Ah, film nerds and listing: like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly, Thelma and Louise.
We're obsessed with them. The IMDb Top 250, the annual slew of critic lists, national film institutions, Flickchart, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? -- and the grand sultan of them all, the film magazine Sight & Sound's list. Coming out every ten years, this has historically been the most prestigious ranking of cinema, and is one of the primary reasons why many call Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made. This year's 2012 selection represents a watershed of sorts, as the number of voters has increased drastically with the magazine making a conscious effort to extend the critical voice beyond the bread-and-butter (look! another duality!) realm of Hollywood and European critics.
And when it dropped a number of months ago, there were perhaps two big stories that emerged. The one that dominated headlines --the unseating of Citizen Kane by Hitchcock's Vertigo as the new victor-- hinted at perhaps the more interesting story of the Top Ten's rather unsurprising picks. With the new plethora of international voices, some suspected that a wildly new top echelon would emerge. Instead, 'the classics' showed their continuing forté: the aforementioned Citizen Kane and Vertigo, Ozu's Tokyo Story, Renoir's La Règle du jeu, Fellini's 8 1/2. Furthermore, four of the critics' top 11 were from the silent era: Sunrise, Man With a Movie Camera, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and perennial favourite Battleship Potemkin.
Moving further down the list into the rest of the top 50, we find some very strong showings for Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky, with Breathless (#13), Mirror (#19), Contempt (#23), Andrei Rublev (#27), Stalker (#29), Pierrot le fou (#43) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (#48) making appearances. Other widely-cited filmmakers in the upper regions of the list include, unsurprisingly, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Ingmar Bergman and Martin Scorsese. The most recent films, as have been widely noted, are Wong Kar-Wai's 2000 romance In the Mood for Love at #24 and David Lynch's 2003 surrealist-noir Mulholland Dr. coming in at #28.
As any good film nerd that has a particular obsession with these lists, I have been working on my own for quite a long time. Rather than simply arranging films in a sort of Flickchart-style order based on an ever-changing "Which one is better?" process, my Top Ten is a curated list: I have taken the effort to select films that I feel cover a large range of cinema, can be seen to have impacted filmmaking in a significant way, are of excellent technical quality, and most importantly, represents my own particular taste. The films that appear speak very closely to me, and are fundamental to my understanding of cinema.
And so, without further ado, the list I would have submitted to Sight & Sound in 2012.
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, USA)
And it starts with, in my humble little opinion, the best. I've seen it dozens of times, and I never seem to tire of it. I've taught first year students about it, I've written about it, I've watched it in classrooms and lecture halls and my living room -- and every single time, I discover something new, find myself completely enthralled, and become more convinced that it is the greatest film ever made. What could I possibly say that others have not elaborated on for years? Only that for me, Citizen Kane is the most enveloping, ambitious, technically sound and, above all, most entertaining movie I've yet seen. [#2 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1943, France)
While curating my list, Carné's epic romantic melodrama almost seemed out of place: it does not really have any overt of the pedagogical, philosophical or experimental qualities that I usually treasure. Instead, it chooses to simply tell a beautiful tale, beautifully told. But "simply" does not really work when discussing Children of Paradise: it sprawls across the screen, its fully fleshed characters leaping out at you, pulling at your heartstrings as they wander the streets and theatres of Paris. There are few other films in which I find myself falling in love with the people on screen, as if I have known them for years --the other example that comes to mind is The Shop Around the Corner-- and Carné's sweeping scope along with the film's much-storied production (filmed over three years during WWII) make this a romance for the ages. [#73 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950, Japan)
Kurosawa's masterpiece features remarkable performances, some of the most beautiful cinematography captured on film, and a haunted, fractured narrative that unfolds like a paper crane. From the rain-soaked, crumbling gate to a sun-dappled forest, Mifune's cackling maniac and Noriko Honma's possessed medium, Rashômon drags you into its world of ambiguity, and deservingly has carved out a special space in both global cinema and cognitive psychology. [#24 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
West Side Story (Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise, 1961, USA)
This almost didn't make this list -- but when I thought it was complete, I took a good look at my Top Ten and felt that something was missing. And what was it? A film that is by no means perfect --my two-plus years of studying it for my MA thesis have made its flaws obvious to me-- but one that I still hold so dearly and closely to my heart. I've lost track of how many times I've seen West Side Story, but every single time, I find myself overwhelmed with its passion, its music and dance and colour and explosion of pathos. But what makes this film so vivid is its small details: a flash of a chain-linked fence doused in scarlet before a deadly rumble; Bernardo staring at the camera as he slams a brick wall with his fist; the stained glass windows of Maria's room. While Jerome Robbins usually takes most of the credit for his incredible staging and choreography, Robert Wise and his team 's expert handling of mise-en-scène and editing allow all of the theatrical elements to soar. [#588 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966, Sweden)
When someone asks me to name the 'scariest film ever made', I instantly blurt out Bergman's Persona. While not a 'horror film' in really any sense of the generic term, Persona leaves me clinging to my seat, terrified of my own thoughts and vision. It's somehow both an anomaly in Bergman's chronology and his defining statement, both his most confident work and his loosest. Sometimes, inspiration strikes like a lightning bolt. [#17 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Week-End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968, France)
There exists no other movie that I have yet experienced that matches the impact Week-End makes on me. Every time I leave a screening, I find myself bursting at the seams: like a time-bomb in my chest, pirouetting ecstatic joy and sublime thoughts of elephantine doom. It is everything I've ever wanted to say within two hours of cinema: the blackest of humour, the most deranged of formalist tricks, savagery and beauty. Godard is shouting into the darkness, slapping his audiences and inciting psychonautic riots, all between moments of mournful, lilac-scented despair. It is, for my money, Godard's defining film and the great representative of the 20th century cinematic avant-garde. [#377 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1980, France)
Chris Marker's hallucinatory essay film is difficult to sum up, but it is a mesmerizing experience. Travelling between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco, flitting between documentary, mockumentary and flat-out fiction --and never quite distinguishing which from when-- we dive head-first into an encapsulating exploration of global modernity, cultural and personal memories, and the making of (personal) history. [#69 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985, USSR)
While 'heavy' films seem to be natural fits for lists of The Greatest Ever, many of the anticipated nominees are too self-consiously moralistic or parables of sticky sentimentality. Klimov's film, on the other hand, does not seem to have been made for the sake of 'teaching' audiences anything, but as a personal --and subnational-- exorcism. It is fitting that it's Klimov's final film, stating that "everything I had wanted to say, now has been". A complete turnaround from his normal mode of comedy, Come and See is the final word on WWII, seen through the eyes of a pre-adolescent boy. But it is not a coming of age tale, nor does it look down on its protagonist as an avatar of (angelic) innocence: it is showing war as it is, as it is imagined, and above all, as it feels. [#154 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994, Hong Kong)
A glorious, sweepingly romantic blur of a dream that nods towards film noir, giddy romance and the rush that is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. It is another film that leaves me dancing out of the theatre, drunk on its hypnotic rhythms and colour-soaked washes, but most of all on its hot-blooded passion. I just want to jump in when Faye Wong, in one of the most delightful performances captured on screen, invades Tony Leung's apartment, playfully rearranging the furniture and feeding goldfish. As a statement of its time, it's incredibly rich, too: the anxieties of a sign-filled postmodern consumer culture three years before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese authority. Yet this never gets in the way of its intoxicating qualities, as it lurks in the background, just waiting for audiences to feel its bony grip. [#144 on 2012 Sight & Sound list]
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002, New Zealand/USA)
Given the rules of Sight & Sound, I am unable to name the entire trilogy as my choice, even though I am a strong supporter of the notion that Jackson's extended version of The Lord of the Rings is, in essence, an eleven-hour film broken into three chunks. But The Two Towers makes my list because it is in my mind the ultimate adventure-epic, and seamlessly balancing each of Tolkien's complex narrative threads. Jackson masterfully unleashes a toolbox of cinematic tricks, built up from over a century of filmmaking history, to spectacular means. A supreme triumph of everything we escape to the movies for. [Does not appear on 2012 Sight & Sound list. The Fellowship of the Ring appears at #894, with only a single critical mention]Strangely, the international flavour of the list grew organically. I didn't set out to create a list that would only have three Hollywood films on it, but there you have it. Dramas dominate the list, but I felt it was important for me to not leave out genre filmmaking. We have a musical, a fantasy, a romantic melodrama; films made outside of not only the Hollywood system, but also not part of the European art house cinema (so-called "second cinema") that I was expecting to completely dominate my personal list; an essay film with documentary roots.
So, what's missing? Well, the big one is comedy. Frankly, I can't think of a single pure comedy that I would feel comfortable placing on my list: City Lights or The Shop Around the Corner or maybe even Annie Hall would be the most likely candidates for me, but I think I speak for many cinéastes that when making these lists I am biased towards films that are perceived to have a certain gravitas. We often conflate this for tragedy and sterility, and it is something that we, as academics, filmmakers and hardcore audiences keep saying that we will rectify. Alas, it just doesn't happen. Sorry, comedy.
The Other Contenders
Films that at one point or another were seriously considered to be part of my list.
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Walther Ruttmann, Germany, 1927)
The classic 'city symphony' that mixes documentary, abstract film to show a day in the life of Berlin.
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1949)
A simply beautiful tale of father and daughter in post-WWII Japan.
Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, USA, 1951)
Acid-laced satire of Hollywood crackles with venom and features Gloria Swanson vamping it up.
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France, 1961)
Stunning narrative fracturing, photography and music.
The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary, 1967)
War as a chess game. Simply unforgettable.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1968)
Must be seen on the big screen.
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, USA, 1979)
Strange that the best neo-realist film wasn't made in Italy or in response to WWII. A poetic slice of life capturing the poor, black American urban experience.
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainier Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979)
In case you're curious, West Side Story bumped this entry off my Top Ten. Historical feminist satirical melodrama, with Hannah Schygulla dominating the screen as the 'Mata-Hari of the economic miracle'.
Germany, Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms, West Germany, 1980)
An interesting pairing with Maria Braun, Sanders-Brahms' film is a bitter, quiet act of mourning.
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, China, 1984)
The film that put the Chinese Fifth Generation on the map is a stunning epic.
The Horse Thief (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1986, China)
The 2001 of Chinese cinema. Prepare to be blown away with its haunting vision of Himalayan life.
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989, USA)
Red-hot in its scorching analysis of contemporary urban racial tension, but also a joyful celebration to life.
Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998, USA)
Citizen Kane meets David Bowie in this glimmering ode to the power of spectacle.
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA, 2001)
Lurhmann's postmodern musical is a giddy treat with a heartbreaking ending that makes me sob every time.
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, UK/USA/Mexico, 2006)
Perfectly capturing the decade's gloomy global mindset, with some of the greatest camerawork ever captured.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne, USA, 2008)
If Moulin Rouge! makes me sob, this will turn even stone into a blubbering mess. Documentary has never been more personal or more devastatingly real.
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, USA, 2011)
Yes, really! Already!
And Don't Forget...
(In no particular order) Casablanca; No Country for Old Men; Umberto D.; City Lights; Diagonal Symphony; Umbrellas of Cherbourg; The Passion of Joan of Arc; The Conformist; Death in Venice; Bonnie and Clyde; Greed; The Trial; Three Colours: Red; Three Colours: Blue; Double Indemnity; Nosferatu; Le Boucher; Vertigo; Daisies; Taxi Driver; The Damned
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