Poll position: a significant shake-up

• From Sight and Sound, May 2023.

“Lists are for laundry, not for film.” When I was invited to write a series of columns on the Sight and Sound Critics’ poll, I recalled this maxim from critic and scholar Elena Gorfinkel’s essay ‘Against Lists’. One of the most consequential works of film criticism of the past decade, it rails against the cultures of quantification and commodity fetishism that reduce film art to numbers, “the rotten mercantilism of the cinephilic soul”. By enshrining canonical importance upon a privileged few titles, Gorfinkel argues, lists reinforce systems of superiority and exclusion, and beg reflection on how film culture can be celebrated without succumbing to popularity contests.

It’s clear that the 2022 results are the most significant shake-up to the list in the last 60 years, not only in the degree to which new films have displaced old ones, but the voices they represent. Among the ten highest debuting titles in the top 100, seven are by women and four by African-American directors. For the first time since 1972, four films are new to the top ten: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), In the Mood for Love (2000), Beau travail (1999) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).

Besides their respective cinematic singularity, collectively they bring a greater range of experience to the top ten: female and queer, Asian and African. How much did a concern for representational politics among the voters determine their choices? Beau travail, which made the biggest leap in the top 100 from 2012, provides a case in point. That Claire Denis would rank among the top auteurs is unsurprising, but why this particular film? Does its combination of post-colonial and homoerotic themes tick more boxes than her other works? Such an analysis treads into political punditry, reflecting the reductive thinking that Gorfinkel warns that such procedures end up promoting. Nonetheless, what remains compelling in this list is an urgency in its choices, that it asks: which films matter most at this moment? In what way do they matter? And to whom?

These questions also apply to titles on the other side of the ledger. Films by Antonioni, Dreyer, Scorsese, Coppola and Renoir dropped significantly from their standing in 2012. Other drops in the top 100 included films by Keaton, Godard, Lang, Bresson, Vigo, Fellini and Tarkovsky. Many of these directors still have multiple films in the top 100, so one could conclude that this is simply a redistribution of auteurial privilege across a wider swath of directors. On the other hand, two major figures – Robert Altman and Howard Hawks – are no longer on the list at all. Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) epitomise a kind of large-ensemble filmmaking that was in vogue in the 90s and early 2000s. Among films that gained the most in the recent poll – Jeanne Dielman, In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr. – there is a marked increase in stories about alienated people navigating lonely worlds. Could this trend be a marker of moods and effects that prevailed during the pandemic? Does the spectre of Covid haunt this list in its shift towards a cinema of seclusion?

Or is it that, more broadly, we are witnessing a rebuff of the films, most of them from the mid-20th century, that have dominated film courses, repertory cinema calendars and the Criterion Collection for decades? One has to wonder how much these shifts in the standings reflect tectonic change in the major institutions of cinema culture and what other platforms for critical discourse have borne influence: Twitter, Letterboxd, chat groups, other social media. The internet is filled with lists, the majority created outside the purview of any organising institution.

Such resources for engaging in cinema are a far cry from when I was a teenager in the US suburbs, seeking out more than what was playing at the multiplex or on TV. Encountering the 1982 and 1992 Sight and Sound polls was like finding a map to a greater world of movies, many of which I didn’t have access to, but suddenly craved, as a means of experiencing liberation and discovery. Gorfinkel’s essay warns that such lists, like maps, are as much about conquest and consolidation of cultural power. In subsequent columns, I’ll use the list to probe further into the larger forces shaping the cinema culture that it might reflect, with Gorfinkel’s admonitions against cinephile onanism in mind.