The best of cinema

Now that the 10 best movies of all the voters in the Sight and Sound poll is out, it is looking much more instructive, fun, and revealing than the 50 best list.

In essence, the 10 best films of some 800-and-odd critics, directors, programmers and cinephiles round the world. As Iain Sinclair, one of the voters observed, “Every entry here has a subterranean, disregarded double. But that would be another game. Ten is too few, a couple short of a set of disciples.” Indeed, the 50 best list pales and shrinks in comparison; the 846 list is more like the movie list we want to see. Here you can discover the films they really put on top (over the final, winning top 10), their (and our) favourite films, the obscure titles even their colleagues did not know about (or didn’t care for), the favourites of cult critics such as Zizek, Armond White and Geoff Dyer, and what the top 10 films of directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Scorsese, Coppola, Asghar Farhadi, Woody Allen and Tarantino look like.

No surprises from Coppola, Scorsese and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (squarely classical choices) but plenty from Tarantino. Woody Allen’s list is the most boring and predictable — like those solemn film classics that some student coming fresh from a film appreciation course will put down. I just knew when I came to Tarantino’s list there would be films that only he would have voted for; every now and then in the entire list from the voters you come across a movie that only one person voted for, but Tarantino’s, I felt, would have several that no one else would care to or want to or dare to include in a decade poll of the greatest films of all time. Tarantino alone lists The Bad News Bears, The Great Escape and Rolling Thunder. I was nicely surprised to see him list (along with one other voter) William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, a thrilling remake most people have forgotten. I wish Tarantino had included a comment.

But Tarantino, I discovered getting to the end of the list of voters, was beaten by one other voter for listing movies no one else will dare — who else but that bad boy of postmodern theory: Slavoj Zizek! His glorious list: The original 1957 3.10 to Yuma, Dune, The Fountainhead, Hitman, The Great Sacrifice, Nightmare Alley, Noi Vivi and On Dangerous Ground. It would have been a record list of 10 movies only one person voted for if it hadn’t been for two movies in his list that find two other voters: Hero and The Sound of Music (the latter, I would have thought, would have no takers).

And fortunately for us, unlike in the case of Quentin, Zizek has left a comment and I quote: “This time, I opted for pure madness: the list contains only ‘guilty pleasures’, from two screen versions of Ayn Rand to a top Nazi melodrama, from David Lynch’s greatest flop to height of musical kitsch, from a low-budget Hollywood action thriller to a Chinese big-budget historical spectacle, plus a half-forgotten Western and two marginal noirs.
This is what I really enjoy — no compromises for high quality or good taste.”

I kept discovering voters sneaking into their lists all sorts of personal recommendations. Geoff Dyer lists Where Eagles Dare. In his comments he writes: “I can’t detect any logic or defining idea of what I want from a film in this list. They’re just the films that insisted on popping into my head. The neon of their titles flashed brightest among the hundreds of others vying for my attention… If I had to choose just one, it would be Christian Marclay’s The Clock.”

Other surprises: Farhadi unexpectedly had Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, a favourite Allen with me; film blogger Girish Shambu had Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se in an otherwise straightforward list, Mathew Vaughn voted for Rocky III, Mike Leigh for Allen’s Radio Days and an obscure title, How a Mosquito Operates, Naman Ramachandran votes in Gandhi and Sholay, I was thrilled that at least Rachel Dwyer listed Ratnam’s Iruvar (his best film probably), Glenn Kenny regrets not finding a place for The Last Temptation of Christ, Paul Greengrass, I was happy to see, mentions Kes, I was also pretty pleased that Whit Stillman had put down another often overlooked masterpiece, Howard’s End. But most ecstatic of all choices for me was the one (and the only one to make it) made by David Hare: Vanya on 42nd Street. Hurray and thank you Mr Hare (and incidentally, I loved your Page 8).

I learnt that 191 critics and 31 directors voted for Vertigo. That 32 critics and 11 directors voted in Pather Panchali, a few others Charulata and even fewer, The Music Room. This last is shocking since for some years now, Jalsagar has been the Ray work that has been steadily climbing up as his masterwork in the eyes of critics, filmmakers and cinephiles — and now it seems to have fallen sharply. Guru Dutt features in the lists but I was dismayed to see the work of Adoor Gopalakrishnan not come up as frequently (or perhaps not at all). An Indian master whose work is sadly and frustratingly not available to watch on video or even at festival retrospectives. In the same way that Ray’s films were restored and taken around the world, the film community should rescue the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

I end with the comment critic Glenn Kenny wrote summing up this exercise: “It’s true, the task is not an easy one. I arrived at this particular list — one out of perhaps dozens of other entirely different ones — by splitting the difference between honouring convention and saying to hell with it… Despite all that, this is a list that satisfies me. If anybody asks me ‘What IS cinema?’ I can show them any one of these pictures and say ‘This is’.”