TOP/TEN

THE TOP TEN

I. Citizen Kane (Welles , 1941) 2. L'Avventura (Antonioni , 1960) 3. La Regie du Jeu (Renoir, 1939) 4. Greed (von Stroheim, 1924)

Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi, 1953) 6. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)

Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1949) Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein, 1943-46) 9. La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948) 10. L'Atalante (Vigo, 1933)

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RUNNERS-UP

I. Hiroshima, mon Amour (Resnais , 1959)

Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955) Zero de Conduite (Vigo , 1933) 2. City Lights (Chap lin, 1930)

The Childhood of Maxim Gorki (Donskoi , 1938) The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925) 3. Sunrise (Murnau , 1927) 4. Earth (Dovzhenko, 1929)

Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947) 5. )"he General (Keaton , 1927)

La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937) lkiru (Kurosawa, 1952) Nazarin (Bufiuel, 1958) October (Eisenstein, 1928) Umberto D (De Sica, 1951) 6. L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)

Intolerance (Griffith, 1916) Limelight (Chaplin, 1952) Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais, 1955) The Passion of joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959) Tokyo Story (Ozu , 1953) Wild Strawberries (Bergman , 1957)

VOTING BY DIRECTORS

Sergei Eisenstein Charles Chaplin Jean Renoir Orson Welles Michelangelo Antonioni Vittorio De Sica Alain Resnais Jean Vigo Kenji Mizoguchi Erich von Stroheim Luis Bufiuel Luchino Visconti

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'THE TOP TEN, 1952

I. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1949) 2. City Lights (Chaplin, 1930)

The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925) 4. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) 5. Louisiana Story (Flaherty, 1947)

Intolerance (Griffith , 1916) 7. Greed (von Stroheim, 1924)

Le Jour se Leve (Carne, 1939) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) I 0. Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945)

Le Million (Clair, 1930) La Regie du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)

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;t O

22 20 19 17

16 14 13

9 8

7

6

46 43 35 30 27 25 24 23 20 19

25 19 16 12

II

10

AMOST TEN YEARS AGO a referendum was organised from Brussels in which film directors were asked to nominate the ten best films in cinema history. SIGHT AND SOUND, following in Brussels' wake, extended the same invitation to critics. Both lists were duly published (they both agreed, incidentally, on the four top choices, though not in the same order). Since then, the game has been played again, during the Brussels Exhibition a few years ago. And now we have asked the critics to have another go, not because we think- or imagine they think- that anyone's individual list, or the consensus of opinion reached by totting up the various choices, involves any definitive judgment, but precisely because no judgments can be definitive. One doesn't arrive at an objective review of the best films ever made (how could one?) but at an indication of how opinion is moving and what the cinema looks like in the perspective of 1962.

The cinema has been given a shake-up in the last few years: the New Wave in France; the advances in Italy; the West's discovery of the Oriental cinemas; the new cinemas of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and so on. Every six months a new movement or school is discovered somewhere~ and critical opinion fluctuates like a barometer in a storm. We thought it would be interesting to see whether taste had significantly changed in the last ten years, how far the 'new cinema' might be shouldering out the established classics, and how much the rise of a post-war generation of critics, people to whom the silent cinema has none of the pull it still exerts on their elders, might have shifted the balance.

The letter we sent out to just over a hundred critics, in this country and overseas, made only one stipulation. We asked people to send us really personal selections, not to let themselves be influenced by academic orthodoxy into nominating films they might not have seen for twenty or thirty years and remembered as misty landmarks. We've received 70 answers~ the majority from this country, the United States and France~ but also from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Soviet Union. We'd like to thank everyone who responded, and also to apologise to those whose individual lists we have been unable to print because of pressure on space. We're sorry, too, that there isn't room to print more of the comments we've received. From Poland, a claim to a record number of titles seen- 13,000; a number of agonised cris de coeur, from critics who could have given us a hundred titles with ease but jibbed desperately at ten ; explanations of choices and forecasts of winners. "Every film critic's favourite parlour game," said one of our contributors ; "yes, it is difficult and impossible but we will try again," said another. We've tried, as on the previous occasion, to print individual lists which cover the widest range of titles and cross-section of opinion; and we've limited our invitation to working critics, with the few exceptions (Karel Reisz here, Curtis Harrington in the U.S.A.) of critics who have become film-makers since they took part in the same feature ten years ago.

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What has changed in ten years? Of the twelve 'best' titles in 1952 (three dead-heating for tenth place), four remain in our present list. La Regie du Jeu and Greed have gained ground (tenth place to third and seventh to fourth) and Bicycle Thieves and Potemkin have lost a Fttle (first place to sixth and fourth to sixth). Bicycle Thieves was then a runaway winner; this time L' A vventura, Citiz en Kane and La Regie du Jeu have been neck and neck at all stages in the votingone new film, one which rather surprisingly failed to make