Anonymous Sight and Sound; Sep 2012; 2012; 22, 9; ProQuest Central pg. pg.

41 41

CRITICS' LL CRITICS' PO POLL

believe that life is a hierarchical system, but rather a collective one. I probably chose them because they revealed something closely connected to my own intimate reality. I belong to a generation who was born in the 195os -- that's why you don't nd any new lm in my list RUTH BARTON
Ireland head of department of f ilm studies, Trinity College. Dublin

PETER BRADSHAW
UK c ritic , The Guardian

Please note the too sample entries below represent just a few edited highlights of the 846 voting entries we received
for the 2012 Critics' Poll. The full interactive versions will be posted online on 15 August at biforg.ulesightsoundpoll2or 2
TARIQ All
wr tc r

Charulata( SoRay) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Mendel) The Bettie of Algiers (Itniecorpo) Tout va bier, (Godard) Osaka Elegy (Mizoguchl) Rashomon (Kurosawa) The Puppetmester (Hem) i f-. (Anderson) Entranced Earth/Terra am trans* (Rocha) Crimson Gold (Pmaln) GEOFF ANDREW
titc head of lm programme BF' Southbank

Sherlock Jr. (Keaton) How would the nal results change if the poll's ten-votes-per-list metric took on, say,lists of 20 or even 30 selections? Would it make a more pertinent list? Hard to say; lust wanted to list more, dammit. CAMERON BAILEY
Canada, artIstic director Toronto International Film Festival

The General (Keaton B ru c k -I:Atalanta (Vigo) His m a Girt n ) Friday (Hawks) Citizen Kane (Welles) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Met (Dreyer) ANWAR (Bergman) My Night with Maud (Rohmer) 10 (Kiarostami) La Mort, Rouge (Price) A top ten might have sufced in 1 top 9 20. difcult to narrow one's list down, 1 5 but we have so many more great k 2 n lms to choose from now. o , w Though I've always voted for i b t Welles in such polls, this is the 'u s rst time I've opted for Citizen a t l I used to be a bit perverse Kane. w t about it, preferring the warmth a of i The Magnicent Arribersoits, the B. y o movie bravura of Duch ofEviL the mischievous magic of FlorF ake. s y But in the last decade, even more b e than before, I've watched this rst e a feature many times, and each time, e r it reveals new treasures. Clearly, n s no single lm is the greatest ever o made. But if there were one, for n me Kane would now be the strongest contender, bar none. w e MICHAEL ATKINSON nIS c ritic e Aguine, Wrath of God (Herzog) e CAtalante (Vigo) d Velvet (Lynch) Blue Celine and Julie Go a Boating (Rivette) Citizen Kane (Welles) Late Spring (Ozu) A Man Escaped(Brrsson) Pierrot le fou ((Iiodard) La Regis du jou (Renoir)

Vertigo (Hitchcock) Sans solell (Marker) Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) A One and a Two( Yang) Apocalypse Now (Coppola) In the Mood for Love (Wong) Tould-Bould (Mambity) Taxi Driver ( Sco rsese) A History of Violence (C mnenherg) LUCIANO BARISONE
I ta y/Switzerland Director Visions du Reel

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Ingram) The Night of the Hunter (Laughton) Staiiker(Taricovsky) Exotica (Egoyan) The Red Shoes (Powell if Pressburger) Brief Encounter (Lean) Citizen Kane(Welles) Rashomon (Kumsawa) Pepe le Moko (Duvivier) 10 (Marostarni) My choice was guided rstly by my own taste, most of all for a visual cinema that offers, through its images, pleasures of a kind that invite you to return over and again to them. I also selected lms that seemed to me to have made a difference, artistically, historically, politically. RAYMOND BELLOUR
France. critic and theorist

I Am Cuba (Kalatozov) The Addiction (Ferrara) Raging Bull ( Sco rsese) Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer) Singin' in the Rain (Donen 6-Kelly) In the Mood for Love( ( Hidden (Harieke) W ang ) Annie Hall (Allen) Black Narcissus (Powell Pressbun3er) ANCHALEE CHAIWORAPORN
Thailand, critic and researcher

Breathless (Godard) The Piano (Campion) In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
RagalentOn ( K urosawa)

Yellow Earth (Choi) Bicycle Thieves (De Sica) The 400 Blows ( T r The - Spirit of the Beehive (Erice) Citizen Welle) u f f a u Kane( t) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Weerasethakil) As an academic,a critic, a woman and a lm buff, my selections are based on the lms' achievements in developing lm theories, new cinematic languages, social identication - and on my personal enjoyment. The top one combines all these elements. JUSTIN CHANG
US senior lm cr V a r i e t y '

Casino ( Scor sese) The 'T Motorist (Paul) A Diary for Timothy (Jennings) Rainbow Dance (Lye) Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein) The Sun (Sokurou) Le PAepris (Godard) Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Mamas) Tokyo Story (Ozu) I didn't look at my last choice of ten years ago, but I think this is almost the same, apart from Sokumv and Ozu butting in. I wonder if this is inuenced by having been in Japan last year. I also nonce that the music of LeMepris is quoted in Guth!), which may reveal some subterranean connection: There's a great deal wrong with this list: I've simply baulked at selecting from the riches of Hitchcock, despite becoming more and more interested in his work as a whole. Likewise Ford: how to choose from such a career (but I do feel it's time to treat The Searchersas the obvious canonic Ford, and pay more attention to earlier work). And what about Lang (especially after seeing the magnicent restoration of Metropolis)and Renoir? And Bergman and Antonioni, both dying at the same moment how could any self-respecting list of the ten greatest omit these? MICHEL CIMENT
France, editor. 'Posit it

Tabu (Mamas if Flaherty) Citizen Kane (Welles) The World of Apu (S Ray) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Journey to Italy (Rossetti!) The 400 Blows (Truffaut) Breathless (Godard) La dolce vita (Fellim) Easy Rider (Hopper) The Last Bolshevik (Marker) Ichose not according to some rational and calculated criteria but spontaneously, like someone who was recalling some of his favourite souvenirs or i f you prefer- as a psychoanalyst's client involved in a word association test. I don't know why I chose these lms: the best lms are in the thousands and I don't really

L AJetee (Marker) Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais) Sunrise: A Song ofT Wo Humans (Mamas) Miss Oyu/Oyu-Same (Mizogucht) The Binh (Hitchcock) La Regle du jeu (Renoir) The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak) Dr Mabuse the Gambier (Lang) Tokyo Story (Ozu) A nhasard Baithazer (Thrsson) I nd my list pretty ridiculous - so many other titles come to mind. Its only justication is that these titles are some of the lms that have counted the most in my relation to cinema and the development of my theoretical work (The order is aleatory). STIG BJORKMAN
Sweden, f ilmmaker & writer

Chungking Express (Wong) Flowers of Shanghai (Has) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) The Lady Eve (Sturges) Meet Main St Louis (Minnelh) La Rot& duJou(Renoir) Rio Bravo (Hawks) Sansho dayu (Mizogucht) Sunrise:A Song of Wo o Humans (Marnau) Vertigo (Hitchcock) PEGGY CHIA0
Taiwan. producer, professor. f chair. writer

In the last decade, even more than before, I've watched 'Citizen Kane' manp times, and each time it reveals new treasures
GeoffAndrew

L'avventuns (Antonioni) Vertigo (Hitchcock) In the Mood for Love (Wong) Le Mends (Godara) In a Lonely Place (Isi. Ray) Touch of Evil ( Welles) The Night of the Hunter (Laughton) BePhant (VanSant) Persona (Bergman) Melancholia (von Trier) For every decade that passes, the choice becomes more and more difcult They don't stop making Films! So, this time maybe not the ten best lms ever, but lms lean (and do)see over and over again with the same, or increasing pleasure. (Well, Melancholia I've only seen twice so far, but I'm certain we'll meet again...) So, ve unhappy or unfullled romances, three tales of evil and two Nordic introspection& What does that say about me?

Arnarcord (Reim) Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) Citizen Kane (Welles) A City of Sadness (Hou) The Godfather (Coppola) La Regis duJou(Renoir) The Searchers (Ford) Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Vertigo (Hitchcock) I chose them not only because they represent the milestones of lm history, but also because they are the lms that I can watch again and again and never get tired of. Even though I know all of them by heart each line and each frame - they still move me each time in different parts. As I grow older, my readings of them may change slightly, but my love for them has never changed. IAN CHRISTIE
UK c ritic and lm hs tonan.Birk bec k University of London

2001:A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) Casanova (Fellini) Persona (Bergman) Providence (Resnais) Sunrise:A Song of lby Humans (Murnau) Madame de-. (Max Ophuls) La Regie du jou (Renoir) Salvatore Giuliano (Rots) Sensho dayu (Mizoguchi) Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch) The latest lm mentioned is from 1977 --1 deliberately wanted to include works that have stood the test of time. Also, the rst half of my list is composed of lms in which imagination (today much underprivileged) plays a central role. The second half is more related to a realistic approach, however arbitrary the distinction may seem, RICHARD CORLISS
U S, c , Chungking Express (Wong) t ic Citizen Kane( Welles) 1 The Lady Eve (Sturges) i r Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard) n e Mouchette (Bresson)

Not in any special order, except howl wrote them dowm A Matter of Life and Death (Itwell Prossbarger)

Psycho (Hitchcock) Pyaasa (Dun) The Searchers (Ford) The Seventh Seal (Bergman) WALL-E (Stanton) Six of my ten selections were made between 1941 and 1967, though on three continents. These aren't simply demonstrations of loyalty to movies I loved in my youth, but also an argument that most lms of the last half-century have been varia tions on earlier models, whose surpassing audacity and C craft they cannot match. l ?mb e r 201:1 I Si g th e So u n d Se i p te
41

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

C MUK. AR critic K and COUSINS documentanst The Insect Woman (Imartutra) Dotard Voices, Still Lives (Davies) Eureka (Rory) Come and See (Klimov) Kaagaz Ke Phool/ Paper Flowers (Dull) The Aparbnant ( Wilder) A Moment of Innocence (M Maldunalbcg5 The House Is Black (Farrokitzad) La Martian et la Putain (Eustache) Minimatm The Victims and their World (nuchimoto) I bang on about lm aesthetics, about formal innovation, and yet in my list of ten lms, what do I see?People rather than style. Lonely, resilient people. Even Jack Lemmon in The Apartment is lonely. Taken together, my rst ve choices could teach much of what there is to know about lm style, but look at the last three: black-andwhite heartbreakers. A Moment of Innocenceis very funny. MANOHLA DARGIS
US critic. 'The New York Times'

I bang on about lm aesthetics, aboutformal innovation, yet in my list, what do I s ee?People rather than style. Lonely, resilient people
Mark Cousins
at traditional lm dailies rather than so-called digital dailies In explaining the benets of lm dailies, Elswit provided an inadvertent explanation of why so many contemporary studio and independent movies look so bad: with lm dailies 'you can't kid yourself about focus and all the other technical issues that can come back to bite you later when you go to do an IP jinterpositivel. Or when you make a digital le into a negative, and you nd Out that those ten shots you sort of saw sharply with your D5 or HD dailies really weren't that sharp at all And then, of course, the colorspace of motion picture lm is completely different than digital color space." In Touch of Evil the camera travelling across the border with both the newlywed Mr and Mrs Vargas and the blonde with "this ticking in my head"! Henry Mancini/ Charlton Heston striding across the screen like the Colossus of Rhodes and Orson Welles looming in it like a colossus of cinemaithe overhead shot of Vargas driving/Dietrich lighting a cigar (evoking von Sternberg) and eulogising Hank Quinlan (suggesting Welles). Growing up in New York in the r96os and 705, my farnily only had a black-and-white TV, so wow, was I surprised when I rst sawThe Wizand of O z in colour! STEPHANE DELORME
France, editor in chief. 'Cahiers du cinema'

MAR DIESTRO-DOPI DO
Spa n/UK 'Sight 8, Sound

Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson) Bilitri Lyndon (Kubrick) nowers of Sharighel (Hint) The nOWers of St Rands (Rossellim) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) Little Stabs* Happiness ( Jacobs) Masculin feminin (Godard) There Will Be Blood (ET Anderson) Touch of Evil (Welles) The Wizard of Oz (Fleming) These are not the ten greatest lms, but rather ten that made me look at cinema, the world and my life differently. That makes this list somewhat nostalgic. Here are some reasons why I came up with this list today: Balthazar wearing a crown of owers and dying among the sheep. The candlelight, 'Sarabande' (Handel) and the Women of Ireland' (Sean 0 Riada) in Barry Lyndon. The camera moving across the pale faces and shadows in the opening of Flowers ofShanghai - the rst of 39 shots in the lm. Saint Francis shushing the birds so that God can hear him while he prays ("My little brothers, you can praise God so easily, because you're free to y through the airso pure."). The parallel structure of The Godfather Thrt IL with Vito ascending and Michael descending; the way the young Clemenza stands pointing his gun at the silhouette of a policeman, evoking the codied gestures in silent cinema and underlining Coppola's two other histories (the Corleone's, cinema's). Jack Smith in the bathtub in Little Stabs at Happiness and Ken Jacobs in voiceover ("Almost no one in this lm do I seeanymore"). "This wasn't the lm we dreamed of," the doomed boy says in Maseulin fninin. that T h i each s of us had carried within himself w a s Niel, the lm that we wanted n ' t to make or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live." t h The cinematographer Robert e Elswit said that while shooting tThere o Will BeBbod he and director t a Paul Thomas Anderson looked l Sight ikSound Sept em ber 2012 l m

Mulholland Dr. (Lynch) Un chien andalou (Buituel) Wercitmeister Hannonies (Tarr) Jo t'aime, le feline (Resnais) 8Yr (Fellim) Repulsion (Polanski) Solaris (Tarkovsky) Le Pont des Arts (E. Green) Arrebato(Zuhte(a) Amanece, quo no as poco (Cuerda) What attracts me most about cinema is its capacity to reveal the surreal and the fantastic within a recognisable reality -to create an extrasensory depth that's more in tune with the way we experience our lives (or 'real', if you like). It is this trait that for me elevates cinema to the category of an art_ The link between my ten lms is aconscious foregrounding of the mind's processes-explored by the medium eversince its origins, and most famously by the Surrealists which irremediably takes us back to the central tenet of Calderon de la Barca's 1635 play Lift Is a Dream That titular precept undoubtedly permeates all of my choices. GEOFF DYER
UK wnter

the Coppola, they are lms of almost foolhardy ambition. Like many of the lms on my list they were directed by the artist who wrote then. Like several of them, they attempt no less than to tell the story of an entire life. I could have chosen either lm - I chose The The of because it's more afrmative and hopeful. BERNARD EISENSCHITZ
France f ilm historian and translator.

The Big Sleep (Hawks) Bringing up Baby (Hawks) The Clock (Marclay) Koyaanisciatsi (Reggio) The Maltese Falcon (Huston) Mirror (Ta r icovsky) Point Blank (Boorman) Stalker (Tarkovsky) Taxi Driver ( Sco rsese) Where Eagles Date (Hutton) I can't detect any logic or dening idea of what I want from a lm in this list They're just the lms that insisted on popping into my head. The neon of their titles ashed brightest among the hundreds of others vying for my attention. The two Tarkovsky lms, Mirror and Stalker; have a primal power and profundity that is unmatched by any of the others. If I had to choose just one it would be Christian Marclays The Clock ROGER EBERT
U S, critic 'Chicago Sun-Times'

The Birth of a Nation (Gnfth) From the Clouds to the Resistance/Della nube alla resistenzs (Straub-Huillet) Gertrud (Dreyer) M (Lang) Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin) The River (Renoir) The Life of ham (Mizoauchi) SevenWomen (Ford) By the Bluest of Seas (Barnet & Mardanin) The Wadding March (vonStmheim) 'Greatest lms' is ne, but 'of all time' sounds like a somewhat pretentious denition, regarding an art that's been in existence for less than r so years. Even so, nobody can claim to be totally knowledgeable- I certainly can't My emotional responses to, and rational appraisals oL lms are limited in time and space-even though I've tried to coveras many of them as I could here, mostly imaginary, from Grifth's Confederate States of America to Renoir's India This, then, is what this list can be at bests reminder of a history that runs a serious risk of being entirely forgotten soon. THOMAS P. ELSAESSER
Netherlands, University of Amsterdam

Unzere Kinder (Gross) The Long Gray line (Ford) The Plague of the Zombies (Gillina) Echo of the Jackboot (Romm) 79 Springtimes (Alvarez) Essene ( Wiseman) The Age of Cosimo de Medici (Rossellim) Everyday Life Ins Syrian Village (Amiralay) The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophuls) We don't believe that these are the ten greatest lms of all time, but we are convinced that it would be better if they were. SCOTT FOUNDAS
US. critic and associate r programming at the Film Society of L r e c tCenter Lincoln or o f

All-time classics in no particular order Metropolis (Lang) La Regle du leu (Renoir) Citizen Kane (Welles) The Searchers (Ford) Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchz)
Modem classics:

Diary of a Country Priest(Bresson) The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch) Pierrot le fou (Godard) Citizen Kane (Welles) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Night of the Living Dead (Romero) In a Lonely Place (N. Ray) The Wind Will Carry Us (10arvstam A fool's errand, as others have noted. Evenas I submit this list (electronically), my jacket pockets are stuffed with scraps of hotel notepaper with dozens of other possible titles scribbled on them, not least Andrei Rublev, A Brighter SummerDay, The kiting vie Chinese Bookie,Lost,Lost,Lost and Syndromes andaCentury. What do these and the other titles above have in common? Nothing except that they opened my own mind and many others' t o new possibilities
in cinema, and cont inue to do so

each time I revisit them. No matter what the word 'cinema' connotes by the next edition of this poll, I
feel sure they will remain wit h us, forever in the rmament.

Vertigo (Hitchcock) Au haunt Balthazar (Bresson) La Marian et la Putain (Eustache) I:Enfant secret (Gan-el) Mulholland Dr. (Lynch) The Saga of Anntahan (von Sternberg) Planet le fou (Godard) Splendor in the Grass (Kazan) The Woman Who Dared/La del eatis *sus (Gremillon) LAtalante (Vigo) DAVID DENBY
US, cntic. The New Yorker'

Citizen Kane (Welles) La Ragle de leu (Renoir) L'awentura (Antonioru) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Sewn Samurai (Kurosawa) &WOW A Song JAW) Humans (M u The Life n rof a Ohm (Mizoguchi) Journey to Italy (Rossefni) u) The Thse of Life (Malick)

Aguirre, Itirath of God (Herzog) Apocalypse Now (Coppola) Citizen Kane (Welles) La doice vita (Fellim) The General (Keaton & Brucktnan) Raging Bull ( Sco rsese) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) The Tree of Life (Maiick) Takeo Story (Ozu) Vertigo (Hitchcock) At one point in pondering this list, here's what I thought I would do: I would simply start over with ten new lms. But it was too much like a stunt Lists are ridiculous, but if you're going to vote, you
have to play the game. Besides, the

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder) Blade Runner (Scott) Pulp Fiction (Tarantino) Pierrot le tau (Godard) A Taste of Cherry (Karostann) FERRONI BRIGADE
Aka Chr stoph Haber, Olaf Moiler and Barbara Warm. Austria/Germany. critics

CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING
UK writer, critic and broadcaster.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasald (Ito) It Will Never Happen Again/

thought of starting with a blank page and a list of all the lms evermade lls me with despair.
So

new t lm_ The two candidates, ford me, were Charlie Kaufman's e Synecdoche, New York and Terrence c s The Tree cf Life Like Malick' thei Herzog, the Kubrick and
d e d t h e r e m

In the 19605, my family only had a black-and-white TV,so wow, was I surprised when Irst saw 'The Wizard of Oz' in colour
Manohla Dargis

Nosteratu (Mumau) Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) Citizen Kane (Welles) Tokyo Story (Ozu) The Searchers (Ford) Some Like It Hot ( Wilder) Psycho (Hitchcock) The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) Lawrence of Arabia (Lean) Once upon a Time in the West(Leone) PHILIP FRENCH
UK. critic. 'The Observer'

Listed alphabetically: Au revs* les enfants (Malle) La Grande Illusion (Renoir) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer) The Leopard (Visconti) Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelh) nether Panchall (S Ray) Seven Samurai (Kumsawa) Stagecoach (Ford) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Wild Strawberries (Bergman)

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

r b t Except for the Renoir, I saw all these lms when they opened, and they've become part of the fabric of my life. The absence of Lang, Hawks, On', Mann, Tavernier, Mizoguchi, Antonioni, Donen, Welles, Wilder, Came, Truffaut, Peckinpah, Powell, Losey,Scorsese, Leigh and a dozen others is acause for sadness. JEAN-MICHEL FRODON
t r In chronological order a Sunrise: A Song of Two n Humans (Mumau) c Latalante (Vigo) e M (Lang) . Singin' in the Rain (Donen & Kel4r) c The Searchers (Fond) r Vivre sa vie (Godard) i Shoal, (Lanzrnann) t Close-Up (Marostarni) i Still Life (Jia) c Unde Boonmee Who Can Recall

with pleasure and with new discoveries to make each viewing. Then I put the list away A few days later! took it out, changed a few things, and put it away again. A few days after that, it still seemed OK, so that's my list. SERGIO GRMEK GERMAN!
Italy. critic and archivist

His Past Lives (Weerosethakul) It's only with shame and modesty one can send such a list. Shame that there is no Hou Hsiao-Hsien, no Eisenstein, no Resnais, no Bergman, no Ozu, no The Magnrent Ambersons,G med, The Great Dictator, Antichrist, Avatar or Out Ong modesty, because obviously one week earlier or later my list would have been different - and also without these other titles I dishonestly just added, But lists are good anyway. they have effects, and hopefully positive effects, though in unpredictable ways. This is why we should keep making them, FU HONGXING
China Director of China Fi m Archive l

The list follows the alphabetical order of the original titles and I seethis becomes also the most logical order The Bells of St May's (McCaw) The House Is Black (Forrolchzad) Whigs (Shepitko) Ullth (Rossen) A Matter of Time (Minnelh) This Night/Ntsit de chien (Schroeter) The Shadow/L'ombra (Bianchi) Ortiet (Dreyer) Pais/ (Rossellim) La Sortie des usines Lumiere (Lumfere) I decided not to consider historical importance, chronological and geographical proportions-, I don't underrate the periods of lm history and the territories left out, and it pained me to miss out any Filipino lm or many silent masterpieces, and some of my most beloved directors, from Grifth, Dwan, Laurel and Hardy, Mumau through Genina, Cottafavi, Fisher to Munk, Ghatak, Tomes. The only representative rule I accepted was not to list more than one title by director The choice was nally on the most indispensable lms to live with every day the ones that better tell to me what is cinema. RYAN GILBEY
UK. cattc. 'New Statesman'

City Lights (Chaplin) The Godfather (Coppola) Once upon a Throe In the West(Leone) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) La Rafe duJeu(Renoir) The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice) Wild Strawberries (Bergman) A list without Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Terrence Malick and Wins Wenders - all among my favourite directors - and without any female directors; how is this even possible? Having to select only ten movies was harder than I imagined. However, aside from asomewhat melodramatic touch. I think the list does credit to the diversity that describes great lmmaking the wonder of love, the terror of war, remembering what it's like to be a child, learning what it means to become old, the coldness of loneliness or, how unfullled love can be meaningful. PIERS HANDLING
Canada. director, Toronto International Film Festival

J. HOBERMAN
US, critic

Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)

Flaming Cro fts's' (Smith)

The Girl from Chicago (Leonard) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Patter Pancludi (S Ray) Rose Hobart (Coma La Regis du leu (Renoir) Shoah (Lanzmann)
WO or Three Things I Know

About Her (Godard) Vertigo (Hitchcock) ALEXANDER HORWATH

Austria, director. Austrian Film Museum

'Close-Up' combined documentary and drama, destroying the boundary offormality of cinema in the most creative way
Kim li-seok
KENT JONES
U S, critic

Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Fox News Outtakes 4-399/400 NYC Street Scenes and Noises (Anonymous, 1929) Late Spring (Ozu) Saga' in the Rain (Donen 8 Sdroeshater - K e l l y ) (Kubeika) The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak) I Am Twenty (Khutsiyev) Line Describing a Cone (McCall) Reisender Krieger (Schocher) My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (Beavers) While it should be pretty obvious that these are the ten greatest lms of all time, I still wonder if everyone will agree. The order is chronological. GARY INDIANA
U S, novelist

Sunrise: A Song of Too Humans (Murnau) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertou) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Pierrot le fou (Godard) Auhasawd Balthazar (Bresson) Late Spdng (Ozu) Fort Apache (Ford) Days and Nights In
the Forest (S Rap)

A Tale of the Wind (Ivens) Intolerance (GMI th) The Adventures of Prince Adened (Reiniger) Spring in a Small Town (Eel) Rashomon (Kurosawa) Wild Strawberries (Bergman) L'avventura (Antoniom) Andrei Rublev (Tarkomky) Once upon a Time in America (Leone) Farewell My Concubine (Chen) Spring in a Small Town is absolutely the best Chinese lm ever- the most successful drama lm that embodies Eastern philosophy and Chinese sentimentalism. Farewell My Concubineis a miniature of China's history from the 19305 to the 1970s. This lm has become the key to understand Chinese society. CHRIS FUJIWARA
US/UK. artistic director, Edinburgh International Film Festival

McCabe and Mrs Maer (Altman) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) The Thin Red Line (Malick) Accattone(lbsolim) Groundhog Day (Ramis) Barry Lyndon (Kubrick) Safe (Haynes) Tould-Bould (Mivnbety) The Palm Beach Story (Sturges)
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (Girard)

I:et:1155e (Antonion Viddiana (Builuet) Almost impossible to justify a selection of ten lms anymore. No Renoir, Hawks, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Chaplin, Tarkovsky on the list -and no lm later than 1970! These selections are highly personal, and include lms that spoke to me because they either broke rules and expanded possibilities within cinema, or continue to move and stimulate me after every re-screening. MOLLY HASKELL
US. author and critic

The Passion of of Arc (Dreyer) Metropolis (Lang) Au heard Balthazar (Berman) Los oMdados (Buriael)
Satentange (Tarr) React le fou (Godard)

In a Year with 13 Moons (Fasshiricto) Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein) Army of S h a d o ws The Death (M e l v i l lof e Maria ) Malibran (Schroeter)
NI CK JAMES
UK. motor. 'Sight & Sound

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)

A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)

Madame de_ (Max Ophuls)

The Shop Around the

ANNE GJELSVIK
Norway. professor ic him studies. Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Apocalypse Now (Coppola) The Best Years of Ow Lives (Wyler)

Brief Encounter (Lean)

Corner (Lubitsch) Au hasard Balthazar (Berman) I Know Where I'm Going! (Powell & Pressburger) Claire's Knee (Rohmer) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Alias amours (Pialat)
The Awful 'Birth (McCarty)

Some Came Running (Minnelh) The Lusty Men (N Ray) Memories of Murder (Bong) North by Noritevest (Hitchcock) My Night with Maid (Rohmer) Equinox Flower (Ozu) Osaka Elegy (Mizogwin) oating Clouds (Naruse) Man's Favorite Sport? (Hawks) The Engagement/ I danzati (Ohm) As quickly as I could, I listed ten great lms that I knew well, had seen many times, and thought I could watch for years to come
441 Sight &Sound 1 Sept ember 2012

I added 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' because Falconetti got under rny skin completely when I saw Dreyer'slm again recently
Nick fames

Chinatowm (Iblansh) Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Muniau) CARLOS F. HEREDERO

Spain, director, Caiman Cuadernos de Cine Vertigo (Hitchcock) Le Boole du jou (Renoir)

Tokyo Story (Ozu) Histoiras) du cinema (Godard) In the Mood for Love (Wong) The Searchers (Ford) Shoah (Lanzmarm) The Green Ray (Rohtiter) Gertrud (Dreyer)
The Magnicent Arnbersons (Welles)

I Know Where I'm Going! (Powell & Pressburger) In the Mood for Love ( Out W aof n the g ) Past (Tourneur) Singin' in the Rain( Dan ces & Kell))) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Taxi Driver ( Sco rsese) Uzak (Ceylon) Vertigo (Hitchcock) As usual, it's about what you leave out but also crucially for me this time - it was important that my list did not make me feel stied. I dumped from my 2002list three fabulous lms that I love slightly less than I did, perhaps because I've seen them too often: Barry Lyndon, The Conformist and Hotel Terminus. I did an auterist swap - Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where PmGoing! for Black Narcissus (pure favouritism) - and I replaced Lherbier's LArgent with ThePassion cf loan of Ar e simply because Falconetti got under my skin completely when I saw Dreyer's lm again recently.

The Musketeers of Pig Ailey (Gnfth) The Magnicent Ambersons (Welle5) Notorious (Hitchcock) Pickpocket( Bresson) Rio Bravo (Hawks) Wavelength (Snow) Raging Bull ( Sco rsese) Fanny and Alexander complete version (Bergman) Shoah (Lanzmann) The Puppebnaster (Hou) In my case, the most painful omissions are: Sunrise, TheShop Around the Comer,Raiser ,Journey to Italy, The River(Renoir), The Searchers, Nicht versO hnt,2001, Belle dejour, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Histoire(s)du cinema Consider the above 'ofcial' list ass momentary freeze-frame of one side of an endlessly spinning coin with these alternates on the ipside -along with the collected works of Brakh,age,Cassavetes, Conner, Frampton, Frank, Ozu, Powell with and without hessburger from TheEdge of the World through The Small BackRoom,Val Lewton from CatPeople through Bedlam, the best of the Freed Unit from 1944 to r 955 (le the best Minnelli and DoneniKelly titles), the best of pre-code Warner Bros, about four or ve other Hawks lms and ten or ii other Hitchcocks. That's still leaving outs lot. So why choose the 'ofcial' chronologically ordered ten? It's certainly not because of any certitude in the matter of ranking. Maybe it's because they seem to me to contain so much. NASREEN MUNNI KABIR
India, schoar and documentarist

Aglaia (Khan) kwreara (Kapoor) Devdas (Roy) The Music Room (S Ray)
The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak)

Pickpocket(Thesson) Pyaasa (Hiatt) Singin' in the Rain (Donen 6 Sunset , K e lBlvd. l y ) ( Wilder)
The Third Man (Reed)

All these lms are from the period 1949-6o, which I nd particularly brilliant all over the world. Most audiences in the West aren't aware that It was also a golden period in Indian cinema The Indian lms in this selection don't feature on many lists of great movies b u t they might if better known. 0

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81/2 FEDERICO FELLINI

by Mar Diestro-Dopido

The title famously refers to the total number of lms that Federico Fellini had made up to that point in his career, so it's no surprise that 8 V , is his most personal work, in essence a lm about the process of lmmaking. The lm has been a xture in S6S top tens, but what's signicant is that it regularly takes an even higher position in the directors' ten bestfor in the history of cinema, 8 Viis arguably the lm that most accurately captures the agonies of creativity and the circus that surrounds lmmaking. After the huge success of his previous feature La doke vita, Fellini turned his focus from portraying the circus that is life itselfa theme that's always present in his work, be it in the more literal sense of La stmda, or the celebrity-related shenanigans in La doke vita and chose to look at the workings of his own mind, represented in the character of Guido (masterfully played by Fellini's alter ego Marcell Mastroianni), a famous director who faces a creative crisis before beginning his next lm. As Guido/ Fellini's mental journey unfolds, the process of self-analysis/discovery is what constitutes the lm itself. In equal parts narcissistic, self-deprecating, bitter, nostalgic, warm, critical and funny, 8 'Zis also a brilliant portrayal of Fellini's unique lmmaking. Stunningly lmed, beautifully grotesque and symbolic, in 8 V3dreams, nightmares, reality and memories coexist within the same time-frame; the viewer sees Guido's world not as it is, but more 'realistically' as he experiences it, inserting the lm in a lineage that stretches from the Surrealists to David Lynch. But perhaps most poignantly, Fellini's lm speaks above all about a faith in nding a kind of purity (in love, lm, life) that can only be conjured in the mind of the creatora notion that almost so years after it was made resonates even more as our individual perspectives become increasingly isolated, trapped in the progressively complex maze of our mediated world.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC

CARLTHEODORDREYER
by Jane Giles

As a teenager in the i98os my introduction to The Passion ooan ofArc came via Godard's Vivre sa vie(1962), in which the heroine Nana (Anna KarMa) sees Dreyer's lm in a cinema, a man's hand snaking around her shoulders. Nana weeps as she watches a tearful Joan preparing for death, and Godard's audience is equally moved. To benchmark Joan in 1962 was a brilliant move. It was and remains an unassailable giant of early cinema, a transcendental lm comprising tears, re and madness that relies on extreme close-ups of the human face. Renee Falconetti was 35 when she played the role of Joan (a teenager when condemned to death in 1434 Dreyer brutally extracted a desperate, brilliant performance from the actress, forcing her to kneel on stone to show the pain on her face. He insisted that they shot in silence. Over the years, Joan has often been a difcult lm to see. Dreyer's original version was thought to have been lost in a nitrate re, and even after it was miraculously found in

perfect condition in a Norwegian psychiatric institution in 1981, it was often out of distribution (though it is nally due to be released on UK DVD and Blu-ray later this year). Even during its lost years, however, Joan has remained embedded in the critical consciousness, thanks to the strength of its early reception, reinforced by the striking stills that appeared in lm books, by its presence in Godard's lm and recently by a series of live screenings accompanied by Richard Einhom's choral work 'Voices of Light', or Nick Cave and Dirty Three, or Adrian Utley and Will Gregory, or Cat Power. To hear any one of these scores performed live with the lm on the big screen is an unforgettable experience. In this year's S&Spoll, Joan has risen to no. 9. But in 2010 it was designated the most inuential lm of all time in the Toronto International Film Festival's 'Essential icio' list, where Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as "the pinnacle of silent cinemaand perhaps of the cinema itself'.

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

DAVE US, columnist. KEHR ' The New York

DIETER KOSSLICK
Times: 'Film Comment' Germany, director, Berlin International Film Festival

Vertigo (Hitchcock) The Seardiers (Foni) Le lAtpris (Godard) Journey to Italy (Rossellim) The Big Rail ( Walsh) Play Tkne (Tan) Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey) Sansho dayu (Mizogucht) Intolerance (Grifth) Docks of NewYork (vonSternberg) All long-take, miseenSthrle movies, with the partial exception of Intolerance Perhaps this is my kneejerk reaction against the current mania for machine-gun editing. MARK KERMODE
UK. critic

The Great Dictator (Chaplin) Some Like It Hot ( Wilder) Magnolia (PT Anderson) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell Pressburger) Ben-Hur (Wyler) Gennany Year Zero( Ro sseRim) MA Driver ( Scor sese) One, Two, Three ( Wilder) Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder) The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (Herzog) ESIN KUCUKTEPEPINAR
Turkey, critic

mind at some point, probably for the same reasons. But I cannot exactly say why; that is why I keep returning to them. In general that is my only criterion in compiling lists and 'rating' lms: which ones would I like to see again, here and now. It happens rather intuitively. But I have to bow my head in humility for not being able to include John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum, Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There?, Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako or Agnes 1/aorta's TheBeaches cf Agnes Oh well. TIINA LOKK
Estonia. Black Knights Festival

All the lms onrnp list are from the period 949-60. Audiences in the West aren't aware that it was also a golden period in Indian cinema
Nasreen Munni Kabir
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford) Zero cle conduits (Vigo) Zodiac (Pincher) Maybe because! am not the list. makingtype, or maybe because greatness is a criterion with a thousand meanings, making this list was a real heartbreak. Films that are like the oldest friends, intimate references, different corners of the heart and mind, and the secret connections between them... Whether !decided to be rational or sentimental, there were many possible alternatives. But even ill only tend to see what's missing in the end, I can say !once fell (and still am) in love with each one of these 'ten great lms'. DEREK MALCOLM
UK, critic London Evening Standard

already 54 years old), ills because I have chosen only foolproof movies, which I have watched many times over the course of at least 5o years, excluding those that I have seen only a couple of times or only quite recently. That leaves out recent discoveries or possibly passing fancies. It makes me angry with myself to leave out Godard, Dreyer, Rossellini, Chaplin, Preminger, Ophuls, Nicholas Ray,Hawks, Naruse, Ozu, Shimizu, Gui try and many others, but alas, ten is ten. ADRIAN MARTIN
Australo. critic

The Exorcist (Thetiltin) A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Piessburger) The Devils (Russell) It's a Wonderful Life (Capra) Don't Look Now(Roeg) Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro) Mary Poppkw(Stevenson) Brazil (Gilliam) Eyes Without a Face (Fmnfu) The Seventh Seal (Bergman) KIM DONG-HO
South Korea, honorary festival director. Busan International Film Festival

Ivan's Childhood (Tctrkovsky) Landscape in the Mist (AncleloPoulos) Modem Times (Chaplin) La doles vita (&//ini) Pickpocket(Brrsson) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Mandela (Im) A City of Sadness (Hou) Seven Samurai (Kurosawa) Platform (Jia) Of the Far Eastern lms,Im Kwon-taek's Mandalais the most profound lmic study on religion and salvation; the Hou is an epic on the history of ordeal told via a tragedy of a family, the Kurosawa, a masterpiece that escapes the limitations of a genre lm; and lia Zhangke's 2009 Plagirm, a cinematic achievement that looks into a society in a period of upheaval KIM JI-SEOK
South Korea. executive Programmer Busan international Film Festival

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky) Barry London (Kubrick) Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressbuiger) La derutga (Marte() Delotiog (10eslowski) Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies) HopelLimut (Gliney) A One and a Two (Yang) Sitintang6 (Tarr) Skeen' in the Rain (Donen & Ke1(j) was on my way to atop moo instead of ten when I started to list lms like G oodbye Dragon Inn, Spirited Away, The Wind Will Cam) Us,. Obviously struggling! Then I recalled my beloved mother saying "Cinema offers bodily experience. Loosen up and lose yourself like in the playground" That was said to asix-year-old me whose basic aim was to enjoy a bottle of soda during the interval So I tied to loosen up, but still with regrets I had to miss out La kale duieu, Metropolis, Belledefour, LAtaianteand Turkish contemporaries suchas Times and Winds,Clouds cf May,Innocence, Somersauh in a Cofn or cult classic llme toLove, and countless more. Still making this list was a great ride, recalling all those emotions. DANA LINSSEN
Netherlands, editor in chief De Filmkrant. lm critic 'NRC Handelsblad

Citizen Kane (Welles) Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) Andrei %Wry (Tarkovsky) Zero de conduits ( Arnarcord V igo) Pulp Action (Tarantino) A Taste of Cherry (16amstann) A One and a 1Wo(Yang) Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (Km) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Forman) VERENA LUEKEN
Germany. lm editor. 'Frankfurter Allgemene Zeitung'

2031: A Space Odyssey (Kubncit) A City of Sadness (Hou) A Moment of innocence (M. Makhmalbajj ATale of the Wind (bens) Citizen Kane (Welles) Close-Up (10amstarni) Diwy of a Country Priest(Brrsson) Nostalgia (Tarkopsky) The Colour of Pomegranates (Parajanov) Ibityo Story (0Z14 2001 is the lm that describes the encounter between God and man in the most dramatic way. Close4Ipimprnsively combined documentary and drama, destroying the boundary of formality of cinema in the most creative way. Nostalgia shows the fate and hope of an artist in a dreamlike style. 46 I Sight/Mound I September 2012

Shen' In the Rain (Dollen & Kelly) Sans solidi (Marker) Yellow Submarine (Dunning) Jeanne Dieknann, 23 spat du Commerce 1080 Bruxeiles(Alairnan) A Man Escaped(I3rrsson) Chungking Express ( The W aHouse n g ) is Black llurrykhzad) The intruder (Denis) Fight Club (lIncher) RR(Benning) I am not a list person. They drift with the clouds. The top three, however, have been unchanged for years. And for these three lms I could even narrow it down to particulargreat' scenes: the famous singing and dancing in the rain; the opening sequence with the English voiceover, but with the original French Racine quote: "The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time" (although I love the Eliot one too) and the nal pandemonium that spells/says/ sings: "All You Need Is Love". These scenes made me love cinema i n all its magic, discomfort and capacity to see beyond the image. The other lms blew my

The Leopard (Visconti) L'avventura (Antonion0 The General (Keaton) Kagemusha (Kurosawa) Night and Fog(Resnais) The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressbumer) The Searchers (Ford) Some Uke it Hot (Wilder) 200L A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) llopical Malady (Weerasethaku) It was a pleasurable challenge, and it took many hours to decide what to do. Thirty movies would be easier, r oo apiece of cake. But ten? Finally,! decided to leave out the lms that we've known for decades belong to this list Citizen Kane,Tokyo Story, Battleship Potemkin,The Godfather, Sunrise et at I chose my lms asa mixture of personal favourites, new proposals and those I think make sense in my view on lm history as presented in a personal 'greatest list TODD MCCARTHY
US, critic. The Hollywood Reporter'

Tokyo Story (Ozu) Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi) Touch of Evil (Welles) LAtalents (Vigo) 1Hstana (Bunuel) Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman) Umberto D (De Sica) Apocalypse Now (Coppola) The Third Man (Reed) The Music Room (S Rap) Tomorrow it could be ten other lms. How to choose between BicycleThieves and Umberto D, Apocalypse Nowand Come and Se e ?It comes down to favourites rather than best, and an attempt to avoid fashion and prejudice. I doubt if I've succeeded MIGUEL MARIAS
Spain. critic and teacher

Anna (On 6.Sarchkilt) Behindert (Divaskin) The Departure/Le Depart (Skohmowski) L'Enfant secret (Garret) Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes) Night and Day/Nult et lour (Akerman) Floating Clouds (Naruse) By the Bluest of Seas (Barnet E Manianin) Wanda (Loden) Most often, polls like this one get stuck in the past the irrefutably canonised greats of cinema,as well as the participants' own, long-ago youthful discoveries of them. This time I have decided to favour masterpieces that, for the most part,! came upon during the last decade, and that sit outside the canons comfort zone. DANIELA MICHEL
Mexico. oirector. Morelia International Film Festival

El (Bunuel) Vertigo (Hitchcock) LAtalente (Vigo) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Double In Paradise (Lubitsch) Andrei Rublev(Tarkavsky) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Setantang6 (Taro) Aventutera (Gout) The Last Command (vonSternberg) WESLEY MORRIS
U S. critic:The Boston GicOe

In chronological order 'Double in Paradise (Lubitsch) Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir) Ruggles of Red Gap (McCarey) To Have and Have Not (Hawks) Shoot the Pianist (Truffaut) Latwence of Arabia (Lean) La Works (Godani) The Leopard (Visconti) Chimes at Midnight (Welles) Barry Lyndon (Kubricic) FLORENCE MAILLARD
France, critic. lCahiers du cinema'

Deep End (Skolimowski) La doice vita (Fe/lint) RA Moon in Paris (Rohmer) North by Northwest (Hitchcock) Pickpodtet ( Bresson) Prolondo msao (Argento) Tabu (Mumau & Flaherty)

The Wings of Eagles (Foni) The River (Renoir) Tabu (Murrzau 6- Flaherty) /Amen chital/Street of Shame (Mizoguchz) Vertigo (Hitchcock) The Tiger of Eschnapur (Lang) An Affair to Remember (McCarey) Isn't Life Wonderful (Grifth) The Mortal Storm (Barrage) The Student Prince in Old Heirletewg (Lubitsch) These are neither the ten lms I think are the greatest evermade nor even my ten favourite ones. I would need at least too for that They are merely ten of my very favourite movies, which !admire as much as any other but which, even choosing only one lm per director, do not fully represent what !nd most important or what moves me most in the cinema. If they are all very old (the most recent are

Au hasard Balthazar ( Bresson) Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) Do the Rigid Thing (Lee) Metropolis (Lang) Naked (Leigh) "IAA Driver ( Sco rsese) There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson) Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau) Vertigo (Hitchcock) A One and Also (Yang) Some history is time reinforcing itself for posterity's benet. And the immediate trouble with a list of ten movies across a century is that you begin tows how posterity springs a leak. I'm not interested in reinforcement, which is the eternal argument against including Citizen Kane orSevenSamurai or T okyoStory on this list It's either "Someone else will do it," or 'This is greatness as a received wisdom." That's not howl feel. They are great but their greatness and the greatness of about three dozen other movies 0

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MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

DZIGAVERTOV
by Nick Bradshaw

Is Dziga Vertov's cine-city symphony a lm whose time has nally come? Ranked only no. 27 in our last critics' poll, it now displaces Eisenstein's erstwhile perennial Battleship Potemkin as the Constructivist Soviet silent of choice. Like Eisenstein's warhorse, it's an agit-experiment that sees montage as the means to a revolutionary consciousness; but rather than proceeding through fable and illusion, it's explicitly engaged both with recording the modern urban everyday (which makes it the top documentary in our poll) and with its representation back to its participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie). A compound of views of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, Man with a Movie Camera is structured less along the geographic lines of most city symphonies of its era than along the basics of how a complex society organises itself across a day. Yet despite the lm's 'pure cinema' avowal, it channels its collectivist vision through the dramatic mainstay of an identiable protagonist, the titular lmmaker/mediator. Of course, there's another lineage at play. As the title makes plain, MWAMC concerns the (post-)industrial

interplay of humans and machines. Like Fritz Lang's Mabuse lms, it's engaged with the novel implications of the moving image; but unlike almost anything from the West, it posits cinema as an extension of other forms of mechanical production and one with the transformational promise of laying bare the integration of human relations, of enabling mass society to see itself. Dziga Vertov's techno-optimism may now seem more ut opian t han any t hing outside Silicon Valley; certainly capitalist movies, from 2001 to The Matrix, have preferred dystopian visions of our relationship with our tools. But in a time when we're all becoming people wit h phone cameras, its manifesto remains a salutary challenge.

0 THE SEARCHERS JOHNFORD

by Kieron Codess

Few would begrudge the return of John Ford's intimate revenge epic to the critics' top ten. Do its uctuations in popularity no appearance in either critics' or directors' top tens in 2002, but fth in the 1992 critics' poll reect the shifts in popularity of the western (this is by some

distance the highest showing in the poll of any lm in that genre)? It could be acase of this being a western for people who don't much care for them, but I suspect it's more to do with lohn Ford's stock having risen higher than ever this past decade (recall the universal rapture at the release of the outstanding Ford at Fox DVD box-sets a few years ago) and the citing of his inuence in the unlikeliest of places in recent cinema the slums of Lisbon, for example, in the cinema of Pedro Costa. Ford was branded a reactionary in the r 96os, but since then, under more nuanced examination by the likes of Tag Gallagher, he has been revealed as a far more politically complex and ambivalent gure. At the heart of The Searchers is a complicated, unvarnished character portrait, one of the greatest ever: John Wayne as Ethan Edwardsbrutal, driven, curdled, racist There are familiar generic elements here, but it's the less than familiar, I'd argue, that elevates the lm in critical estimation:moments of savage poetry and mystery. Take the haunting (studio) shot of two men on horses in the snowbound trees, like a gorgeous Richard Prince avant la lettrr. Doors are a common-or-garden metaphor in cinema, but here the opening of the door at the beginning and that slow track through it u s into such strange vistas; Monument Valley here is virtually a sci- landscape. And never was a door more eloquently, heartbreakingly and denitively closed than it is in the nal shot. What gives this the edge over so many other brilliant westerns is its sense of a plenitude of meanings of being utterly inexhaustible. Just like the spirit of Ethan Edwards, still out there, still searching for a place of rest and peace, a home.
Sept embet 2012 Sight&Sound ! 47

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

-doesn't thrill me the way Spike Lee's or, in that one lm, Mike Leigh's does. I'm also interested in the recent past and the way great directors rose to the occasions of their times. Or were directors of their times I didn't choose amovie by Michael! laneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, butt could have. How reasstuing it would be to see this magnicent list and not feel that the movies - cinemal- stopped after the second Godfather. No one seriously believes that Do they? KATE MUIR
UK. chief lm critic . ' T he The Godfather (Coppola) The Ascent (Shepitko) l i m e s ' Psycho (Hitchcock) Shoah (Lanzmann) Cleo ham 5 to 7( Varda) Salads (Taricoosky) We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay) Mulholland Dr. (Lynch) I Know Where I'm Going! (Powell & Pressburger) Do the Right Thing (Lee) What would an all-female list look like, starting with Alice Guy-Blache and marching on to Leni Riefenstahl, Claire Denis, Jane Campion, Kelly Reichardt, Kathryn Bigelow and Andrea Arnold? Are women directors just starting to stand the test of time?

The Music Room (S. Ray) Andrei Rublev (Tarkopsky) Yukcheul idi/The Body's Way(Jo) A Touch of Zen (Hu) Yol (Guney 8-GOren) The Boys from Fenglauel (Hold) There is a group of lms that feel like my family. I didn't choose any of them. Hence, no works by 'classical'Japanese lm masters at all. I also didn't choose any lms that feel like my relatives. So, no lms by such pantheon cineastes as Keaton, Ford, Welles or Renoir. Why not? It's simply because I feel great hesitation to praise any members of my own family or relatives in public. The lms of my list are all felt like my year-long friends from afar. They once gave me a hard slap on the cheek_ I can't forget that pain and pleasure. OKUBO KEN
Japan, critic

ALAN PAULS
Argentina, writer

Citizen Kane (Welles) Hitler A Film from Gemaany (Syberberg) l'eclisse (Antonioni) La Manisa at la Putain (Eustache) Full Moon in Paris (Rohmer) Love Streams (Cassavetes) The Sacrice (Tatkovsky) Prenatal Carmen (Godard) Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti) Stmmboll (Rossellim) These are, in alphabetical order, ten lms that make me ask - every time I see them, and I've seen them a lot of times the same two questions: a) what the hell is that? b) what kind of world would the world be without cinema? IAN PENMAN
UK. critic and archivist, Museum of Loneliness

PAARCO MOLLER
Italy/Switzerland. director. Rome Film Festival

The General (Keaton) Les Enfants du wa ds (Came) The Song Lantern (Na ruse) Touch of Evil (Welles) Antonio des Mortes (Rocha) Eros Plus Massaas (Yoshida) Magino VNInge: Aisle (Ogawa) Dogra Magura (Matsumoto) Mysterious Object at Noon ( Weenasethakul) Tied INPAlest of the 'Racks (Wang ft) From the silent era to the list century, I have chosen some monsters I love. Ogawa's last lm and the Weerasethakul are brilliant examples of the freedom of multi-narratives. CAMILLE PAGLIA
U S, professor of humanities and media studies. University of the Arts. Philadelphia

Au Mend Balthazar (Bmsson) Bringing up Baby (Hawks) Europa 51 (Rossellim) I Was Bom, But.. (Ozu) Cadet (Draper) The River (Renoir) The Searchers (Ford) Sunrise A Song of Two Hurnem (Murnau) By the Bluest of Seas (Barnet 6- Mardanin) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Barnet's lm is an ethology of the euphoric human body the most unclassiable Soviet lm ever. LAURA MULVEY
UK, professor of lm and media studes,
Birkbeck. University of London

In chronological order Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Love Me Tonleit (Mamoulian) La signora di tutti (Max Ophuls) Journey to Italy (Rossellini) Imitation of Life (Situ) Plerrot le Jou(Godard) Wavelength (Snow) Kale (Sanbene) Jeanne Dielmann. 23 quail du Commerce IMO Bruxelles (Akerman) Tbnaugh the Olive Dees (IGamstarni) OKAJIMA HISASHI
Japan. chief curator, National Film Center

Ben-Hur (Wyter) The Godfather (Coppola) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) Gone with the Wind (Fleming) La doice vita (Fellini) Lawrence of Arabia (Lean) North by Northwest (Hitchcock) Olphie(Cocteau) Persona (Bergman) Vertigo (Hitchcock) My favourite lms combine spectacular photography with strength and depth of character. Their intense emotional resonance is often amplied by superb orchestral scores, more expressive than mere words. A great lm creates a world of its own. It can be seen again and again without ever losing its freshness and surprise.

In chronological order Sylvester (Pick) Borderline (MacPherson) Malorrobra (Soldan) Susan. (Bunuel) SS Sigha&Sound I September 2012

What would an all-female list look like, starting with Alice Gup Blache and marching on to Claire Denis, Jane Campion and Andrea Arnold?
Kate Muir

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Peckinpah) Le Cercie rouge (Melville) In a Year with 1,3 Moons (Fassbinder) The Producers (BrirolG) A New Leaf (May) It's a Gift (McLeod) Sicilia! (Straub-Huillet) latras-EuropExpress (Robbe-Grillet) The Funeral (Ferrara) Trash (Morrissey) overcomes the actor before the T camera_ is basically of the same h kind e as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the f mirror." - Walter Benjamin. e List-making of this sort is an e impossible and fearful task. The l only S6'S top tens I ever noticed in i previous decades were the little selfportraits n in list form, rather than the g ones striving towards some grand canonical presentation - the o half-forgotten polaroid in a drawer, f rather than the commandment s from on high. Small movements t or gestures in lms moments r unlikely energy, reection, of a emptying or light- can affect you n out of proportion to their way g supposed 'importance'. Or as Manny e Farber might have it the vigour and surprise of "termite n art e excess of "white elephant art". -s o s OLIVIER PERE v t France/Switzerland, a e rh Locarno t i s t i cInternational Film Festival rai r e c t o r . d In chronological order tt Sunrise: A Song Of Ave h Humans (Murnau) The e Testament of Dr s &tabus. (Lang) Pattie de campagne (Renoir) m La Regis du jeu (Renoir) u To g Be or Not to Be (Lubiach) Ugetsu monogatarl (Mizoguclu) n Searchers (Ford) The e Vertigo (Hitchcock) s Moods (Godand) Le s Ludwig (Visconti) Dying a in a car accident just after the advent of sound and the n talkies, Murnau was undoubtedly d the rst major genius of cinema, and the last of the great German
Romantics. His vast knowledge

and philosophy enabled him to realise a perfect work of art that is complete at every level, both in terms of formal execution and thematics, yet it is a purely cinematic creation, in no way dependent on the pre-existing arts. In The Testament (# Mabuse, we are confronted with an impressive mastery Dr of the dramatic use of sound elements and an incredible feeling for action and suspense. Only Renoirhas managed to express on lm the most elevated notion of naturalism, examining this world from a perspective that is dark, cruel but objective, before going on to achieve the serenity of the work of his old age. With him, one has no qualms about using superlatives: La Regledu ku is quite simply the greatest French lm by the greatest of French directors. The greatest of Japanese lmmakers, Mizoguchi in his lms expresses perfectly the universality of an art that is however rooted in Japanese culture and history. Ugetsu monogatari is the apogee of lm classicism. John Ford, beyond a doubt the greatest of American directors (and one of the greatest in the world), produced a body of work of incredible scope and richness. One of the nest lms ever made about both coupledom and the cinema, Le Mepris is also -wi th good reason - Godard's most mythical lm, in which he allows himself adegree of lyricism that was only to resurface again in his much later work. In 1973 Visconti concluded his 'German trilogy' with Ludwig. The titanic shoot delivered a monster of a lm, without a doubt the director's most brilliant work, but which proved to be, once again, a nancial disaster. The lm suffered drastic editing for international distribution, and it was only after Visconti's death that we were able to see this spectacular lm in its full four-hour version GILBERTO PEREZ
LiS/Cuba, writer and academic. Sarah Lawrence College

Small gestures in lmsmoments of unlikely energp, reection, emptying or light can affect pou wap out o f their 'importance' Ian Penman pro The Godfather Part II (Coppola) His p Girl o Friday r t (Hawt) Late Spring (Ozu) Masculin i o n forninin (Godard) My Friend Ivan Lapshin (German) Notorious (Hitchcock) t Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Mumau) o
QUINTIN
Argent , Histoire(s) du cinema(Godard) na, I Was Born, But-. (Ozu) c rGrande it i La Illusion (Renoir) The c Man Who Shot

Liberty Valance (Ford) Journey to Italy (Rossellini) Sicilia! (Straub-Huillet) Shoah (Lanzmann) Death Proof (Tarantino) The Host (Bong) La libertad (Alonso) NICOLAS RAPOLD
US, senior editor. 'Film Comment'

In a Lonely Place (N. Ray) Vetttgo (Hitchcock) Pickpocket( Bresson) The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Sturges) Play Time (Tatt) The 400 BiO WS (Truffaut) Breathless (Godani) Eraserheed (Lynch) Videadrome (Cmnenberg) Duck Soup (McCarry) TONY RAYNS
UK. critic

Sherlock Jr. (Keaton) Earth (Dovzhenko) Zero de conduit. ( Vigo) La Regle du jeu (Renoir) Wagon Master (Ford) Sansho dayu (Mizoguch0 Viridiana (Bunuel) Veclisse (Antoniom) Caddo Thnsugh the O Nve ( Trees (IGamstarni) The order is chronological. I regret I have no room in the arbitrary top ten for Chaplin or Mumau, Cagney or Stanwyck, Bruce Baillie or Ernie Gehr, It HappenedOne Night or Mr Thank You,Shadow ofa Doubt or TheR ecklessMoment, Day ofWrath or Andrei Rubles, Nicht versohnt orElogedeFamour. JOHN POWERS
US, lm critic. 'Vogue LAt akint e (Vigo)

Birth of the Nation/Die aghast der Nation (VVyborny) Un chien ancialou (Burluel) Once upon a Time In the West(Leone) The Scarlet Empress (Pon Sternberg) Scenes from City Ltfe/ Dushi Fengguang (Yuan) Spring in a Small Town(Per) Straits of Lave and Hate/ Alen Kyo (Mizoguciu) Taipei Story (Wing) Modiste (Hirabayashi) 'Much of Evil (Welles) Not much change from 2002, S OI'm obviously set in my ways. What the list reveals is an admiration for lms which push an idea about cinema to its apparent limit, and do so with elegance and wit. The only recent lm on the list Hirabayashi's brilliant 'Maim (2003), stands for a vein of iconoclastic avantgardism which stretches from Robert Rorey to Kenneth Anger and Hollis Frampton. 0

of painting theatre, architecture

Blue Velvet (Lynch) Flowers of Shanghai (Hou)

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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

STANLEYKUBRICK
by Kim Newman

2001: A SpaceOdysseymade its rst entry in this poll, at number ten, in 1992,24 years after its 1968 release. It climbed to number six in 2002,andhasheld that position in 2012. (I'm partially responsible for this performance: I compiled my 2012 list without looking up my 2002 list Six lms recurred, but this time I plumped for 2001 instead of The Shining. After the theatrical reissue of the latter, it might edgeahead again. In 2022, Barry 1 m Lyndon i g h over t both, e l or e rel vegate a tStanl e ey Kubrick from the pantheon entirely.) Not only do we now nd ourselves 44 years on from a lm that seemed once to epitomise the futureit advanced the default date of what we thought of as'the future' fromGeor ge Orwell's 1984 but we're a full decade past the years (and despite the lm's title, it is 'years'the plot, even excluding the 'Dawn of Man' prologue, covers more than i 2 months) in which Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke decided that humanity would come face to face with its alien origins. Somany future visions, from Metropolis to BladeRunner to The Matrix, get shunted into a parallel time a possible timeline we didn't take. But, despite the date-stamp,2001 still seems coolly plausible and resonant. The lm's belief in manldnd's future (and past) in space hasbeen sidelined, which gives it a nostalgic edge, but it remains a fascinating, stately lm, which nds space slow and empty and yet wondrous, and simmers with emotional nuance even when the onscreen characters are a computerand astronauts obligated to show no reaction. AsPr om etheusproved with its Wikipedia version of 2001's content, Kubrick's lm remains the touchstone for ambitious lm science ction. And at the same time its wondershave only beenenhanced by the recent trend for screening the lm with a full symphony orchestra on hand to perform the classical soundtrack selections by Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Ligeti and Khachaturian.

0 SUNRISE F.W.MURNAU
by Isabel Stevens

When DK. Mumau left Germany for America in 1926, did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense that change was around the comerthat nowwas the time to ll up on fantasy, delirium and spectacle before taildng actors wrenched the artform closerto reality?Sunrise ASong of Tw oHumans the pinnacle of Mumau's silent career certainly suggests this was the case. Many things make this lm more than just a morality tale about temptation and lust, a fable abouta young husband so crazy with desire for a city girl that he contemplates drowning his wife, an elemental but sweet story of ahusbandand wife rediscovering their love foreach other. Sunrisewasan exampleperhaps neveragain repeated on the same scaleof unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio system working together rather than at cross purposes. Mumau hada newFox studio to transform into moonlit marshes and dazzling gargantuan cityscapes. In his quest for optical experimentation he used every tool available (superimposition, in-camera trickery), inventing those that didn't already exist (such as his ying camera, oating fromcranesabove). Testament to Murnau's remarkable achievement was the fact that post-Sunrise cinema could never again be dismissed as lightweight amusement in quite the same way. Combining Expressionism's shadowsand shards of light with the lyricism of Dutch genre painting, Mumau decreed that cinema could do what art does,and more... Sowhy, one wonders, did Sunrise only rst appear in the top ten in zooz? And why has it now climbed from seventh position to fth? Silent cinema's resurgence in popularitycombined with recent restorations accounts forsome of that Butavote for Sunrise is of course avote for a lost world. As cinema teeters on the edge of technologicalchange again as projectors are ripped out of cinemas and lm camerasand canisters gather dust in archives Sunrise reminds us that there's no turning back
Septernher 0 S i ght& S ound i 49

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

B US. . RUBY RICH professor. University of

California, Santa Cruz

Born in Flames (Borden) Daisies (Chytilovd) Daovin's Nightmare (Sauper) In the Mood for Love (Wong) Looldng for Langston (Julien) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutierrez Alea) Nostalgia for the Ugtd(Gumin) Orlando (Potter) Sweet Sweetbades Beadasesss Song (VanPeebles) The importance of lms is xed in the moment in our lives at which we see them- in a classroom, in a drive-in, in a rep house, in a festival or on a plane or computer screen or, gasp, iPhone. Our age at that moment is crucial: I was imprinted with Vertov and Daisies at a moment when cinematic language was changing radically, and these lms from the former Eastern Bloc were key to fusing artistic bravura with political reach As I came of ageas a lm addict, a feminist and lesbian, attuned to the aesthetics of my age, Potter and Julien and Borden were equally crucial in demonstrating how thrillingly cinema could write the templates of identity. Of sexuality, too, though here Sally Potter and Wong Kar-Wai are equally inuential on that front Ah, Tilda Swinton in a sleigh, Maggie Cheung in a cafe, and Honey on the radio diaL For my generation, Latin America was the great battleground and the land of promise. Gutierrez Alea's longmisunderstood masterpiece dened a new Latin American cinema, just as Guzman's more recent essay lm did, all over again. And SweetSweetback? Here there's a manifesto to be written. Raw,scabrous and packed with too many ideas and energy for one lm, it's the cornerstone of the modem American independent-lm movement, linking together low-budget production, non-union crews.
sexploitation, and the French New

Dying in a car accident just after the advent of sound and the talkies, Murnau was undoubtedlp the rst major genius of cinema
Olivier Pere
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch) That Obscure Object of Desire (Buituet) Thiry Story (Om) Itopical Malady (Weennethakul) Vertigo (Hitchcock) A One and a Two ( Yan g ) The attempt into heed the call of history as well as the urgency of the now, but in all I guess I merely try to recall the moment the hammer hit me i t's more than ten times and to remember the lms that tried to test the invisible borders of cinema. JONATHAN ROMNEY
UK, lm critic, 'The Independent on Sunday'

authentic 'mysterious object'. As for an old favourite, Hellzapoppin', it's still my desert-island lm a crammed encyclopedia of meta farce that continues to crack me up after all these years. JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
US. critic

In chronological order: Greed (von Stroheim) Spione/Spies (Lang) Ivan (Dovzhenko) I Was Born, But... (Ozu) Rear Window(Hitchcock) Cuadecasc vampir (Portabella) Setantange (Tarr) Histoore(s) du cinema (Godard) The Wind Will Carry Us (Karostamr) The World (pa) didn't allow myself to include any titles from my previous SESlists. PAMELA BIENZOBAS SAFFIE
Chile, critic, Revista de Cine Mabuse

Rebecca (Hitchcock) Party Girl (N. Ray) 1 . 1 1 1 1 1 1 e l ecrew (Grernillon) Three Rooms in Manhattan (Came) La Visite sawBebe Donge/The Tiuth About Bebe Dotage (Decoln) All those ten lms, American and French, propose very acute explorations of female experiences, desires, sufferings and attempts at emancipation. Most of them are made by male lmmakers, but the most recent one is a woman's lm: Le Lait dela tendr essehumaine (The Milk ofuman Mndness), by Dominique Cabrera. KEITH SHIRI
UK, curator and director. Africa at th e Pictures

Boating (Rivette) The C i r c u s Blackmail ( C h a p l i(Hitchcock) n) PAIdchen in Uniform (Sagan 8 Meet Me in St. WW1 (Minnelh) , My Childhood (Douglas) Fm e Napoleon l i c h (Game) Nights of Cabida (Fell* ) Rout eat pardonne (Hansen - am in mourning for the so many lms all crowding behind this ten, Love) I may have nightmares for weeks. GAVIN SMITH
US, editor, 'Film Comment'

Heitrapoppin' (Potter) Lola (Demy) Out l(Rivette) Planet le fou (Godard) Sataintango (Tarr) The Shining (Kubrick) Street of Crocodiles (Quay & Quay) Syndromes and a Century (Weerasethakul) The ThreeC MW113 of the Sailor (Ruiz) Touch of Evil (Welles)
It's hard making the list again, ten

years after the last time - you feel you want to be faithful to your earlier choices, but what to lose if other lms have inspired you since? My only criterion for this list is that it's entirely to do with my own lmgoing history- these are lms that have all revealed moments. There are three new additions. Pierrot lefas replaces Le Mepris,as it's simply more fun - butt also realised that it was the rst Godard lever saw. Of the two lms I've discovered in the last decade, Outs was for years my Holy Grail - I thought I'd neversee it, and when I did I wasn't disappointed. It's still a magnicent blueprint for generating ctions out of the everyday and it impresses me all the more in that, even though huge chunks are barely watchable (the theatre sections), it's nevertheless extraordinary overall.
I'm t aking a risk on somet hing new to me at import ant

Andrei Rublev(Tarkovsky) Blue Velvet (Lynch) Days of Heaven (Malick) Edvard Munch (Watkins) Pads. Texas (Wenders) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Pickpocket(Thrsson) The Passenger (Antonioni) Ugetsu monogatarl (Mizoguchi) The Gospel According to St Matthew (ssolim) One way I found to try to get around the difculty (and the feeling of arrogance) of establishing a list of the 'greatest lms of all time' was to arbitrarily rule out all the lmmakers who in the roar poll arrived within the top ro hns or directors, of the critics or the directors, This means excluding all lms by Bergman, Coppola, De Sica, Donen, Eisenstein, Fellini, Ford, Godard, Hitchcock, Kelly, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lean, Mumau, Ozu, Renoir, Scorsese, Welles or Wilder. I stuck to a term suggested in the invitation to vote- "impact" - and assumed the utter subjectivity of the exercise. SATO TADAO
Japan. critic, historian and president. Japan Ins titute of the Moving Image

Ulm (Sernbene) Durrett (Haruun) A Separation (Farhads) Waiting for Happkiess (Sissako) Tould-Bould (Marnbity) The Nine Muses (Akonsfrah) Tem (Grime) Bicycle Thieves (De Sica) The Battle of Algiers (Ftnitecorvo) Mother (Bong) IAIN SINCLAIR
UK. w r ite , alphabetical order (by director): In

Diary of a Country Priest(Bresson) The Flinn of Nathaniel Dorsicy Nouvelle vague (Godard) Platform (Jia) Psycho (Hitchcock) Raging Bull ( Sco rsese) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford) Shoah (Lanzmann) Sunrise: A Song of1Wo Humane (Mumau) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) FERNANDA SOLORZANO
Mexico c ritic

Wave into one combustible whole. PIERRE RISSIENT

France c ntic lmmak er and programmer

In chronological order LAssonanoir (C,apellam) The Mothering Heart (Grifth) Faust (Mumau) Rom Saturday to Sunday (Machaty) Angel (Lubitsch) Make Way for T O MO IT O W (McCarry) Pursued (Walsh) Not Wanted (Luptno) Whirlpool (Preminger) The Tiger of Eachnapur (Lang) PS: from am 2 - LikeSomeonein Loveby Abbas Kiarostami? KONG RITHDEE
Thailand, him critic. Bangkok Post'

The Bogey-Man (Aratrindan) Mandela (Irn) Where Is My Friend's House? (Kiarostam Banana Paradise(Wang T) Ferocious Saint Lord of the Gobi (Nyamgavaa) Tokyo Story (Ozu) The Une of Destiny (Peries) Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchh Man of the Story/ Kathaplaushnen (Gopalakrishnan) Children of Heaven (Majid GENEVIEVE SELLIER
France professor of cinema studies, Universite Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux

griclo (Antoniom) The Act of Seeing with One's O V 71Eyes (Brakhage) PAouchette (Brisson) Los olvidados (Wiwi) Gerbud (Dreyer) Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder) Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (Godard) The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang) Le Deuxiime Soufe (Melville) The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (Rcsselliru) The museum aspect of pretending to select the 'ten greatest lms of all time' is surely redundant I have combined the strategic short-termism of lms that are feeding current projects with memory landscapes from a curated past Every entry here has a subterranean, disregarded double. But that would be another game. Ten is too few, a couple short of aset of disciples. And too many, shadows of the one, the great lm yet to be made. ALI SMITH
UK, novelist

Vertigo (Hitchcock) The Godfather Part II (Coppola) The Matrix (Wachowski lv Wachowski) Nosferadu (Mumau) Mulholland Dr. (Lynch) Rashomon (Kumsawa) Blade Runner (Scott) Sunset Blvd.( Wilder) EP/ 2(Fellim) Citizen Kane (Welles) With The Matrix, what seemed to bea fad has become a lm-history landmark, both technologically and for so effectively tapping the zeitgeist Non linear narratives had already been explored in lm, but lynch took the form to a different and unique level in Mulholland Dr CLARE STEWART
Australia /L K. head of exhibition, BFI

Mitten on the Wind (Sirk) Days of Being Wild ( Beau Maven Wan g ) (Denis) The Cameraman (Keaton) The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice) The Life and Death of Colonel
Blimp (Powell Pressburger)

Pandora's Box (hint) Udine and Julie Go

Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) Wake In Right (Kotchell) Sullivan's Ravels (Sturges) A Separation (Farhadi) My list is led by emotion. These are the lms to which I return, the lms that make my heart sing, that of cinema and what it can be. Films that make me want to dance with the thrill of being alive and
having cinema to prove it (and the have transformed my perception

Breathless (Godart L'awanture (Antoniom) La Regis du jeu (Renoir) Mirror (Tarkovsky)

so s ighr & S ound S ept em ber 2012

Apichatpong Weerasethalcul, as I'm not sure what Syndromes will mean in the long term, but I was bowled over when I saw it I 'm always hoping to sight those rare screen phenomena that French critics like to call UFOs, and this lm truly is (at the risk of repeating the Joe clich) the

The BestYears of Our Lives (Wyler) The Chapman Report (Cukor) Magas/Paris Rills (Becker) Le Loft de Is tendresse hone/tie/The Milk of Human Kindness (Cabrera) Mime, Marken libertine (Audry)

With 'The Matrix', what seemedtobe a fad hasbecome a lm-history landmark, both technologically andfor tapping the zeitgeist
Fernanda Soldrzana

top three all have liberating solo dance sequences: Dorothy Malone, Leslie Chetmg, Denis Lavantl). This list will be different tomorrow (when it will include The Night of theHunter, Cleo from 5 to 7, Saft, Hunger, TheShop Around the Cornerand Leone, Fassbinder, Ceylan, Woo and July). Lurking in the shadows of this list (and tomorrow's) are a great many beloved lms, but today I feel like giving short lmsa that nod almost to four 0

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LA REGLE DU JEU
JEAN RENOIR
by James Bell

When the rst critics' poll ran in 1952, La R egle du jeu came joint tenth, but it's remarkable that the lm appeared at all, for voters wouldn't have been able to see Renoir's masterpiece in anything like the form we know today. A peerlessly uid ensemble drama, the lm depicts the events that ensue when guests and staff drawn from all strata of French society gather at the country chateau of the Marquis de la Cheyniest for a hunting weekend, Renoir capturing the seething passions, jealousies and class tensions of everyone present with virtuoso skill and genuine empathy. The lm's unsparing depiction of French life in '939from crumbling aristocracy to rife anti-semitism proved explosive in a country beset with divisions, and offered grave forebodings of defeat in the imminent war. Following a disastrously received premiere of a truncated edit of the lm, Renoir agreed to further cuts, only to see his 'demoralising' and 'unpatriotic' lm banned anyway by the French government in October 1939. The original negative was destroyed in a bombing raid during the war, and for years the lm could only be seen in butchered versions, until 200 cans of outtakes were discovered in 1956 and the lm was restored to close to its original form. Three years after its triumphant resurrection at the Venice Film Festival in 1959, La Regle du jeu came third in the 1962 poll a position it has hovered around ever since. Where other lms have risen or fallen with prevailing critical tides, Renoir's lm has remained astonishingly steady. "Everyone has their reasons," says Octave, the character played by Renoir himself, in the lm's most famous line of dialogueone often taken as the purest expression of the director's own humanistic tolerance. It's a sentiment that's easy to accept but harder to portray on lm, and yet in La Regle do jeu that's just what Renoir achieves, his roaming camera capturing everything without judgement, every character and every exchange ringing true.

0 TOKYO OZUYASUJIROSTORY
by James Bell

It's one of the well-told legends of cinema history that the glories of Japanese cinema were rst revealed to Western audiences when Kurosawa's Rashomon screened at the Venice Film Festival in 195 However, despite Ozu's high status in Japan, critical appreciation in the West took much longer to come to him than it did to Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari appeared in the 1962 and 1972 top tens, and Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in the 1982 list, but it wasn't until 1 9 9 Story 2 t rst h a appeared, t T coming o k y third. o The absence of Ozu's 1953 lm- about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, only to nd them all indifferentcan partly be explained by availability, for according to Donald Richie, it wasn't until 1958 that it was rst screened in the UK, under the title Their First Trip to Tokyo, it was only when Richie organised a programme of ve Ozu lms at the 1963

Berlin Film Festival that interest really began to spread_ Books on Ozu's work by Richie, Noel Burch, Paul Schrader and David Bordwell followed, and his reputation steadily grewin this year's poll, Ozu's Late Spring is the second highest-ranking Japanese lm, sitting just above Seven Samurai. Ozu's delicate, formally precise lms now chime with critical opinion in ways that the muscular Kurosawa and owing Mizoguchi styles do not Ozu used to liken himself to a "tofu-maker", in reference to the way his lmsat least the post-war ones were all variations on a small number of themes. So why is it Tokyo Story that is acclaimed by most as his masterpiece? DVD releases have made available such prewar lms as I Was Born, But..., and yet the Ozu vote has not been split, and Tokyo Story has actually climbed two places since 2002. It may simply be that in Tokyo Story this most Japanese tofumaker rened his art to the point of perfection, and crafted a truly universal lm about family, time and loss.
September 2 01? S ight & S ound 151

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2012 POLL

THE CRITICS

KRISTIN THOMPSON C mand ade the list this Weber Phillips Smalley' s SuspenseLa jetee Sadie Benning's lavery Girl Had a Diary and Guy Maddin's The Heart ophe World MATTHEW SWEET
UK historian and broadcaster U S, honorary fellow. University of Wisconsin-Madison

KATA ANNA VAR()

Hungary, lecturer and programme advisor, Titanic International Film Festival, Budapest

Battleship Potemidn(Eisenstem) Citizen Kane (Welies) Days of Herren (Malick) Great Expectations (Lean) The Kid (Chaplin) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer) King Kong (Cooper Schordsath) Napoleon (Gana) The Third Man (Reed) The Wizard of Oz (Fleming) I feel the ghosts of Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Cavalcanti will be gathering to push me down the stairs tonight Looking at this list it seems clear that I have a problematic relationship with colour, though I'll say in my defence that so much in the cinema of the last 50years seems a renement ora reworking of work from its rst 50and the echoes of these ten lms are, I think, everywhere in contemporary lm. And a picture from the r 98os or after still feels too young for canonical status. ALIN TASCIYAN
Turkey, critic
$11001111111 mo n a mo u r (Resnais)

The Davelling Players (Angelopoulos) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Csontvity (Huszdrik) AMrei Rublev (Tarkovsky) Leases (Antonioni) Modern Times (Chaplin) The Colour of Pomegranates (Parafanov) Barak. (Priclx) Metropolis (Lang) Choosing only ten has been a very painful process for me. I feel like a mother who left her children behind! AMY TAUBIN
US.Artfor um'

La Regie du Jou(Renoir) Vertigo (Hitchcock) Au hared Balthazar ( Sresson) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard) Shoah (Lartzmann) Jeanne Dietitian. 23 cruel du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles Warman) Screen Tests (Warhol) ildru (Kumsawa) Cosmopolls(Cronenberg) Ridiculous exercise! Shouldn't it be25 greatest by now? How can l teave out Late SprIng, Topsy-TUrvy, A Woman UndertheInuence, Inland Empire Germany YearZero, L'Age d'or, L'Atalante, Barry Lyndon, JailercfSheep,Orpheus, Xala, Imitation ofL jfr Principle, , T h e FearEats the Soul Angry Harvestand on and on. Or U n c e r perhaps should have named t a i nIt y ordy Histoirr(s)du cinemano more idiosyncratic than this list and far more generous. 52 , sight&Sound 1September 2012

Play Time (Tab) Late Spdrtg (Om) Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein) La Ririe du leu (Renoir) M (Ling) The General (Keaton Bruckman) Through the Olive *frees (Kiarostann) How GreenWas My Valley (Ford) Rear Window(Hitchcock) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Making up a list of ten lms to constitute the pinnacle of world cinema means, to a considerable extent choosing the greatest directors and picking one lm to represent each. To me, the greatest directors are Tati, Ozu and Esenstein. For Taft and Eisenstein, the best lms are clear to me. For Ozu, there could be any of at least haff adozen lms plausibly chosen for this list, but Late Spring happens to be my favourite. Inevitably there are other lms that I much regret not being able to include on the list, suchasSevenSamurai, Double in Thrudise, His Girl Friday, Sitistrbm's The Phantom Carriage and Capellani's Germinal (The silent era is too little represented in previous polls, but restorations by archives and retrospectives at specialist lm festivals make this lack easier to remedy.) Had Orson Welles's The Magnicent Arnbersons not been re-cut by RICO , it would probably be on my list. There are other directors who should be represented here, most notably Bresson, Mizoguchi and Godard. Their work is so consistent, however, that I simply cannot choosea single masterpiece by any of them. I felt that a lm more recent than 5 9 7 4 latest ( T h lm e Grepresented o on previous S&Slists) d r t h should e r be included. The last of lm history T hfour r l Idecades l have surely seen the release of at t h least one worthy lm, but the vast e expansion of production in smaller countries and the international exhibition of such lms in festivals have rendered it more difcult than ever for critics to agree upon a single candidate. It remains easier to vote for the established cla%ics. My choice of a lm that deserves to be watched and rewatched decades from now, as we currently watch such lms as La Regledu feu,is Through the Olive Trees( or Underthe Olive Trees, to give a more accurate translation than the usual). DAVI D THOMSON
UK/US, critic

2001 A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky) Blowup (Antonioni) Blue Velvet (Lynch) Hidden (Haneke) Chungidng Express(Wong) Cries and Whispers (Bergman) Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais) Rashomon (Kurosawa) The majority of the lms I have picked come from the middle of the last century, which witnessed a major change in cinematic storytelling, lm form and style, especially in Europe. Bergman's Fanny and Alexander may be the most appreciated of his lms, but the lavish setting, the rich colours and textures paired with suffocating atmosphere and the rigour of Chekhov's plays make Cries and Whispers the most outstanding of his works. Kubrick's, Tarr's and Lynch's metaphysical ventures through time and space into the human psyche haven't failed to mesmerise moviegoers and academics alike throughout the years. With Hidden Haneke took both the thriller genre and the role of a lmmaker in the narrative to a whole new level and made this racially engaged chilleras unsettling as it could get. When it comes to secret desires, quiet longings, little obsessions and unrequited love, no one does them better than Wong Kar-Wai, the Hong Kong master of genre-bending melodramas. NOEL VERA
critic, Businessworld

lms ever about a lmmaker's passion for his work. From Miyazaki, one of the few sciencection lms to deal with ecological systems and the environment arguably the greatest animated lm evermade. From Ghatak, a neorealist masterwork one of the most heartrending depictions ever of female oppression. And from Mario O'Hara. the rare lm from a victimised nation cm this case the Philippines) that strives to understand, perhaps even forgive, the invader. GINETTE VINCENDEAU
UK. professor, King's College London

becausesheuses the camera with such deep empathy for her subjects,as does Kurosawa SERGIO WOLF
Argentina, critic and lmmaker

Cleo from 5 to 7( Varda) La Corbeau (C/ouzot) Do the Right Thing (Lee) La Grande Illusion (Renoir) La Heine (Kassovitz) The Leopard (Visconti) Le Mends (Godara) Le SamouraT(Melvine) Touchez pas au grisbl (Becker) Wild Strawberries (Bergman) This reects the national cinemas, genres and actors I know best rather than an all-encompassing view of the cinema. PETER VON BAGH
Finland/Italy, chtic, historian arid director. Midnight Sun Film Festival and II Cinema Ritrovato

Citizen Kane (Welles) The Quince 'Rae Sun (Erice) Le Marls (Godani) Rear Window(Hitchcock) Shoah (Lanzmann) The Godfather (Coppola) The House on liubnaya Street (Barnet) The Passenger (Antonion6 The Searchers (Ford) Di n o (Ta(s) These ten lms are for me the more innovative in the different 'moments' of cinema All of them propose across between reality and artice, between genre and style, between tradition and experimentation, between classicism and modernity. Each of them has meant an opening of borders and boundaries of cinema, and has asked about what lm is. MICHAEL WOOD
UK/US professor of English, Princeton
University

Late Spring (Ozu) Chimes at Midnight (Welles) Faust (Murnau) Diary of a Country Priest(Bresson) Kaagaz Ka Phool/ Paper Rowers (Dutt) Nausican of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki) M (Lang) The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak) Sherlock Jr. (Keaton) Tationg Taong Walang Diyos/ Three Years Without God (O'Hara) I look at how well the lmmaker translates his passion, at the intensity of said passion, and listen to the feeling in my gut that tells me: "This is one" Guru Dutt'sim maudit, a titanic box-ofce op, is one of the best

My list as 'critic/historian': The Wedding March (vonStroheim) AngMe IPagno0 Only Angels Have Wings (Hawlcs) A Canterbury Tale (Powell 6-Pressburger) Ivan the Terrible Part II (Eisenstein) Iris och Ironhilkten/ids and the Lieutnent (*berg) Late Spring (Ozu) Distant Drums (Walsh) Party Girl (IV. Ray) Nazarin (Bunue0 I was approached by two different letters, with different deadlines, and I have proceeded accordingly. Which means that I have hereby two lists, entirely different, and corresponding to my schizophrenia about the roles that were the cause of the two letters. MARINA WARNER
UK. professor of literature, lm and theatre studies. Univers',y of Essex

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Los olvidados(Buciuel) Ugetsu monogateri (Mizoautin) Wild Strawberries (Bergman) Ivan the Terrible Part II (Eisenstein) Touch of Evil (Welles) Some Uke It Hot (Wilder) The Leopani (Visconti) Ran (Kurosawa) Wercitmeister Harmonies (Tarr) The list is a bit more nostalgic than I expected it to be, and more clustered around the 1950s- but it gets worse, or further from my idea of things,as I tinker with it, so I'll stop. Criteria for 'greatest' here are multiple, consistent only in the sense of being strict in their different ways: lms you can't shake from your mind, lms you can't imagine the history of cinema without, lms that are the best imaginable in their kind, lms that get better every time you watch them, and so on. SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Slovenia. critic and philosopher

Blue Velvet (Lynch) Celine and -tube Go Boating (Riverte) Citizen Kane (Welles) The Conformist (Bertoluca) Hiroshima man amour (Resnais) His Girl Riday (Hawks) Plermt le fou (Godard) La Regis du }au(Renoir) The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch) Ugetsu monogatan (Mizaguchi)

'The CloudCapped Star' is aneorea list masterwork one of themost heartrending depictions ever of female oppression
Noel Vera

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Reiniger) The Aparbnent ()lder) Bringing up Baby (Hawks) Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette) The Devil's Backbone (del Toro) DoclesIrden (Kurosawa) Lucia (Soils) The Gleaners & I Varda) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Donkey Skin (Derny) Cinema works for meas 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 lms as such,as they convey inner worlds of dream, This list presents fantasy as lived
experience, some of it extremely

Nol Vivi/Vsle the Living (Alessandrim) Hihnan (Germ) Hero (Zhang) Opfergang (Harlan) The Fountainhead ( The V a Sound l o r ) of Music ( Virse) Dune (Lynch) 310 to Yuma (Daves) Nightmare Ailey (Goulding) On Dangerous Ground (N. Ray) This time, I opted for pure madness: the list contains only 'guilty pleasures', from two screen
versions of Ayn Rand to a top

funny. The Varda is there, too,

Nazi melodrama, from David Lynch's greatest op to the top musical kitsch, from a low-budget Hollywood action thriller to a Chinese big-budget historical spectacle, plus a half-forgotten western and two marginal noirs This is what I really enjoyno compromises with high quality or good taste.

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CITIZEN KANE
! " 0 1 0 ORSON WELLES 1
by Nick James

Yes, it's true. Kane is no longer the immovable object of cinema appreciation. But let's leave any re-examination of the lm and its legacy to others. Let us instead, for fun, imagine Orson Welles receiving the news. Even in his youth and middle age, Welles played so many old men on screen so convincingly from Kane himself to Hank Quinlan to Falstaff that it's not difcult to imagine him at the age he'd be if he were still alive: a portly 97, sitting in his favourite restaurant Ma Maison (alas no longer with us either), smoking, eating and talking all at once, in a voice that had only grown more gravelly with the passing years. "What," he would snarl, and backhand a glass into the wall. Then, after a moment, with half a smile, his voice would soften to a purr, his eyes beaming amusement "Kane no longer the best, you say? And whic h pompous, baubled hippopotamus in a wig bows now in my stead? Hitchcock is it? Oh well, I was wrong about the wig, but he's big enough, that's for sure. A little lacking in

panache, don't you think, but plenty of girth?" Falling quiet, he'd pull harder on his cigar, and mutter as if to himself, "'Who loses and who wins; who's in and who's out Packs and sects of great ones that ebb and ow by the moon.' I guess that's me from now on: Lear lost in lost glory. Old Hearst must be laughinghe'll be gladhanding the pimps." Then the grand old man would stagger to his feet, perhaps propelled on walking sticks like Everett Sloane in The Lady from Shanghai, his voice gradually fading as he wandered further off, trailing perfect strands of white cigar smoke. "You know I never thought Kane was my best," he'd say. "Not bad for a beginner and better than anything those Hollywood numbskulls ever dreamed up. But if I'd had money to make them properly, it would be pretty clear to everyone that Chimes at Midnight and Touch ofEvil would have been better yet And as for Ambersons..." Kane is dead. Long live Welles.
Sepi i ' 0 S ight & S ound 53

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2011

O VERTIGO ALFRED HITCHCOCK

by Peter Matthews

After half a century of monopolising the top spot, Citizen Kane was beginning to look smugly inviolable. Call it Schadenfreude, but let's rejoice that this now conventional and ritualised symbol of 'the greatest' has nally been taken down a peg. The accession of Vertigo is hardly in the nature of a coup d'etat. Tying for r ith place in 1972, Hitchcock's masterpiece steadily inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel gratied at the modest revolution i f only for the proof that lm canons (and the versions of history they legitimate) are not completely fossilised. There may be no larger signicance in the bare fact that a couple of lms made in California 17 years apart have traded numerical rankings on a whimsically impressionistic list. Yet the human urge to interpret chance phenomena will not be denied, and Vertigo is a crafty, duplicitous machine for spinning meaning. At the very least, its championship bout with Kane affords a pretext to reect on two different myths of cinema. I doubt whether my personal recollection of either lm is unique. When I rst saw Kane at a revival in the midr 97os, I enjoyed the typical sensation of being knocked out No other movie before or since has quite so astounded me with its sheer muscular virtuosity a bombastic compendium of every known trick that epitomises the thrilling exhibitionist possibilities of the medium. In short, Kane fulls the idea of total cinema. As such, it remains a permanent touchstone for all young lmmakers who seek to aunt their wares, aiming wide instead of deep. If Welles's hammy pyrotechnics fail to smite me as they once did, it may be that I no longer need them. Reciprocally, I have grown into Vertigo. My initial response (on the occasion of a1984 rerelease together with
54 I Sight &Sound I Sept ember 2012

four other Hitchcock classics) was mild disappointment Though admiring its pictorial splendour, I found Kim Novak gauche, the plot baloney and the whole enterprise lacking the master's customary snap. I never supposed that I was merely retracing the steps of the lm's original Anglo-American critics. In 1958, John McCarten of The New Yorker had lambasted it as ''far-fetched nonsense", while Arthur Knight of Saturday Review crabbed that "technical facility is being exploited to gild pure dross". As for Sight 8' Sound, editor Penelope Houston's verdict was sniffy at best: "One is agreeably used to Hitchcock repeating his effects, but this time he is repeating himself in slow motion." How a band of lunatic French cinephiles intervened with the scandalous suggestion that a popular entertainer might be a serious artist and gradually won the non-auteurist heathen to their creed i s too familiar a tale to belabour here. Sufce to say that I too was dismally behind the beat. I still thought of Hitchcock as a crackerjack marksman who in Vertigo had overshot the target My epiphany occurred 20 years later when I was obliged to teach the lm on an undergraduate course. Perhaps the most emphatic conversions are the fruit of subliminal waiting. All I know is that everything I had judged wrong about Vertigo suddenly, alchemically seemed right. The gilded dross was transformed into pure cinema. Hitchcock regularly brandished the phrase,

The pleasure principle of Hollywood cinema succumbs to the death instinct. Never has a work of ostensible light entertainment been this dark

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yetnot conspicuous for his metaphysical leanings understood it simply to express the practical resources by which lm declares its independence. Editing, camera movement, sound design owe little to the prior arts; even mise en scene, with its roots in stagecraft, becomes sui generis through the innite mutability of screen space. The challenges of sovereignty are terrifying, however, and most lmmakers cravenly fall back on the inherited armature of theatre: well-told stories, plausible characters, good performances. Hitchcock's famous distrust of both actors and screenwriters certied an absolute visual elan that would brook no contradiction. For all that, he was far from being an accursed renegade like Welles. His genius rested on unconditional faith in the studio system and its mission of delivering smartly packaged escapism to a broad audience. But if Hitchcock religiously ticks the boxes of classical Hollywood style, he also bends them to his autocratic will. Rear Window lifts ordinary point-of-view shots to a new level of cold ruthlessness, thereby exposing the seedy voyeuristic illusion at the heart of cinematic pleasure. Vertigo, which concerns the effort to model a real woman into an ideal, is nowadays commonly diagnosed as another reexive text: the ultimate demystication of stardom and its origins in male fantasy. Such rational readings hold water, but leave me dissatised. They cannot account for a delirious excess that paradoxically borders on abstraction and renders the lm a true nonpareil in Hitchcock's career. Early reviewers who savaged the idiocy of the plot were in their way more prescient. Let me spare any existing Vertigo novices the details. Basically, we are asked to swallow that, in order for a murder to appear a suicide, criminal mastermind Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) can rely on the acrophobia of traumatised ex-cop Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) kicking in at the precise moment needed. (In his famous interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock volunteers that this is a "aw in the story" that still "bothers" him.) One may blame the source material, Boileau-Narcejac's 1954 potboiler D'entre les morts-, yet having engineered this baroque conspiracy, the script (by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor) then blows the whistle in an eccentrically timed ashback that genre fans still quarrel over. Identifying a structural aw, Hitchcock even reportedly got cold feet and wanted to remove the sequence at the last minute, but was talked out of recalling prints for re-editing by Paramount. The problem was bigger than he imagined. For in Vertigo, the tightly knit fabric of classical narrative starts to unravel. Who knows why this was happening, but television is the usual suspect. Confronted by its pipsqueak rival, 19505 Hollywood answered wit h spectaclelaying on panoramic colour extravaganzas for which traditional story was an increasingly slender alibi. The CGI-led blockbusters of our own era constitute the endgame in this disintegrative process, their loosely episodic form resembling beads on a string more than the intricate lockstep of cause and effect. Though Hitchcock cheerfully slept with the enemy when required, Vertigo is one of the plush exercises whereby a panicky industry hoped to recoup its dwindling gures. But here, the cinema of attractions yields an intense, surrealist poetry. As Scottie goes driving, driving around San Francisco in pursuit of his chimerical love interest Madeleine (Novak),

ENTRANCED The obsessive quest of Scottie (James Stewart) for lost love Madeleine (Kim Novak. also far left) has a dreamlike feel; below, Alfred Hitchcock

the action resolves into elaborate set pieces: the visit to the ower shop, the churchyard, the art museum, the McKittrick Hotel, the Golden Gate Bridge, the sequoia forest It could be a sightseer's itinerary, and indeed every year ocks of cinephiles do the 'Vertigo tour'. That such an institution has evolved is not surprising, for the movie holds a singular power to contaminate viewers with its own quality of dreamy obsession. Hitchcock's best critic Robin Wood describes the San Francisco locations as "little pockets of silence and solitude", both attaching to the city and somehow outside it. The silence is not literal, given Bernard Herrmann's throbbing, Wagnerian score. Yet the alternation between long, dialogue-free passages and scenes of talky exposition creates a strange, sluggish rhythm that waxes ever more ceremonial and trancelike. Robert Burks's glamorising cinematography (with its liberal use of fog lters) raises each place into a distinct fetish, isolated from the exigencies of plot Classical narrative pushes relentlessly forward. Vertigo stalls, rambles, repeats (three meals at Ernie's restaurant, three chases up the fatal bell tower). The goal-oriented, mystery-solving hero that Stewart essayed in previous Hitchcock lms now loses condence, drifting in perpetual circles. The entropy that aficts Scottie brings him within striking distance of Antonioni's listless, world-weary universe. His fear of heights is nominally cured through extremity; but if he starts by hanging over one abyss, he nishes by staring into another. So it is that the pleasure principle of Hollywood cinema succumbs to the death instinct. For behind Scottie's obscure compulsion to possess Madeleine/Judy lurks a desire for nothingness the ecstasy of sinking forgetfully into the One. Never has a work of ostensible light entertainment been this dark. Filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein had his own word for pure cinema: photogenic. Once it had relinquished the "historical", the "educational" and the "novelistic", he believed, the camera lens in conjunction with the lm author's personality would illuminate the inner "moral value" of things. That's just what occurs in Vertigo. When Judy, having reluctantly agreed to pin up her bleached hair in exact conformity with the lost object Madeleine, advances through the green neon haze of her shabby hotel room, both Scottie and we catch an unspeakable glimpse of the sublime. Modern, civilised Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) may mock Scottie's fascination and, of course, it all turns out to be a shell game perpetrated by arch-choreographer Elster (or his accomplice, Hitchcock). But that's cinema an organised lie that gestures, however dumbly, at truth.
Septembet 201 S i g h t & S o u n d i 55

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