The Top Ten Films of All Time – According to Sight and Sound’s 2012 Poll
1) Vertigo
2) Citizen Kane
3) Tokyo Story
4) Rules of the Game
5) Sunrise
6) 2001: A Space Odyssey
7) The Searchers
8) Man with a Movie
Camera
9) The Passion of
Joan of Arc
10) 8 ½
The biggest news in the world of cinema is the recent
announcement of Sight and Sound’s
once-a-decade list of the best films of all time, as voted for by the world’s
most prominent critics and filmmakers. Sight and Sound have been publishing
the list once every ten years since 1952, and it has come to be regarded by
most cinephiles as the closest thing to an official film canon; Citizen Kane’s (1941) status as “the
greatest film of all time” came about because it topped every list from 1962 to
2002 (the original 1952 poll favored Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic
Bicycle Thieves). Perhaps the most surprising, and widely
reported about, development of the 2012 list is that it is not topped by Kane, or by perennial number 2 or 3 Rules of the Game (1939), but by Alfred
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film
that has been slowly creeping up the top ten since appearing as a runner-up in
the 1972 list.
Like Kane, Vertigo was not widely appreciated in
its own time, and was a failure at the box office as well as with critics. Today Vertigo’s
status as a masterpiece is rarely disputed, though Hitchcock’s long string of
classics makes choosing a definitive work difficult. Personally, I’ve never been able to decide
whether I prefer Vertigo or Rear Window (1954), but if I were
including a Hitchcock film on my own hypothetical ballot for the Sight and Sound poll – which is meant
as a list of “best” films rather than “favorites,” assuming that it’s possible
to make such a distinction – I would have to give the edge to Rear Window. Vertigo
is undeniably the grander auteurist statement, a hypnotic and eccentric
waking dream from a director whose obsessions clearly lined up with those of
his protagonist Scottie (James Stewart), who becomes hopelessly fixated on a
woman (Kim Novak) he’s supposed to be investigating. Hitchcock’s 1958 classic is the most
intense and emotionally expressive of his films, but Rear Window is the easier film to make a logical argument for
placing on a list of all-time greats. A
model of perfect narrative construction and a triumph of old Hollywood craftsmanship,
Rear Window is about as close to
flawless as movies come. The film’s meta
fascination with voyeurism satisfies intellectually, providing the bedrock for
decades of film theory. Meanwhile, the
incredibly tight plotting, the likeable performances of an all-star cast, and
Hitchcock’s customary stylishness combine to make Rear Window the most conventionally entertaining of the director’s
films.
Whether Vertigo
deserves the top spot over Citizen Kane
is also debatable. It’s hard to compare Vertigo to Kane, since the films have radically different goals and wildly dissimilar
styles. Few serious cineastes would
argue with either films masterpiece status, but it’s easy to see that Kane has ultimately had the greater
impact on the history of the medium. Kane brought all of the innovations of
pre-‘40s cinema up to date and virtually created (and/or perfected) a number of
stylistic and narrative techniques that still feel fresh today, all while
telling a grippingly funny and tragic story about the rise and fall of a
complicated individual. Vertigo is no less entertaining than Kane, and in some ways it is the more
fascinating film from an auteurist perspective.
Hitchcock’s film is certainly more autobiographical than Orson Welles’ (though
the fact that Welles played the lead role in Kane has understandably led many to mistakenly compare the titular
tyrant to the free-spirited Welles).
Still, Vertigo can’t be said
to have had as much influence on the state of the art as Kane has. Kane is essentially a summary of all
that came before it and an inspiration for everything that came after it, a
feat that very few works of art can boast.
It may have been a bit boring to see Citizen
Kane retain its Sight and Sound
championship, but it is a definitive and logical top choice in a way that Vertigo simply isn’t, even though the
two films are equally enjoyable.
Obviously this is an extremely nitpicky argument to
make. As I hope I’ve made clear, I do
really love Vertigo, a film that will
certainly appear on my long-in-the-works list of my 100 favorite movies (which
I hope to post on this site by the end of the year, though I’m not making any
promises). I’m just not sure that it’s
as definitive a piece of film history as some of the other movies on Sight and Sound’s list. I also don’t want to put too much effort into
criticizing the list itself, since all of the movies on it are genuinely
important works of art. Personally, I’ve
never been a fan of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo
Story (1953), but I’m willing to accept that that may simply be the result
of my not having seen it in nearly a decade, or of me simply not connecting
with the Ozu aesthetic that has bowled over many people whose opinions I
respect (though I feel fairly comfortable calling Leo McCarey’s 1937 film Make Way for Tomorrow – Ozu’s
acknowledged inspiration for his most famous work – the better movie). I also think that John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) is a bit more
morally compromised than its reputation suggests, as its criticisms of western
mythology are a lot less rigorous and honest than those in Ford’s own The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
or Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995),
though as pure cinema it is as good a representation of the western genre as
any.
While it’s a shame that filmmakers as important as
Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Luis Bunuel, Jean Vigo, Michael
Powell, Nicholas Ray, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc
Godard, Chris Marker, Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami (to name just a few
that immediately come to mind) couldn’t crack the top ten with any of their
major works, it has to be acknowledged that only a handful of slots are available
and that we’d be equally likely to bemoan the absence of any of the ten
directors whose films do appear on the list had they not made it. Dive into the extended top fifty list and you’ll
see classics from many of the directors mentioned above, alongside some
wonderfully cutting-edge choices like Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975).
Having said all that, I’d like to lament the continuing
absence of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) from
the Sight and Sound list. While few cinephiles would deny M its status as a classic, it rarely
seems to be considered when debates about the greatest film of all time
arise. Metropolis (1927) has become known as Lang’s official masterpiece –
which is understandable considering the pronounced influence the film continues
to have on the science fiction genre, but perhaps harder to argue for when one
considers its incoherent mishmash of half-understood competing ideologies. That Metropolis
isn’t Lang’s greatest film says more about the director’s incredible oeuvre
than it does about any failings of the film itself, but M is certainly the better film and in many ways an even more
important one. Conceived at the nexus of
silent and sound film, M provides the
best of both worlds, as Lang liberally incorporates elements of the silent
style that he’d mastered while also making some profoundly groundbreaking use
of the new sound technology. M’s innovative and flashy method of
linking scenes by having a character finish a sentence that another one in a
completely different setting started clearly had a major impact on the
transitions in Citizen Kane, and
arguably is used to greater purpose in M,
which memorably depicts an entire city whipped into a frenzy as they attempt to
capture a child murderer (Peter Lorre).
With its impeccable and still modern style, its tight narrative, its profoundly
challenging morality, and its unforgettably disturbing glimpse into the psyche
of Germany in the immediate pre-Nazi era, M
is my choice for the greatest film of all time.
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