Sight and Sound have published their generational ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll. Like others – probably including everyone involved in voting for or organising it! – I had some reservations about it as an enterprise. We’ve asked our staff to put together some picks for films that are excellent and deserve attention, but sit outside of the picture of ‘greatness’ as it’s offered in aggregate by the top 100. And I’d hope that some of our picks might make the expanded list when it’s released in 2023.
To talk more generally about some of those reservations by way of introduction: there’s a universe where the list is an invitation to consider greatness. We can sit with what others consider great about something and consider what we can find great in it. But since lists are a process of reduction, they tend away from the generosity and expansion we should bring to any film. While furloughed, I set myself the challenge to watch all of the Sight and Sound list from 2012 ahead of the new poll’s release. When watching some films on the list, one has to actively resist the temptation to ask, ‘This is supposed to be great?’ It adds a heavy veil between us and the art, either to concur with or resist its ‘greatness’. ‘Greatness’ as a metric is somehow both thuddingly definitive and vaporously elusive. The question I come back to again is what invitation is it to the uninitiated? If the poll serves any purpose, it’s the work that comes afterwards, of sharing these films with audiences and the ones far beyond ‘greatness’ (in this spirit, we have put together a list of UK rights holders for the top 100 films in the critics’ poll, to help cinemas to share these titles with their audiences).
The other half of me that can wear these things more lightly is able to see the playful side of it. We’re less putting laurels on Olympians and more donning a paper party hat for a parlour game. I understand that no one who voted in the poll has seen every film ever made and we haven’t begun blasting the unelected films into the sun yet. It’s silly and partial. The very stupidity of trying to pick ten great films only makes more excitingly clear the incredible richness of the medium. So, with that hat on, let’s get on with something sillier still, and select one film each!
– Duncan Carson, ICO Projects and Business Manager
Isabel Moir, Film Programmer
Loves of a Blonde (dir. Miloš Forman, 1965)
I felt very lucky to be asked to contribute to the Sight and Sound poll and happy to see that five of my top ten titles made the list. That said, one of my favourite films, Loves of a Blonde, sadly did not make the list so I wanted to highlight it here. I first saw this film during my first year of university at a time when I was being introduced to new films and directors, when a friend kindly gifted me a Second Run DVD which completely charmed me, and I instantly fell in love. It is a film I have found myself revisiting over the years and have also programmed for audiences on more than one occasion.
Loves of a Blonde is an early work by director Miloš Forman (Hair, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) which on release immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and in 1967 earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. The film is a bittersweet tragicomedy about Adula, a young woman who falls for a young jazz pianist visiting from Prague who she plans to visit after a casual encounter. What unfolds is a heartbreaking relatable tale which is both tender and honest as it depicts this woman’s journey and search for love and longing for something outside of her everyday existence. The film is set in a very small factory town where there is a noticeable absence of men, the film beautifully captures the relationship and the intimate bond between the women in their shared boarding house. The film is full of satire and humour as well as being a dark and sombre look at these women’s futures and the feeling of entrapment by their surroundings. I would recommend viewing as a double bill with Věra Chytilová’s 1962 film A Bagful of Fleas which is also available via Second Run.
Bookings: Second Run
James Calver, Projects and Events Officer
City of God (dir. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
There’s very little I can write about City of God (Cidade de Deus) that hasn’t already been written, especially in terms of the film’s significance within the canon of cinema. For many people in my generation, it served as an entry point not only into Brazilian cinema but Latin American cinema as a whole. Over the last 20 years since its debut at Cannes it’s still a cultural touchstone for a lot of film fans, especially within the conversation of non-English language cinema. There are some for whom this might be the only non-English language film they’ve ever seen (a group my dad is included within).
With all that in mind, I was slightly taken aback to see that it was not included in the Sight and Sound Top 100. Whilst films from the 21st century are few and far between on the list in general (another major gripe I have with it), it felt like within those two decades since it was released, City of God has earned the right to be a part of this conversation. More shockingly somewhat is the fact that there are no Latin American films in the list whatsoever – a list that somehow has space for over 60 films from the US and France combined. I can only hope that if they expand the voting pool again for the 2032 list, bringing in more contributors from my generation and hopefully the generation afterwards, then we may find space for City of God where it rightly belongs.
Bookings: Park Circus
Duncan Carson, Projects and Business Manager
Losing Ground (dir. Kathleen Collins, 1982)
Partly I want to sing about this film – which I know will have been chosen by many when we can see the individual ballots, the much more interesting part of this endeavour – because it goes to show what we’re missing if we walk the same paths of ‘greatness’ decade after decade, the already anointed getting yet another new restoration. Collins’ film is only recently getting its flowers after a stunning restoration brought to us by Milestone Films, following her premature death in 1988.
Losing Ground is a film deeply interested in our pleasure. It’s a sunlit recreation of the joys of summer: it includes dancing, jokes and self-expansion (it’s the story of a woman considering different loves, as well as different selves). It’s also a story of general human frustration – parents, marriages, work – and specific African American pain. Every time I’ve watched it, something new comes to mind as my life and knowledge expands. The film itself even pokes fun at the idea of directorial ‘greatness’, with a long section with a hyper-pretentious black film director trying to capture ‘the relationship between the characters, the space and the light’.
Bookings: Milestone Films
Patrick Stewart, Marketing and Communications Manager
Hunger (dir. Steve McQueen, 2008)
As I rewatch Hunger, my instinctive choice for this blog, I wonder if I’ve fallen into a trap of thinking greatness can only be achieved through intensity. Perhaps I have, but I’m still astonished by the searing mastery of Steve McQueen’s debut feature. Looking both at and through beyond the hunger strikes, McQueen brings to bear his background in visual art, Enda Walsh’s experience as a dramatist and delicate, devastating camerawork. At moments it’s abstract art, then excruciating body art, now a transcendent Renaissance scene of martyrdom. It’s a static shot Antigone, a historical record, it’s a political 2001: A Space Odyssey collapsing into the universe from a hospital bed.
Improbably, McQueen finds space for this creation in the thorniest thicket of recent Irish history while neither twisting into propaganda or condemnation. In drawing on all those traditions it’s perhaps not the peak of achievement in terms of the history and conventions of film, but I think it’s his greatest achievement and would sit comfortably in my top 100.
Bookings: Park Circus
Jake Abatan, Marketing and Administration Coordinator
Thriller (dir. Sally Potter, 1979) & The Gold Diggers (dir. Sally Potter, 1983)
Jeanne Dielman topping the most recent decade list will have very welcome consequences for film audiences. The film will be seen more widely now, and seems to already be easier to view than ever before. I’m sure this will draw more deserved attention to Chantal Akerman’s work, but I also hope that it will spark a wider embrace of experimental feminist filmmaking. Two films in particular that deserve more attention are Sally Potter’s Thriller and The Gold Diggers. Both are significant examples of feminist filmmaking, toying with genre and performance in playfully surprising ways.
Thriller, Potter’s debut short, deconstructs Puccini’s opera La Boheme by bringing Mimi, the seamstress who tragically dies at the opera’s end (and played here by Colette Laffont), back to life so that she can ponder why she had to die in the first place. Furthering the argument put forward in Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Thriller uses freeze frame, voice over, and Bernard Herrmann’s infamous Psycho score to expose the objectification of women in society as something deeply rooted in culture, both high and low.
Similar themes are the focus of The Gold Diggers, an avant-garde feminist musical of sorts. Colette Laffont returns as a bank clerk, Celeste, who becomes fixated on the relationship between gold and power. Much like her character in Thriller, Laffont’s Celeste questions the world around her. She probes the (male) higher ups about the workings of the world, but their answers only obscure things further; it seems information is also key to those in power. Julie Christie plays Celeste’s opposite, a performer named Ruby caught in the midst of a nightmarish fiction she has no recollection of. There are echoes of Mimi in Thriller here, but whilst Mimi was trapped in an unglamorous attic, Ruby traverses the stage, the streets, and the wider world. Certainly, The Gold Diggers is a far more transportative film, with striking imagery by Babette Mangolte—who also shot Jeanne Dielman as well as other Chantal Akerman films.
It’s no surprise that neither of these films have ranked in the top 100. Potters most popular film, Orlando (1992), ranked 447th in 2012’s poll with just three votes. But both are bold, original—and most importantly—great films, undoubtedly worth your time.
Bookings: Women Make Movies (Thriller) (The Gold Diggers)
David Williams, Film Hub South East Coordinator
A Serious Man (dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2009)
There are a number of Coen brothers films considered to be greats, but if a few are jostling for a spot in an all-time list then what A Serious Man manages to do when compared with their other efforts is to perfectly hybridise their core sensibilities. Often seen to be operating in two different modes on a wacky to woeful spectrum across their career, with A Serious Man the Coens tell a story that has the melancholy and malaise central to the likes of No Country For Old Men or Inside Llewyn Davis, but told with the chaotic, kinetic structure and farcical tone of a Fargo or an O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as entertaining to see someone experience crises as the Coens manage to make it, and for such an intimate character portrait to have the kind of scope it does is masterful work.
Bookings: Park Circus
Sami Abdul-Razzak, Marketing Officer
The Naked Island (dir. Kaneto Shindo, 1960)
A man and woman row across a stretch of sea. They stop at the side of a road to fill their buckets with water. They row back across the sea to their little island. They slowly carry their buckets up a steep hill. They carefully water their crops.
So goes much of Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island, a poetic and almost dialogue-less portrayal of a family’s harsh existence of subsistence farming on a tiny island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea (the only words uttered in the film, besides a few snippets of song, are two instances of ‘heave-ho!’). My opening paragraph may make it sound like complete tedium, but through the magic of editing and Hikaru Hayashi’s hypnotic score, the film soon draws you under its rhythmic spell. It’s not all cold aestheticism, however. Three moments interrupt the repetition of their daily routine: one of shocking violence, one of familial joy, and, finally, one of intense grief.
The Naked Island ranked 588th in the 2012 poll, with two votes. With this year’s poll giving prominent positions to a number of formally experimental works, I’ll be curious to see whether that’s changed much when the full results are released.
Bookings: TBC
Araya (dir. Margot Benacerraf, 1959)
Given their thematic similarities, I would also like to highlight Margot Benacerraf’s Araya, made one year before The Naked Island. While Benacerraf’s film is a documentary, the two films have much in common—both employing a poetic style to examine the backbreaking daily work of people living in a hostile rural environment, isolated from the developments of the modern world. Araya’s subject is a salt pan in Venezuela’s Araya Peninsula, where generations of ‘salineros’ have manually exploited the region since its discovery by the Spanish nearly five hundred years ago. In her only feature-length work, Benacerraf beautifully captures this harsh and archaic way of life, which would soon vanish with the arrival of industrial mechanisation.
Despite sharing the FIPRESCI prize with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, Araya seems to have gone largely forgotten until Milestone Films’ restoration in 2009. It didn’t get a single vote in the 2012 poll, but hopefully the restoration and its inclusion in this year’s Cinema Rediscovered programme will continue to bring more people to this extraordinary film.
Bookings: Cinema Rediscovered
Sight and Sound 2022 Poll – Booking Information
To help you to share the titles from the Sight and Sound poll (and beyond) with your audiences, we’ve put together a list with details of the rights holders for the top 100 films in the critics’ poll. See it here.
