Opinions on BFI 2022 Sight and Sound Poll

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Sorry to revive this thread again, but here's the full list of 4,000+ films. It shows the exact amount of points each films received:

https://letterboxd.com/csmithchicago...-sound/detail/

According to my Letterboxd stats, I've seen 1,184/4,198.
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Here's my review of the new no. 1 voted film in perhaps the most prestigious film poll. In case anyone is curious to know why I think so highly of Jeanne Dielman, here is my review on letterboxd - https://letterboxd.com/wu_yong/film/...080-bruxelles/


The singular event that erupts at the end has often been characterized as a brief, momentary (re-)assertion of one's autonomy from the oppressive mundanity of labour - an emancipatory albeit destructive act. There is however a sense that Seyrig feels most at ease when she is precisely going through her chores inattentively, whereas the few moments that punctuate - those scenes where she literally does "nothing"/being out-of-sync with her mundane routines - are also those where she appears to be at her most tense (a testament to how far capitalist ideology has cultivated a sense of freedom through endless work). This alters the meaning of the ending to be far bleaker than one which can be calculated in terms of repercussions. Instead of a triumphant break-out from the cycle of domestic servitude, the after-effect of the act dissipates further highlighting that Seyrig can never manage to escape from both her geo-spatial & mental patterns of behavior.


More instructively, I think the film draws to our attention that mood & emotions are not something that reside internally within us but take on their existence via the affection of objects around us. No matter how close the camera invades Seyrig's private space, or how long the static frame attempts to confine her, it can never capture the existence of her feelings. Their implied existence do not come prior to their expression through the minutiae changes in habit and orientation of said objects. Expression, explication, habit, disposition, attunement - these are the key features of existence which come prior to any sort of cognitive reflection that retrospectively imputes a mental state of affairs. In this regard, Dielman is more like a dance than a film by foregrounding the embodied-ness of Seyrig and the audience.


Besides presenting to the viewer an externalist view of the psyche, the film also broaches an ontological issue related to the Heideggerian concept of "un-ready-to-hand" which describes our fundamental encounter of the world as being perpetually mediated by the mode of familiarity/unfamiliarity. There is a parallel between Seyrig becoming unattuned to her familiar world of habitual dispositions and the audience noticing Seyrig's unheimlichkeit. For Seyrig, heretofore familiar objects oppose and resist her grasp, unconcealing their presence to her. For the audience, a series of seemingly ordinary routines becomes transformed by a singular event, which then forces a re-evaluation of the entire preceding sequence that used to pass by unnoticed - a veritable analogy for the history of all forms of oppression, and also of life in general.


What is truly disquieting is this: by objectifying Seyrig as a domestic subject to be studied, she actually disappears into the mis-en-scene/background like a cog in the wheel of domesticity. The revelation of the extent of her entrapment becomes apparent through the very same mis-en-scene that enables her emergence from it, like a being that flickers into and out of existence. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty calls this site of encounter the reversibility of Flesh, where in-betweenness is not something derived secondarily from pre-given fully-formed objects but is the original plane of encounter with the world that has yet to be constituted as "things"/"objects".


No other film in the history of cinema thus far has choreographed the unveiling of life's undercurrents which resonate in intensity and manifest themselves as changes in a person's disposition, insisting that human knowledge is always already a step too late, and that the ascription of emotions is only done retrospectively. This is because the film sunders motive from consequence, demonstrating that what we attribute as "cause" is always (and can only be) retrospective. What is really novel, a theme Hong Sang-Soo would later obsessively pursue, is to take the Kuleshov effect to its limits by pushing out the reference frame (one we associate with cause) altogether. What we are left with is a series of main frames (eg. Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) with no discernible causal structure, since there is no reference frame that is itself not just another effect.



Sorry to revive this thread again, but here's the full list of 4,000+ films. It shows the exact amount of points each films received:

https://letterboxd.com/csmithchicago...-sound/detail/

According to my Letterboxd stats, I've seen 1,184/4,198.
Kudos to whoever it was who voted for Kung Fu Panda as one of the greatest movies of all time.



Kudos to whoever it was who voted for Kung Fu Panda as one of the greatest movies of all time.

I would've voted for it if the character development for the Furious Five was stronger. Did you know it's one of the most beloved and watched movies in China because it horors traditional Chinese storytelling so well?



I would've voted for it if the character development for the Furious Five was stronger. Did you know it's one of the most beloved and watched movies in China because it horors traditional Chinese storytelling so well?
That's interesting; I didn't know that. It's a fun movie for sure. No way I would put it on my own top 10 list but I respect the conviction of whoever did.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
https://letterboxd.com/csmithchicago...-sound/detail/

According to my Letterboxd stats, I've seen 1,184/4,198.
I've only seen 2,297 (54%)
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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.