2012 POLL
INTRODUCTION
To most readers it’s probably a familiar story. Every ten years, from 1952 onwards, this magazine has conducted a worldwide poll of critics in order to decide which films are currently regarded as the greatest ever made. We’re proud that the longevity of this poll means that it’s widely regarded as the most trusted guide there is to the canon of cinema greats. So for us it’s a very big moment – the biggest Sight & Sound enjoys.
Sixty years ago, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist parable Bicycle Thieves won the first poll only four years after it was shot. In today’s era of digital plenitude, it’s hard to imagine how critics could be so sure they had recently seen the greatest film ever made, but of course in those days there were vastly fewer films to measure Bicycle Thieves against than there are today. Famously, Citizen Kane won the next five polls, up to and including the last one in 2002. Orson Welles’s film had the disadvantage in 1952 of not yet having been seen by a lot of Europeans because of World War II. If they had been able to see it, it might even have won then. So Citizen Kane is the critics’ all-time champion movie thus far.
I’m not going to reveal here whether it has won for the sixth time in succession. You’ll have to turn a few pages to find out. What I want to explain here are some changes of rationale behind this year’s poll, so that the complete lists and commentaries we’ll be posting online – and the 100 critics’ lists that appear overleaf – make sense.
About a year ago, the S&S team met to consider how we could best approach the poll this time. Given the dominance of electronic media, what was immediately apparent was that we would have to abandon the somewhat elitist exclusivity with which contributors to the poll had been chosen in the past and reach out to a much wider international group of commentators. We were also keen to include among them critics who’d established their careers online rather than purely in print.
To that end we approached more than 1000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline)
precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2045 different films. This makes the process a little more democratic, though I can’t pretend that the 1000 or so individuals were selected by any more rigorous process than simple chains of recommendation. (The 2002 critics’ poll, by contrast, was based on just 145 lists.) Each entry on each list counts as one vote for the film in question, so personal rankings within the individual top tens don’t matter. And one important rule change compared to 2002 was that The Godfather and The Godfather Part II would no longer be accepted as a single choice, since they were made as two separate films. As a qualification of what ‘greatest’ means, our invitation letter stated, “We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.”
The task proved more gargantuan than I had imagined. Databases were constructed to allow us to mine as much rich information as possible from the lists. What the increase in numbers has – and hasn’t – done is surprising. We had hopes that some 21st-century films might break into top-flight contention; this has not been the case. Instead, what we have achieved is a consensus on what represents ‘great cinema’ that now has a greater force of numbers behind it. Another fascinating result is that we now have a plausible Sight & Sound ‘Top 100’ , which you can view on p.56.
Since 1992, we have also conducted a separate directors’ poll, which likewise has been dominated by Citizen Kane. Leaving to one side what’s number one this time, I can say that you’ll find a pronounced difference between the filmmakers’ top tens and those of the critics. Around 350 directors (we’re still chasing some as I write) have contributed, of whom 100 are included in the pages overleaf. We hope you enjoy this initial rummage, but perhaps the real fun will come when every list and comment is available online from 15 August. Nick James
40 | Sight&Sound | September 2012
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