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The Observer (05/Aug/2012) - How Hitchcock's Vertigo eventually topped the Sight and Sound critics' poll

(c) Philip French in The Observer (05/Aug/2012)


How Hitchcock's Vertigo eventually topped the Sight and Sound critics' poll

Sight & Sound magazine has announced the results of its latest critics' poll to decide the greatest film of all time. Philip French charts the history of the poll

In the early 1950s, the British Film Institute was transformed by Denis Forman and Gavin Lambert. Forman was appointed director of the BFI in 1948, and one year later, he invited Lambert to edit what Lambert recalled as "the institute's terminally boring magazine Sight & Sound and bring it back to life". Both left the institute in 1955, Forman to help create Granada TV, Lambert to become a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, and by then the National Film Theatre had been established on the South Bank, and Sight & Sound had become one of the world's pre-eminent film journals.

Among Lambert's innovations was a worldwide poll of critics to vote each decade on the top 10 films of all time, an immense undertaking that utilises the resources of the BFI and depends on the authority of Sight & Sound. The results of the seventh and largest poll were announced on Wednesday to a gathering waiting with bated breath at the now rather grand BFI Southbank complex (formerly the National Film Theatre), and they're published in the redesigned September edition of Sight & Sound (in 1952 a quarterly costing 3/6 – 17½p; since 1990 a monthly now priced at £4.50).

In 1962, when there were few books on the cinema, no film schools, and virtually the only way to see a movie was in a picture house or at a film club; all 10 films were in black and white. Six were silent (two of them by Chaplin), Robert Flaherty's tedious Louisiana Story was the single docudrama, and there were just two postwar movies, Lean's Brief Encounter and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, a key movie in the influential neo-realist style.

Fifty years later, with film schools everywhere and 115 years of movies easily available to scholars and fans alike, the only surviving film from the first list is Dreyer's Joan of Arc, one of three silent pictures. The most surprising inclusion is the documentary Man with a Movie Camera by the Soviet theorist who styled himself Dziga Vertov (Russian for spinning top). Vertov's film is as dazzling, obscure and avant-garde as on the day it was made, and somewhat less accessible than such masterly movies as On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men, photographed in America by his brother, Boris Kaufman. The 1962 list represented the orthodox canon of that day. The 10 top films chosen in 2012 by 846 critics (of whom I was one) are the tip of an iceberg formed by the 1,045 nominated movies, and they reflect a new orthodoxy of sorts. Over six decades a new cinematic canon has been developing and changing, and it is less fluctuating and more conservative than one might have predicted.

Neo-realism has come and gone, as has the new Italian cinema that followed in the form of Antonioni's L'avventura, which in 1962 got on the list in second place a little less than two years after being greeted with uncomprehending derision at Cannes. Ingmar Bergman, too, has also been and gone, possibly because votes were divided between a string of his masterpieces. The same is true of the French new wave, with neither Truffaut nor Godard reaching the top 10. Japanese cinema was unknown until Rashomon took a major prize at Venice in 1951 and helped heal the wounds created by the second world war. Since 1962 every poll has featured Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Ozu, with the last named now in third place with Tokyo Story, one of the most affecting movies of family life and ageing ever made.

In 1962, Citizen Kane suddenly took over the first position, with Renoir's La Règle du jeu close behind. Then, in 1982, Hitchcock's Vertigo joined the list after spending years out of distribution and available only in bootleg prints. This year, not entirely surprisingly, it became substantially pre-eminent. All three movies were box-office failures in their day, and it needed the polemical magazine Movie in the early 1960s to establish the reputation of Hitchcock as a personal director of great depth rather than just the "master of suspense", which he called himself, or merely a gifted entertainer, which was Sight & Sound's view of his achievement. The first book on Hitchcock in English was by a key Movie contributor, Robin Wood, published in 1965 and initially reviewed by a single national paper, the Observer.

The 30 pages the September Sight & Sound devotes to the poll make for a fascinating read. So many of the great masters – Wilder, Lang, Eisenstein, Peckinpah, Almodóvar, for instance – fail to make the cut, though in some cases only just. There's not a single 21st-century picture in the new list. The nearest any gets is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love at 24, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive at 28. Since 1992, the critics' poll has been accompanied by a parallel top 10 chosen by directors, which also contains nothing from this century. Interestingly, Michael Mann picked two pictures from the 21st century, but they didn't get on to the winning list. One was James Cameron's Avatar, which (in an accompanying note) he calls "a brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes".

I first voted in 1972 when I was in my late 30s. My 10 films included Citizen Kane, La Règle du jeu and Battleship Potemkin, which all made the top 10 list that year, unlike my other choices, which were Buster Keaton's The General, Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, Kurosawa's Ikiru, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Ford's Stagecoach, Kelly and Donen's Singin' in the Rain and Bergman's Winter Light. This year (which even an apprentice actuary would tell you is likely to be my last) I decided to make a defiantly different choice of current favourites. They are (in alphabetical order) Au Revoir les enfants, La Grande illusion, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Leopard, Meet Me in St Louis, Pather Panchali, Seven Samurai, Stagecoach, Vertigo, Wild Strawberries. Only Stagecoach was on my 1972 list, and only Vertigo also appears in the latest top 10. On reflection, I find it much easier to list my 100 favourite westerns or 10 best films featuring dogs than to pick the 10 all-time best pictures.

Top 10 films The Sight & Sound 2012 list

  1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
  2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
  3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
  4. La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
  5. Sunrise (FW Murnau, 1927)
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
  7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
  8. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
  9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)
  10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)