Opinions on BFI 2022 Sight and Sound Poll

Tools    





Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Back in my formative years as a cinephile, we had a small group of Polish cinephiles on a Polish film rating site. That was about 10 years ago. The group consisted of a few people who watched a lot of films.

Their film ratings were brutal. They'd denounce most films. The films they did rate high were usually absolute masterworks, I would find after watching them. Though they did overrate some films, they never really gave high ratings to duds. You could say there was a sort of hivemind among them. It's true they had a lot of commonalities in their ratings. But they also had differences. And one only had to deep dive into their ratings to see them. They didn't hate mainstream cinema, they championed something like The Thing. But they also loved the arthouse.

Now, I was different from them in that I was way less strict with my ratings. I also seemed to have loved many more films than they did. Though static and at times dogged, their tastes were great. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't have gone the same way in the cinematic journeys that I did. Sure, I was there. I watched Werckmeister Harmonies, but now what? Their tastes allowed me to get a quick start in the best films of all time. And after that, I could go my own way.

We also had some inside jokes, like claiming that any film that has a long scene of peeling potatoes is bound to be an all-time masterwork. This opinion, needless to say, was proved by two great masterpieces: Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.

Anyway, Jeanne Dielman was one of the films they unanimously loved. The thing is, they were a bunch of conservative folk with some opinions edging on misogynistic. And yet they still did find value in the slow rhythms of domesticity that Jeanne Dielman has to offer. I never got to talk to them about this film in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised if they never really thought of Jeanne Dielman as a piece of feminist filmmaking. I wouldn't find it weird that they loved it for its style, its melody, its compulsive routine, its hypnotizing power, and how you can see MORE when contemplating it, how every little detail is of utmost importance.

Whether this is the kind of value that most people will see, and how many of them sincerely like it versus how many go with the flow is another question.

Also, Jeanne Dielman is one of the first Slow Cinema films. I'm not sure if Akerman tried to go anti-cinema, though. That's why I find the implication that it's not a film ludicrous. it is rather a conscious, avant-garde minimalism, sensational anyway.
__________________
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.



So, again, it boils down to this. I strongly disagree with you and @crumbsroom because "favorite" and "best" are the same to me. Also, the "best" is not a constant but something born out of the experience, and as the person experiencing changes, so does the experience. We don't need years of debate and research to have a feeling about a movie.

Exchange "the best" for "the most influential," and I'd agree.

Favourite suggests a preference. There is no need to argue for a preference. If one prefers Deuce Bigelow to Citizen Kane, they are well within their right to say so. No one should dare dictate what ones preferences are.


Best implies better than others. That it is achieving some standards with greater success. Calling something best implies a thought has been made. An argument is in the wings. When you call something the best, you should expect questions as to how you got to this opinion.



If we want a consensus list of what everyone's favorite films are, we've got imdb for these things. Or box office returns. Sight and Sound poll is meant to offer something different. Something that actually is meant to foster argument about what is the best, or why we disagree with what is on the list. Just having 'a feeling', while more than adequate for any individual in figuring out what their favorite is, is not what a critical consensus list is meant to show us. Sight and Sound is about highlighting what films have impacted art and have achieved the highest standards (maybe narratively, maybe aesthetically, maybe technically) compared to the rest of this riff raff universe.



Victim of The Night
Minio already outlined this when talking about something standing the test of time. That matters. That means something. And very few films stay relevant decade after decade. And its good to set those films that do apart from the many many films that have been loved for a few years, or sometimes even a few decades, and then forgotten.



Of course the actual hard copy of the film stays the same. People are what change. Which is why lists change. Why some films fall in favour and fall out of favour. What matters is the discussion of the film and how we interact with it. And that changes over time, even when the film stays exactly the same. We change. The world changes. And if the film still retains that something special, then we are getting down to business. Otherwise, we are just talking about what our favorites are. And that, as already discussed, is very different from 'best'.



To argue otherwise is to say movies, or any art, are born great. But they aren't. They require audience and critical interaction to imbue them with meaning. Talking about films after we watch them is what makes us find their value. Something beyond our simple lizard brain response to them while we are watching them. And films on a S&S poll should, at least ideally, demand more.


It's why if the next Citizen Kane was released later this afternoon, and in time became a film that would completely reinvent cinema in its own image, it shouldn't suddenly be considered the greatest of all time by dinnertime. Even if it is ultimately deemed to be the greatest, we need to wait a little. Pump the breaks, for god's sake because we can only truly figure these things out as we talk with eachother. Agree upon the terms of what makes it important. Great. Better than almost everything else. Any other evaluation would just be an emotional impulse, and frankly, what value do these have to something that is supposed to be born of consensus. Gut feelings are essential to what our favorite movies are...but when we talk about best films, we are moving the film out from our personal experience and trying to articulate why it should also matter to others. Or to the art form itself. And, how this gets done properly without time to let our ideas and thoughts and feelings and intellectual responses marinate on it, is beyond me.
So, to be clear, you are saying that the list was wrong in 1962 to include L'Avventura, Hiroshima, and Marienbad, because it is either impossible for a film to be great until the audience is prepared to declare it great or it is impossible to know if a film is great until we think about it and talk about it and kick it around for a few decades (then leading to the former).
I just don't know if I buy that. When great albums are declared great years later, I always think, "Wow, we just weren't ready yet", I never think "Wow, that wasn't great until now". Because the music itself never changed. It was just as great the day it was released, we had to come around to it. But if we were able to recognize it in the moment, it would be just as great. Like Marienbad, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Pather Panchali (7 years old when it debuted at No.11), Wild Strawberries (5 years old at debut), Persona (6 years old), 2001 (4 years old). All of those films were great then and they are great now. Were the people that called them great at the time wrong? Were they simply not great films yet, they had to age properly and these folk clearly jumped the gun?
I'll concede that maybe some films do need to age, perhaps, like Raging Bull which took 12 whole years, 5 years fewer than Beau Travail, to make the list.



So, to be clear, you are saying that the list was wrong in 1962 to include L'Avventura, Hiroshima, and Marienbad, because it is either impossible for a film to be great until the audience is prepared to declare it great or it is impossible to know if a film is great until we think about it and talk about it and kick it around for a few decades (then leading to the former).
I just don't know if I buy that. When great albums are declared great years later, I always think, "Wow, we just weren't ready yet", I never think "Wow, that wasn't great until now". Because the music itself never changed. It was just as great the day it was released, we had to come around to it. But if we were able to recognize it in the moment, it would be just as great. Like Marienbad, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Pather Panchali (7 years old when it debuted at No.11), Wild Strawberries (5 years old at debut), Persona (6 years old), 2001 (4 years old). All of those films were great then and they are great now. Were the people that called them great at the time wrong? Were they simply not great films yet, they had to age properly and these folk clearly jumped the gun?
I'll concede that maybe some films do need to age, perhaps, like Raging Bull which took 12 whole years, 5 years fewer than Beau Travail, to make the list.

I don't know how to respond to this without literally rewriting what I just wrote.



And like Minio has already said, it's not like it was necessarily that great a thing for them to do then. Just because they turned out to be right in finding a bunch of films that have stood the test of time, doesn't mean we shouldn't have been suspect for their inclusion in 1962.


If anything, their success in getting some things correct is more an indication that the idea of film criticism was taken much more seriously at that time. That it was more rigorous. More open to the revolution that was currently happening. Critics in 1962 actually were studied in what they are writing about and weren't what passes for critics in modern time, which has become an almost standardless profession.



There is also the important fact that movies at that period, were in fact changing, in real time, how movies were made. So while it was probably a little silly proclaiming their all time greatness three years after they were made, at the very least, their influence could be seen from year to year. Movies became different during that decade and many of those were the films that made that happen. Which would have been clearly observable. The notion that The Florida Project or Get Out are seismic in the way L'Avventura or Breathless was is laughable. Even if they prove to be worthy of such a list in the future, it will take a lot more nuanced debate as to why. One that will take time, because when I look around, I don't see any great revolution in cinema happening because of those two films.



And one final factor that is important is, one of the reasons all of those movies listed are considered as great, has a lot to do with the fact that those original Sight and Sound lists (as well as reviews from the Cahiers de Cinema) have become the holy grail of what film criticism would soon become. The birth of auteur theory. They probably could have picked a completely different top films, that would have all been similarly worthy, and instead of it being Wild Strawberries that became cannon, it would have been The Silence. Critics back then (for good reason) had a greater influence on how we thought. Unlike now where (for good reason) most criticism can be completely discarded.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
@Wooley I think you should take a second and read what me and Crumbs said in our previous posts instead of repeating your little statistics over and over again ad nauseam



Victim of The Night
I don't know how to respond to this without literally rewriting what I just wrote.



And like Minio has already said, it's not like it was necessarily that great a thing for them to do then. Just because they turned out to be right in finding a bunch of films that have stood the test of time, doesn't mean we shouldn't have been suspect for their inclusion in 1962.


If anything, their success in getting some things correct is more an indication that the idea of film criticism was taken much more seriously at that time. That it was more rigorous. More open to the revolution that was currently happening. Critics in 1962 actually were studied in what they are writing about and weren't what passes for critics in modern time, which has become an almost standardless profession.



There is also the important fact that movies at that period, were in fact changing, in real time, how movies were made. So while it was probably a little silly proclaiming their all time greatness three years after they were made, at the very least, their influence could be seen from year to year. Movies became different during that decade and many of those were the films that made that happen. Which would have been clearly observable. The notion that The Florida Project or Get Out are seismic in the way L'Avventura or Breathless was is laughable. Even if they prove to be worthy of such a list in the future, it will take a lot more nuanced debate as to why. One that will take time, because when I look around, I don't see any great revolution in cinema happening because of those two films.



And one final factor that is important is, one of the reasons all of those movies listed are considered as great, has a lot to do with the fact that those original Sight and Sound lists (as well as reviews from the Cahiers de Cinema) have become the holy grail of what film criticism would soon become. The birth of auteur theory. They probably could have picked a completely different top films, that would have all been similarly worthy, and instead of it being Wild Strawberries that became cannon, it would have been The Silence. Critics back then (for good reason) had a greater influence on how we thought. Unlike now where (for good reason) most criticism can be completely discarded.
I guess we're just disconnected here. I read every word you wrote and still felt like my response was very much a response. I think maybe we're just too far apart on this if you feel like you're just repeating yourself and I feel like you're not answering my question. I guess it's something about your notion that a film must be revolutionary to be great and mine that that's wrong. We're not gonna find a common ground here, I was just hoping you could make your side of the argument make more sense to me than it did, but it sounds like my side is at least as foreign to you so we're speaking totally different languages.
It's ok, there'll be plenty more for us to argue about in the future.
The only thing maybe new I would add, in response to your statement that movies themselves were changing so new movies could be a bold and obvious new addition which you think is no longer so, I would counter that the canon is far, far greater in length and breadth and depth now and we have many, many more years of seeing the great films so, much more so now than ever, we know a great movie when we see it.



Victim of The Night
@Wooley I think you should take a second and read what me and Crumbs said in our previous posts instead of repeating your little statistics over and over again ad nauseam
Minio. I've read every word Crumbs wrote and most of yours.
We fundamentally disagree, which doesn't mean I'm not trying to understand your point of view.
And there's no need to be condescending - again - when we were having an actual discussion. "My little statistics"? You mean facts about cinematic history? You're right, we should ignore them for your opinion simply because you can state it more condescendingly than anyone. Jesus, man.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
We fundamentally disagree, which doesn't mean I'm not trying to understand your point of view.
I just felt like we were going in circles. Sorry if I came off as condescending.



So, again, it boils down to this. I strongly disagree with you and @crumbsroom because "favorite" and "best" are the same to me. Also, the "best" is not a constant but something born out of the experience, and as the person experiencing changes, so does the experience. We don't need years of debate and research to have a feeling about a movie.

Exchange "the best" for "the most influential," and I'd agree.
I wouldn't call my favorite movies 'best' unless you all consider Valley of the Dolls the best-est movie ever made

I do like what you said in bold. 'Best' is vague, 'the most influential' says more. OK all of you self-proclaimed film experts, discuss Pahak's idea.



I guess it's something about your notion that a film must be revolutionary to be great and mine that that's wrong.

I didn't say this. I said the influence of those particular movies was something that would have been observable to critics at the time, because movies actually changed because of their existence. Breathless or L'avventura changed movies almost immediately. This is one thing which potentially made it easier to recognize their greatness so quickly. Why they weren't just flavors of the month, as most critical darlings eventually turn out to be.



It's also why I said maybe one day people might have a better read on the potential worthiness of a Florida Project or Get Out, in spite of the fact that they clearly aren't similarly revolutionary. Sometimes things are great just because they are made well (like Casablanca). But those arguments take a lot longer to gestate and to be sure of because they are often entangled with personal experience which doesn't always translate outside of ourselves. It's easy to think a movie we just watched was an all time classic. But get back to me in ten years if you still feel that way about. Otherwise, maybe not such a classic (as classic suggests permanence of some kind, and we can't know anything about permanence until...a considerably amount of time passes)



Victim of The Night
I just felt like we were going in circles. Sorry if I came off as condescending.
I appreciate you saying that.



Victim of The Night
I didn't say this. I said the influence of those particular movies was something that would have been observable to critics at the time, because movies actually changed because of their existence. This is one thing which potentially made it easier to recognize their greatness so quickly. Why they weren't just flavors of the month, as most critical darlings eventually turn out to be.



It's also why I said maybe one day people might have a better read on the potential worthiness of a Florida Project or Get Out, in spite of the fact that they clearly aren't similarly revolutionary. Sometimes things are great just because they are made well (like Casablanca). But those arguments take a lot longer to gestate and to be sure of because they are often entangled with personal experience which doesn't always translate outside of ourselves. It's easy to think a movie we just watched was an all time classic. But get back to me in ten years if you still feel that way about. Otherwise, maybe not such a classic (as classic suggests permanence of some kind, and we can't know anything about permanence until...a considerably amount of time passes)
To be clear, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth I'm actually partly referring to a different conversation we had elsewhere where you were saying something along those lines a different context and I was just pulling it in here because you had said you felt kinda that way. And, again, I don't think there's anything wrong with you feeling that way (or not if you feel like I've got it wrong), I just definitely don't feel that way. A well-painted bowl of fruit can be a really good painting to me. Admittedly less-so dogs-playing-poker. But I see what you mean about their greatness being easier to see because of their risk-taking.
I actually think it's harder to see a movie I've just seen as an all-time classic. At least I used to. Some movies hit me so ******* hard, I just know it. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is one of the most heralded movies of all time but that would not have pressed me to put it on any list of mine. The fact that it punched me in the gut so hard I felt like dropping to my knees did. I don't need time to think about it. I don't need to see it again. I don't need to hear anyone else's opinion, and I don't need to ruminate on it for 10 years and then decide. I knew before it was even over. Why can't that be true of a new film?

On Get Out specifically, just one movie out of all of this, I guess I feel like Get Out (and what I've heard about Lady On Fire which I have not seen) does stand out in a big way because it felt like a totally new voice I had never heard before, not just a great story well-told. Get Out doesn't feel like a nicely executed good story to me, it felt like getting hit in the nuts in a way I haven't before to me, in this case narratively I guess, but supported by great vision. How do you tell this story? How do you come up with this story? I never could have. The story speaks so much and so powerfully to me that it kinda knocked me on my ass. There's something poetic about this film, while it's thrilling and dark and violent and twisty and all those things. The hypnosis scene is just wonderful in my mind but so much about the way the narrative moves is brilliant to me and hit me like a truck when I saw it and more so the second and third time. Which really is something I look for. I mean, most of the movie I would put on a Great Films list will have hit me hard in some way, in some cases through the story they tell in many more cases in how they tell it. To use the two films I never shut up about these days again, Paris, Texas was one of the quietest films to ever kick me in the balls up to that point and Memoria had me just wondering how long they could keep it up maybe 15 minutes into the film. Yes, "Joe" and Tilda, just keep kicking me in the nuts please.
And I feel like I got kicked in the nuts by Get Out. Several times, honestly. And maybe, honestly, it's because I'm a white American that it hit me so freaking hard, but it did.

Now, all that said, I don't know if Get Out would make my Top-100. Probably not, if I think about it, but maybe because I think of it this way. There are way more than 100 Great Films. Way more. And once we get to Great it gets really hard to parse. So if we imagine a situation in which we have 200 Great films on pieces of paper in a hat and we pick two out of the hat and one goes on the list and the other gets discarded (as Lawrence Of Arabia, Touch of Evil, Un Chien Andalou, The Wild Bunch and many others have been according to many detractors of the list), we end up with 100 Great Films but that doesn't mean that the one that would have been No.110 on this go-round might not easily switch places with number 73. Because they're both Great. And probably if we did 200, there would be some obvious, painful omissions.
The list is always just a snapshot in time. That's part of what makes it so great. I agree with many who have said this is possibly-probably the most interesting list yet because more people were heard. More people around the World and a more diverse group of people in general and I think you see it in the list and I think it's good. I know some people don't. I think it will be interesting to see if some of these films will hold on. Where will poor Jeanne Dielman, who has taken such a beating these last few days, be in 2032? Where will PoaLoF be? Will it prove the people who chose it right by either staying on the list or even ascending? Or will we look back and say, "Whoops, a lotta folks got a little too excited there". I feel like Moonlight's star continues to rise steadily so I feel like it will be there in 10 years, but I could be wrong. But I'm really fascinated by all this and I'm really loving it.



Favourite suggests a preference. There is no need to argue for a preference. If one prefers Deuce Bigelow to Citizen Kane, they are well within their right to say so. No one should dare dictate what ones preferences are.

Best implies better than others. That it is achieving some standards with greater success. Calling something best implies a thought has been made. An argument is in the wings. When you call something the best, you should expect questions as to how you got to this opinion.
Again, I see no difference. Unless I've missed something, there are no mathematical equations or some artistic laws of nature to act as some mystical, objective standards to evaluate films (or other art). To me, the only standard art needs to achieve is personal gratification or, in other words, personal preference.

Maybe we should just agree to disagree?
__________________



The trick is not minding
I actually understand and agree with Minio and Crumbs here, in their explanation of the differences between “best” and “favorite” films.

There’s a lot of films I love that I wouldn’t ever consider among the all time best, and I don’t think it’s a matter of semantics. I also agree with them that a film needs time to be properly considered among the best all time. While I haven’t seen Get Out yet, I imagine even if I love it, I don’t think I’d ever consider it better than classics that have withstood the test of time, as it were.



Back in my formative years as a cinephile, we had a small group of Polish cinephiles on a Polish film rating site. That was about 10 years ago. The group consisted of a few people who watched a lot of films.

Their film ratings were brutal. They'd denounce most films. The films they did rate high were usually absolute masterworks, I would find after watching them. Though they did overrate some films, they never really gave high ratings to duds. You could say there was a sort of hivemind among them. It's true they had a lot of commonalities in their ratings. But they also had differences. And one only had to deep dive into their ratings to see them. They didn't hate mainstream cinema, they championed something like The Thing. But they also loved the arthouse.
.
So what site was this? I would like to see a forum where people like arthouse.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
So what site was this? I would like to see a forum where people like arthouse.
Filmweb. Definitely not what you're looking for. Actually, it's quite the opposite. The group of cinephiles I was talking about was, so to speak, the exception that proves the rule.



There is an article in the New Yorker that probably gives as good a description of Jeanne Dielmanns value as a film as any I've seen.


It is written by someone who claims to be more an admirer of the film than someone in love with it, but she has the understanding of what makes the film work, and how it plays with how audiences engage with the film, that she doesn't have to completely tether herself to her own personal experience with it....like so so many people who have seen it and don't like it seem to do, refusing to even acknowledge any good faith appreciation or love for it.


And that is not even getting into those who refuse to acknowledge the possible worth it might have who haven't even seen the thing.



It is written by someone who claims to be more an admirer of the film than someone in love with it, but she has the understanding of what makes the film work, and how it plays with how audiences engage with the film, that she doesn't have to completely tether herself to her own personal experience with it....like so so many people who have seen it and don't like it seem to do, refusing to even acknowledge any good faith appreciation or love for it.
I talked with someone about the film this weekend. They said they hadn't heard of it before and I started describing the basic plot. They said, "Wait! Is that the film where at the end ________?" And it was. They said, "You know, I watched that movie back in college (12 years ago). At the time I didn't love it, but I actually think about it all the time even though I didn't remember its name. I remember how she would turn the lights off whenever she left a room to save electricity. I think about her when I turn the lights off when I leave the house."

This anecdote in not necessarily in response to what you wrote above, but just that it was neat to encounter someone who had a different kind of appreciation of the film than mine.

EDIT: Just read the essay you reference and wowza do I feel this in my bones! In “Jeanne Dielman,” it remains ambiguous whether the repetitiveness and routinization of Jeanne’s life erode her sanity, or if, rather, it’s the lockstep structure of her days that wards off darker thoughts and impulses.