I think you'll find it considerably less slapdash the more you look at it. That was my experience. It totally jumbled me up the first time I saw it and it's gotten clearer and more intentional ever since. True masterpiece.
I also agree it's a masterpiece, but at the risk of being too contrarian, my favorite Lynch is the least Lynchian of all - "The Straight Story." I'd go with "Blue Velvet" before "Mullholland," but do appreciate that there's such a whacked out choice in the top 10.
I have tried and failed to finish this movie so many times. I generally love Lynch, and there are parts of this that I find interesting, but there’s something about the presentation that’s so off-putting that I struggle to fully engage.
Look obviously anecdotal stuff is anecdotal blah blah blah but I have never once heard of someone who thinks Jeanne Dielman is the greatest movie of all time. I have watched over 4,700 movies according to my IMDB ratings and never saw fit to check it out because there was never a sense it was something I needed to see. I won't criticize the film, because I haven't seen it, but how can something be the consensus best movie of all time when
1. No one has seen it. Citizen Kane and Vertigo have over 400,000 views on IMDB. A great foreign movie like Grand Illusion has 37,000. Jean Dielman had 7,000 when the list was announced.
2. No one likes it. In all previous version of the list, both overall list and directors list, it never ranked in the Top 10.
So everyone just suddenly decided this was the best movie of all time? It doesn't make any sense. The only sense I can make of this is identitarian
-it's directed by a woman and about a woman and we're making a conscious effort to disrupt the canon, because WHO makes the movie now matters to us more than WHAT the movie is
And elitist.
-there is a clear move into the obscure and less mainstream on this year's list. Oscars reflect it too
Look at it this way. There are at least, say, 200 movies people think are great, right? And it's virtually impossible to say whether The Godfather or Vertigo is a better movie than Grand Illusion or The Battle of Algiers They're all masterpieces. So I will absolutely see the movie now when I can carve out, *checks notes* 3.5 hours for the daily routine of a sex working housewife. And maybe I'll find it great.
But in the meantime, I can still ask WHY such a movie would suddenly emerge as the consensus best movie ever made when, as noted, no one has seen it and no one previously loved it. Why did it rise over the other 199 films?
I don't understand why you would ever make such a comment. If we were talking face to face, you'd never make such a silly, dismissive comment. It is absolutely fair to ask why JD suddenly becomes #1. It doesn't make you some sort of angry misogynist.
I'd answer that question in a few ways: 1. Critics were perhaps less inclined than previous year to submit ballots with films directed entirely by white men. And I think an effort has been made, too, to balance out a voting pool that was also heavily male. 2. Akerman's reputation has grown significantly in the last decade, with quite a bit of repertory attention and a lot of appreciation for her work after her death in 2015. 3. The "slow cinema" scene, of which Akerman's work is a touchstone, has become a more common staple of film festivals, with directors like Lav Diaz, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, and others gaining a lot of acclaim and premium competition slots.
I don't agree with you on Jeanne Dielman, obviously. As the tweet I wrote before the list was posted predicted, I thought it had a real shot at #1, because in the critical circles I run it (full of, you know, the folks who vote in this poll), there was a lot of appreciation for Akerman and that film.
And I don't see much evidence of the list getting more esoteric this year at all. I mean, it's got Get Out and Parasite and two Miyazakis and Portrait of a Lady on Fire on it. It anything, the opposite is true.
So what caused, in ten years, a sudden appreciation of Jeanne Dielman?
Also, it really says something that your examples of the list being less esoteric include...Portrait of a Lady on Fire? A lesbian French drama that made 10m worldwide?
Compared to The Godfather? It's way less esoteric than Jeanne Dielman but if the idea that Scott's citing this movie to show how mainstream the list is? Jeez.
Like, travel people I know really like Luxembourg but if the list of 10 Places to See Before You Die had Luxembourg at #9, and I used that to cite how mainstream the list was, that'd be really weird right?
this is probably going too far afield from your point, but I think mainstream success has changed in recent decades (thought it may change back!) films that were BOTH classics and blockbusters really fall off after the 70s. if you're going to include more recent movies you're going to be including non-blockbusters
I generally agree -- in that the 1970s is the apex of commerical/artistic cinema merging. But Mad Max Fury Road is an all-timer too, we just no longer thing that such cinema should be included in lists like this.
I’m not sure if this is a good comparison or not, but it’s all I got. For a while, I was posting songs each day on Facebook and writing about them. One day it was Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” cause I like the song and didn’t have enough time to write anything more substantial than “I like it.” The following day it was Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Obviously not the hit that “Call Me Maybe” was, but I argued that it was just as successful in its own way. It was quite the sensation for those like me who wanted something a bit different than what was hitting the Top 40 at the time. It topped the 1981 Village Voice critics poll and even reached #2 on the British singles chart thanks to exposure offered up by DJ John Peel! So something that avant garde became sort of mainstream even though most Americans didn’t have a clue.
Worth pointing out too that since JEANNE DIELMAN joined the Criterion Collection in 2009 it's significantly viewable for more people than in the preceding decades. I remember getting into film in the late 90s/early 00s and it was basically impossible to see outside of big city rep screenings or bootleg copies.
"So everyone just suddenly decided this was the best movie of all time?" Only if all 1600+ ballots included that movie at number one. Which, having seen some ballots, is not the case.
Also, it was #35 on the list 10 years ago! That's not some obscure position — it was considered the 35th greatest film of all time! If that's not a nudge to check it out, I'm not sure what counts.
I have not seen Jeanne Dielman, and maybe I'll hate it, but it's been on my to-watch list for a while. (And now that it's the greatest film of all time, at least until we run the next poll, I'm excited to see a local movie theater is going to show it in March. Will go.)
Long movies are a general blind spot for me — haven't seen A Brighter Summer Day, rewatched Seven Samurai or Once Upon a Time in America since my 20s, tackled Satantango ...
I will also confess that it's probably only in the last few years that I've developed the cinema-watching muscles to feel up to tackling a long "deliberately paced" movie.
Jeanne Dielman is kind of a magical experience in that way. As I said, it adjusts your metabolism as you watch it. The whole thing is just so mesmerizing.
I'm pretty sure that daily mindfulness practice, something I've done for just the past few years, has made it much more possible for me to get into "slow" movies.
When I watched Nina Menkes' QUEEN OF DIAMONDS last year, I loved it but also knew that I would not have had the patience for it 5 years earlier, and that movie is less than 90 minutes.
I was learning about film living in rural WA state hours from the nearest art house theater in the 90s and I learned about JEANNE DIELMAN (probably via a Rosenbaum book or review). Was years before I could see it though but it's been widely available since Criterion added it to the collection in 2009 (and it even got a blu-ray upgrade a couple years ago).
Actually it's a very good site to discuss good movies, because it measures what we might call the REMP - the Reasonably Engaged Movie-going Public. They're going to have far more "sophisticated" tastes than the average moviegoer who sees two films in theaters a year, but they'll skew more mainstream than critics who see 300 movies a year. As such they're a pretty balanced group. Do they have their flaws and biases? Of course. But so do critics. We should acknowledge that IMDB has a certain "fanboy" bias which leads to, say, The Dark Knight being considered the 4th best movie of all time. But we should also acknowledge that critics have biases towards slower, more esoteric and unengaging cinema, which leads to Jeanne Dielman being considered the best movie of all time.
I broadly agree with your takes throughout this comment section, though I wouldn't say that critics "have biases towards" movies like Jeanne Dielman, so much as that audiences have biases against them. You sit me and a professional critic down with Jeanne Dielman and Blade Runner, the odds are I hate the former and love the latter, while the critic loves both.
My tastes are phenomenally middlebrow - Oscar-nominee, AFI's 100 Years, 100 Films (original 1998 list) kind of stuff. It's amazing how many of the films on this S&S list I haven't even heard of. But, agreed---people at the IMDB level of fandom are still more sophisticated than many, many movie fans. That said, I've made my peace with S&S being for cineastes who are more serious than me.
I think we're splitting semantical hairs here with biases towards vs. biases against - the point still stands that critics are far more likely to value such films (and that doesn't make the rest of us wrong or inferior)
I saw Vertigo in 2012 not long after that year’s S&S poll shocked everyone. I loved it but living with undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea at the time meant I fell asleep at some bits unintentionally. I need to see it again.
And how great is it that that film, Citizen Kane and Jeanne Dielman are all streamableon HBO Max?
It blows my mind how much of the cannon is viewable at my fingertips now, instead of driving two hours roundtrip to rent a bunch of movies and then make the same trip two days later to return them!
Jeanne Dielman would not have been my first choice, but man, I love that it ended up at the top. So glad Filmspotting covered that one, it would've been, well, until now I guess before I'd seen it.
I don’t know, Scott, I think that’s a damn fine ballot, and IMO picking certifiably great, “canon”-approved movies is just as valid an approach as picking 10 offbeat choices you merely want to cheerlead because maybe no one else will. The snootiest corners of Film Twitter were snickering at Ti West’s supposedly too-basic S&S ballot, despite him picking 10 genuinely great and hugely influential movies. You can’t win with those jerks!
But I love when these kinds of lists experience major shake-ups because it’s a fascinating barometer of the shifting tides of opinion. Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums list was formative for me 15-20 years ago, but its 2020 version looked entirely different from past iterations, which I think is great. A few tried-and-trues stayed on top, many were knocked from the perch — is it because they no longer have cultural relevance (and does cultural relevance even factor in to your vote?), or is it merely a matter of voters thinking “Sgt. Pepper’s” had had its time in the sun and so went for an artist they feel deserves canonization instead? Such is the nature of the list.
Looking forward to seeing Jeanne Dielman -- this is the kick in the pants I needed. (Thanks, Tom, for mentioning it's streaming on HBO Max!)
And of course, no one single person actually said that it was the greatest film of all time. (Well, maybe some people did, but for this list, that doesn't matter.) It was just listed in more people's top 10s than any other. More and more people were including it in the conversation.
I've been thinking about my own picks over the last week or so, and here's what I've come up with:
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Rear Window
Jaws
8 1/2
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Casablanca
Do the Right Thing
Picnic at Hanging Rock
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
It's an imperfect list. They're only 10 films on it, for one thing, when there should be a hundred. But these are the ones that speak to me, and I'd watch any of them again right this second.
Well you have a new subscriber (me!). Thanks for contributing to the S&S poll and for the months (or more) of this great substack. Picking a top ten seems impossible - should it be your favorite? Should it be "the best" and include films you admire more than you like?
I think Jean Dielman falls into the latter category for me - clearly interesting, but too frustrating for me to take much away from it. Personally I'd put "The Piano," "Lost in Translation," "The Hurt Locker," "Wanda," "Persepolis" (hell can we count "The Matrix?) in the top 10 ahead of it.
No one asked me, but here's what I'd submit in no particular order:
"ET"
- still my favorite Speilberg, and he belongs here.
"Rear Window"
- at least as good as "Vertigo"
"Do the Right Thing"
- this would have made a better number one in 2022's list.
"Goodfellas"
- because...c'mon now.
"The Piano"
- best romance of the last 30 yrs, IMO.
"You Can Count on Me"
- surely not a of votes for this one, but it kills me every time.
"Pulp Fiction"
- The most formative movie for me, coming out as I entered film school and had been making short films on a VHS camera with friends throughout high school.
"Singin' in the Rain"
- Can't think of a better musical and at least one belongs here.
"Dr Strangelove"
- As much as I admire "2001," This is the Kubrick that should be here IMO.
Dave, welcome! I think Spielberg belongs on the list, too, but alas. I love You Can Count on Me, too, but I think the real mover in the future might be Lonergan's Margaret, which has such a huge cult-ish appreciation among critics, myself included.
I can see Margaret moving into the top 250, though "Manchester by the Sea" is just as great, IMO.
Something about how grief isn't something everyone can move past (or should) just struck such a chord with me. I get that "Margaret" is about the indifference towards people's pain too, but something about "Manchester" makes it more intimate and therefore more affecting - for me, at least.
I mean, yeah, Manchester By The Sea is an absolute hammer. About as heartbreaking as movies get, and so tough and true in its conclusion. 99.9% of movies would get sentimental about that character finding his way back home, but that's not what Lonergan does. I think what gives Margaret the edge is just the scope of the thing is so massive. It's denser, more complex, messier, and a real snapshot of post-9/11 NYC.
coincidentally, I just watched The Lady Eve last night for the first time. It's a good film! but.... it's not even my favorite Sturges. I honestly don't get the overwhelming love it gets. The first half is wonderful fun, but the fact that Charles never once catches on to her deceptions in the second half is just....not funny after the first half dozen times?
if you've got five seconds to point me to what makes it a contender for a top ten film, I'd love to know. by comparison we watched Palm Beach Story last week and found it a much superior film.
I'm shocked. Shocked! I love The Lady Eve so much. (And if Stephanie Zacharek, who was not invited to the poll for some reason, had gotten the chance, she'd have had it on her ballot for sure.) I just love the chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda so much-- they're two of my favorites-- and I think the film is so funny and kind of steamy in its way, too. But that's the Sturges dilemma, right? Lots of dividing the vote there.
My main feeling about the sight and sound list is that 100 is just too small a number for all the great films across the mediums history. Maybe 100 made sense in 1952, but by 2022 it’s a positively anemic amount. Also I think it unconsciously make people get a little conservative with their votes. You only get ten and you know like Broadcast News (a GREAT film) isn’t making it when it has to compete with seven samurai and The Godfather and all those serious European art house films. So you don’t wanna waste ya vote on something that probably isn’t happening. Of all the talk of upheaval and recency bias, the list is largely the same canonical films that’s been on this list for decades.
I’m for expansion when it comes to lists like this. A website i frequent, They Shoot Pictures Don’t They(TSPDT for short) did a top 1005 favorites with nearly 2000 of us voted for 25 films. With ten times the results and 2.5x the choices, it opened the results up to a vastly more varied and interesting collection of movies across history, genre, and style.
So yes all the Sight and Sound 100 usual suspects are there(many are there for good reason: they’re great films!), but there’s way more comedy, horror, action, American indie, animation, obscurities and those weird personal touches that you and maybe a dozen other cinephiles just absolutely love.
An incomplete list of great filmmakers who’s work is featured here but did not make the cut for Sight and Sound 2022: Melville, Altman, Carpenter, Morris, Leigh, Peckinpah, Fuller, Eastwood, Bigelow, Cukor, Cronenberg, Wenders, Yimou , Von Trier, Malle, Almodovar, Lumet, Malick, Allen, Mann(michael and anthony), Lubistch, Cuaron, Spielberg, Hawks, Bunuel, Tarantino, Anderson(Wes, Paul Thomas AND Paul W.S.), Coens, Woo, De Palma, Ang Lee, Polanski, Lean, Cassavettes, Cimino, Cameron, Linklater, Lucas, May, Nolan, Burton, Lanthimos, Friedkin, Naruse, Jarmusch, Kore-eda, To, Kazan, Hark, Ramsay, Wachowskis, Raimi, Preminger, Roeg, Sternberg, Malle, Hu, Bird, Zemeckis, Weir, Tourneur, McQueen, Miller, Carax, Boorman, Verhoeven, Assayas, Brooks, Kobayashi, Reichardt, Zhangke, Craven, Stone, Ashby, Fincher, Aldrich, Huston, Wright, Reiner, Romero, Bogdanovich, Kon, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sturges, Ray, Wyler, Nichols, Gerwig, Safdies, Costa-Gavras, Herzog, Jonze, Yimou, Glazer, Rohmer, Fosse, Schrader, Jackson, Demy, Clouzot, Kalatozov, Haneke, Park, McCarey, Argento, Takahata, Fleming, Gilliam, Demme, Forman...I mean I can keep going.
When you put all these films together, i think it gives a wider and more interesting idea about great cinema. When you scroll down the list and see Winter Light, Akira, Hard Boiled, Before Sunrise, and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg all sitting side by side, you see great films can come in all sorts of forms, genres, colors, or even in animation. It can open your mind more to the possibilities of the medium and make you wanna check some of these out. A similar expansion for Sight and Sound can only help, not hurt, conversation and broaden cinephile horizons.
As someone who prefers F FOR FAKE to CITIZEN KANE and NORTH BY NORTHWEST to VERTIGO I am used to being "this guy", but am I the only one who doesn't think JEANNE DIELMAN is even Akerman's best? I prefer LES RENDEZVOUS D'ANNA by a sizable margin, and would put NEWS FROM HOME, HOTEL MONTEREY and NO HOME MOVIE above it as well, albeit with only one viewing of all of those. (I think my rhetorical question is probably also answered by the fact that NEWS FROM HOME probably didn't place there from voters naming *two* Akerman films in their top ten.)
I like that you have the Top 5 on your list while still making room for less obvious films like “Modern Romance” and “Blow Out.” As much as I like looking through the consensus list, I think I enjoy seeing what’s on all the individual lists even more. Once in a while I’ll see something that’ll surprise and delight me, and with over 1600 participants this year, I’ll definitely be geeking out for a while.
Scott, how much can I pay you to change your Albert Brooks selection from Modern Romance to Defending Your Life? ;)
I adore both films, but I do think DYL is his masterwork.
I'll be watching two 3+ hour movies this month -- Avatar 2 and Jeanne Dielman! I have a feeling they're gonna be a little different. I've never heard of "slow cinema," but I have heard of, and have seen, "slow tv," the train video in Norway. I hope Jeanne Dielman will be slightly more exciting than that...I hope!
I've been sitting on my Netflix DVD of Jeanne Dielman for the last two months, approximately... just in time for the latest S&S poll! (just kidding, coincidence of course) But I've wanted to make sure there was time when I wasn't busy with work, family and classes to watch it with my wife, now that I'm done with class for the term.
When Scott got into “stodgy”-ness, I immediately thought of this take by Paul Schrader on the new list (linking an article discussing the take, not to FB where he wrote it) - https://nofilmschool.com/Paul-schrader-sight-and-sound. Perhaps lists shouldn’t be called “stodgy”, but takes about such lists can absolutely reek of it, among other things (*cringe).
I think you'll find it considerably less slapdash the more you look at it. That was my experience. It totally jumbled me up the first time I saw it and it's gotten clearer and more intentional ever since. True masterpiece.
I also agree it's a masterpiece, but at the risk of being too contrarian, my favorite Lynch is the least Lynchian of all - "The Straight Story." I'd go with "Blue Velvet" before "Mullholland," but do appreciate that there's such a whacked out choice in the top 10.
This was the first Lynch I ever watched, and it blew me away on first viewing. IMO it deserves its place in the Top 10
I have tried and failed to finish this movie so many times. I generally love Lynch, and there are parts of this that I find interesting, but there’s something about the presentation that’s so off-putting that I struggle to fully engage.
I LOVE MD, but I don't think it belongs in the top 10
Look obviously anecdotal stuff is anecdotal blah blah blah but I have never once heard of someone who thinks Jeanne Dielman is the greatest movie of all time. I have watched over 4,700 movies according to my IMDB ratings and never saw fit to check it out because there was never a sense it was something I needed to see. I won't criticize the film, because I haven't seen it, but how can something be the consensus best movie of all time when
1. No one has seen it. Citizen Kane and Vertigo have over 400,000 views on IMDB. A great foreign movie like Grand Illusion has 37,000. Jean Dielman had 7,000 when the list was announced.
2. No one likes it. In all previous version of the list, both overall list and directors list, it never ranked in the Top 10.
So everyone just suddenly decided this was the best movie of all time? It doesn't make any sense. The only sense I can make of this is identitarian
-it's directed by a woman and about a woman and we're making a conscious effort to disrupt the canon, because WHO makes the movie now matters to us more than WHAT the movie is
And elitist.
-there is a clear move into the obscure and less mainstream on this year's list. Oscars reflect it too
"I haven't seen it."
Fixed that for you!
You'll note that none of my comment is about the film's quality
How could it be?
Look at it this way. There are at least, say, 200 movies people think are great, right? And it's virtually impossible to say whether The Godfather or Vertigo is a better movie than Grand Illusion or The Battle of Algiers They're all masterpieces. So I will absolutely see the movie now when I can carve out, *checks notes* 3.5 hours for the daily routine of a sex working housewife. And maybe I'll find it great.
But in the meantime, I can still ask WHY such a movie would suddenly emerge as the consensus best movie ever made when, as noted, no one has seen it and no one previously loved it. Why did it rise over the other 199 films?
James, I'm sorry the lady movie made you upset on the internet. I hope you watch it and like it.
I don't understand why you would ever make such a comment. If we were talking face to face, you'd never make such a silly, dismissive comment. It is absolutely fair to ask why JD suddenly becomes #1. It doesn't make you some sort of angry misogynist.
I'd answer that question in a few ways: 1. Critics were perhaps less inclined than previous year to submit ballots with films directed entirely by white men. And I think an effort has been made, too, to balance out a voting pool that was also heavily male. 2. Akerman's reputation has grown significantly in the last decade, with quite a bit of repertory attention and a lot of appreciation for her work after her death in 2015. 3. The "slow cinema" scene, of which Akerman's work is a touchstone, has become a more common staple of film festivals, with directors like Lav Diaz, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, and others gaining a lot of acclaim and premium competition slots.
Thanks for the answer! But this does support my point about the list becoming increasingly esoteric. Slow cinema is very, very unmainstream
I do wonder how significantly post-death retrospectives are impacting the list (for better or worse)
I don't agree with you on Jeanne Dielman, obviously. As the tweet I wrote before the list was posted predicted, I thought it had a real shot at #1, because in the critical circles I run it (full of, you know, the folks who vote in this poll), there was a lot of appreciation for Akerman and that film.
And I don't see much evidence of the list getting more esoteric this year at all. I mean, it's got Get Out and Parasite and two Miyazakis and Portrait of a Lady on Fire on it. It anything, the opposite is true.
So what caused, in ten years, a sudden appreciation of Jeanne Dielman?
Also, it really says something that your examples of the list being less esoteric include...Portrait of a Lady on Fire? A lesbian French drama that made 10m worldwide?
you may not consider it "popular", but it was a huge art house hit and got tons of mainstream press. I don't know how you'd call it esoteric
Compared to The Godfather? It's way less esoteric than Jeanne Dielman but if the idea that Scott's citing this movie to show how mainstream the list is? Jeez.
Like, travel people I know really like Luxembourg but if the list of 10 Places to See Before You Die had Luxembourg at #9, and I used that to cite how mainstream the list was, that'd be really weird right?
this is probably going too far afield from your point, but I think mainstream success has changed in recent decades (thought it may change back!) films that were BOTH classics and blockbusters really fall off after the 70s. if you're going to include more recent movies you're going to be including non-blockbusters
I generally agree -- in that the 1970s is the apex of commerical/artistic cinema merging. But Mad Max Fury Road is an all-timer too, we just no longer thing that such cinema should be included in lists like this.
I’m not sure if this is a good comparison or not, but it’s all I got. For a while, I was posting songs each day on Facebook and writing about them. One day it was Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” cause I like the song and didn’t have enough time to write anything more substantial than “I like it.” The following day it was Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Obviously not the hit that “Call Me Maybe” was, but I argued that it was just as successful in its own way. It was quite the sensation for those like me who wanted something a bit different than what was hitting the Top 40 at the time. It topped the 1981 Village Voice critics poll and even reached #2 on the British singles chart thanks to exposure offered up by DJ John Peel! So something that avant garde became sort of mainstream even though most Americans didn’t have a clue.
Worth pointing out too that since JEANNE DIELMAN joined the Criterion Collection in 2009 it's significantly viewable for more people than in the preceding decades. I remember getting into film in the late 90s/early 00s and it was basically impossible to see outside of big city rep screenings or bootleg copies.
"So everyone just suddenly decided this was the best movie of all time?" Only if all 1600+ ballots included that movie at number one. Which, having seen some ballots, is not the case.
Also, it was #35 on the list 10 years ago! That's not some obscure position — it was considered the 35th greatest film of all time! If that's not a nudge to check it out, I'm not sure what counts.
I have not seen Jeanne Dielman, and maybe I'll hate it, but it's been on my to-watch list for a while. (And now that it's the greatest film of all time, at least until we run the next poll, I'm excited to see a local movie theater is going to show it in March. Will go.)
I'll watch it too. And I hope it's great because I like seeing great movies. But Jesus, 3.5 hours
Long movies are a general blind spot for me — haven't seen A Brighter Summer Day, rewatched Seven Samurai or Once Upon a Time in America since my 20s, tackled Satantango ...
I will also confess that it's probably only in the last few years that I've developed the cinema-watching muscles to feel up to tackling a long "deliberately paced" movie.
Jeanne Dielman is kind of a magical experience in that way. As I said, it adjusts your metabolism as you watch it. The whole thing is just so mesmerizing.
I'm pretty sure that daily mindfulness practice, something I've done for just the past few years, has made it much more possible for me to get into "slow" movies.
When I watched Nina Menkes' QUEEN OF DIAMONDS last year, I loved it but also knew that I would not have had the patience for it 5 years earlier, and that movie is less than 90 minutes.
What's that Simpsons quote...
"I'm not saying I don't believe you but...I don't know how to finish that sentence."
I was learning about film living in rural WA state hours from the nearest art house theater in the 90s and I learned about JEANNE DIELMAN (probably via a Rosenbaum book or review). Was years before I could see it though but it's been widely available since Criterion added it to the collection in 2009 (and it even got a blu-ray upgrade a couple years ago).
Lots of great movies are under-seen. The IMDB is just about the worst site to reference to discuss good movies.
Actually it's a very good site to discuss good movies, because it measures what we might call the REMP - the Reasonably Engaged Movie-going Public. They're going to have far more "sophisticated" tastes than the average moviegoer who sees two films in theaters a year, but they'll skew more mainstream than critics who see 300 movies a year. As such they're a pretty balanced group. Do they have their flaws and biases? Of course. But so do critics. We should acknowledge that IMDB has a certain "fanboy" bias which leads to, say, The Dark Knight being considered the 4th best movie of all time. But we should also acknowledge that critics have biases towards slower, more esoteric and unengaging cinema, which leads to Jeanne Dielman being considered the best movie of all time.
Sorry, just getting around to this now.
I broadly agree with your takes throughout this comment section, though I wouldn't say that critics "have biases towards" movies like Jeanne Dielman, so much as that audiences have biases against them. You sit me and a professional critic down with Jeanne Dielman and Blade Runner, the odds are I hate the former and love the latter, while the critic loves both.
My tastes are phenomenally middlebrow - Oscar-nominee, AFI's 100 Years, 100 Films (original 1998 list) kind of stuff. It's amazing how many of the films on this S&S list I haven't even heard of. But, agreed---people at the IMDB level of fandom are still more sophisticated than many, many movie fans. That said, I've made my peace with S&S being for cineastes who are more serious than me.
I think we're splitting semantical hairs here with biases towards vs. biases against - the point still stands that critics are far more likely to value such films (and that doesn't make the rest of us wrong or inferior)
Yeah, we're agreed.
I saw Vertigo in 2012 not long after that year’s S&S poll shocked everyone. I loved it but living with undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea at the time meant I fell asleep at some bits unintentionally. I need to see it again.
And how great is it that that film, Citizen Kane and Jeanne Dielman are all streamableon HBO Max?
I have a CPAP and I still struggling with dozing off involuntarily mid-movie. I feel you, sir, hope things have at least improved since then.
They have! I have a solid CPAP machine now and as long as I stick to a sleep routine I’m good
It blows my mind how much of the cannon is viewable at my fingertips now, instead of driving two hours roundtrip to rent a bunch of movies and then make the same trip two days later to return them!
Exactly! And what I can’t stream I can usually get from my county library which delivers between locations!
Or having to set a timer on the VCR to record something foreign or silent off TCM at like 2:00AM!
Jeanne Dielman would not have been my first choice, but man, I love that it ended up at the top. So glad Filmspotting covered that one, it would've been, well, until now I guess before I'd seen it.
I don’t know, Scott, I think that’s a damn fine ballot, and IMO picking certifiably great, “canon”-approved movies is just as valid an approach as picking 10 offbeat choices you merely want to cheerlead because maybe no one else will. The snootiest corners of Film Twitter were snickering at Ti West’s supposedly too-basic S&S ballot, despite him picking 10 genuinely great and hugely influential movies. You can’t win with those jerks!
But I love when these kinds of lists experience major shake-ups because it’s a fascinating barometer of the shifting tides of opinion. Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums list was formative for me 15-20 years ago, but its 2020 version looked entirely different from past iterations, which I think is great. A few tried-and-trues stayed on top, many were knocked from the perch — is it because they no longer have cultural relevance (and does cultural relevance even factor in to your vote?), or is it merely a matter of voters thinking “Sgt. Pepper’s” had had its time in the sun and so went for an artist they feel deserves canonization instead? Such is the nature of the list.
My take on Jeanne Dielman is that she should get a cat.
Looking forward to seeing Jeanne Dielman -- this is the kick in the pants I needed. (Thanks, Tom, for mentioning it's streaming on HBO Max!)
And of course, no one single person actually said that it was the greatest film of all time. (Well, maybe some people did, but for this list, that doesn't matter.) It was just listed in more people's top 10s than any other. More and more people were including it in the conversation.
I've been thinking about my own picks over the last week or so, and here's what I've come up with:
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Rear Window
Jaws
8 1/2
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Casablanca
Do the Right Thing
Picnic at Hanging Rock
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
It's an imperfect list. They're only 10 films on it, for one thing, when there should be a hundred. But these are the ones that speak to me, and I'd watch any of them again right this second.
Well you have a new subscriber (me!). Thanks for contributing to the S&S poll and for the months (or more) of this great substack. Picking a top ten seems impossible - should it be your favorite? Should it be "the best" and include films you admire more than you like?
I think Jean Dielman falls into the latter category for me - clearly interesting, but too frustrating for me to take much away from it. Personally I'd put "The Piano," "Lost in Translation," "The Hurt Locker," "Wanda," "Persepolis" (hell can we count "The Matrix?) in the top 10 ahead of it.
No one asked me, but here's what I'd submit in no particular order:
"ET"
- still my favorite Speilberg, and he belongs here.
"Rear Window"
- at least as good as "Vertigo"
"Do the Right Thing"
- this would have made a better number one in 2022's list.
"Goodfellas"
- because...c'mon now.
"The Piano"
- best romance of the last 30 yrs, IMO.
"You Can Count on Me"
- surely not a of votes for this one, but it kills me every time.
"Pulp Fiction"
- The most formative movie for me, coming out as I entered film school and had been making short films on a VHS camera with friends throughout high school.
"Singin' in the Rain"
- Can't think of a better musical and at least one belongs here.
"Dr Strangelove"
- As much as I admire "2001," This is the Kubrick that should be here IMO.
"Casablanca"
- The most "movie" movie ever made, right?
Dave, welcome! I think Spielberg belongs on the list, too, but alas. I love You Can Count on Me, too, but I think the real mover in the future might be Lonergan's Margaret, which has such a huge cult-ish appreciation among critics, myself included.
My pleasure Scott :)
I can see Margaret moving into the top 250, though "Manchester by the Sea" is just as great, IMO.
Something about how grief isn't something everyone can move past (or should) just struck such a chord with me. I get that "Margaret" is about the indifference towards people's pain too, but something about "Manchester" makes it more intimate and therefore more affecting - for me, at least.
I mean, yeah, Manchester By The Sea is an absolute hammer. About as heartbreaking as movies get, and so tough and true in its conclusion. 99.9% of movies would get sentimental about that character finding his way back home, but that's not what Lonergan does. I think what gives Margaret the edge is just the scope of the thing is so massive. It's denser, more complex, messier, and a real snapshot of post-9/11 NYC.
coincidentally, I just watched The Lady Eve last night for the first time. It's a good film! but.... it's not even my favorite Sturges. I honestly don't get the overwhelming love it gets. The first half is wonderful fun, but the fact that Charles never once catches on to her deceptions in the second half is just....not funny after the first half dozen times?
if you've got five seconds to point me to what makes it a contender for a top ten film, I'd love to know. by comparison we watched Palm Beach Story last week and found it a much superior film.
I'm shocked. Shocked! I love The Lady Eve so much. (And if Stephanie Zacharek, who was not invited to the poll for some reason, had gotten the chance, she'd have had it on her ballot for sure.) I just love the chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda so much-- they're two of my favorites-- and I think the film is so funny and kind of steamy in its way, too. But that's the Sturges dilemma, right? Lots of dividing the vote there.
I'll completely agree with Stanwyck and Fonda: great duo
So weird she wasn't invited. Nearly won a Pulitzer, pretty big profile.
My main feeling about the sight and sound list is that 100 is just too small a number for all the great films across the mediums history. Maybe 100 made sense in 1952, but by 2022 it’s a positively anemic amount. Also I think it unconsciously make people get a little conservative with their votes. You only get ten and you know like Broadcast News (a GREAT film) isn’t making it when it has to compete with seven samurai and The Godfather and all those serious European art house films. So you don’t wanna waste ya vote on something that probably isn’t happening. Of all the talk of upheaval and recency bias, the list is largely the same canonical films that’s been on this list for decades.
I’m for expansion when it comes to lists like this. A website i frequent, They Shoot Pictures Don’t They(TSPDT for short) did a top 1005 favorites with nearly 2000 of us voted for 25 films. With ten times the results and 2.5x the choices, it opened the results up to a vastly more varied and interesting collection of movies across history, genre, and style.
So yes all the Sight and Sound 100 usual suspects are there(many are there for good reason: they’re great films!), but there’s way more comedy, horror, action, American indie, animation, obscurities and those weird personal touches that you and maybe a dozen other cinephiles just absolutely love.
https://www.theyshootpictures.com/2021poll.htm
An incomplete list of great filmmakers who’s work is featured here but did not make the cut for Sight and Sound 2022: Melville, Altman, Carpenter, Morris, Leigh, Peckinpah, Fuller, Eastwood, Bigelow, Cukor, Cronenberg, Wenders, Yimou , Von Trier, Malle, Almodovar, Lumet, Malick, Allen, Mann(michael and anthony), Lubistch, Cuaron, Spielberg, Hawks, Bunuel, Tarantino, Anderson(Wes, Paul Thomas AND Paul W.S.), Coens, Woo, De Palma, Ang Lee, Polanski, Lean, Cassavettes, Cimino, Cameron, Linklater, Lucas, May, Nolan, Burton, Lanthimos, Friedkin, Naruse, Jarmusch, Kore-eda, To, Kazan, Hark, Ramsay, Wachowskis, Raimi, Preminger, Roeg, Sternberg, Malle, Hu, Bird, Zemeckis, Weir, Tourneur, McQueen, Miller, Carax, Boorman, Verhoeven, Assayas, Brooks, Kobayashi, Reichardt, Zhangke, Craven, Stone, Ashby, Fincher, Aldrich, Huston, Wright, Reiner, Romero, Bogdanovich, Kon, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sturges, Ray, Wyler, Nichols, Gerwig, Safdies, Costa-Gavras, Herzog, Jonze, Yimou, Glazer, Rohmer, Fosse, Schrader, Jackson, Demy, Clouzot, Kalatozov, Haneke, Park, McCarey, Argento, Takahata, Fleming, Gilliam, Demme, Forman...I mean I can keep going.
When you put all these films together, i think it gives a wider and more interesting idea about great cinema. When you scroll down the list and see Winter Light, Akira, Hard Boiled, Before Sunrise, and the Umbrellas of Cherbourg all sitting side by side, you see great films can come in all sorts of forms, genres, colors, or even in animation. It can open your mind more to the possibilities of the medium and make you wanna check some of these out. A similar expansion for Sight and Sound can only help, not hurt, conversation and broaden cinephile horizons.
As someone who prefers F FOR FAKE to CITIZEN KANE and NORTH BY NORTHWEST to VERTIGO I am used to being "this guy", but am I the only one who doesn't think JEANNE DIELMAN is even Akerman's best? I prefer LES RENDEZVOUS D'ANNA by a sizable margin, and would put NEWS FROM HOME, HOTEL MONTEREY and NO HOME MOVIE above it as well, albeit with only one viewing of all of those. (I think my rhetorical question is probably also answered by the fact that NEWS FROM HOME probably didn't place there from voters naming *two* Akerman films in their top ten.)
I like that you have the Top 5 on your list while still making room for less obvious films like “Modern Romance” and “Blow Out.” As much as I like looking through the consensus list, I think I enjoy seeing what’s on all the individual lists even more. Once in a while I’ll see something that’ll surprise and delight me, and with over 1600 participants this year, I’ll definitely be geeking out for a while.
Scott, how much can I pay you to change your Albert Brooks selection from Modern Romance to Defending Your Life? ;)
I adore both films, but I do think DYL is his masterwork.
I'll be watching two 3+ hour movies this month -- Avatar 2 and Jeanne Dielman! I have a feeling they're gonna be a little different. I've never heard of "slow cinema," but I have heard of, and have seen, "slow tv," the train video in Norway. I hope Jeanne Dielman will be slightly more exciting than that...I hope!
I've been sitting on my Netflix DVD of Jeanne Dielman for the last two months, approximately... just in time for the latest S&S poll! (just kidding, coincidence of course) But I've wanted to make sure there was time when I wasn't busy with work, family and classes to watch it with my wife, now that I'm done with class for the term.
Can't wait...
Great list, btw, Scott
When Scott got into “stodgy”-ness, I immediately thought of this take by Paul Schrader on the new list (linking an article discussing the take, not to FB where he wrote it) - https://nofilmschool.com/Paul-schrader-sight-and-sound. Perhaps lists shouldn’t be called “stodgy”, but takes about such lists can absolutely reek of it, among other things (*cringe).