If I Voted in Sight & Sound

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.