10 films among the best ever made
One of my reactions to Sight and Sound’s latest list of the best films ever made was how predictable it was, how obvious. I had seen all films on the top 100 list* except two and I think this is a bad thing. Bad in the sense that it suggests that despite there being hundreds of thousands of films, the known ones constitute a very small group. The films on the list deserve to be on it, they are good films, and such lists are useful, not least as a way for the newcomer to the world of film, and film history, to get a comprehensive overview of films to watch. But there are so many other great films that few people even know about. A favourite example is George Sherman, a filmmaker who is completely unknown (I discovered him by chance some years ago) yet he made a number of exceptional films that are more or less unviewed, such as The Last of the Fast Guns (1958). The awareness of Hasse Ekman has risen over the last couple of years but, internationally especially, Girl with Hyacinths (1950) is still the only one that has any kind of name-recognition. This is not surprising, since what is available to watch, and what is being written about, is restricted for reasons that have little to do with the quality and skills of the films and filmmakers. Rights issues is one such reason, the quality of the available prints another, as are the individual interests at any given moment of the curators and programmers at the world’s cinematheques and home distribution companies
The Sight and Sound list is yet another reminder of how the constantly repeated mantra “everything is available” is so detached from reality. If everything was available, this list would be very different. It is no surprise that Jeanne Dielman (1975) suddenly went from place 38 in 2012 to the top place in 2022, since it had in the intervening years finally become available to watch at home, and a new restoration had been screened at cinematheques and in cinemas. (I do not begrudge its top position but I personally prefer Akerman’s first film, Je tu il elle (1974) which I find more playful and less preordained.)
Things are even more lopsided within publishing, where a few filmmakers have more books written about them then the rest of the world’s filmmakers put together, but that is a topic for another post.
Another thing to say about the list is that it is short on the whimsical, the mischievous, the outrageous, the cheesy, or the vulgar. It is primarily a list of prestige cinema. This is not a criticism of the individual films either, as, again, they are all good films. It is a complaint against the cumulative effect of the list. I first wanted to complain about those who voted too, but that is unfair. All of them might have some weird or goofy films, or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), on their individual lists, but neither of these films would get enough votes to make it to the final list.
Here are ten films that I might have put on my top ten list, if I had been asked to contribute. (I could just as well have picked ten other films.) Some of these are by well-known directors, others are not. The order is chronological:
That Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman 1933)
Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon 1941)
Wandering with the Moon (Hasse Ekman 1945)
Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch 1948)
Lightning (Mikio Naruse 1952)
Men in War (Anthony Mann 1957)
The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish 1959)
A Sunday in the Country (Bertrand Tavernier 1984)
High Tide (Gillian Armstrong 1987)
After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda 1998)
*Orginally I wrote I had seen all but two films on the full list, but since then Sight and Sound have released an even longer list, and there were a few more there which I have not seen.