Roger Ebert has described the British Film Institute’s decennial Sight & Sound poll as “by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies–the only one most serious movie people take seriously.” If that is true, then the initiated now have no ‘great movies’ poll to take all that seriously; Sight & Sound, some two and a half years ago, lost much of its legitimacy. Granted, this is not a terribly unfortunate event: a man-made creation must not be placed on a pedestal. Nevertheless, the news does not fill one with joy.
And no, this post is not a rant about how greater of a film I believe Citizen Kane is than Vertigo. This post will not just deride critics and directors for placing something besides Citizen Kane on the golden throne. My arguments have nothing to do with anger over where any given film is.
Rather, I believe the Sight & Sound poll has lost much of its credibility because of the flaws in its voting process. For the poll, the British Film Institute asks respected critics and directors worldwide to vote for 10 works of cinema. There is a slight misconception that only feature-length movies are eligible; counted, however, was one director’s vote for the 1897 short film Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (the first surviving film in history to depict the motion of the camera that was filming, putting aside the fact that the camera was simply on a moving object).
First of all, I strongly appreciate the BFI’s insistence on posting every single voter’s votes online. It is essential in any form of criticism for the minority not to be marginalized. This measure is also, however, a major reason the poll’s legitimacy will not hold up. The fact that every vote can be accessed makes more critics and directors confident in the concept of a “propaganda choice,” as Ebert called it. See, many renowned film critics understand that film aficionados already know which films are canonical. It won’t serve much purpose to vote for 10 movies many consider among the 10 greatest. What they often want more is to attract attention to the great underrated movies. As a result, a critic spends one of the 10 votes on a little-known film. S/he does not believe it is one of cinema’s 10 finest achievements, but s/he nonetheless wants to recommend it to others and put a surprise in the list.
This small trend of “propaganda choices” seems harmless to the overall outcome at first. Think logically, however, about if you are a renowned film critic and you want to draw attention to an underrated movie using a ‘greatest films’ poll. If you can only vote for 10 works, which of the 10 will you take out in order to make room? Won’t you remove the most respected one, assuming it will stay at #1 and nothing will change because enough other people will vote for it?
This is why the Sight & Sound rankings are losing their legitimacy. Multiple votes for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2008) were counted – and yes, that film is beyond excellent, but did any of those critics really consider it one of the 10 greatest ever made? Come on. What about the 30+ votes for Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), which placed it #24 in the final poll, ahead of masterpieces like Satan’s Tango and almost as high as Bergman’s Persona? That can’t possibly be the true opinion among our most respected critics. If so, I am worried about the next generation of film criticism.
What will happen when the 2022 poll comes around? How do we know critics and directors who won’t vote for Citizen Kane actually think Welles’ debut isn’t one of the 10 best movies ever? How do we know they will not have removed it simply to have used the empty space as an opportunity to vote for a later Welles effort (because there are certainly under-appreciated ones) or a little-known foreign picture? Maybe a significant portion of the critics who didn’t vote for it in the 2012 poll were confident enough it would stay #1. The thing is, it didn’t.
If we say the Sight & Sound poll deserves to be taken more seriously than any other, we are saying a poll in which many voters possibly misrepresent their opinions on their 10 favorite [whatever]s is a poll which deserves to be taken more seriously than any other.
Another important thing is that the poll is organized by approval voting. This means that if you are to submit 10 ranked films to the BFI, the BFI does not take into account your rankings of the 10 films you submitted. There is no point system for the poll; they will not give 10 points to your #1 film, nine points to your #2 film, eight points to your #3 film, etc. The poll’s final rankings are only assembled by how many votes the films got. The BFI doesn’t reveal how many critics ranked Vertigo #1; that placement simply shows how many times it was voted for. If a critic/director includes in their 10 choices for the BFI both his/her choice for the best movie ever and an underrated work, the propaganda choice will get just as much weight as what that critic/director thinks is the greatest film ever made.
Let’s say that my 10 favorite films, as of now, are as follows:
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
- Человек с киноаппаратом/Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) [When with the Michael Nyman score.]
- La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
- Андрей Рублёв/Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
- Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
- 七人の侍/Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- Otto e mezzo/8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Let’s say, just hypothetically, I vote in the next Sight & Sound poll. I think the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is underrated, and that it deserves to be a part of the film canon by then. Since I want Kane back at #1 on the poll, I will vote for it, but since The Passion of Joan of Arc is already near where I want it to be on the poll, and because I may put it a little lower upon another viewing, I’ll remove it. What’s the end result? My 10 films voted for, with my rankings disregarded, will simply be:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- 8½
- Andrei Rublev
- Citizen Kane
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- The Godfather
- Man with a Movie Camera
- The Rules of the Game
- Seven Samurai
- Touch of Evil
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will have the same weight as Citizen Kane (something I would not want). This is most likely what happened to many film critics in the 2012 poll, and it could happen to many more in the 2022 poll.
When we discuss the Sight & Sound poll, we are discussing not only a poll in which voters’ rankings for submitted films are not counted, but also one in which many choose what they believe are underrated movies over their legitimate top 10. This system no longer deserves to be treated as that of the highest authority on cinema.
arts/politics post 