This time, I guess I've got more going on, as I considered not even mentioning it on my blog at all.
Then I thought, If I can't give at least a passing mention to something that occurs only once a decade, what kind of film blogger am I?
I considered updating the list linked above. I'm pretty sure 2001: A Space Odyssey, which topped the directors' poll this year, would make it on my personal list now. I've also soured a little bit on Rear Window since last time, though I need another viewing to see if my last viewing in 2015 just caught me on a bad night.
But even when you've been writing a film blog for nearly 14 years, it can be boring to write the same post twice, so I'm going to skip over that idea and instead register my shock at this year's new poll topper.
I had not even seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when the last list was released. I rectified that in 2018, but only after sitting through its arduous and intentionally monotonous 201 minutes over the course of two nights. I considered myself better for having seen it but I cannot say I actually liked it in the traditional sense. In some respects it is one of the most uncinematic films I have ever seen.
And now it has been voted by critics as only the fourth film ever to top the list.
The Bicycle Thief (still refusing the plural over here) was the first ever list-topper in 1952, before Citizen Kane launched a (justified) reign of terror that ran the next half century, until just before the 2012 list was released. Even when the list was separated into two lists in 1992, divided between critics and directors, neither group moved off of Kane until 2012, when both dropped it in favor of Vertigo (critics) and Tokyo Story (directors).
I was incensed enough when my beloved Kane was overthrown by the overrated Vertigo, but this ... this is something else.
"Incensed" is not the right word this time. "Puzzled" is probably better.
On the one hand I applaud that Sight & Sound's attempt to diversify its voting body has yielded what would appear to be immediate results. It seems impossible not to draw a correlation between the invitation to more female critics, and the existence of more female critics in general, and the rapid ascension of a film that they obviously believe speaks to the essential experience of women.
On the other hand, in a list designed as intentionally slow-moving, where one film was king for 50 years, should we really be seeing such a rapid ascension? Jeanne Dielman was a mere #36 in 2012, and the only event that occurred in the ten years since then to raise its profile was the suicide of its director, Chantal Akerman -- which could indeed be used as a lens to add intensity to the film's themes.
Then again this list is fundamentally an expression of passion inspired in its voters at the time of their vote, not some stodgy adherence to the status quo. One of the 2022 list's great surprises on the positive side is the #30 debut of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 of 2019 that still makes me swoon any time I think about it. It may be that this film will never get any closer to #1, and probably that it should not, but the fact that it has this moment to commit to permanence its impact on critics is really terrific. And of course it's likely we have female critics to thank for this as well.
And it's not like they've cleared the deck of the old standard bearers. Vertigo is still #2, Citizen Kane is still #3. I hate to think of Kane as "only" the third best movie of all time, but Kane doesn't need Sight & Sound to continue delivering accolades to it. It is thoroughly and utterly chalk at this point.
I want to pause to acknowledge a slight grammatical deviation in the listing of the full title of Jeanne Dielman, now that the film is getting such attention. I'm seeing it listed primarily with an additional comma than the one I'd been using, as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles rather than Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (The poster above has yet a third punctuation, with only one comma after 23.)
I'm going to keep the punctuation I've used over the years whenever I've mentioned it -- this used to be my go-to joke for a long and ungainly title, even before I saw it -- for a couple reasons. One is that having the 23 offset by commas makes it seem like it is Jeanne's age, which we know is not correct because the character has a grown son. Furthermore, its points would be considerably hollower if we were talking about a woman just five years out of high school -- the whole idea is that her life has settled into a drudgery of household chores and tricks with johns. Another reason is that Wikipedia, which I trust implicitly whether I should or not, continues to use the punctuation I've been using, though notably, IMDB uses the one I've been seeing passed around since the Sight & Sound list was revealed. It could be that IMDB scrambled to fix it up just within the last few days, I don't know.
In 2012 it seems like the top 250 vote getters were readily available to find, but this year's articles about the poll seem to focus on the top 100, so I'll make some isolated comments about those top 100 for the remainder of this piece.
#4 - Tokyo Story - This is my preferred example of how to make a slow-moving film that lulls us into a total understanding of its themes by the end. I wrote a long piece on this movie in college and I'm really due for another viewing.
#6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey - As mentioned, this topped the directors' poll and rightly so, as this film has shot up majorly in my estimation as a result of two viewings (one on the big screen in 70 mm) since the 2012 poll. This is now in my personal top 20 on Flickchart and I couldn't be happier to see all the voters continue to shower it with praise. (And yes, it makes sense that this would top the directors' poll as it is a very "directy" film, as I wrote to a friend yesterday.)
#7 - Beau Travail - Okay ladies, you need to calm down now. This is the highest ranked film I haven't seen, and it was another film directed by a woman, Claire Denis. In its way, the ascension of this film could be considered even more shocking than Jeanne Dielman, as it was only at #74 in 2012. Guess I will prioritize a viewing now.
#9 - Man With a Movie Camera - Another film I had not seen in 2012, this one truly earns its spot. I awarded this five stars on Letterboxd when I finally watched it in 2020.
#14 - Cleo from 5 to 7 - This makes three female directors in the top 15, which really, is a good thing, whatever shock I may be registering. I had meant to watch this when I acquainted myself with the films of Agnes Varda a few years ago but for some reason couldn't find it. Second movie in the top 100 I haven't seen.
#16 - Meshes in the Afternoon - Female co-directed (Maya Deren). Third unseen.
#17 - Close Up - I had only just seen Abbas Kiarostami's film when the last list was revealed. Really deserving.
#27 - Shoah - This movie is like nine hours long and it still breaks my notion of what a film is, so I still have not seen it. Fourth unseen.
#28 - Daisies - Another female director. Fifth unseen.
#31 - Mirror - Tarkovsky. Sixth unseen.
#43 - Killer of Sheep - Another film newly seen by me in the last decade. Wasn't quite this impressed with it but like that it's on the list.
#48 - Wanda - Directed by Barbara Loden, another woman. First film on this list whose title is not actually familiar to me at all. Seventh unseen.
#52 - News from Home - Chantal Akerman's second film on the list. I wasn't aware of this, apparently, when I watched two movies by Akerman for my Audient Auteurs series in 2018, watching the similarly titled No Home Movie to go along with Jeanne Dielman. Eighth unseen.
#52 - Fear Eats the Soul - I actually wanted to watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder films for the above-mentioned Audient Auteurs series, but I think there was an availability issue with his films. (Incidentally, I always heard this referred to as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but I guess Ali has gone away.) Ninth unseen.
#54 - Sherlock Jr. - This was a first-time viewing for me in 2016, and I really wish it were in the top ten.
#54 - Le Mepris (Contempt) - Godard. Tenth unseen.
#59 - Sans Soleil + #60 - Daughters of the Dust - Two more movies that I've watched for the first time since last list. I wasn't using that list as an official watchlist but it looks like I did some good work in the past ten years.
#60 - Moonlight - Second film that could not have made a previous list.
#66 - Touki Bouki - Eleventh unseen.
#67 - The Gleaners and I - This is what I watched when I watched Varda films for Audient Auteurs and couldn't get my hands on Cleo. Another first-time viewing in the past ten. Really good film.
#67 - Andrei Rublev - Another Tarkovsky I haven't seen, though ten years ago I hadn't seen any, and now I've seen three, so I guess that's something. Twelfth unseen.
#72 - My Neighbor Totoro - It seems hard to believe that in 2012 I had only seen one Miyazaka film, that being Spirited Away, and now I have seen all but his first and his most recent. Did I mention I've been doing good work in the past ten years? Totoro is my favorite.
#72 - Journey to Italy - Thirteenth unseen.
#72 - L'avventura - Another first-time watch in the past ten.
#75 - Imitation of Life and Sansho the Bailiff - Two more first-time watches since the 2012 list, though I really didn't like Sansho the Bailiff.
#78 - A Brighter Summer Day, Satanango and Celine and Julie Go Boating - Fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth unseen.
#78 - A Matter of Life and Death - I really need to stop listing the films I've watched for the first time in the past ten years. I get it, I've been a good doobie. This is one of my favorites of those.
#84 - Pierrot le Fou, Histoire du Cinema and Spirit of the Beehive - Seventeenth through nineteenth unseen.
#88 - Chungking Express - I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find this. I can't. Twentieth unseen.
#90 - Parasite - That's two 2019 films to debut on this list, though I would have liked to see my #1 from that year higher.
#90 - Yi Yi - I have also tried to find this without success. Twenty-first unseen.
#97 - Get Out - Final film debuting in the top 100 that did not yet exist in 2012. It's interesting to note that the debuts are from two Black male directors, one Korean male director and one French female director. That's some good diversity right there.
#95 - Black Girl and Tropical Malady. And we end with a total of 23 unseen movies.
I'll have you know that I skipped mentioning five more films that I had seen since 2012 after vowing to stop that. I also missed a few earlier (sorry Battle of Algiers, I love you) but I'm not going to go back and correct that now.
So having seen 77% of the top 100 is pretty good, certainly a lot better than I did last time. And now I've got a good list to work from for next time, though with the way this list tends to randomly unearth movies that aren't household names for cinephiles, I don't suspect I'll have any chance of hitting the full top 100 in 2032.
Sounds like a long time from now, but I guess 2022 sounded like a long time from 2012. I'll be 59. Perish the thought.
I should probably give an additional shout out to the directors' list, which, as in 2012, seems like more a reflection of the films they actually like than the films they think they should like. In my 2012 post linked above, I said that the critics seemed to try to out-impress each other while the directors were more likely to geek out on a perceived peer that they admired, tending for (slightly) more mainstream fare. Many of the titles are of course the same, but a handful I'll shout out that I'm happy to see are Taste of Cherry, The Conformist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wild Strawberries, A Separation, The Seventh Seal, Jaws, Eraserhead, Don't Look Now and Dr. Strangelove. They only had room for two of the first-time eligible movies, Parasite and Moonlight. Minus points for including Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on their list -- also an unfortunate first-time viewing in the past decade. Blecch.
I guess once I got writing about Sight & Sound I had a fair amount to say after all.
See you back here in ten years.
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