What about Dekalog or Berlin Alexanderplatz? A Pialat film would be nice, but I doubt any of them would have received that many votes in spite of the Dardenne Bros. selecting Loulou.
Is Lynch a better director than Bunuel?
NO
Is The Searchers really the best Western or the best film by John Ford?
NO
Is Godard the greatest director ever?
YES
Is Journey to Italy Rossellini’s best film?
NO
Is Rio Bravo the best Hawks’ film?
POSSIBLY
Final assessment: the poll is at times accurate, at times misleading.
@Bobby
Looks like you misspelled NO wrong in statement 3. Either that or you misspelled Bergman.
Well at least a fourth continent makes it into the top 100. Also, no Marienbad or Hiroshima, Mon Amour in the top 100 at all?
“A radically altered Sight & Sound list would be weak and destabilizing; breaking into the Top 10 should be slow and carefully considered.”
This only makes sense if you’re coming from the position that there isn’t anything flawed with the list. I know many people who disagree.
^^ Sure, there are people who disagree, but neither a radically list nor the list as it is could be considered perfect, and you’re never going to manage to please everyone with lists like these. I know the guy’s attitude sounds a bit academic to some, but canons need to have some stability and are a necessity whether one likes it or not. Necessary evil perhaps, but they are necessary. If artistic canons have no purpose and aren’t necessary then nothing means anything. Mind you, the fact that Tokyo Story is ranked three while Persona is ranked seventeen is essentially meaningless to me, and in that sense the list is flawed, but at the very least canons in general serve a purpose, and that’s what the guy who wrote that article getting at. If we throw objective/intersubjective standards out the window things would become destabilized. The best method in my opinion would simply be to agree upon a top tier of filmmakers and then a second tier and so on. How many filmmakers and/or films belong in each tier is up for debate, but suffice it to say stabilized canons preserved and overseen by ‘gatekeepers’ do serve a purpose, though a necessary evil some may believe them to be.
The problem with the film canon is the same problem that exists in the entire art world: It is centered on the problems and lives of white men. The bias affects from which films even ever get production to which will get a substantial release to which ones will even be seen to how the films will even be discussed. And these all, and many more reasons, affect how the canon is shaped.
Well maybe many people simply feel that films dealing with white men and their problems happen to be superior works of art, regardless of what race the film deals with. If what you say were true, then Japanese films wouldn’t get the attention they do. Critics shouldn’t feel obligated to canonize a film about Syrian men, Kenyan men, or Peruvian men simply to make the canon more ethnically diverse if the films themselves don’t stand up as works of art. Touki Bouki and Close-Up didn’t make into the top 100, due to the critics’ self-imposed obligation to recognize films from ‘neglected’ countries even if the films themselves may have been a tad weaker but simply because they felt them to be great works of art that deserved recognition. There’s more to great works of art than content (i.e. whether or not it deals with white men and their problems). Whether a film deals with a white man or an Amerindian man or a Kenyan man or a Bengali man shouldn’t factor into determining whether or not it’s a great work of art. I don’t understand what’s so difficult about that concept. Let’s not bring sociology into this please.
But that’s not all. I believe someone mentioned in an article about this new list, but I don’t remember which article, that with older films (i.e. films over 40-50 years old) there are certain works a plurality of voters are bound to coalesce around, whereas with respect to more recent works sentiments tend to be more disparate with each person having their own personal favorite, since a far great number of films are fresh in people’s memory. With that said, in many ‘neglected’ regions throughout the world filmmaking communities have developed far more recently than those of the titans, such as France, Japan, Germany, and America. The films people tend to coalesce around are older films that were released while communities in other parts of the world were barley in existence yet. For example, Africa only produced it’s first feature film, Black Girl, in 1966, and it’s not even an hour long. There aren’t too many films within the past 45 years or so people support in unison period, since far more films are fresher in far more people’s memories, and everyone will have his or her personal favorite with each respected film receiving a couple of votes a piece.
We’ve had this debate a million times over on this site. Touki Bouki and Close-Up on the list are harbingers of things to come.
I agree, but S&S lists are usually way more international than any other type of lists, hell.. we have Tokyo story as number 1 in the directors poll. I miss a Mexican Buñuel film, and maybe something else from India or China. There is plenty of love for the 3 most known Japanese directors.
I’ve seen Touki Bouki and Close up
Touki Bouki is interesting, but neither belong in a top 25
Directors who submitted a list:
Newton Aduaka
Woody Allen
Lisandro Alonso
Thom Anderson
Roy Andersson
Aoyama Shinji
Michael Apted
Oliver Assayas
Kutlug Ataman
Richard Ayoade
Bong Joon-Ho
Kenneth Branagh
Charles Burnett
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Francis Ford Coppola
The Dardenne Brothers (for some reason, one list between them)
Terence Davies
Tacita Dean
Rolf De Heer
Guillermo del Toro
Andrew Dominik
Sean Durkin
Atom Egoyan
Asghar Farhadi
Abel Ferrara
Mike Figgis
John Gianvito
Amos Gitai
Michael Glawogger
Jonathan Glazer
Miguel Gomes
Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Eugene Green
Paul Greengrass
Jose Luis Guerin
Patricio Guzman
Mia Hansen-Love
Michel Hazanavicius
Monte Hellman
Mike Hodges
Joanna Hogg
Agnieszka Holland
Hong Sangsoo
Ann Hui
Miranda July
Asif Kapadia
Aki Kaurismaki
Kore-Eda Hirokazu
Peter Kosminsky
Andrew Kotting
Stanley Kwan
Pablo Larrain
Malcolm Le Grice
Mike Leigh
Richard Lester
Kevin MacDonald
Guy Maddin
Michael Mann
Pia Marais
Raya Martin
Martin McDonagh
Steve McQueen
Fernando Meirelles
Sam Mendes
Jiri Menzel
Lukas Moodysson
Samantha Morton
Gerardo Naranjo
Shirin Neshat
Jeff Nichols
Gaspar Noe
Manoel De Oliveira
Horace Ove
Gyorgy Palfi
Pawel Pawlikowski
Babak Payami
Chris Petit
Nicholas Philibert
Pere Portabella
Corneliu Porumboiu
Pen-Ek Ratabaruang
Carlos Reygadas
Mark Romanek
David O. Russell
Walter Salles
Lone Scherfig
Paul Schrader
Martin Scorsese
Ulrich Seidl
Quentin Tarantino
Bela Tarr
Pablo Trapero
Jan Troell
Tsai Ming-Liang
Andrei Ujica
Gillian Wearing
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Edgar Wright
Andrzej Zulawski
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Is the printed issue released on newsstands outside the UK today (or yesterday), in Continental Europe, for example?
the highlight for me was seeing Outcast of the Islands getting a vote. Thank you, Monte Hellman!
It does no service to other filmmakers to try and discredit the accomplishments of Japanese and ‘white’ filmmakers.
And it is not the fault of white and Japanese filmmakers that they were born into societies that allowed, supported, and could fund such leisure activities as art and moviegoing on a scale that would allow one to produce an Andrei Rublev or Gone with the Wind; when other societies have more basic means of filmmaking.
One can only judge the art being presented.
^ i have no idea, I live in the UK and my issue just arrived about 30 minutes ago.
Are those all the directors? That certainly looks like a lot less than anything nearing 350.
^ well there’s 100 of them there, and that’s definitely all the directors whose lists are in this issue… was there supposed to be 350???
Wait, just seen in small print:
“…the 100 sample entries below are a few edited highlights of the 358 voting entries we received for the 2012 Directors’ Poll.”
I just looked at Sight & Sound’s website. They’ll release every list contributed from the critics and the directors later on this month in interactive form.
Damn you Haneke. No Kiarostami or Jarmusch either.
I’m waiting to see Manoel de Oliveira’s list. Certainly it has Gertrud.
If possibe, I would love to see Manoel De Oliveira’s ballot.
Maybe Haneke, Kiarostami, and Jarmusch weren’t among the 100 selected for the printed edition.
Sorry guys, had to go out for a bit.
Manoel De Oliveira:
1. Gertrud (Dreyer)
2. Mouchette (Bresson)
3. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
4. The Informer (Ford)
5. Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
6. Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
7. Play Time (Tati)
8. Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi)
9. The Gold Rush (Chaplin)
10. Journey to Italy (Rossellini)
“The films I listed were those that arrived in my mind in the first moment. On another occasion, some of them could be replaced by others, but not all”
Not a single filmmaker younger than him made his top ten.
I have no idea of how this works, but is there a selection of 100? i doubt they wouldn’t select Haneke, i think it’s him who didn’t want to contribute.
Thanks, Maximilian. As I suspected, the venerable old man listed his old influences.
Dardenne’s even share a top 10 list… Maybe they watch movies together all the time.
Angel
The eighties?
1. Shoah
2. Raging Bull
3. Blade Runner, Sans Soleil, Blue Velvet
6. Fanny and Alexander
7. A City of Sadness
8. L’Argent, Do the Right Thing
10. Come and See, Distant Voices Still Lives, My Neighbour Totoro, Once Upon a Time in America, The Shining