The Greatest Films of All Time - Sight and Sound Poll 2022
Earlier this month, the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound published the 2022 edition of “The Greatest Films of All Time” a list made every 10 years based on votes by invited critics and filmmakers.
The 8th edition of this poll was published on December 1 and there’s been a lot of online discussions, good and bad, praising and criticising the list. Many are up in arms over the new number 1 film, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
These are the number one films from the last 7 polls:
1952: Bicycle Thieves
1962: Citizen Kane
1972: Citizen Kane
1982: Citizen Kane
1992: Citizen Kane
2002: Citizen Kane
2012: Vertigo
For this year’s poll, more than 3000 critics were asked to vote, and 1600+ responded (based on this interview with Isabel Stevens, Managing Editor of Sight and Sound on The Cinematologists Podcast).
In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.
The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot. via BFI
The argument against Jeanne Dielman titled as the “Greatest Film of All Time” is that most people have never heard of it or seen it, and that it’s voted for by a bunch of film snobs.
Maybe the title of the list is the problem in itself, because ‘greatest’ and ‘all time’ needs a lot more participants. A list based on 1600+ votes will never cover all tastes or represent a wider group of people. Would a more democratic approach via a global open call give us a more accurate answer to what people think is the greatest film of all time? I’m certain the list would look very different, for better or worse.
To me, the point of a poll like this is to give attention to films and directors that aren’t household names. It doesn’t mean films like Vertigo, Citizen Kane and Bicycle Thieves are no longer great, but to make room for other films and expand people’s knowledge of cinema.
The first time I watched Jeanne Dielman was at home few years ago, streamed on MUBI. In February 2020, I had a chance to watch it in a cinema at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The film is 3h 22min long, and of course it was a better experience in the cinema where I could commit my mind and emotions to it. Its duration is part of subject Akerman is addressing. Watching a woman’s daily routine and labour at home and witnessing her mental distress is a reflection of a state of monotony and alienation experienced by many - especially mothers, workers.
I’m not alone when I say that since the 2012 poll (Jeanne Dielman was number 32), and Akerman’s death in 2015, I’ve been exposed to more writings and discussions about her work, and it’s great that now even more people are hearing about the film and Chantal Akerman.
The 2022 list, however, is undeniably faulty. Overall, it reflects a mostly Western/Euro/American-centric taste. There’s quite a few films from Asia (albeit many are the usual suspects), a handful of films from Africa, barely any titles from the Middle East, and no films from South America.
The lack of films from the Middle East region, especially Arab cinema illustrates how they are under-seen or unknown by audiences and film critics around the world. Whilst contemporary Arab cinema is getting included in more international film festivals over the recent years, it’s the classic films that are mostly unknown internationally (I can only think of the Yousef Chahine retrospective screened in a small number of cities in the past few years). The main cause of this is the lack of institutional and financial support to restore, subtitle and distribute these films to a wider audience and region. Most of these films are only available to watch on regional TV channels (and recently some are available online too).
In January, the individual Sight and Sound polls will be published (which I am certain will be full of new film discoveries for many), and I hope it includes a geographical breakdown of the voters because I am curious to see how wide was the net cast.
These are some additional thoughts about the list shared on Twitter that I liked:
@BartVersteirt
Don't mean to say anything about any specific film or its ranking (love Chantal), but the new list is not so much a shake-up or a necessary correction as it is clear proof of a lack of a historical vantage point among the majority of the voters.
Instead of a reevaluation of the films on the list, all that happened is that some films or filmmakers "du jour" have been added to (or have climbed the ranking among) the same old canonical stuff. There's no fresh outlook on film history.
No reevaluation of the place of, say, Kubrick in film history, no reconsideration of what the prominent films are in e.g. Ozu's or Welles' oeuvre etc.
Zero films were added that couldn't be considered "a shake-up" or "necessary correction", but that would rather constitute a reconsideration of what "a great film" is, one of the few things these lists are useful for, considering they are a gateway for budding cinephiles.
@orwany
Sight & Sound poll includes great cinema and exposes extreme poverty of our vision of the world and of cinema. Limited, narrow, and mostly conservative. The canon shifted to include more women, which is great, but then, seems like we all know 3 women directors from same country
I did not read S&S poll methodology, but I believe this must be the result of a 1:1 straightforward treatment of input data, without the necessary balancing of regional weight. Democracy is in the details. Then, I have seen 77 of the 100 films, and 2 of my own submitted list made it.
@abbypsun
Observations re: the poll 1. recency bias most prominent in recent restorations and retrospectives: Locarno's Sirk retro, Daisies, Daughters of the Dust, etc. 2. American indie films and white Euro women significant increases 3. despite better BIPOC rep...it's mostly Western filmmakers who benefit. not much movement in African films and crucially it appears the amount of Asian films has dropped? Fewer Japanese films, Chinese filmmakers did terribly WKW excepting, nothing from rest of the continent
I also enjoyed reading Glenn Kenny’s piece about the list, Not Quite As Much Of A Country For Old Men: The 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll.
Getting lost in what you could call the weeds of minutiae is part of what makes lists such as these both infuriating and fun. They don’t make sense because they can’t make sense.
Their value, ultimately, is in provoking discussion, and spurring people to see more movies. If someone actually feels like they want to make a case AGAINST Jeanne Dielman, they’ll actually have to sit down and watch it, won’t they? And any reactionary who wants to claim that the list is following some kind of “Woke” agenda will have to explain why The Searchers is still on the list, let alone at #15, five places ahead of Seven Samurai.
Below is the top 10 list I submitted in the same order, by year. It’s the second time for me to take part in the Sight and Sound poll* and I didn’t want to repeat any titles from my 2012 list — again, to make room for other films.
I did change my mind several times whilst making a list and after submitting it. I also think we’d all come up with a different list every week because cinema is too expansive to be narrowed down to a definitive top 10 or top 100 list.
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
The Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli, 1994)
Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 2000)
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)
*My Sight and Sound Poll in 2012:
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M Eisenstein, 1925)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958)
Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
The Colour of Paradise (Majid Majidi, 1999)
In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
Goodbye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)
The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, 2003)
Links to the polls between 1952-2012:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1952
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1962
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1972
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1982
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/1992
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/greatest-films-all-time/2002
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012
Links to the 2022 poll:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/directors-100-greatest-films-all-time