Opinions on BFI 2022 Sight and Sound Poll

It feels obvious to me that Jeanne Dielman is entirely a work of passion and devotion stemming from her heart, but the clincher here is whether or not that is proper justification for the risks it takes, or whether or not a movie like this is an acquired taste. If more non-critics finished the movie, this would be one of the most polarizing movies on Earth.

One of the joys of a list is finding things you haven't seen (or sometimes even heard of).

Watching people put the same 20 films in different orders doesn't hold much interest for me. It's like watching someone shuffle around their 20 favorite Pokemon cards or something.

FWIW, I heard of Jeanne Dielman a little under 10 years ago, when looking at the 2012 poll results. It was on Hulu at the time, because that was the era when Hulu had the criterion collection. There were even ads promoting the criterion collection on hulu. I remember someone I knew at the time, who wasn't a cinephile asking me, "what is the criterion collection," because they had presumably seen the ads on Hulu.

Coincidentally, that's also when I first heard of Pather Panchali. Seeing as how I was more impressed with that one and it was was from India (a Bengali film specifically), country where my film knowledge is, to put it politely, "shit," (tbh, it still is. btw, you should watch The Night of Knowing Nothing while it's (hopefully) still on the Criterion Channel) it seemed the more embarrassing point of ignorance for me. Due to a sequence of studio fires (I think in the 90s), that one was legitimately more difficult to track down until it got a restoration in the early part of the past decade.
But also, you should watch Pather Panchali, if you haven't seen it (it's been S&S top 10 before, so maybe you have) - and also the whole trilogy.
I'm trying to make up, apparently not ringing the Messiah of Evil bell louder 10 years ago, right now. You should make note of it.

I'm a little unclear what this line meant. BFI ballots are unweighted. To my understanding, it's just, "give us your top 10 films of all time." (whatever that means to you).

Ah. I assumed people submitted ranked lists.

When we do lists here, for example, films sometimes place high because a few people ranked it very high, and sometimes place high because a lot of people had it on their ballot, even if not in a very high spot. I meant that I could see a lot of people putting Jeanne Dielman on their lists, even in a lower spot and that really adding up.

(My numbers are coming from letterboxd lists which aren't accommodating ties, so my numbers might be a bit off. I've seen something like 7-way ties in the the BFI polls before).
It was on the 2012 poll and ranked relatively highly (39)

Given that this year is making news for so much shifting around, I'm going to guess Dielman has ranked highly on the list before with the notion that position 39 wasn't a fluke, so that seems like at least 10-20 years of it being considered a classic, at least by people who pay attention to and look at this list. Unless your definition of a classic only extends to 10-15 movies in existence.

Fwiw: Goodfellas went form 176 to 64. A 112 slot jump.

Ten films. Unweighted. No tie-breakers. If movies tie, they tie, and that's fine.
I agree with @Frightened Inmate No. 2. I think the people who voted for it, liked it, and I would suspect they liked it a lot.

I think the issue of selecting 10 movies does get into the, "why this movie and not that one," can result in some fickleness and probably susceptibility to group think (I'm a fan of Citizen Kane and it would be an entry on my hypothetical ballot, but I also think the fact that it was the #1 for so many years created pressure for and against that a voter might unconsciously weigh when deciding for it on their ballot or against it all of those decades because it was recognized as #1. I think the decision to push films directed by women probably caused a similar mental pressure when people filled out there ballots this time. Given the other shakeups on the list (the ones not involving movies directed by women or people of color), I just think that all of the widening voting population affected this list more though. But that might just be the whole, "So Goodfellas and not Raging Bull?" sticking in my craw).

The fun of it is seeing where the surprises lay when it comes to user lists. Example, My numbers one and two are very typical: Godfather and Citizen Kane. But how often do you see 12 Monkeys just three spaces under another Terry Gilliam movie, Holy Grail, right in the top ten?

On this statement, it bothers me that the short film La Jetee is included and not 12 Monkeys, let alone the lack of Monty Python. Btw, I wrote MoFo's first Jeanne Dielman review, as far as I can find. Just finished the movie tonight in one sitting.

I wrote but deleted something because it wasn't quite expressing what I wanted it to. I think that when you are so restricted (10 films? I feel vicariously faint!), you become very aware of the films you are discarding. I know that when I've put together my ballots in the countdowns here, I've become more aware of things like "Wow, I'm throwing out a lot of foreign films". And at that point I would be tempted to try and make sure that the "best of each type" was represented.

I think that Jeanne Dielman is the best film I've seen about what it means to be a person who is being ground down by social indifference and being pigeonholed into a certain role. I actually like the film more now that my sister has a child and I'm hearing by proxy what she's being told, including the fact that she is a "terrible parent" if she goes back to work part time as opposed to spending all of her time in the home, with no thought to how isolating it is to be in a single role 24/7. I think that increased acknowledgement of some of the issues presented in the film make it something that a wider audience can be receptive to these days, even if the runtime and deliberate slowness is still a huge barrier to a casual viewer.

The word "best" has a lot of metrics to it. When I think about a movie like The Red Shoes or Lawrence of Arabia, they are a kind of "best" (a best in majesty) that is very different from the way that I regard Jeanne Dielman as being a "best" film.

Also, something you said earlier, "you didn't want to watch Citizen Kane after it leapt over Casablanca as the greatest movie ever."
That never happened with the AFI list. They only ever did two editions. Kane was as the top of both. Casablanca was at #2 on the first one, The Godfather passed it up on the second one.
Kane was at the top of the BFI poll since '62 and remained at the top until 2012 (Bicycle Thieves topped it in '52, which was the first edition), when Vertigo got more votes. (To my understanding, Vertigo was nipping at its heels in 2002.)

ETA: Though other people have said it in this thread, I'll echo it, Beau Travail is kinda amazing. Still shocked to see it jump all the way up to the top 10 in a list that I perceive as usually changing more gradually (which also does leave me somewhat unsettled, but the more people talk about this list here and elsewhere, I'm thinking the rate at which you want a "best" list to fluctuate is its own discussion). (I'm mentioning these movies, bolded, to you, because you had multiple posts in the thread of, "because I don't remember anyone mentioning 'x' movie." I watched Cleo only once though and didn't click with it. I want to give it a second go at some point. Varga's Vagabond, I did click with (it showed up on the directors poll). She still made movies in the past decade. I think they were more documentaries. I was meaning to get Faces, Places in before the 2010's ballots here. Will it make my mine? Who knows. Just putting it out there, so you aren't smacking your head later.

Addressing the different kinds of best are oftentimes the best way to compare movies of varying arts. Comparing movies of similar types is one thing, but asking yourself, "does this movie do what it does as well as this other movie" really hones the personal skill, even if it's hard at first.

Have you seen it?

Those kinds of films are the hardest to judge, I think. How much do you reward a film for succeeding in its goal, versus critiquing the goal itself? There is some degree to which we must take all films on their own terms, but that does not extend infinitely, and it's pretty hard to decide where that line goes.

I think of this sort of question when I think of the (contentious!) divide between "best" and "favorite."

I don't really have an opinion yet, but my null hypothesis is that it's probably close to impossible for any particularly strange or experimental film to be voted the top <anything> by a significant number of people without some sort of outside consideration playing a significant role. I imagine some people feel that's actually the purpose of lists and organizations like this, though.

But including 12 Monkeys instead of La Jetee would make the list even worse and more laughable.

__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

By the way just to check with Flickchart
https://www.flickchart.com/movie/EDA0904CC2

1 person has this as their #1 film and less than 30 people have it in there top twenty.

Vertigo
https://www.flickchart.com/movie/6AE2473940
395 people, 4305 in the top twenty

Citizen Kane
https://www.flickchart.com/movie/693CD88917
519 people have it as number 1, 5724 in the top twenty

The best movies tend to generate two things: emotion or discussion.


Dielmann is a film designed to not simply be an intellectual exercise, but to align our sympathy with the main character. It does this by utilizing the real time it is so often attacked for, not to alienate, but to engage. It is this films direct route to truth and it simply does not work unless done in extended takes. It would be the equivalent of asking the actors in a musical to stop singing. As divisive as this can obviously be, it is the whole point of the film. And for those willing not to completely discard the experiment, I dont know, because they are close minded to anything that doesn't conform to their idea of what a movie should look like, the experience of watching her becomes so intense that we begin to feel the stifling yet also hypnotizing rhythms of her existence. And then to continue watching is to actually find the drama even suspense even the horror of her situation. It turns housework into both an alien and completely horrifying familiar landscape. And it doesn't need to only speak to women, even though it is certainly catered to the experience of the houseworker. It is about anyone's lives that are slowly being drained by pointless repetition for the benefit of people who do not care. And while this is just an assumption, Im going to assume if this was instead designed to detail the life of a man on an assembly line, being slowly drained of his will to even exist as his job just continues amd continues and hardly even recognizes him as an independent being, there would hardly be such an amount of cry baby bullshit by the detractors of this. No, it still probably wouldn't be a box office smash, but it wouldn't get certain kinds of dorks screaming amount the women trying to push their experience into the faces of others. Because **** those people.


But even for critics of the film, at least those not too terrified to watch it with an open mind, it still offers discussion. It is always going to be a divisive film. And that's okay. But it opens the door for all sorts of questions, the main one being exactly what are we erasing from our own narratives when we tell a story. And why? Is it because it offers no compelling drama. Well, obviously not because , contrary to very dumb opinions, people don't love this movie out of a sense of obligation to an agenda. They love it because it moves them and means something to them. And while it doesn't have to appeal to everyone, it does to some. Which then makes us wonder, what kind of shame or disgust or possibly total ignorance do we have towards so much of our own lives. All of these discarded moments that don't matter. That we go to movies to pretend they don't exist. Jeanne Dielmann allows us to observe them in a different context. Bring all of the anxiety and despair and, yes, even monotony that they contain. That they are also worth considering, especially when so many lives are almost exclusively composed of such moments.

Re: divisive films.

We've actually observed something like this with our countdowns. I'm not sure we've ever had something particularly odd or experimental win, but we've definitely noticed that the films that win are often more divisive (and/or that divisive films can end up very high), like Kubrick films. I wonder if that's a hallmark of any kind of mass voting, since there's just so many frippin' movies out there that the ones that top mass voting lists will mostly be those with modest, but fervent, followings.

Having a distinction between those two has always been absurd to me. I think someone listing their "best" over their "favorite" is not giving their true opinion.


As for the list, I've only seen 25 out of the 100. A lot of them don't sound like something I would enjoy, but I might comb through them later and give some a shot.

Well, the good (bad?) news is we've had a lot of arguments about this already. And I come down on the side that the distinction makes sense, personally, just as a fair warning. If you're interested in reviving some of those or seeing the cases people made for/against I can probably find a few links.