' poll I just found out about. Directors have been choosing their top 50 films for La Cinémathèque des Réalisateurs for some time now, and the results are a dead tie between Vertigo and Sunrise, followed most closely by The 400 Blows.

https://www.lacinetek.com/en/the-top-of-the-lists

Not thrilling results: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181029-the-100-greatest-foreign-language-films

i.e. Amelie is higher than Taste of Cherry

i.e. Amelie is higher than ANYTHING

82. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
76. Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)
26. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)

Man With a Movie Camera is on there despite being silent and having no intertitles.

While speaking in English haltingly or with an accent or not at all, foreign language films address us all too fluently in another tongue... the tongue of cinema.

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) October 31, 2018

This is back:

ok guys, it's that time again: the 2019 SHMIGHT & SHMOUND POLL, film twitter's 4th annual poll of the best movies ever made. doing things different this year... feel free to still tweet out your ballots, but PLEASE submit them here: https://t.co/E9hNkTlnB6

— nathan escar smith (@trillmoregirls) June 12, 2019

what i ended up voting for:

La Regle du Jeu (1939)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Apartment (1960)
Late Autumn (1960)
Lancelot du Lac (1974)
Le Rayon Vert (1986)
Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
The Gleaners & I (2000)
Happy Hour (2015)

Nice! Here's what I gave them (bold are repeats from last year ballot):

DAISY KENYON (Preminger)
UN CHANT D'AMOUR (Genet)
DUCK AMUCK (Jones)
THE LADIES' MAN (Lewis)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (Kubelka)
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Hooper)
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Yang)
TASTE OF CHERRY (Kiarostami)
OUTER SPACE (Tscherkassky)

I don't follow Twitter, Film or otherwise, but does anyone ever go all Paul Westerberg with this and submit a ballot that's all Police Academy movies and then one by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or something like that?

former ilxor nrq put "ferris bueller" on his ballot along with some standard choices, iirc

i think mark s may have had a ballot at one point too?

always cheers me up when i remember tsai ming liang put goodbye, dragon inn on his s&s ballot

I'm not on Twitter, but pretending I have a ballot,

Ugetsu
Yi Yi
The Green Ray
The Rules of the Game
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Kiki's Delivery Service
Night of the Living Dead
Sans Soleil
Pather Panchali
Pas de deux

goodbye, dragon inn is one of my favorite films of all time