One of my earliest film-related memories is sitting on the floor of our family room watching the American Film Institute’s top 100 films list program. When I was kid, they would do one of these around every year for the better part of a decade (1998-2008). Sometimes they highlighted quotes or great characters, but book-ending this run were lists of the greatest American films ever. I would sit there transfixed knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to see many of them until I was much older, if ever. And I would feel a sense of personal pride when something I had seen, like Singin’ in the Rain (Donen, 1952), ranked high on the list.
This started what has been a life-long love of movies, but it also started a life-long love of film canonization. I love lists. Every year I release my own top 100 best movies (send me a message on my Instagram, @dgillespie42, if you wish to get this email when the 2022 version comes out shortly), updating it to reflect what I really loved that past year and movies that I think more people need to know about (like The Cremator (Herz, 1969)). I update my personal list every year because the things I value about film change often. Institutions like the British Film Institute update their Sight and Sound list every decade. The 2022 installment was released on December 1st to much fanfare. I’ll go to my thoughts on the 2022 list eventually (if you wish to skip ahead you may, of course, scroll down the page), but I wanted to use this occasion to explore the Sight and Sound list more thoroughly throughout history.
The BFI started doing this in 1952 which, in terms of film canonization efforts, makes it probably the oldest. This is before the French New Wave pioneered much of film criticism (like auteur theory I wrote about previously) before most Americans had seen anything not made in the US or England, and long before home media made accessing films incredibly easy. In short, a film canonization effort today should look very different from one 70 years ago, but it’s still more than worthwhile to look at what Sight and Sound have thought over the years to inform our understanding of modern times.
So that’s what I did. I found the 7 lists (I’ll link them below), I put all the data in an Excel spreadsheet and tracked how often movies appear, new entries each year, etc. I take both movies and lists very seriously. I’m now going to summarize such findings, year by year, along with my thoughts. It should be noted that in instances of ties, I just wrote them down in the order they appeared on the page. So if there was a tie of two films at #6, I put one at #6 and one at #7. This makes very little difference to the data analysis. The official lists indicate ties if you really want to know exactly. I also included any and all honorable mentions since many years focused just on a top 10.
What I especially like about these lists is that they are not American. American films do make appearances but not more often than many other countries.
This makes for quite a different list than the kind of internalized film canon that lives in my head.
Staples of the upper tier of the American film canon, like The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) or On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954), never appear on the Sight and Sound lists, and others, like Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), don’t appear until 2012. Of course, the Sight and Sound lists have many other shortcomings as will be addressed here.
One final note, all of my data comes from the critics poll and not the directors poll. My piece on auteur theory should make the reason for this quite obvious. But when discussing canonization, I believe in the role of critics even more strongly. The director’s job is to make the movies and, ideally, advocate for the art form. It is the role of the viewer and critic to analyze the works and make aesthetic and artistic judgments. Canonization firmly falls in this realm.
1952
De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) tops the list this year followed by two Chaplin features, City Lights (1931) and The Gold Rush (1925). It’s clear that this is the first list as a lot changed by 1962. 9 of the 23 films mentioned this year have yet to reappear on a Sight and Sound list, including David Lean’s excellent Brief Encounter (1945), which I highly recommend. Otherwise, this is a year of figuring things out without a lot of interesting or unusual picks.
1962
14 of the 23 movies from the 1952 list return, with Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) jumping from 13th to take the top spot (which it will hold for a while). Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) debuts at number 2 presumably because some of his other movies don’t exist yet. What’s notable about this is that L’Avventura came out in 1960, which is quite close to when the list happened in 1962. I find this willingness to include recent material admirable and essential for canonization efforts. The list had 33 entries this year with some other notable newcomers being Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952), Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957), and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). There are seven movies that make their only appearance this year including one of my favorites, Last Year at Marienbad (Renais, 1961).
1972
This is a pretty boring year, to be honest. The list shrinks to 23 entries, and there are only 3 new inclusions in the top 15—8 ½ (Fellini, 1963), The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, 1942), and Persona (Bergman, 1966). The most historically significant addition is 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), which barely made the list this year but would become a staple of it going forward. Only two of the 23 movies this time around were single-appearance films, Mouchette (Bresson, 1967) and Viridana (Buñuel, 1961).
1982
1982 provided a list just as stale as 1972. Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939) held served as #1 and #2, while just two new movies disrupted the top 12—Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954) and Singin’ in the Rain. Interestingly, though Seven Samurai is top 5 this year, it won’t appear on the list again until the much-expanded version of 2012. Also somewhat interesting is the inclusion of Andrei Rublev (1966), which is the first Tarkovsky entry and is not, to my surprise, Mirror (1975) or Stalker (1979). Also somewhat interesting is the lack of The Godfather (F. Coppola, 1972), which had been out a decade at this point. Truffaut’s delightful Jules and Jim (1962) is the lone film from this year to never reappear, though several were absent for 30 years after this one.
1992
1992 provided anything but a historic day for the film as the Sight and Sound list limited itself to only 10 films, all of which have previously appeared. In fact, in this, the 5th edition of the list, 4 of the 10 films made their 4th or 5th appearance. The only note this year is that Tokyo Story, L’Atalante (Vigo, 1934), and Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955) returned to the list after a 30-year absence, previously appearing in 1962.
2002
2002, even more than 1992, is a case study for film canonization gone wrong. The 90s were a watershed time for film creativity with radical developments in technology, distribution, and the kinds of stories being told. There were whole movements of new queer cinema, emerging film cultures in places like South Korea or Poland, and, through home video, more access to older films than ever before. Women, like Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, 1999), Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, 1999), and Claire Denis (Beau Travail, 1999) were breaking new ground in directing and shaking up the industry, in the US and abroad.
I personally don’t like all these movies, but here is a list of some 90s and 2000s movies that could reasonably be considered for this list in 2002: The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), Three Colors: Blue (Kieslowski, 1993), The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993), Beau Travail, A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991), Yi Yi (Yang, 2000), La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995), Chungking Express (Wong, 1994), In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000). What does the 2002 list have instead? 9 movies that made the list previously with the lone new inclusion being The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (F. Coppola, 1974), which they grouped together.
I’m disgusted by this list. I think it’s laughable to count the Godfather films as one (and I personally think the first one is a much better movie, but that’s beside the point).
I think it’s shameful to have two of the top 3 movies be the exact same for 40 years and 5 lists.
5 of the films on this list have now appeared 4 or more times, which is fine, except for the fact that the hard cut of 10 films makes it impossible for a shake-up. This is a prime example of canonization gone wrong, with everything getting overly stale and predictable. To do so after one of the most vibrant and exciting decades of film history adds further insult.
2012
Following 2002, the system needed a shake-up, and it kind of got it. The list is now 101 films, though the top 12 remain fairly stable. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) unseats Citizen Kane after a 50-year run in the top spot (I think Citizen Kane is an excellent movie, and better than Vertigo, but I find this length of a run at the top ridiculous). Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) is the only new movie in the top 10 (ironic to call it new as it’s very, very old).
But the expanded list allows an opportunity to, at least mention, a lot of films that, frankly, ought to have made a list by now. These include Breathless (Godard, 1960), Late Spring (Ozu, 1949) Mirror, In the Mood for Love, Stalker, Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) (I think the first true documentary to receive mention), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975), La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960) (it boggles my mind that this wasn’t on a list until 2012), Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975), Nashville (Altman, 1976), Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1963), Casablanca, The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974). And a lot of other notable films that I either haven’t seen yet or don’t personally enjoy. It’s a definite step in the right direction, setting the stage for the 2022 list, the release of which was a historic day for cinema.
2022
Everything in the top 13 had previously made the list, but there was a lot of change. Most notable, historic, game-changing, and revolutionary was that Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman jumped from 37th all the way to first. It almost goes without saying that this is the greatest accolade a woman-directed film has ever received in terms of a major list like this. By a LOT. I’d be willing to guess that no woman-directed film had previously even cracked the top 10 or top 20 on a list like this.
It’s not the only big mover. In the Mood for Love finally makes a push for the top, landing at number 5 after being #25 in 2012. Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001) (which I don’t particularly like, full disclosure) jumped up to #8 after being #28 last time, a good sign of the list welcoming change even if I don’t particularly care about that specific movie. The other big mover is Claire Denis’s Beau Travail jumping up to number 7 after previously being ranked #79. Such movement knocked The Rules of the Game out of the top 5 for the first time since 1962 (I’ll admit that I don’t see the appeal of this movie at all), and it knocked The Searchers (Ford, 1956) down to #15. For my money, there are far better satires out there than The Rules of the Game, and The Searchers is almost unfathomably racist, so I’m thrilled to see these movies lose some of their previously unshakeable status in the film Canon.
But the story of this list is women. As noted women-directed films made the top ten at #1 and #7. But that’s not all. Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) makes its incredibly long overdue debut on the list at #14. Maya Deren’s experimental short film masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) comes in at #16. Vera Chytilová’s Czech New Wave staple Dasies (1966) lands at #28. “Instant classic” Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019) debuts at #30, a positive sign that the Sight and Sound people are back to considering recent films. Wanda (Loder, 1970) lands at #48, The Piano at #50. Akerman gets another entry with News from Home (1976) at #52. Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991) comes in at #60, and Varda gets another spot with The Gleaners and I (2000) at #67.
That’s 11 women-directed films, all landing in the top 70, 7 of them in the top 30. Women-directed films account for 23%, or nearly a fourth, of the top 30. Only 8 women have ever been nominated for the Oscar for Best Director. Three have won it, two of them coming within the last 2 years.
Since the mid-2010s, there’s been a real effort to finally give women directors their due. This fight has happened on two fronts, both with up-and-coming directors making great movies—like Portrait of a Lady on Fire or Lady Bird (Gerwig, 2017, not on the list)—and with long overdue canonization of forgotten masterpieces, like Jeanne Dielman, Daisies, or Cleo from 5 to 7. The 2022 Sight and Sound list feel like the culmination of this serious recent effort and decades-long project.
I got emotional when I first saw the list. It represents a group—a large group—willing to change and expand their definition of what is “best.” It’s a historic day.
It represents everything wonderful about film canonization and categorization.
Years from now, filmmakers will do interviews and point to this moment, either as a list that inspired them to make movies or as the moment they heard of Jeanne Dielman (etc.) and then were inspired by it.
The backlash has come and will keep coming. But people like Paul Schrader can be as mad about it as they want to be. This is a major film canon that considers a film directed by a woman to be the best of all time. And nothing will ever take that away.
