🥇🏆 GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME? IF YOU SAY SO.

February 27, 2023

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Check out this definitive ranking of the best films that have come out! The Top 10:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Vertigo (1958)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Tokyo Story (1953)
In the Mood for Love (2000)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Beau travail (1999)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)

What do you think of this ranking? Meet your expectations or not? That is not an entertainment version of fan magazines, but the definitive ranking published by Sight and Sound.

Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound, the film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI), has invited critics and other industry professionals to select the Greatest Films of All Time. This tradition is more a testament to the changing trends in the mainstream of film culture over each decade.

1 - The No.1 film, probably you haven't seen

In 1952, 63 critics voted, and Bicycle Thieves (1948), which had only been in theaters for four years, was voted the best film of all time with 25 votes. A decade later, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane began a half-century-long reign of dominance until 2012 when Hitchcock's Vertigo took the top spot.

Vertigo

In 2012 top ten, the 'newest' film was 2001: A Space Odyssey released in 1968(still at number 6 in 2022 and topping the Directors' Poll), and there are even fewer films from the new century in the entire Top 100 list.

This year, on the other hand, four films from the post-seventies appear directly in the top ten. Of these, Kar-Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love (2000) and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) are long-established New Century classics, and Claire Denis' Beau travail (1999) soars straight from 79th place to 7th. But nothing says more about the vote's tendency towards recognition than the top spot for Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (Jeanne Dielman for short in the following)

Released in 1975, Jeanne Dielman is one of the most significant films of the second half of the 20th century. The difference, however, is that it is a masterpiece that belongs to the avant-garde cinema, rather than the other films from the industry that are more familiar to the general public. Just as Welles created a kind of modernist cinema in Citizen Kane at the age of 25, so did Akerman at the age of 25 making this feminist 'epic' that had never been seen before in cinema history.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Of course, I'm afraid the word 'epic' in this context only has to do with its length of 201 minutes. Compared to the grand narrative epics, Akerman's work seemed very simple in terms of its temporal and spatial structure: for three days and two nights, we watch the heroine as she goes through the daily events in her Brussels flat and the surrounding streets, including living, doing housework, grocery shopping, resting, working part-time as a prostitute in the afternoons, cooking dinner for her son when he returns home in the evening, and so on.

Akerman arranged the scenes in real-time and built the film by capturing the subtle movements of everyday life. For example, the time the heroine took to make a cup of coffee or peel a potato in a regular shot coincided with real-time. And by exploiting this repetition and difference in time and space, Akerman revealed the slow-brewing anxieties of the characters as they become trapped in the order of their lives.

This almost extreme continuity of attention to events also gives it a collateral Hitchcockian suspense: it is only in such scenarios that whether or not the lid of a cash jar is left on can be the turning point that changes the course of the film.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

It is worth noting that at the time of the film's release in 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey published the famous VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA, in which she introduced the concept of the 'male gaze' in cinema, referring to Vertigo as an example. Now that Akerman and Hitchcock's films are tied on the list, Mulvey once again contributed an article that pointed out Akerman's bond with the Hollywood and avant-garde cinema traditions. (The greatest film of all time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)

The selection of Jeanne Dielman as 'Best of All Time' also reflects some of the aesthetic shifts in art cinema in the new century, such as the female perspective, the slow pace of fixed shots, the employment of real-time, the dilution of narrative, and so on.

It is not easy for the average viewer to see such a film. Akerman's work is the antithesis of all mainstream entertainment today, both in form and content. Perhaps this is proof that art cinema, once the benchmark of popular culture, may no longer be able to recapture the glory of its golden age.

2 - Behind the ballot are the changes of the times

It is clear to everyone that we cannot expect a list to cover the entire spectrum of cinema history. But from a statistical point of view, tracing these lists gives us a glimpse into the formation of a kind of canon of film. Some works gradually establish themselves as unquestionable classics, while others move through the list, drop out, or even disappear as time flies.

Of course, it is often not the work that changes, but the viewer. Sight and Sound may not be as well-known as Cahiers du Cinéma for its lineage of aesthetic ideas. It is more like a popular publication in the field of culture, chasing all (the English-speaking world) trends with a neutral attitude. This ranking is, therefore, to a certain extent, universally representative.

Spike Lee

In the decade since 2012, we have collectively experienced many changes in the world of film. From the age of cinema and DVD came the age of streaming, and as the Hollywood industry produced more and more commercial blockbusters, art cinema fell into unprecedented marginalization and the aesthetic differences between the general public and the critics gradually widened.

At the same time, identity politics (femininity, race, sexuality) became a central topic of academia and industry. In the face of an old era centered on white male directors, there was a strong desire to criticize and revise. In addition, traditional paper media is declining, and social media, with its faster distribution, becomes the new venue for film critics. The most obvious response to it is the increase in the number of critics participating in this selection from over 800 last time to a whopping 1,639.

With these changes, this 2022 poll is, in many senses, a reshuffle.

3 - Listed, also relevant to distribution companies

Represented by Akerman, we see this list of 'minority' films by women and black directors, among others, gradually replacing the grand male-dominated narrative films. Although these minority films are making their debut in the Top 100, they have also long been recognized as classics in academia. They have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity with the release of restored versions by distribution companies recently. Now they have been 'rightly' named in the list, arguably the expected outcome.

Women directors' works include Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, #14), Czech director Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966, #28), and Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970, #48), and etc. Black directors include Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989, #24), Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1978, #44), and (also woman director) Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991, #60).

In addition to refurbishing old films, film distribution companies do a lot of things that can invisibly influence the list.

The Criterion Collection releases make up a staggering half of the list. Non-English language films in particular, such as the Chinese and Japanese films on the list, are mostly released by The Criterion Collection. All of Kar-wai Wong's films are covered by The Criterion Collection, including the just-released 4K version of the Hong Kong film In the Mood for Love (2000), which came in at number five. Foreign art films remain hot in the UK and US, held in the hands of a few distributors.

World of Wong Kar Wai by Criterion Collection

The four new releases of recent years that made it high on the list are Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, #30) and Parasite (2019, #93), which are being distributed in the US by NEON, Moonlight(2016, #62) by A24 and Get Out (2017, #100) by Blumhouse, a thriving distributor of horror films in recent years. These companies have done a great job of marketing, quickly promoting them as 'hits' or even 'contemporary classics'.

Regardless of the ranking or artistic merit of these films, it is impossible to ignore the impact of their publicity, especially as most critics are now voluntarily part of this system.

4 - Not perfect, even problematic

In any case, the canon is being rewritten, a sign that this list leaves us with a lot of holes in a short list of 100 films that offer limited freshness now that the full voting results are not yet available.

While new faces have been chosen, some periods of film history have been significantly downplayed. For example, only The Godfather (1972), Taxi Driver (1976), and Apocalypse Now (1979) remain from the New Hollywood period. Traditional European art films such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini have significantly declined in stature, and the only New German Cinema on the list today is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

Latin American cinema remains nowhere to be found, and we don't even know how many voters from Latin America were there. Asian cinema remains a few familiar faces as well. Although In the Mood for Love stormed into the top five, how many Asians can we name besides Kar-Wai Wong, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirô Ozu, and Satyajit Ray?

Another example is the absence of genre films. Get out cuts, but can we ignore horror masters as John Carpenter and George A. Romero, who influenced Jordan Peele? Bong Joon Ho's Parasite reaffirms the influence of the Korean genre, but at the same time, how should we accept that Howard Hawks, the all-rounder of classic Hollywood, is missing?

Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) is a welcome addition to the list. The New Wave's most indifferent director has now had his entire oeuvre restored, but at the same time, we begin to wonder about the absence of Éric Rohmer. With two of Agnès Varda's films on the list, has her contemporary, Alain Resnais, gone out of fashion?

Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda

Wanda is the masterpiece of American independent cinema in the late sixties, but is John Cassavetes who pioneered it less important? Jeanne Dielman tops the list, but the pioneering American films of the 1960s that had such a profound influence on Akerman are nowhere to be found on the list.

Of course, these are just a few of the issues, and making a list of films is an interesting phenomenon, as it will always be imperfect. Whatever the reason for the absence in a list, fans will fill it with questions, discussion, and more names, and that may be the beginning of the next list.