Critics Poll from Sight and Sound

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CRITICS' POLLAnonymousSight and Sound; Sep 2012; 22, 9; ProQuest Centralpg. 41

CRITICS' PO LLAnonymousSight and Sound; Sep 2012; 22, 9; ProQuest Centralpg. 41

Please note the too sample entries below represent just afew edited highlights of the 846 voting entries we receivedfor the 2012 Critics' Poll. The full interactive versions will beposted online on 15 August at biforg.ulesightsoundpoll2or 2

TARIQ Allwr tcr

Charulata (So Ray)The Discreet Charm of theBourgeoisie (Mendel)The Bettie of Algiers (Itniecorpo)Tout va bier, (Godard)Osaka Elegy (Mizoguchl)Rashomon (Kurosawa)The Puppetmester (Hem)i f-. (Anderson)Entranced Earth/Terraam trans* (Rocha)Crimson Gold (Pmaln)

GEOFF ANDREWtitc head of fi lm programme BF'Southbank

The General (Keaton B ru c k-m a n )I:Atalanta ( Vigo)His Girt 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 sufficed in1952, but tio years on we need a

top 20.1 k no w i t' s a lways been

difficult to narrow one's list down,but we have so many more greatfilms to choose from now.

Though I've always voted forWelles in such polls, this is thefirst time I've opted for CitizenKane. I used to be a bit perverseabout it, preferring the warmthof The Magnificent Arribersoits, theB. movie bravura of Duch ofEviL themischievous magic of Flor Fake.But in the last decade, even morethan before, I've watched this firstfeature many times, and each time,it reveals new treasures. Clearly,no single film is the greatestever made. But if there were one,for me Kane would now be thestrongest contender, bar none.

MICHAEL ATKINSONIS c r itic

Aguine, Wrath of God (Herzog)CAtalante ( Vigo)Blue Velvet (Lynch)Celine and Julie GoBoating (Rivette)Citizen Kane ( Welles)Late Spring (Ozu)A Man Escaped (Brrsson)Pierrot le fou ((Iiodard)La Regis du jou (Renoir)

Sherlock Jr. (Keaton)How would the final results changeif the poll's ten-votes-per-list metrictook on, say, lists of 20 or even 30selections? Would it make a morepertinent list? Hard to say; lustwanted to list more, dammit.

CAMERON BAILEYCanada, artIstic director TorontoInternational Film Festival

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 (Scorsese)A History of Violence (C•mnenherg)

LUCIANO BARISONEI ta y/Switzerland Director Visions du Reel

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)I chose not according to somerational and calculated criteriabut spontaneously, like someonewho was recalling some of hisfavourite souvenirs or i f youprefer- as a psychoanalyst's clientinvolved in a word associationtest. I don't know why I chosethese films: the best films are inthe thousands and I don't really

In the last decade,even more thanbefore, I'vewatched 'CitizenKane' manp times,and each timeit reveals newtreasuresGeoffAndrew

believe that life is a hierarchicalsystem, but rather a collective one.

I probably chose thembecause they revealed somethingclosely connected to my ownintimate reality. I belong to ageneration who was born inthe 195os -- that's why you don'tfind any new film in my list

RUTH BARTONIreland head of department of fi l mstudies, Trinity College. DublinThe Four Horsemen of theApocalypse (Ingram)The Night of theHunter (Laughton)Staiiker (Taricovsky)Exotica (Egoyan)The Red Shoes (Powellif Pressburger)Brief Encounter (Lean)Citizen Kane( Welles)Rashomon (Kumsawa)Pepe le Moko (Duvivier)10 (Marostarni)My choice was guided firstlyby my own taste, most of allfor a visual cinema that offers,through its images, pleasures ofa kind that invite you to returnover and again to them. I alsoselected films that seemed tome to have made a difference,artistically, historically, politically.

RAYMOND BELLOURFrance. critic and theoristLA Jetee (Marker)Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais)Sunrise: A Song of TWoHumans (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)An hasard Baithazer (Thrsson)I find my list pretty ridiculous- so many other titles come tomind. Its only justification is thatthese titles are some of the filmsthat have counted the most inmy relation to cinema and thedevelopment of my theoreticalwork (The order is aleatory).

STIG BJORKMANSweden, f ilmmaker & writer

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 theHunter (Laughton)BePhant ( Van Sant)Persona (Bergman)Melancholia (von Trier)For every decade that passes,the choice becomes moreand more difficult Theydon't stop making Films!So, this time maybe not the tenbest films ever, but films lean(and do) see over and over againwith the same, or increasingpleasure. (Well, Melancholia I'veonly seen twice so far, but I'mcertain we'll meet again...)

So, five unhappy or unfulfilledromances, three tales of eviland two Nordic introspection&What does that say about me?

PETER BRADSHAWUK critic , The Guardian

I Am Cuba (Kalatozov)The Addiction (Ferrara)Raging Bull (Scorsese)Andrei Rublev ( Tarkovsky)Kind Hearts andCoronets (Hamer)Singin' in the Rain (Donen 6-Kelly)In the Mood for Love( (W a n g )Hidden (Harieke)Annie Hall (Allen)Black Narcissus (Powell

Pressbun3er)

ANCHALEECHAIWORAPORNThailand, critic and researcher

Breathless (Godard)The Piano (Campion)In the Realm of theSenses (Oshima)RagalentOn (Kurosawa)Yellow Earth (Choi)Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)The 400 Blows ( Tr-uffa ut)The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice)Citizen Kane( Welle)Uncle Boonmee Who Can RecallHis Past Lives ( Weerasethakil)As an academic, a critic, a womanand a film buff, my selections arebased on the films' achievementsin developing film theories,new cinematic languages, socialidentification - and on mypersonal enjoyment. The top onecombines all these elements.

JUSTIN CHANGUS senior film cr Va r i e ty '

Chungking Express (Wong)Flowers of Shanghai (Has)The Godfather Part II (Coppola)The Lady Eve (Sturges)Meet Main St Louis (Minnelh)La Rot& du Jou (Renoir)Rio Bravo (Hawks)Sansho dayu (Mizogucht)Sunrise:A Song of WooHumans (Marnau)Vertigo (Hitchcock)

PEGGY CHIA0Taiwan. producer, professor. fchair. writer

Arnarcord (Reim)Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)Citizen Kane ( Welles)A City of Sadness (Hou)The Godfather (Coppola)La Regis du Jou (Renoir)The Searchers (Ford)Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)Tokyo Story (Ozu)Vertigo (Hitchcock)I chose them not only becausethey represent the milestonesof film history, but also becausethey are the films that I can watchagain and again and never gettired of. Even though I know allof them by heart each line andeach frame - they still move meeach time in different parts. As Igrow older, my readings of themmay change slightly, but my lovefor them has never changed.

IAN CHRISTIEUK critic and film hstonan.Birkbeck

University of LondonNot in any special order, excepthowl wrote them dowmA Matter of Life and Death(Itwell Prossbarger)

Casino (Scorsese)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 TwoHumans (Mamas)Tokyo Story (Ozu)I didn't look at my last choice of tenyears ago, but I think this is almostthe same, apart from Sokumv andOzu butting in. I wonder if thisis influenced by having been inJapan last year. I also nonce thatthe music of Le Mepris is quotedin Guth!), which may revealsome subterranean connection:

There's a great deal wrongwith this list: I've simply baulkedat selecting from the riches ofHitchcock, despite becomingmore and more interested in hiswork as a whole. Likewise Ford:how to choose from such a career(but I do feel it's time to treat TheSearchers as the obvious canonicFord, and pay more attention toearlier work). And what aboutLang (especially after seeingthe magnificent restorationof Metropolis) and Renoir? AndBergman and Antonioni, bothdying at the same moment howcould any self-respecting list ofthe ten greatest omit these?

MICHEL CIMENTFrance, editor. 'Posit it

2001:A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)Casanova (Fellini)Persona (Bergman)Providence (Resnais)Sunrise:A Song of lbyHumans (Murnau)Madame de-. (Max Ophuls)La Regie du jou (Renoir)Salvatore Giuliano (Rots)Sensho dayu (Mizoguchi)Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch)The latest film mentioned is from1977 --1 deliberately wanted toinclude works that have stoodthe test of time. Also, the firsthalf of my list is composed offilms in which imagination(today much underprivileged)plays a central role. The secondhalf is more related to a realisticapproach, however arbitrarythe distinction may seem,

RICHARD CORLISSUS , c,t ic 1 i rn e

Chungking Express ( Wong)Citizen Kane( Welles)The Lady Eve (Sturges)Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard)Mouchette (Bresson)Psycho (Hitchcock)Pyaasa (Dun)The Searchers (Ford)The Seventh Seal (Bergman)WALL-E (Stanton)Six of my ten selections weremade between 1941 and 1967,though on three continents.These aren't simplydemonstrations of loyalty tomovies I loved in my youth, butalso an argument that most filmsof the last half-century have beenvaria tions on earlier models, whose

surpassing audacity and Cli ?

craft they cannot match.

Se p te mb e r 201:1 I Sig fi th e So u n d 14 1



2012 POLL

C M A R K COUSINSUK. critic and documentanstThe 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 Maldunalbcg5The House Is Black (Farrokitzad)La Martian et la Putain (Eustache)Minimatm The Victims andtheir World (nuchimoto)I bang on about film aesthetics,about formal innovation, andyet in my list of ten films, whatdo I see? People rather than style.Lonely, resilient people. EvenJack Lemmon in The Apartment islonely. Taken together, my first fivechoices could teach much of whatthere is to know about film style,but look at the last three: black-and-white heartbreakers. A Moment ofInnocence is very funny.

MANOHLA DARGISUS critic. 'The New York Times'Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)Bilitri Lyndon (Kubrick)nowers of Sharighel (Hint)The nOWers of StRands (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 greatestfilms, but rather ten that mademe look at cinema, the world andmy life differently. That makesthis list somewhat nostalgic.

Here are some reasons whyI came up with this list today:Balthazar wearing a crown offlowers and dying among thesheep. The candlelight, 'Sarabande'(Handel) and the Women ofIreland' (Sean 0 Riada) in BarryLyndon. The camera moving acrossthe pale faces and shadows in theopening of Flowers ofShanghai - thefirst of 39 shots in the film. SaintFrancis shushing the birds so thatGod can hear him while he prays("My little brothers, you can praiseGod so easily, because you're free tofly through the air so pure."). Theparallel structure of The GodfatherThrt IL with Vito ascending andMichael descending; the way theyoung Clemenza stands pointinghis gun at the silhouette of apoliceman, evoking the codifiedgestures in silent cinema andunderlining Coppola's two otherhistories (the Corleone's, cinema's).Jack Smith in the bathtub in LittleStabs at Happiness and Ken Jacobsin voiceover ("Almost no one inthis film do I see anymore"). "Thiswasn't the film we dreamed of,"the doomed boy says in Maseulinffininin. -T h i s w a sn ' t t he t ot al film

that each of us had carried withinhimself Niel, the film that wewanted to make or, more secretly,no doubt, that we wanted to live."

The cinematographer RobertElswit said that while shootingThere Will Be Bbod he and directorPaul Thomas Anderson looked

Sight ikSound Sept ember 2012

THE CRITICS

I bang on aboutfilm aesthetics,aboutformalinnovation, yet inmy list, what do Isee? People ratherthan style. Lonely,resilient peopleMark Cousinsat traditional film dailies ratherthan so-called digital dailiesIn explaining the benefits offilm dailies, Elswit provided aninadvertent explanation of whyso many contemporary studioand independent movies look sobad: with film dailies 'you can'tkid yourself about focus and allthe other technical issues that cancome back to bite you later whenyou go to do an IP jinterpositivel.Or when you make a digital fileinto a negative, and you find Outthat those ten shots you sort of sawsharply with your D5 or HD dailiesreally weren't that sharp at all Andthen, of course, the color space ofmotion picture film is completelydifferent than digital color space."

In Touch of Evil the cameratravelling across the borderwith both the newlywed Mrand Mrs Vargas and the blondewith "this ticking in my head"!Henry Mancini/ Charlton Hestonstriding across the screen likethe Colossus of Rhodes andOrson Welles looming in it like acolossus of cinemaithe overheadshot of Vargas driving/Dietrichlighting a cigar (evoking vonSternberg) and eulogising HankQuinlan (suggesting Welles).

Growing up in New York inthe r96os and 705, my farnilyonly had a black-and-white TV, sowow, was I surprised when I firstsaw The Wizand of Oz in colour!

STEPHANE DELORMEFrance, editor in chief. 'Cahiers du cinema'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/Ladel eat is *sus (Gremillon)LAtalante (Vigo)

DAVID DENBYUS, 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)H u m a n s( M u n r au )The Life of Ohm (Mizoguchi)Journey to Italy (Rosseffini)The Thse of Life (Malick)

MAR DIESTRO-DOPI DOSpa n/UK 'Sight 8, SoundMulholland 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 aboutcinema is its capacity to reveal thesurreal and the fantastic within arecognisable reality -to create anextrasensory depth that's more intune with the way we experienceour lives (or 'real', if you like). Itis this trait that for me elevatescinema to the category of an art_The link between my ten films isa conscious foregrounding of themind's processes-explored by themedium ever since its origins, andmost famously by the Surrealists -which irremediably takes us backto the central tenet of Calderon dela Barca's 1635 play Lift Is a DreamThat titular precept undoubtedlypermeates all of my choices.

GEOFF DYERUK wnterThe Big Sleep (Hawks)Bringing up Baby (Hawks)The Clock (Marclay)Koyaanisciatsi (Reggio)The Maltese Falcon (Huston)Mirror (Ta rico vsky)Point Blank (Boorman)Stalker (Tarkovsky)Taxi Driver (Scorsese)Where Eagles Date (Hutton)I can't detect any logic or definingidea of what I want from a film inthis list They're just the films thatinsisted on popping into my head.The neon of their titles flashedbrightest among the hundredsof others vying for my attention.The two Tarkovsky films, Mirrorand Stalker; have a primal powerand profundity that is unmatchedby any of the others. If I hadto choose just one it would beChristian Marclays The Clock

ROGER EBERTUS, critic 'Chicago Sun-Times'Aguirre, Itirath of God (Herzog)Apocalypse Now (Coppola)Citizen Kane (Welles)La doice vita (Fellim)The General (Keaton & Brucktnan)Raging Bull (Scorsese)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 tennew films. But it was too muchlike a stunt Lists are ridiculous,but if you're going to vote, youhave to play the game. Besides, thethought of starting with a blankpage and a list of all the filmsever made fills me with despair.

Sot decided there must be one

new film_ The two candidates,for me, were Charlie Kaufman'sSynecdoche, New York and TerrenceMalick's The Tree cf Life Likethe Herzog, the Kubrick and

the Coppola, they are films ofalmost foolhardy ambition. Likemany of the films on my listthey were directed by the artistwho wrote then. Like several ofthem, they attempt no less thanto tell the story of an entire life. Icould have chosen either film - Ichose The The of because it'smore affirmative and hopeful.

BERNARD EISENSCHITZFrance f ilm historian and translator.The Birth of a Nation (Gnffith)From the Clouds to theResistance/Della nube allaresistenzs (Straub-Huillet)Gertrud (Dreyer)M (Lang)Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin)The River (Renoir)The Life of °ham (Mizoauchi)Seven Women (Ford)By the Bluest of Seas(Barnet & Mardanin)The Wadding March (von Stmheim)'Greatest films' is fine, but 'of alltime' sounds like a somewhatpretentious definition, regardingan art that's been in existencefor less than r so years. Even so,nobody can claim to be totallyknowledgeable- I certainly can'tMy emotional responses to, andrational appraisals oL films arelimited in time and space-eventhough I've tried to cover asmany of them as I could here,mostly imaginary, from Griffith'sConfederate States of America toRenoir's India This, then, is whatthis list can be at bests reminderof a history that runs a serious riskof being entirely forgotten soon.

THOMAS P. ELSAESSERNetherlands, University of AmsterdamAll-time classics in noparticular orderMetropolis (Lang)La Regle du leu (Renoir)Citizen Kane (Welles)The Searchers (Ford)Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchz)Modem classics:The Marriage of MariaBraun (Fassbinder)Blade Runner (Scott)Pulp Fiction (Tarantino)Pierrot le tau (Godard)A Taste of Cherry (Karostann)

FERRONI BRIGADEAka Chr stoph Haber, Olaf Moiler andBarbara Warm. Austria/Germany. criticsThe Effects of the Atomic Bombon Hiroshima and Nagasald (Ito)It Will Never Happen Again/

In the 19605, myfamily only had ablack-and-whiteTV, so wow,was I surprisedwhen Ifirst saw'The Wizard ofOz' in colourManohla Dargis


Unzere Kinder (Gross)The Long Gray line (Ford)The Plague of theZombies (Gillina)Echo of the Jackboot (Romm)79 Springtimes (Alvarez)Essene ( Wiseman)The Age of Cosimo deMedici (Rossellim)Everyday Life Ins SyrianVillage (Amiralay)The Memory of Justice(Marcel Ophuls)We don't believe that these arethe ten greatest films of all time,but we are convinced that itwould be better if they were.

SCOTT FOUNDASUS. critic and associate r-L r e c t o r o fprogramming at the Film Society ofLincoln CenterDiary of a Country Priest (Bresson)The Shop Around theCorner (Lubitsch)Pierrot le fou (Godard)Citizen Kane ( Welles)The Godfather Part II (Coppola)Celine and Julie GoBoating (Rivette)The Passion of Joanof Arc (Dreyer)Night of the Living Dead (Romero)In a Lonely Place (N. Ray)The Wind Will CarryUs (10arvstamA fool's errand, as others havenoted. Even as I submit this list(electronically), my jacket pocketsare stuffed with scraps of hotelnotepaper with dozens of otherpossible titles scribbled on them,not least Andrei Rublev, A BrighterSummer Day, The kiting vie ChineseBookie, Lost, Lost, Lost and Syndromesand a Century. What do theseand the other titles above have incommon? Nothing except thatthey opened my own mind andmany others' t o new possibilitiesin cinema, and cont inue to do soeach time I revisit them. No matterwhat the word 'cinema' connotesby the next edition of this poll, Ifeel sure they will remain withus, forever in the firmament.

CHRISTOPHER FRAYLINGUK writer, critic and broadcaster.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 inthe West (Leone)

PHILIP FRENCHUK. critic. 'The Observer'Listed alphabetically:Au revs* les enfants (Malle)La Grande Illusion (Renoir)Kind Hearts andCoronets (Hamer)The Leopard (Visconti)Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelh)nether Panchall (S Ray)Seven Samurai (Kumsawa)Stagecoach (Ford)Vertigo (Hitchcock)Wild Strawberries(Bergman) 0


2012 POLL

City Lights (Chaplin) J. HOBERMANThe Godfather (Coppola) US, critic

Once upon a Throe In Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)the West (Leone) Flaming Cro fts's' (Smith)The Passion of Joan The Girl from Chicago (Leonard)of Arc (Dreyer) Man with a Movie CameraLa Raffle du Jeu (Renoir) (Dziga Vertov)The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice) Patter Pancludi (S Ray)Wild Strawberries (Bergman) Rose Hobart (ComaA list without Werner Herzog, La Regis du leu (Renoir)Alfred Hitchcock, Terrence Malick Shoah (Lanzmann)and Wins Wenders - all among my WO or Three Things I Knowfavourite directors - and without About Her (Godard)any female directors; how is thiseven possible? Having to selectonly ten movies was harder than

Vertigo (Hitchcock)

ALEXANDER HORWATHI imagined. However, aside from Austria, director. Austrian Film Museuma somewhat melodramatic touch. Man with a Movie CameraI think the list does credit to the (Dziga Vertov)diversity that describes great Fox News Outtakes 4-399/400filmmaking the wonder of love,the terror of war, remembering

NYC Street Scenes andNoises (Anonymous, 1929)

what it's like to be a child, learning Late Spring (Ozu)what it means to become old, the Saga' in the Rain (Donen 8

- K e l l y )coldness of loneliness or, how Sdroeshater (Kubeika)unfulfilled love can be meaningful. The Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak)

I Am Twenty (Khutsiyev)PIERS HANDLING Line Describing a Cone (McCall)Canada. director, Toronto International Reisender Krieger (Schocher)Film Festival My Hand Outstretched toSunrise: A Song of Too the Winged Distance andHumans (Murnau) Sightless Measure (Beavers)Man with a Movie Camera While it should be pretty(Dziga Vertou) obvious that these are the tenVertigo (Hitchcock) greatest films of all time, I stillPierrot le fou (Godard) wonder if everyone will agree.Au hasawd Balthazar (Bresson) The order is chronological.Late Spdng (Ozu)Fort Apache (Ford) GARY INDIANADays and Nights In US, novelistthe Forest (S Rap) The Passion ofI:et:1155e (Antonion of Arc (Dreyer)Viddiana (Builuet) Metropolis (Lang)Almost impossible to justify a Au heard Balthazar (Berman)selection of ten films anymore. Los oMdados (Buriael)No Renoir, Hawks, Mizoguchi, Satentange (Tarr)Rossellini, Chaplin, Tarkovsky React le fou (Godard)on the list -and no film later In a Year with 13 Moonsthan 1970! These selections are (Fasshiricto)highly personal, and include films Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein)that spoke to me because they Army of S ha dows

(M e l v i l l e )either broke rules and expanded The Death of Mariapossibilities within cinema, orcontinue to move and stimulateme after every re-screening.

Malibran (Schroeter)

NI CK JAMESUK. motor. 'Sight & Sound

MOLLY HASKELL Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)US. author and critic A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)Madame de_ (Max Ophuls) I Know Where I'm Going!The Shop Around the (Powell & Pressburger)Corner (Lubitsch) In the Mood for Love (

W a n g )Au hasard Balthazar (Berman) Out of the Past (Tourneur)I Know Where I'm Going! Singin' in the Rain (Dances & Kell)))(Powell & Pressburger) The Passion of JoanClaire's Knee (Rohmer) of Arc (Dreyer)Vertigo (Hitchcock) Taxi Driver (Scorsese)Alias amours (Pialat) Uzak (Ceylon)The Awful 'Birth (McCarty) Vertigo (Hitchcock)Chinatowm (Iblansh) As usual, it's about what you leaveSunrise: A Song of Two out but also crucially for me thisHumans (Muniau) time - it was important that my

list did not make me feel stifled. ICARLOS F. HEREDERO dumped from my 2 00 2 list threeSpain, director, Caiman Cuadernos fabulous films that I love slightlyde Cine less than I did, perhaps because I'veVertigo (Hitchcock) seen them too often: Barry Lyndon,Le Boole du jou (Renoir) The Conformist and Hotel Terminus.Tokyo Story (Ozu) I did an auterist swap - PowellHistoiras) du cinema (Godard) and Pressburger's I Know WhereIn the Mood for Love (Wong) Pm Going! for Black Narcissus (pureThe Searchers (Ford) favouritism) - and I replacedShoah (Lanzmarm) Lherbier's LArgent with The PassionThe Green Ray (Roh titer) cf loan of Are simply becauseGertrud (Dreyer) Falconetti got under my skinThe Magnificent completely when I saw Dreyer'sArnbersons (Welles) film again recently.

r b t Except for the Renoir, Isaw all these films when

they opened, and they've becomepart of the fabric of my life. Theabsence of Lang, Hawks, On',Mann, Tavernier, Mizoguchi,Antonioni, Donen, Welles, Wilder,Came, Truffaut, Peckinpah, Powell,Losey, Scorsese, Leigh and a dozenothers is a cause for sadness.

JEAN-MICHEL FRODONtrance. critic

In chronological orderSunrise: A Song of TwoHumans (Mumau)Latalante (Vigo)M (Lang)Singin' in the Rain (Donen & Kel4r)The Searchers (Fond)Vivre sa vie (Godard)Shoal, (Lanzrnann)Close-Up (Marostarni)Still Life (Jia)Unde Boonmee Who Can RecallHis Past Lives (Weerosethakul)It's only with shame and modestyone can send such a list. Shame thatthere is no Hou Hsiao-Hsien, noEisenstein, no Resnais, no Bergman,no Ozu, no The MagnrentAmbersons,Gmed, The GreatDictator, Antichrist, Avatar or OutOng modesty, because obviouslyone week earlier or later my listwould have been different - andalso without these other titles Idishonestly just added, But lists aregood anyway. they have effects, andhopefully positive effects, thoughin unpredictable ways. This is whywe should keep making them,

FU HONGXINGChina Director of China Film ArchiveA Tale of the Wind (Ivens)Intolerance (GMI fith)The Adventures of PrinceAdened (Reiniger)Spring in a Small Town (Eel)Rashomon (Kurosawa)Wild Strawberries (Bergman)L'avventura (Antoniom)Andrei Rublev (Tarkomky)Once upon a Time inAmerica (Leone)Farewell My Concubine (Chen)Spring in a Small Town is absolutelythe best Chinese film ever- themost successful drama film thatembodies Eastern philosophyand Chinese sentimentalism.

Farewell My Concubine is aminiature of China's historyfrom the 19305 to the 1970s.This film has become the key tounderstand Chinese society.

CHRIS FUJIWARAUS/UK. artistic director, EdinburghInternational Film FestivalSome 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)floating Clouds (Naruse)Man's Favorite Sport? (Hawks)The Engagement/I fidanzati (Ohm)As quickly as I could, I listed tengreat films that I knew well, hadseen many times, and thoughtI could watch for years to come

441 Sight &Sound 1 September 2012

THE CRITICS

with pleasure and with newdiscoveries to make each viewing.Then I put the list away A fewdays later! took it out, changeda few things, and put it awayagain. A few days after that, it stillseemed OK, so that's my list.

SERGIO GRMEK GERMAN!Italy. critic and archivistThe list follows the alphabeticalorder of the original titles -and I see this becomes alsothe most logical orderThe Bells of St May's (McCaw)The House Is Black (Forrolchzad)Whigs (Shepitko)Ullth (Rossen)A Matter of Time (Minnelh)This Night/Ntsit dechien (Schroeter)The Shadow/L'ombra (Bianchi)Ortiet (Dreyer)Pais/ (Rossellim)La Sortie des usinesLumiere (Lumfere)I decided not to consider historicalimportance, chronological andgeographical proportions-, I don'tunderrate the periods of filmhistory and the territories leftout, and it pained me to missout any Filipino film or manysilent masterpieces, and someof my most beloved directors,from Griffith, Dwan, Laurel andHardy, Mumau through Genina,Cottafavi, Fisher to Munk, Ghatak,Tomes. The only representativerule I accepted was not to listmore than one title by director

The choice was finally on themost indispensable films to livewith every day the ones thatbetter tell to me what is cinema.

RYAN GILBEYUK. cattc. 'New Statesman'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 AboutGlenn Gould (Girard)

ANNE GJELSVIKNorway. professor ic him studies.Norwegian University of Science andTechnologyApocalypse Now (Coppola)The Best Years of OwLives (Wyler)Brief Encounter (Lean)

I added 'ThePassion of Joanof Arc' becauseFalconetti gotunder rny skincompletely when Isaw Dreyer'sfilmagain recentlyNick fames


'Close-Up'combineddocumentary anddrama, destroyingthe boundaryofformality ofcinema in the mostcreative wayKim li-seokKENT JONESUS, criticThe Musketeers ofPig Ailey (Gnffith)The MagnificentAmbersons ( Welle5)Notorious (Hitchcock)Pickpocket (Bresson)Rio Bravo (Hawks)Wavelength (Snow)Raging Bull (Scorsese)Fanny and Alexander-complete version (Bergman)Shoah (Lanzmann)The Puppebnaster (Hou)In my case, the most painfulomissions are: Sunrise, The ShopAround the Comer, Raiser, Journeyto Italy, The River(Renoir), TheSearchers, Nicht versOhnt, 2001, Bellede jour, Crimes and Misdemeanorsand Histoire(s) du cinema Considerthe above 'official' list assmomentary freeze-frame of oneside of an endlessly spinning coinwith these alternates on the flipside-along with the collected worksof Brakh,age, Cassavetes, Conner,Frampton, Frank, Ozu, Powell withand without hessburger fromThe Edge of the World through TheSmall Back Room, Val Lewton fromCat People through Bedlam, thebest of the Freed Unit from 1944to r 955 (le the best Minnelli andDoneniKelly titles), the best ofpre-code Warner Bros, about fouror five other Hawks films and tenor i i other Hitchcocks. That's stillleaving outs lot. So why choose the'official' chronologically orderedten? It's certainly not becauseof any certitude in the matter ofranking. Maybe it's because theyseem to me to contain so much.

NASREEN MUNNI KABIRIndia, schoar and documentaristAglaia (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, K e l l y )Sunset Blvd. ( Wilder)The Third Man (Reed)All these films are from theperiod 1949-6o, which I findparticularly brilliant all over theworld. Most audiences in theWest aren't aware that It was alsoa golden period in Indian cinemaThe Indian films in this selectiondon't feature on many lists of great

movies but they might if 0better known.


by Jane GilesAs a teenager in the i98os my introduction to The Passionofloan ofArc came via Godard's Vivre sa vie(1962), in whichthe heroine Nana (Anna KarMa) sees Dreyer's film in acinema, a man's hand snaking around her shoulders. Nanaweeps 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. Itwas and remains an unassailable giant of early cinema, atranscendental film comprising tears, fire and madnessthat relies on extreme close-ups of the human face.

Renee Falconetti was 35 when she played the role ofJoan (a teenager when condemned to death in 1434 Drey-er brutally extracted a desperate, brilliant performancefrom the actress, forcing her to kneel on stone to show thepain on her face. He insisted that they shot in silence.

Over the years, Joan has often been a difficult film to see.Dreyer's original version was thought to have been lost ina nitrate fire, and even after it was miraculously found in

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARCCARL THEODOR DREYER

8 1 / 2FEDERICO FELLINI

perfect condition in a Norwegian psychiatric institution in1981, it was often out of distribution (though it is finallydue to be released on UK DVD and Blu-ray later this year).

Even during its lost years, however, Joan has remainedembedded in the critical consciousness, thanks to thestrength of its early reception, reinforced by the strik-ing stills that appeared in film books, by its presence inGodard's film and recently by a series of live screenings ac-companied by Richard Einhom's choral work 'Voices ofLight', or Nick Cave and Dirty Three, or Adrian Utley andWill Gregory, or Cat Power. To hear any one of these scoresperformed live with the film on the big screen is an unfor-gettable experience.

In this year's S&Spoll, Joan has risen to no. 9. But in 2010it was designated the most influential film of all time inthe Toronto International Film Festival's 'Essential icio' list,where Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as "the pinna-cle of silent cinema—and perhaps of the cinema itself'.


by Mar Diestro-DopidoThe title famously refers to the total number of films thatFederico Fellini had made up to that point in his career,so it's no surprise that 8 V, is his most personal work, inessence a film about the process of filmmaking. The filmhas been a fixture in S6S top tens, but what's significantis that it regularly takes an even higher position in thedirectors' ten best—for in the history of cinema, 8 Vi is argu-ably the film that most accurately captures the agonies ofcreativity and the circus that surrounds filmmaking.

After the huge success of his previous feature La dokevita, Fellini turned his focus from portraying the circusthat is life itself — a theme that's always present in hiswork, be it in the more literal sense of La stmda, or the ce-lebrity-related shenanigans in La doke vita— and chose tolook at the workings of his own mind, represented in thecharacter of Guido (masterfully played by Fellini's alterego Marcell° Mastroianni), a famous director who faces acreative crisis before beginning his next film. As Guido/Fellini's mental journey unfolds, the process of self-analy-sis/discovery is what constitutes the film itself.

In equal parts narcissistic, self-deprecating, bitter,nostalgic, warm, critical and funny, 8 'Zis also a brilliantportrayal of Fellini's unique filmmaking. Stunninglyfilmed, beautifully grotesque and symbolic, in 8 V3dreams,nightmares, reality and memories coexist within the sametime-frame; the viewer sees Guido's world not as it is, butmore 'realistically' as he experiences it, inserting the filmin a lineage that stretches from the Surrealists to DavidLynch. But perhaps most poignantly, Fellini's film speaksabove all about a faith in finding a kind of purity (in love,film, life) that can only be conjured in the mind of thecreator — a notion that almost so years after it was maderesonates even more as our individual perspectivesbecome increasingly isolated, trapped in the progressivelycomplex maze of our mediated world.


2012 POLL

0 DAVE KEHRUS, columnist. ' The New YorkTimes: 'Film Comment'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 (Griffith)Docks of New York (von Sternberg)All long-take, mise en Sthrle movies,with the partial exception ofIntolerance Perhaps this is my knee-jerk reaction against the currentmania for machine-gun editing.

MARK KERMODEUK. criticThe 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-HOSouth Korea, honorary festival director.Busan International Film FestivalIvan'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 films,ImKwon-taek's Mandalais themost profound filmic study onreligion and salvation; the Houis an epic on the history of ordealtold via a tragedy of a family,the Kurosawa, a masterpiecethat escapes the limitations ofa genre film; and lia Zhangke's2009 Plagirm, a cinematicachievement that looks into asociety in a period of upheaval

KIM JI-SEOKSouth Korea. executive ProgrammerBusan international Film Festival2031: A Space Odyssey (Kubncit)A City of Sadness (Hou)A Moment of innocence(M. MakhmalbajjA Tale 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 (0Z142001 is the film that describesthe encounter between Godand man in the most dramaticway. Close4Ipimprnsivelycombined documentary anddrama, destroying the boundaryof formality of cinema in themost creative way. Nostalgiashows the fate and hope of anartist in a dreamlike style.

46 I Sight/Mound I September 2012

THE CRITICS

DIETER KOSSLICKGermany, director, Berlin InternationalFilm FestivalThe Great Dictator (Chaplin)Some Like It Hot ( Wilder)Magnolia (PT Anderson)The Life and Death of ColonelBlimp (Powell Pressburger)Ben-Hur (Wyler)Gennany Year Zero (RosseRim)MA Driver (Scorsese)One, Two, Three ( Wilder)Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)The Enigma of KasperHauser (Herzog)

ESIN KUCUKTEPEPINARTurkey, criticAndrei 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 tolist films like Goodbye Dragon Inn,Spirited Away, The Wind Will Cam)Us,. Obviously struggling! Then Irecalled my beloved mother saying"Cinema offers bodily experience.Loosen up and lose yourself like inthe playground" That was said toa six-year-old me whose basic aimwas to enjoy a bottle of soda duringthe interval So I tied to loosenup, but still with regrets I had tomiss out La kale du ieu, Metropolis,Belle defour, LAtaianteand Turkishcontemporaries such as Times andWinds, Clouds cf May, Innocence,Somersauh in a Coffin or cult classicllme to Love, and countless more.Still making this list was a greatride, recalling all those emotions.

DANA LINSSENNetherlands, editor in chief De Filmkrant.film critic 'NRC Handelsblad•Shen' In the Rain (Dollen & Kelly)Sans solidi (Marker)Yellow Submarine (Dunning)Jeanne Dieknann, 23spat du Commerce 1080Bruxeiles(Alairnan)A Man Escaped (I3rrsson)Chungking Express (W a n g )The House is Black llurrykhzad)The intruder (Denis)Fight Club (lIncher)RR (Benning)I am not a list person. They driftwith the clouds. The top three,however, have been unchangedfor years. And for these three filmsI could even narrow it down toparticulargreat' scenes: the famoussinging and dancing in the rain; theopening sequence with the Englishvoiceover, but with the originalFrench Racine quote: "The distancebetween countries compensatessomewhat for the excessivecloseness of time" (although I lovethe Eliot one too) and the finalpandemonium that spells/says/sings: "All You Need Is Love". Thesescenes made me love cinema i nall its magic, discomfort andcapacity to see beyond the image.

The other films blew my

mind at some point, probably forthe same reasons. But I cannotexactly say why; that is whyI keep returning to them. Ingeneral that is my only criterion incompiling lists and 'rating' films:which ones would I like to seeagain, here and now. It happensrather intuitively. But I have tobow my head in humility fornot being able to include JohnSmith's The Girl Chewing Gum,Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind WillCarry Us Tsai Ming-liang's WhatTime Is It There?, AbderrahmaneSissako's Bamako or Agnes 1/aorta'sThe Beaches cf Agnes Oh well.

TIINA LOKKEstonia. Black Knights FestivalCitizen Kane ( Welles)Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)Andrei %Wry (Tarkovsky)Zero de conduits (V i g o )ArnarcordPulp Action (Tarantino)A Taste of Cherry (16amstann)A One and a 1Wo (Yang)Spring, Summer, Autumn,Winter... and Spring (Km)One Flew over theCuckoo's Nest (Forman)

VERENA LUEKENGermany. film editor.'Frankfurter Allgemene Zeitung'The Leopard (Visconti)L'avventura (Antonion0The 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 decidewhat to do. Thirty movies wouldbe easier, r oo apiece of cake. Butten? Finally,! decided to leaveout the films that we've knownfor decades belong to this listCitizen Kane, Tokyo Story, BattleshipPotemkin, The Godfather, Sunrise etat I chose my films as a mixture ofpersonal favourites, new proposalsand those I think make sense in myview on film history as presentedin a personal 'greatest list

TODD MCCARTHYUS, critic. The Hollywood Reporter'In chronological order'Double in Paradise (Lubitsch)Le Crime de MonsieurLange (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 MAILLARDFrance, 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)

All the films on rnplist are from theperiod 949-60.Audiences in theWest aren't awarethat it was also agolden period inIndian cinemaNasreen Munni KabirYoung Mr. Lincoln (Ford)Zero cle conduits ( Vigo)Zodiac (Pincher)Maybe because! am not the list.makingtype, or maybe becausegreatness is a criterion with athousand meanings, making thislist was a real heartbreak. Filmsthat are like the oldest friends,intimate references, differentcorners of the heart and mind, andthe secret connections betweenthem... Whether !decided to berational or sentimental, there weremany possible alternatives. Buteven ill only tend to see what'smissing in the end, I can say !oncefell (and still am) in love with eachone of these 'ten great films'.

DEREK MALCOLMUK, critic London Evening StandardTokyo Story (Ozu)Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi)Touch of Evil (Welles)LAtalents (Vigo)1Hstana (Bunuel)Smiles of a SummerNight (Bergman)Umberto D (De Sica)Apocalypse Now (Coppola)The Third Man (Reed)The Music Room (S Rap)Tomorrow it could be ten otherfilms. How to choose betweenBicycle Thieves and Umberto D,Apocalypse Nowand Come andSee? It comes down to favouritesrather than best, and an attemptto avoid fashion and prejudice.I doubt if I've succeeded

MIGUEL MARIASSpain. critic and teacherThe Wings of Eagles (Foni)The River (Renoir)Tabu (Murrzau 6- Flaherty)/Amen chital/Street ofShame (Mizoguchz)Vertigo (Hitchcock)The Tiger of Eschnapur (Lang)An Affair to Remember (McCarey)Isn't Life Wonderful (Griffith)The Mortal Storm (Barrage)The Student Prince in OldHeirletewg (Lubitsch)These are neither the ten films Ithink are the greatest ever madenor even my ten favourite ones. Iwould need at least too for thatThey are merely ten of my veryfavourite movies, which !admire asmuch as any other but which, evenchoosing only one film per director,do not fully represent what !findmost important or what movesme most in the cinema. If they areall very old (the most recent are


already 54 years old), ills because Ihave chosen only foolproof movies,which I have watched many timesover the course of at least 5o years,excluding those that I have seenonly a couple of times or only quiterecently. That leaves out recentdiscoveries or possibly passingfancies. It makes me angry withmyself to leave out Godard, Dreyer,Rossellini, Chaplin, Preminger,Ophuls, Nicholas Ray, Hawks,Naruse, Ozu, Shimizu, Gui try andmany others, but alas, ten is ten.

ADRIAN MARTINAustralo. criticAnna (Onfi •6. Sarchkilt)Behindert (Divaskin)The Departure/LeDepart (Skohmowski)L'Enfant secret (Garret)Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)The Killing of a ChineseBookie (Cassavetes)Night and Day/Nultet lour (Akerman)Floating Clouds (Naruse)By the Bluest of Seas(Barnet E Manianin)Wanda (Loden)Most often, polls like this one getstuck in the past the irrefutablycanonised greats of cinema, aswell as the participants' own,long-ago youthful discoveries ofthem. This time I have decided tofavour masterpieces that, for themost part,! came upon during thelast decade, and that sit outsidethe canons comfort zone.

DANIELA MICHELMexico. oirector. MoreliaInternational Film FestivalEl (Bunuel)Vertigo (Hitchcock)LAtalente (Vigo)Tokyo Story (Ozu)Double In Paradise (Lubitsch)Andrei Rublev(Tarkavsky)The Passion of Joanof Arc (Dreyer)Setantang6 (Taro)Aventutera (Gout)The Last Command (von Sternberg)

WESLEY MORRISUS. critic:The Boston GicOe•Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)Do the Rigid Thing (Lee)Metropolis (Lang)Naked (Leigh)"IAA Driver (Scorsese)There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson)Sunrise: A Song of TwoHumans (Murnau)Vertigo (Hitchcock)A One and Also (Yang)Some history is time reinforcingitself for posterity's benefit. Andthe immediate trouble with a listof ten movies across a century isthat you begin tows how posteritysprings a leak. I'm not interestedin reinforcement, which is theeternal argument against includingCitizen Kane or Seven Samurai orTokyo Story on this list It's either"Someone else will do it," or 'Thisis greatness as a received wisdom."That's not howl feel. They aregreat but their greatness andthe greatness of aboutthree dozen other movies 0


MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERADZIGA VERTOV

by Nick BradshawIs Dziga Vertov's cine-city symphony a film whose timehas finally come? Ranked only no. 27 in our last critics'poll, it now displaces Eisenstein's erstwhile perennialBattleship Potemkin as the Constructivist Soviet silent ofchoice. Like Eisenstein's warhorse, it's an agit-experimentthat sees montage as the means to a revolutionary con-sciousness; but rather than proceeding through fable andillusion, it's explicitly engaged both with recording themodern urban everyday (which makes it the top docu-mentary in our poll) and with its representation back toits participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie).

A compound of views of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, Manwith a Movie Camera is structured less along the geograph-ic lines of most city symphonies of its era than along thebasics of how a complex society organises itself across aday. Yet despite the film's 'pure cinema' avowal, it channelsits collectivist vision through the dramatic mainstay of anidentifiable protagonist, the titular filmmaker/mediator.

Of course, there's another lineage at play. As the titlemakes plain, MWAMC concerns the (post-)industrial

0 THE SEARCHERSJOHN FORDby Kieron CodessFew would begrudge the return of John Ford's intimaterevenge epic to the critics' top ten. Do its fluctuations inpopularity — no appearance in either critics' or directors'top tens in 2002, but fifth in the 1992 critics' poll reflectthe shifts in popularity of the western (this is by some

interplay of humans and machines. Like Fritz Lang'sMabuse films, it's engaged with the novel implicationsof the moving image; but unlike almost anything fromthe West, it posits cinema as an extension of other formsof mechanical production and one with thetransformational promise of laying barethe integration of human relations, ofenabling mass society to see itself.

Dziga Vertov's techno-opti-mism may now seem moreutopian t han any t hingoutside Silicon Valley; cer-tainly capitalist movies, from2001 to The Matrix, havepreferred dystopian visionsof our relationship with ourtools. But in a time when we'reall becoming people withphone cameras, its manifestoremains a salutary challenge.


distance the highest showing in the poll of any film in thatgenre)? It could be a case of this being a western for peoplewho don't much care for them, but I suspect it's more to dowith lohn Ford's stock having risen higher than ever thispast decade (recall the universal rapture at the release ofthe outstanding Ford at Fox DVD box-sets a few years ago)and the citing of his influence in the unlikeliest of placesin recent cinema the slums of Lisbon, for example, in thecinema of Pedro Costa. Ford was branded a reactionary inthe r 96os, but since then, under more nuanced examina-tion by the likes of Tag Gallagher, he has been revealed as afar more politically complex and ambivalent figure.

At the heart of The Searchers is a complicated, unvar-nished character portrait, one of the greatest ever: JohnWayne as Ethan Edwards — brutal, driven, curdled, racistThere are familiar generic elements here, but it's the lessthan familiar, I'd argue, that elevates the film in critical es-timation:moments of savage poetry and mystery. Take thehaunting (studio) shot of two men on horses in the snow-bound 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 andthat slow track through it u s into such strange vis-tas; Monument Valley here is virtually a sci-fi landscape.And never was a door more eloquently, heartbreakinglyand definitively closed than it is in the final shot. Whatgives this the edge over so many other brilliant westernsis its sense of a plenitude of meanings— of being utterly in-exhaustible. Just like the spirit of Ethan Edwards, still outthere, still searching for a place of rest and peace, a home.

Sept embet 2012 Sight&Sound ! 47


2012 POLL

-doesn't thrill me theway Spike Lee's or, in that

one film, Mike Leigh's does.I'm also interested in the

recent past and the way greatdirectors rose to the occasionsof their times. Or were directorsof their times I didn't choosea movie by Michael! laneke,Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denisor Apichatpong Weerasethakul,butt could have. How reasstuingit would be to see this magnificentlist and not feel that the movies- cinemal- stopped after thesecond Godfather. No oneseriously believes that Do they?

KATE MUIRUK. chief film critic. ' T h e-l i m e s '

The Godfather (Coppola)The Ascent (Shepitko)Psycho (Hitchcock)Shoah (Lanzmann)Cleo ham 5 to 7( Varda)Salads (Taricoosky)We Need to Talk AboutKevin (Ramsay)Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)I Know Where I'm Going!(Powell & Pressburger)Do the Right Thing (Lee)What would an all-female listlook like, starting with AliceGuy-Blache and marching on toLeni Riefenstahl, Claire Denis,Jane Campion, Kelly Reichardt,Kathryn Bigelow and AndreaArnold? Are women directors juststarting to stand the test of time?

PAARCO MOLLERItaly/Switzerland.director. Rome Film FestivalAu 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 TwoHurnem (Murnau)By the Bluest of Seas(Barnet 6- Mardanin)Vertigo (Hitchcock)Barnet's film is an ethology of theeuphoric human body the mostunclassifiable Soviet film ever.

LAURA MULVEYUK, professor of film and media studes,Birkbeck. University of London

In chronological orderMan 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. 23quail du Commerce IMOBruxelles (Akerman)Tbnaugh the OliveDees (IGamstarni)

OKAJIMA HISASHIJapan. chief curator, National Film CenterIn chronological orderSylvester (Pick)Borderline (MacPherson)Malorrobra (Soldan)Susan. (Bunuel)

SS Sigha&Sound I September 2012

THE CRITICS

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 films that feellike my family. I didn't chooseany of them. Hence, no works by'classical' Japanese film masters atall. I also didn't choose any filmsthat feel like my relatives. So, nofilms by such pantheon cineastesas Keaton, Ford, Welles or Renoir.Why not? It's simply because Ifeel great hesitation to praise anymembers of my own family orrelatives in public. The films of mylist are all felt like my year-longfriends from afar. They once gaveme a hard slap on the cheek_ I can'tforget that pain and pleasure.

OKUBO KENJapan, criticThe General (Keaton)Les Enfants du wads (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 atNoon ( Weenasethakul)Tied INPAlest of the'Racks (Wang ft)From the silent era to the listcentury, I have chosen somemonsters I love. Ogawa's lastfilm and the Weerasethakulare brilliant examples of thefreedom of multi-narratives.

CAMILLE PAGLIAUS, professor of humanities andmedia studies. University of the Arts.PhiladelphiaBen-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 films combinespectacular photography withstrength and depth of character.Their intense emotional resonanceis often amplified by superborchestral scores, more expressivethan mere words. A great filmcreates a world of its own. It can beseen again and again without everlosing its freshness and surprise.

What would anall-female list looklike, starting withAlice Gup Blacheand marching onto Claire Denis,Jane Campion andAndrea Arnold?Kate Muir

ALAN PAULSArgentina, writerCitizen Kane (Welles)Hitler A Film fromGemaany (Syberberg)l'eclisse (Antonioni)La Manisa at la Putain (Eustache)Full Moon in Paris (Rohmer)Love Streams (Cassavetes)The Sacrifice (Tatkovsky)Prenatal Carmen (Godard)Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti)Stmmboll (Rossellim)These are, in alphabetical order,ten films that make me ask - everytime I see them, and I've seenthem a lot of times the sametwo questions: a) what the hell isthat? b) what kind of world wouldthe world be without cinema?

IAN PENMANUK. critic and archivist,Museum of LonelinessPat Garrett & Billy theKid (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)-The feeling of strangeness that

overcomes the actor before thecamera_ is basically of the samekind as the estrangement feltbefore one's own image in themirror." - Walter Benjamin.

List-making of this sort is animpossible and fearful task. Theonly S6'S top tens I ever noticed inprevious decades were the little self-portraits in list form, rather thanthe ones striving towards somegrand canonical presentation - thehalf-forgotten polaroid in a drawer,rather than the commandmentfrom on high. Small movementsor gestures in films momentsof unlikely energy, reflection,emptying or light- can affect youway out of proportion to theirsupposed 'importance'. Or asManny Farber might have it thevigour and surprise of "termiteart- over the smugness and

excess of "white elephant art".

OLIVIER PEREFrance/Switzerland, ar t i s t i c d i r e c t o r .Locarno International Film FestivalIn chronological orderSunrise: A Song Of AveHumans (Murnau)The Testament of Dr&tabus. (Lang)Pattie de campagne (Renoir)La Regis du jeu (Renoir)To Be or Not to Be (Lubiach)Ugetsu monogatarl (Mizoguclu)The Searchers (Ford)Vertigo (Hitchcock)Le Moods (Godand)Ludwig (Visconti)Dying in a car accident just afterthe advent of sound and thetalkies, Murnau was undoubtedlythe first major genius of cinema,and the last of the great GermanRomantics. His vast knowledgeof painting theatre, architecture

and philosophy enabled him torealise a perfect work of art thatis complete at every level, bothin terms of formal executionand thematics, yet it is a purelycinematic creation, in no waydependent on the pre-existing arts.

In The Testament (#-Dr

Mabuse, we are confrontedwith an impressive masteryof the dramatic use of soundelements and an incrediblefeeling for action and suspense.

Only Renoir has managed toexpress on film the most elevatednotion of naturalism, examiningthis world from a perspective thatis dark, cruel but objective, beforegoing on to achieve the serenity ofthe work of his old age. With him,one has no qualms about usingsuperlatives: La Regle du ku is quitesimply the greatest French film bythe greatest of French directors.

The greatest of Japanesefilmmakers, Mizoguchi in hisfilms expresses perfectly theuniversality of an art that ishowever rooted in Japanese cultureand history. Ugetsu monogatari isthe apogee of film classicism.

John Ford, beyond a doubt thegreatest of American directors(and one of the greatest in theworld), produced a body of workof incredible scope and richness.

One of the finest films evermade about both coupledomand the cinema, Le Mepris is also-wi th good reason - Godard'smost mythical film, in whichhe allows himself a degree oflyricism that was only to resurfaceagain in his much later work.

In 1973 Visconti concluded his'German trilogy' with Ludwig. Thetitanic shoot delivered a monsterof a film, without a doubt thedirector's most brilliant work, butwhich proved to be, once again, afinancial disaster. The film suffereddrastic editing for internationaldistribution, and it was only afterVisconti's death that we wereable to see this spectacular filmin its full four-hour version

GILBERTO PEREZLiS/Cuba, writer and academic. SarahLawrence CollegeSherlock Jr. (Keaton)Earth (Dovzhenko)Zero de conduit. ( Vigo)La Regle du jeu (Renoir)Wagon Master (Ford)Sansho dayu (Mizoguch0Viridiana (Bunuel)Veclisse (Antoniom)Caddo(Thnsugh the ONveTrees (IGamstarni)The order is chronological. I regretI have no room in the arbitrarytop ten for Chaplin or Mumau,Cagney or Stanwyck, Bruce Baillieor Ernie Gehr, It Happened OneNight or Mr Thank You, Shadowofa Doubt or The Reckless Moment,Day ofWrath or Andrei Rubles,Nicht versohnt or Eloge de Famour.

JOHN POWERSUS, film critic. 'VogueLAtakinte (Vigo)Blue Velvet (Lynch)Flowers of Shanghai (Hou)

Small gestures infilms — momentsof unlikelyenergp, reflection,emptying or light —can affect pou wapout o f-p r op o r ti o n to

their 'importance'Ian Penman

The Godfather Part II (Coppola)His Girl Friday (Hawt)Late Spring (Ozu)Masculin forninin (Godard)My Friend Ivan Lapshin (German)Notorious (Hitchcock)Sunrise: A Song of TwoHumans (Mumau)

QUINTINArgent,na, c r i t ic

Histoire(s) du cinema(Godard)I Was Born, But-. (Ozu)La Grande Illusion (Renoir)The Man Who ShotLiberty Valance (Ford)Journey to Italy (Rossellini)Sicilia! (Straub-Huillet)Shoah (Lanzmann)Death Proof (Tarantino)The Host (Bong)La libertad (Alonso)

NICOLAS RAPOLDUS, senior editor. 'Film Comment'In a Lonely Place (N. Ray)Vetttgo (Hitchcock)Pickpocket (Bresson)The Miracle of Morgan'sCreek (Sturges)Play Time (Tatt)The 400 BiOWS (Truffaut)Breathless (Godani)Eraserheed (Lynch)Videadrome (Cmnenberg)Duck Soup (McCarry)

TONY RAYNSUK. criticBirth of the Nation/Die aghastder Nation (VVyborny)Un chien ancialou (Burluel)Once upon a Time Inthe 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,SO I'm obviously set in myways. What the list reveals isan admiration for films whichpush an idea about cinema to itsapparent limit, and do so withelegance and wit. The onlyrecent film on the listHirabayashi's brilliant'Maim (2003), stands for a veinof iconoclastic avant•gardismwhich stretches from Robert

Rorey to Kenneth Anger 0and Hollis Frampton.



by Kim Newman2001: A Space Odyssey made its first entry in this poll,at number ten, in 1992, 24 years after its 1968 release. Itclimbed to number six in 2002, and has held that positionin 2012. (I'm partially responsible for this performance:I compiled my 2012 list without looking up my 2002list Six films recurred, but this time I plumped for 2001instead of The Shining. After the theatrical reissue of thelatter, it might edge ahead again. In 2022,1 m i g h t e l e v a t eBarry Lyndon over both, or relegate Stanley Kubrick fromthe pantheon entirely.)

Not only do we now find ourselves 44 years on froma film that seemed once to epitomise the future — itadvanced the default date of what we thought of as 'thefuture' from George Orwell's 1984 but we're a full decadepast the years (and despite the film's title, it is 'years' — theplot, even excluding the 'Dawn of Man' prologue, coversmore than i 2 months) in which Kubrick and Arthur C.Clarke decided that humanity would come face to facewith its alien origins.

So many future visions, from Metropolis to Blade Runnerto The Matrix, get shunted into a parallel time a possibletimeline we didn't take. But, despite the date-stamp, 2001still seems coolly plausible and resonant.

The film's belief in manldnd's future (and past) in spacehas been sidelined, which gives it a nostalgic edge, butit remains a fascinating, stately film, which finds spaceslow and empty and yet wondrous, and simmers withemotional nuance even when the onscreen charactersare a computer and astronauts obligated to show no re-action. As Prometheus proved with its Wikipedia versionof 2001's content, Kubrick's film remains the touchstonefor ambitious film science fiction. And at the same timeits wonders have only been enhanced by the recent trendfor screening the film with a full symphony orchestra onhand to perform the classical soundtrack selections byJohann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Ligeti and Khachaturian.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEYSTAN LEY KUBRICK

0 SUNRISEF.W. MURNAU


by Isabel StevensWhen DK. Mumau left Germany for America in 1926,did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense thatchange was around the comer — that now was the time tofill up on fantasy, delirium and spectacle before taildng ac-tors wrenched the artform closer to reality?Sunrise A Songof Two Humans the pinnacle of Mumau's silent career —certainly suggests this was the case.

Many things make this film more than just a moralitytale about temptation and lust, a fable about a young hus-band so crazy with desire for a city girl that he contem-plates drowning his wife, an elemental but sweet story ofa husband and wife rediscovering their love for each other.Sunrise was an example—perhaps never again repeated onthe same scale — of unfettered imagination and the cloutof the studio system working together rather than at crosspurposes. Mumau had a new Fox studio to transform intomoonlit marshes and dazzling gargantuan cityscapes. Inhis quest for optical experimentation he used every toolavailable (superimposition, in-camera trickery), inventingthose that didn't already exist (such as his flying camera,floating from cranes above).

Testament to Murnau's remarkable achievement wasthe fact that post-Sunrise cinema could never again bedismissed as lightweight amusement in quite the sameway. Combining Expressionism's shadows and shards oflight with the lyricism of Dutch genre painting, Mumaudecreed that cinema could do what art does, and more...

So why, one wonders, did Sunrise only first appear inthe top ten in zooz? And why has it now climbed fromseventh position to fifth? Silent cinema's resurgencein popularity — combined with recent restorations —accounts for some of that But a vote for Sunrise is of coursea vote for a lost world. As cinema teeters on the edge oftechnological change again as projectors are ripped outof cinemas and film cameras and canisters gather dust inarchives — Sunrise reminds us that there's no turning back

Septernher 0 S ight&Sound i 49


2012 POLL

C B . RUBY RICHUS. professor. University ofCalifornia, Santa CruzBorn in Flames (Borden)Daisies (Chytilovd)Daovin's Nightmare (Sauper)In the Mood for Love (Wong)Looldng for Langston (Julien)Man with a MovieCamera (Dziga Vertov)Memories of Underdevelopment(Gutierrez Alea)Nostalgia for the Ugtd(Gumin)Orlando (Potter)Sweet Sweetbades BeadasesssSong (Van Peebles)The importance of films is fixed inthe moment in our lives at whichwe see them- in a classroom, in adrive-in, in a rep house, in a festivalor on a plane or computer screenor, gasp, iPhone. Our age at thatmoment is crucial: I was imprintedwith Vertov and Daisies at amoment when cinematic languagewas changing radically, and thesefilms from the former EasternBloc were key to fusing artisticbravura with political reach

As I came of age as a film addict,a feminist and lesbian, attunedto the aesthetics of my age, Potterand Julien and Borden wereequally crucial in demonstratinghow thrillingly cinema couldwrite the templates of identity.Of sexuality, too, though hereSally Potter and Wong Kar-Waiare equally influential on thatfront Ah, Tilda Swinton in asleigh, Maggie Cheung in a cafe,and Honey on the radio diaL

For my generation, LatinAmerica was the greatbattleground and the land ofpromise. Gutierrez Alea's long-misunderstood masterpiecedefined a new Latin Americancinema, just as Guzman's morerecent essay film did, all overagain. And Sweet Sweetback? Herethere's a manifesto to be written.Raw, scabrous and packed withtoo many ideas and energy forone film, it's the cornerstoneof the modem Americanindependent-film movement,linking together low-budgetproduction, non-union crews.sexploitat ion, and the French NewWave into one combustible whole.

PIERRE RISSIENTFrance cntic fi lmmaker and programmer

In chronological orderLAssonanoir (C,apellam)The Mothering Heart (Griffith)Faust (Mumau)Rom Saturday toSunday (Machaty)Angel (Lubitsch)Make Way for TOMOITOW(McCarry)Pursued (Walsh)Not Wanted (Luptno)Whirlpool (Preminger)The Tiger of Eachnapur (Lang)PS: from am 2 - Like Someone inLove by Abbas Kiarostami?

KONG RITHDEEThailand, him critic. Bangkok Post'Breathless (GodartL'awanture (Antoniom)La Regis du jeu (Renoir)Mirror (Tarkovsky)

so s ighr & S ound Sept ember 2012

THE CRITICS

Dying in a caraccident justafter the adventof sound and thetalkies, Murnauwas undoubtedlpthe first majorgenius of cinemaOlivier Pere

Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)That Obscure Objectof Desire (Buituet)Thiry° Story (Om)Itopical Malady (Weennethakul)Vertigo (Hitchcock)A One and a Two ( Yang)The attempt into heed the callof history as well as the urgencyof the now, but in all I guess Imerely try to recall the momentthe hammer hit me i t's morethan ten times and to rememberthe films that tried to test theinvisible borders of cinema.

JONATHAN ROMNEYUK, fi lm critic, 'The Independent onSunday'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 Three CMW113 ofthe Sailor (Ruiz)Touch of Evil (Welles)It's hard making the list again, tenyears after the last time - you feelyou want to be faithful to yourearlier choices, but what to loseif other films have inspired yousince? My only criterion for thislist is that it's entirely to do withmy own filmgoing history- theseare films that have all revealedsomething new to me at importantmoments. There are three newadditions. Pierrot lefas replacesLe Mepris, as it's simply more fun- butt also realised that it was thefirst Godard lever saw. Of the twofilms I've discovered in the lastdecade, Outs was for years my HolyGrail - I thought I'd never see it, andwhen I did I wasn't disappointed.It's still a magnificent blueprintfor generating fictions out ofthe everyday and it impressesme all the more in that, eventhough huge chunks are barelywatchable (the theatre sections), it'snevertheless extraordinary overall.

I'm taking a risk onApichatpong Weerasethalcul,as I'm not sure what Syndromeswill mean in the long term, butI was bowled over when I sawit I 'm always hoping to sightthose rare screen phenomena thatFrench critics like to call UFOs,and this film truly is (at the riskof repeating the Joe cliché) the

authentic 'mysterious object'. Asfor an old favourite, Hellzapoppin',it's still my desert-island film

a crammed encyclopedia ofmeta farce that continues tocrack me up after all these years.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUMUS. 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 CarryUs (Karostamr)The World (pa)didn't allow myself to include any

titles from my previous SESlists.

PAMELA BIENZOBAS SAFFIEChile, critic, Revista de Cine Mabuse

Andrei Rublev(Tarkovsky)Blue Velvet (Lynch)Days of Heaven (Malick)Edvard Munch (Watkins)Pads. Texas (Wenders)The Passion of Joanof Arc (Dreyer)Pickpocket (Thrsson)The Passenger (Antonioni)Ugetsu monogatarl (Mizoguchi)The Gospel According toSt Matthew ( fissolim)One way I found to try to getaround the difficulty (and thefeeling of arrogance) of establishinga list of the 'greatest films of alltime' was to arbitrarily rule out allthe filmmakers who in the roarpoll arrived within the top ro fihnsor directors, of the critics or thedirectors, This means excludingall films 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 termsuggested in the invitation tovote- "impact" - and assumed theutter subjectivity of the exercise.

SATO TADAOJapan. critic, historian and president.Japan Ins titute of the Moving ImageThe Bogey-Man (Aratrindan)Mandela (Irn)Where Is My Friend'sHouse? (KiarostamBanana Paradise( Wang T)Ferocious Saint Lord ofthe Gobi (Nyamgavaa)Tokyo Story (Ozu)The Une of Destiny (Peries)Ugetsu monogatari (MizoguchhMan of the Story/Kathaplaushnen (Gopalakrishnan)Children of Heaven (Majid

GENEVIEVE SELLIERFrance professor of cinema studies,

Universite Michel de Montaigne,BordeauxThe Best Years of OurLives (Wyler)The Chapman Report (Cukor)Magas/Paris Rills (Becker)Le Loft de Is tendressehone/tie/The Milk of HumanKindness (Cabrera)Mime, Marken libertine (Audry)

Rebecca (Hitchcock)Party Girl (N. Ray)1.111111ele crew (Grernillon)Three Rooms inManhattan (Came)La Visite saw Bebe Donge/TheTiuth About Bebe Dotage (Decoln)All those ten films, Americanand French, propose very acuteexplorations of female experiences,desires, sufferings and attempts atemancipation. Most of them aremade by male filmmakers, butthe most recent one is a woman'sfilm: Le Lait de la tendresse humaine(The Milk offluman Mndness),by Dominique Cabrera.

KEITH SHIRIUK, curator and director. Africa at thePictures

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 SINCLAIRUK. wr ite,In alphabetical order (by director):

griclo (Antoniom)The Act of Seeing with One'sOV•71 Eyes (Brakhage)PAouchette (Brisson)Los olvidados (Wiwi)Gerbud (Dreyer)Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)Germany Year 90 NineZero (Godard)The Testament of DrMabuse (Lang)Le Deuxiime Souffle (Melville)The Rise to Power ofLouis XIV (Rcsselliru)The museum aspect of pretendingto select the 'ten greatest filmsof all time' is surely redundantI have combined the strategicshort-termism of films that arefeeding current projects withmemory landscapes from acurated past Every entry herehas a subterranean, disregardeddouble. But that would be anothergame. Ten is too few, a coupleshort of a set of disciples. Andtoo many, shadows of the one,the great film yet to be made.

ALI SMITHUK, novelist

Pandora's Box (hint)Udine and Julie Go

With 'The Matrix',what seemed to bea fad has becomea film-historylandmark, bothtechnologicallyandfor tappingthe zeitgeistFernanda Soldrzana


Boating (Rivette)The C i r c us(C ha pl i n )Blackmail (Hitchcock)PAIdchen in Uniform(Sagan 8, F m el i c h)

Meet Me in St. WW1 (Minnelh)My Childhood (Douglas)Napoleon (Game)Nights of Cabida (Fell*Rout eat pardonne (Hansen-Love)

am in mourning for the so manyfilms all crowding behind this ten,I may have nightmares for weeks.

GAVIN SMITHUS, editor, 'Film Comment'Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson)The Flinn of Nathaniel DorsicyNouvelle vague (Godard)Platform (Jia)Psycho (Hitchcock)Raging Bull (Scorsese)She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford)Shoah (Lanzmann)Sunrise: A Song of 1WoHumane (Mumau)2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)

FERNANDA SOLORZANOMexico c ritic

Vertigo (Hitchcock)The Godfather Part II (Coppola)The Matrix (Wachowskilv Wachowski)Nosferadu (Mumau)Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)Rashomon (Kumsawa)Blade Runner (Scott)Sunset Blvd.( Wilder)EP/2 (Fellim)Citizen Kane (Welles)With The Matrix, what seemedto be a fad has become afilm-history landmark, bothtechnologically and for soeffectively tapping the zeitgeistNon linear narratives had alreadybeen explored in film, but lynchtook the form to a different andunique level in Mulholland Dr

CLARE STEWARTAustralia /LK. head of exhibition, BFI

Mitten on the Wind (Sirk)Days of Being Wild (W a n g )Beau Maven (Denis)The Cameraman (Keaton)The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice)The Life and Death of ColonelBlimp (Powell Pressburger)Throne of Blood (Kurosawa)Wake In Right (Kotchell)Sullivan's Ravels (Sturges)A Separation (Farhadi)My list is led by emotion. Theseare the films to which I return, thefilms that make my heart sing, thathave transformed my perceptionof cinema and what it can be.Films that make me want to dancewith the thrill of being alive andhaving cinema to prove it (and thetop three all have liberating solodance sequences: Dorothy Malone,Leslie Chetmg, Denis Lavantl).

This list will be differenttomorrow (when it will includeThe Night of the Hunter, Cleo from 5to 7, Saft, Hunger, The Shop Aroundthe Cornerand Leone, Fassbinder,Ceylan, Woo and July). Lurkingin the shadows of this list (andtomorrow's) are a great manybeloved films, but today I feel

like giving a nod to four 0short films that almost


LA REGLE DU JEUJEAN RENOIR

by James BellWhen the first critics' poll ran in 1952, La Regle du jeu camejoint tenth, but it's remarkable that the film appeared atall, for voters wouldn't have been able to see Renoir's mas-terpiece in anything like the form we know today. A peer-lessly fluid ensemble drama, the film depicts the eventsthat ensue when guests and staff drawn from all strataof French society gather at the country chateau of theMarquis de la Cheyniest for a hunting weekend, Renoircapturing the seething passions, jealousies and class ten-sions of everyone present with virtuoso skill and genuineempathy. The film's unsparing depiction of French life in'939 — from crumbling aristocracy to rife anti-semitism— proved explosive in a country beset with divisions, andoffered grave forebodings of defeat in the imminent war.

Following a disastrously received premiere of a trun-cated edit of the film, Renoir agreed to further cuts, onlyto see his 'demoralising' and 'unpatriotic' film bannedanyway by the French government in October 1939. Theoriginal negative was destroyed in a bombing raid duringthe war, and for years the film could only be seen in butch-ered versions, until 200 cans of outtakes were discoveredin 1956 and the film was restored to close to its originalform. Three years after its triumphant resurrection at theVenice Film Festival in 1959, La Regle du jeu came third inthe 1962 poll —a position it has hovered around ever since.Where other films have risen or fallen with prevailing crit-ical tides, Renoir's film has remained astonishingly steady.

"Everyone has their reasons," says Octave, the characterplayed by Renoir himself, in the film's most famous line ofdialogue — one often taken as the purest expression of thedirector's own humanistic tolerance. It's a sentiment that'seasy to accept but harder to portray on film, and yet inLa Regle do jeu that's just what Renoir achieves, hisroaming camera capturing everything without judgement,every character and every exchange ringing true.

0 TOKYO STORYOZU YASUJIROby James BellIt's one of the well-told legends of cinema history thatthe glories of Japanese cinema were first revealed toWestern audiences when Kurosawa's Rashomon screenedat the Venice Film Festival in 195 However, despite Ozu'shigh status in Japan, critical appreciation in the West tookmuch longer to come to him than it did to Kurosawa andMizoguchi. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari appearedin the 1962 and 1972 top tens, and Kurosawa's SevenSamurai in the 1982 list, but it wasn't until 19 9 2 t h a t T o k y oStory first appeared, coming third.

The absence of Ozu's 1953 film- about an elderlycouple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children,only to find them all indifferent — can partly beexplained by availability, for according to Don-ald Richie, it wasn't until 1958 that it was firstscreened in the UK, under the title Their FirstTrip to Tokyo, it was only when Richie organ-

ised a programme of five Ozu films 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 reputationsteadily grew — in this year's poll, Ozu's Late Spring is thesecond highest-ranking Japanese film, sitting just aboveSeven Samurai. Ozu's delicate, formally precise films nowchime with critical opinion in ways that the muscularKurosawa and flowing Mizoguchi styles do not

Ozu used to liken himself to a "tofu-maker", in referenceto the way his films — at least the post-war ones were allvariations on a small number of themes. So why is it TokyoStory that is acclaimed by most as his masterpiece? DVDreleases have made available such prewar films as I WasBorn, But..., and yet the Ozu vote has not been split, andTokyo Story has actually climbed two places since 2002. Itmay simply be that in Tokyo Story this most Japanese tofu-maker refined his art to the point of perfection, and crafteda truly universal film about family, time and loss.

September 2 01? S ight &Sound 151


2012 POLL

C made the list this Weberand Phillips Smalley'sSuspense La jetee Sadie Benning'slavery Girl Had a Diary and GuyMaddin's The Heart ophe World

MATTHEW SWEETUK historian and broadcasterBattleship Potemidn (Eisenstem)Citizen Kane ( Welies)Days of Herren (Malick)Great Expectations (Lean)The Kid (Chaplin)Kind Hearts andCoronets (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 Cavalcantiwill be gathering to push medown the stairs tonight

Looking at this list it seemsclear that I have a problematicrelationship with colour, thoughI'll say in my defence that somuch in the cinema of the last50 years seems a refinement or areworking of work from its first50 — and the echoes of these tenfilms are, I think, everywhere incontemporary film. And a picturefrom the r 98os or after still feelstoo young for canonical status.

ALIN TASCIYANTurkey, critic$11001111111 mon a mour (Resnais)The •Davelling Players(Angelopoulos)Man with a MovieCamera (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 beena very painful process forme. I feel like a mother wholeft her children behind!

AMY TAUBINUS.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 KnowAbout Her (Godard)Shoah (Lartzmann)Jeanne Dietitian. 23 crueldu Commerce 1080Bruxelles Warman)Screen Tests (Warhol)ildru (Kumsawa)Cosmopolls(Cronenberg)Ridiculous exercise! Shouldn't itbe 25 greatest by now? How cantleave out Late SprIng, Topsy-TUrvy,A Woman Under the Influence,Inland Empire Germany Year Zero,L'Age d'or, L'Atalante, Barry Lyndon,Jailer cfSheep, Orpheus, Xala,Imitation ofL jfr, T h e U n c e rt a i n t y

Principle, Fear Eats the Soul AngryHarvestand on and on. Orperhaps I should have namedordy Histoirr(s)du cinema— nomore idiosyncratic than this listand far more generous.

52 , sight&Sound 1 September 2012

THE CRITICS

KRISTIN THOMPSONUS, honorary fellow. University ofWisconsin-MadisonPlay 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 Green Was My Valley (Ford)Rear Window (Hitchcock)The Passion of Joanof Arc (Dreyer)Making up a list of ten films toconstitute the pinnacle of worldcinema means, to a considerableextent choosing the greatestdirectors and picking one filmto represent each. To me, thegreatest directors are Tati, Ozu andEsenstein. For Taft and Eisenstein,the best films are clear to me.For Ozu, there could be any of atleast haff a dozen films plausiblychosen for this list, but Late Springhappens to be my favourite.

Inevitably there are otherfilms that I much regret notbeing able to include on the list,such as Seven Samurai, Doublein Thrudise, His Girl Friday,Sitistrbm's The Phantom Carriageand Capellani's Germinal (Thesilent era is too little representedin previous polls, but restorationsby archives and retrospectivesat specialist film festivals makethis lack easier to remedy.) HadOrson Welles's The MagnificentArnbersons not been re-cut by RICO,it would probably be on my list.

There are other directors whoshould be represented here, mostnotably Bresson, Mizoguchiand Godard. Their work is soconsistent, however, that Isimply cannot choose a singlemasterpiece by any of them.

I felt that a film more recentthan 5 9 7 4( T h e G od fi r t h e rT h r l I l t he

latest film represented on previousS&Slists) should be included. Thelast four decades of film historyhave surely seen the release of atleast one worthy film, but the vastexpansion of production in smallercountries and the internationalexhibition of such films in festivalshave rendered it more difficultthan ever for critics to agree upon asingle candidate. It remains easierto vote for the established cla%ics.My choice of a film that deserves tobe watched and rewatched decadesfrom now, as we currently watchsuch films as La Regle du feu, isThrough the Olive Trees( or Under theOlive Trees, to give a more accuratetranslation than the usual).

DAVI D THOMSONUK/US, criticBlue Velvet (Lynch)Celine and -tube GoBoating (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 theCorner (Lubitsch)Ugetsu monogatan (Mizaguchi)

KATA ANNA VAR()Hungary, lecturer and programmeadvisor, Titanic International Film Festival,Budapest2001 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 films I havepicked come from the middle ofthe last century, which witnesseda major change in cinematicstorytelling, film form andstyle, especially in Europe.

Bergman's Fanny and Alexandermay be the most appreciated ofhis films, but the lavish setting, therich colours and textures pairedwith suffocating atmosphere andthe rigour of Chekhov's playsmake Cries and Whispers themost outstanding of his works.Kubrick's, Tarr's and Lynch'smetaphysical ventures throughtime and space into the humanpsyche haven't failed to mesmerisemoviegoers and academicsalike throughout the years.

With Hidden Haneke tookboth the thriller genre andthe role of a filmmaker in thenarrative to a whole new leveland made this racially engagedchiller as unsettling as it could get.When it comes to secret desires,quiet longings, little obsessionsand unrequited love, no onedoes them better than WongKar-Wai, the Hong Kong masterof genre-bending melodramas.

NOEL VERAcritic, •Businessworld•

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 ofthe 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 filmmakertranslates his passion, at theintensity of said passion, andlisten to the feeling in my gutthat tells me: "This is one"

Guru Dutt'sfiim maudit, a titanicbox-office flop, is one of the best

'The Cloud-Capped Star'is a neorea listmasterwork —one of the mostheartrendingdepictions ever offemale oppressionNoel Vera

films ever about a filmmaker'spassion for his work. FromMiyazaki, one of the few science-fiction films to deal with ecologicalsystems and the environment—arguably the greatest animatedfilm ever made. From Ghatak, aneorealist masterwork one ofthe most heartrending depictionsever of female oppression.

And from Mario O'Hara. therare film from a victimised nationcm this case the Philippines) thatstrives to understand, perhapseven forgive, the invader.

GINETTE VINCENDEAUUK. professor, King's College LondonCleo 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 reflects the national cinemas,genres and actors I know bestrather than an all-encompassingview of the cinema.

PETER VON BAG HFinland/Italy, chtic, historian arid director.Midnight Sun Film Festival and II CinemaRitrovatoMy list as 'critic/historian':The Wedding March (von Stroheim)AngMe IPagno0Only Angels Have Wings (Hawlcs)A Canterbury Tale(Powell 6- Pressburger)Ivan the Terrible Part II (Eisenstein)Iris och Ironhilkten/idsand the Lieutnent (*berg)Late Spring (Ozu)Distant Drums (Walsh)Party Girl (IV. Ray)Nazarin (Bunue0I was approached by twodifferent letters, with differentdeadlines, and I have proceededaccordingly. Which means thatI have hereby two lists, entirelydifferent, and corresponding to myschizophrenia about the roles thatwere the cause of the two letters.

MARINA WARNERUK. professor of literature, film andtheatre studies. Univers',y of EssexThe Adventures of PrinceAchmed (Reiniger)The Aparbnent ()lder)Bringing up Baby (Hawks)Celine and Julie GoBoating (Rivette)The Devil's Backbone (del Toro)DoclesIrden (Kurosawa)Lucia (Soils)The Gleaners & I Varda)The Passion of Joanof Arc (Dreyer)Donkey Skin (Derny)Cinema works for me as a charm'dmagic casement making possiblein image and action all manner ofimpossible experiences, realisedas if they could happen and arehappening. I haven't chosensurrealist films as such, as theyconvey inner worlds of dream,This list presents fantasy as livedexperience, some of it extremelyfunny. The Varda is there, too,


because she uses the camerawith such deep empathy for hersubjects, as does Kurosawa

SERGIO WOLFArgentina, critic and filmmakerCitizen Kane ( Welles)The Quince 'Rae Sun (Erice)Le Marls (Godani)Rear Window (Hitchcock)Shoah (Lanzmann)The Godfather (Coppola)The House on liubnayaStreet (Barnet)The Passenger (Antonion6The Searchers (Ford)Di no (Ta(s)These ten films are for me themore innovative in the different'moments' of cinema All of thempropose a cross between realityand artifice, between genreand style, between traditionand experimentation, betweenclassicism and modernity. Eachof them has meant an opening ofborders and boundaries of cinema,and has asked about what film is.

MICHAEL WOODUK/US professor of English, PrincetonUniversityThe Passion of Joanof 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 nostalgicthan I expected it to be, and moreclustered around the 1950s- butit gets worse, or further from myidea of things, as I tinker with it,so I'll stop. Criteria for 'greatest'here are multiple, consistentonly in the sense of being strictin their different ways: films youcan't shake from your mind, filmsyou can't imagine the history ofcinema without, films that arethe best imaginable in their kind,films that get better every timeyou watch them, and so on.

SLAVOJ ZIZEKSlovenia. critic and philosopherNol Vivi/Vsle the Living(Alessandrim)Hihnan (Germ)Hero (Zhang)Opfergang (Harlan)The Fountainhead (V a l o r )The Sound of Music ( Virse)Dune (Lynch)310 to Yuma (Daves)Nightmare Ailey (Goulding)On Dangerous Ground (N. Ray)This time, I opted for puremadness: the list contains only'guilty pleasures', from two screenversions of Ayn Rand to a topNazi melodrama, from DavidLynch's greatest flop to the topmusical kitsch, from a low-budgetHollywood action thriller to aChinese big-budget historicalspectacle, plus a half-forgottenwestern and two marginal noirsThis is what I really enjoy — nocompromises with high quality orgood taste.


0 111111111010"!

CITIZEN KANEORSON WELLES

by Nick JamesYes, it's true. Kane is no longer the immovable object ofcinema appreciation. But let's leave any re-examinationof the film and its legacy to others. Let us instead, for fun,imagine Orson Welles receiving the news. Even in hisyouth and middle age, Welles played so many old menon screen so convincingly — from Kane himself to HankQuinlan to Falstaff— that it's not difficult to imagine himat the age he'd be if he were still alive: a portly 97, sitting inhis favourite restaurant Ma Maison (alas no longer with useither), smoking, eating and talking all at once, in a voicethat had only grown more gravelly with the passing years.

"What," he would snarl, and backhand a glass into thewall. Then, after a moment, with half a smile, his voicewould soften to a purr, his eyes beaming amusement

"Kane no longer the best, you say? And whichpompous, baubled hippopotamus in a wig bows now inmy stead? Hitchcock is it? Oh well, I was wrong about thewig, 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 andwho's out Packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flowby the moon.' I guess that's me from now on: Lear lost inlost glory. Old Hearst must be laughing — he'll be glad-handing the pimps."

Then the grand old man would stagger to his feet,perhaps propelled on walking sticks like Everett Sloanein The Lady from Shanghai, his voice gradually fading ashe wandered further off, trailing perfect strands of whitecigar smoke. "You know I never thought Kane was mybest," he'd say. "Not bad for a beginner and better thananything those Hollywood numbskulls ever dreamed up.But if I'd had money to make them properly, it would bepretty clear to everyone that Chimes at Midnight and TouchofEvil would have been better yet And as for Ambersons..."

Kane is dead. Long live Welles.

Sepi i ' 0 S i g h t & S o u n d 5 3



2011

54 I Sight &Sound I September 2012

O VERTIGOALFRED HITCHCOCKby Peter MatthewsAfter half a century of monopolising the top spot, CitizenKane was beginning to look smugly inviolable. Call itSchadenfreude, but let's rejoice that this now conventionaland ritualised symbol of 'the greatest' has finally beentaken down a peg. The accession of Vertigo is hardly inthe nature of a coup d'etat. Tying for r ith place in 1972,Hitchcock's masterpiece steadily inched up the pollover the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearlythe heir apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians shouldfeel gratified at the modest revolution i f only for theproof that film canons (and the versions of history theylegitimate) are not completely fossilised.

There may be no larger significance in the barefact that a couple of films made in California 17 yearsapart have traded numerical rankings on a whimsical-ly impressionistic list. Yet the human urge to interpretchance phenomena will not be denied, and Vertigo is acrafty, duplicitous machine for spinning meaning. Atthe very least, its championship bout with Kane affordsa pretext to reflect on two different myths of cinema. Idoubt whether my personal recollection of either filmis unique. When I first saw Kane at a revival in the mid-r 97os, I enjoyed the typical sensation of being knockedout No other movie before or since has quite so astound-ed me with its sheer muscular virtuosity — a bombasticcompendium of every known trick that epitomises thethrilling exhibitionist possibilities of the medium. Inshort, Kane fulfils the idea of total cinema. As such, it re-mains a permanent touchstone for all young filmmak-ers who seek to flaunt their wares, aiming wide insteadof deep. If Welles's hammy pyrotechnics fail to smite meas they once did, it may be that I no longer need them.

Reciprocally, I have grown into Vertigo. My init ialresponse (on the occasion of a 1984 rerelease together with

four other Hitchcock classics) was mild disappointmentThough admiring its pictorial splendour, I found KimNovak gauche, the plot baloney and the whole enterpriselacking the master's customary snap. I never supposedthat I was merely retracing the steps of the film's originalAnglo-American critics. In 1958, John McCarten of TheNew 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 verdictwas sniffy at best: "One is agreeably used to Hitchcockrepeating his effects, but this time he is repeating himselfin slow motion." How a band of lunatic French cinephilesintervened with the scandalous suggestion that a popularentertainer might be a serious artist and gradually wonthe non-auteurist heathen to their creed is too familiara tale to belabour here. Suffice to say that I too wasdismally behind the beat. I still thought of Hitchcock asa crackerjack marksman who in Vertigo had overshot thetarget

My epiphany occurred 20 years later when I wasobliged to teach the film on an undergraduate course.Perhaps the most emphatic conversions are the fruitof subliminal waiting. All I know is that everything Ihad judged wrong about Vertigo suddenly, alchemicallyseemed right. The gilded dross was transformed intopure cinema. Hitchcock regularly brandished the phrase,

The pleasure principle of Hollywoodcinema succumbs to the death instinct.Never has a work of ostensible lightentertainment been this dark



yet — not conspicuous for his metaphysical leanings —understood it simply to express the practical resourcesby which film declares its independence. Editing, cameramovement, sound design owe little to the prior arts; evenmise en scene, with its roots in stagecraft, becomes suigeneris through the infinite mutability of screen space.The challenges of sovereignty are terrifying, however,and most filmmakers cravenly fall back on the inheritedarmature of theatre: well-told stories, plausible characters,good performances. Hitchcock's famous distrust of bothactors and screenwriters certified an absolute visual elanthat would brook no contradiction. For all that, he was farfrom being an accursed renegade like Welles. His geniusrested on unconditional faith in the studio system andits mission of delivering smartly packaged escapism to abroad audience.

But if Hitchcock religiously ticks the boxes of classicalHollywood style, he also bends them to his autocraticwill. Rear Window lifts ordinary point-of-view shotsto a new level of cold ruthlessness, thereby exposingthe seedy voyeuristic illusion at the heart of cinematicpleasure. Vertigo, which concerns the effort to model a realwoman into an ideal, is nowadays commonly diagnosedas another reflexive text: the ultimate demystificationof stardom and its origins in male fantasy. Such rationalreadings hold water, but leave me dissatisfied. Theycannot account for a delirious excess that paradoxicallyborders on abstraction and renders the fi lm a truenonpareil in Hitchcock's career.

Early reviewers who savaged the idiocy of the plotwere in their way more prescient. Let me spare anyexisting Vertigo novices the details. Basically, we are askedto swallow that, in order for a murder to appear a suicide,criminal mastermind Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) canrely on the acrophobia of traumatised ex-cop ScottieFerguson (James Stewart) kicking in at the precisemoment needed. (In his famous interview with FrancoisTruffaut, Hitchcock volunteers that this is a "flaw inthe story" that still "bothers" him.) One may blame thesource material, Boileau-Narcejac's 1954 potboiler D'entreles morts-, yet having engineered this baroque conspiracy,the script (by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor) thenblows the whistle in an eccentrically timed flashbackthat genre fans still quarrel over. Identifying a structuralflaw, Hitchcock even reportedly got cold feet and wantedto remove the sequence at the last minute, but was talkedout of recalling prints for re-editing by Paramount.

The problem was bigger than he imagined. For inVertigo, the tightly knit fabric of classical narrativestarts to unravel. Who knows why this was happening,but television is the usual suspect. Confronted by itspipsqueak rival, 19505 Hollywood answered withspectacle — laying on panoramic colour extravaganzasfor which traditional story was an increasingly slenderalibi. The CGI-led blockbusters of our own era constitutethe endgame in this disintegrative process, their looselyepisodic form resembling beads on a string more than theintricate lockstep of cause and effect. Though Hitchcockcheerfully slept with the enemy when required, Vertigois one of the plush exercises whereby a panicky industryhoped to recoup its dwindling figures. But here, thecinema of attractions yields an intense, surrealist poetry.As Scottie goes driving, driving around San Francisco inpursuit of his chimerical love interest Madeleine (Novak),

the action resolves into elaborate set pieces: the visit tothe flower shop, the churchyard, the art museum, theMcKittrick Hotel, the Golden Gate Bridge, the sequoiaforest It could be a sightseer's itinerary, and indeed everyyear flocks of cinephiles do the 'Vertigo tour'. That suchan institution has evolved is not surprising, for the movieholds a singular power to contaminate viewers with itsown quality of dreamy obsession.

Hitchcock's best critic Robin Wood describes theSan Francisco locations as "little pockets of silence andsolitude", both attaching to the city and somehow outsideit. The silence is not literal, given Bernard Herrmann'sthrobbing, Wagnerian score. Yet the alternationbetween long, dialogue-free passages and scenes of talkyexposition creates a strange, sluggish rhythm that waxesever more ceremonial and trancelike. Robert Burks'sglamorising cinematography (with its liberal use of fogfilters) raises each place into a distinct fetish, isolatedfrom the exigencies of plot

Classical narrative pushes relentlessly forward. Vertigostalls, 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 previousHitchcock films now loses confidence, drift ing inperpetual circles. The entropy that afflicts Scottie bringshim within striking distance of Antonioni's listless,world-weary universe. His fear of heights is nominallycured through extremity; but if he starts by hanging overone abyss, he finishes by staring into another.

So it is that the pleasure principle of Hollywoodcinema succumbs to the death instinct. For behindScottie's obscure compulsion to possess Madeleine/Judylurks a desire for nothingness — the ecstasy of sinkingforgetfully into the One. Never has a work of ostensiblelight entertainment been this dark.

Filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein had his own wordfor pure cinema: photogenic. Once it had relinquished the"historical", the "educational" and the "novelistic", hebelieved, the camera lens in conjunction with the filmauthor's personality would illuminate the inner "moralvalue" of things. That's just what occurs in Vertigo. WhenJudy, having reluctantly agreed to pin up her bleachedhair in exact conformity with the lost object Madeleine,advances through the green neon haze of her shabbyhotel room, both Scottie and we catch an unspeakableglimpse of the sublime.

Modern, civilised Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) maymock Scottie's fascination— and, of course, it all turns outto be a shell game perpetrated by arch-choreographerElster (or his accomplice, Hitchcock). But that's cinema —an organised lie that gestures, however dumbly, at truth.


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

Septembet 201 S ight & S ound i 55

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