by Nathaniel R
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
The once a decade Sight & Sound poll of the "Greatest Films of All Time" is upon us, and there's a new winner. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). The Belgian film jumped 35 spots from a decade ago to claim the top spot from Hitchcock's Vertigo which itself had pushed Citizen Kane from the top of the heap in an earlier poll. The list is getting extremely recent! A full forty percent of the top ten is now from the still newish 21st century... which seems extreme to us for an all time list given that there's nearlly 100 years of feature films before the year 2000!
A few more notes after the jump and the top 50...
Vertigo
1 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
3 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4 Tokyo Story (Ozu Yasujiro, 1953)
5 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2001)
6 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Beau Travail
7 Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
8 Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
9 Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov,1929)
10 Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
About that recency bias. Yes, technically Beaux Travail is from the 20th century. But it wasn't widely screened until 2000 when it began opening in various countries around the world (including its home country, France) so we consider it part of the 21st century. Anyway, this suggests that there's either a hunger to shake up the canon or the new people polled either don't know or don't care much about the back catalogue. Or both.
1 1 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)
12 The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
13 Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
14 Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)
15 The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
16 Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)
17 Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
18 Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
20 Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
21 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)
22 Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
23 Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
Do the Right Thing
24 Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
25 Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
26 The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
27 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
28 Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966)
29 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
30 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
30 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
-- Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
-- Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
34 L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
35 Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
36 City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
-- M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Some Like It Hot
38 Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
-- Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
-- Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
41 Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
-- Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
43 Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
-- Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
45 Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
-- Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
-- North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
48 Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
-- Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)
50 The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
-- The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
You can see the rest at the BFI's official Sight & Sound page
The prevalence of two-way to even six-way ties in the lists suggests to us that they need to poll a bit more than the 1,639 people they spoke with so ties are harder to come by in the math.
Several directors have two films on the list but the only ones who show up more than that are the Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard with four titles each, and Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Billy Wilder with three titles each.
Parasite
The most recent films on the list are Parasite (tied for 90th) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (tied for 30th) both from just three years ago (my personal 2019 top ten list here) which is far too young to place on an all time list though both are obviously very great movies!
Do you have any observations about this list and will you use it for screening ideas?