Sight and Sound 2022 Poll Results

[AfterHours]

[AfterHours]

Apparently, S & S is about a month away from revealing all the individual lists of the critics and directors that voted.

Fortunately, some have been shared on twitter and elsewhere by some of the voters wanting to reveal for themselves which films they voted for. And someone with a lot of time on their hands tracked a bunch of those down and posted them in one place here:

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2022/1...jfs5r7oihc
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Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

[CA Dreamin]

I'm afraid I can only half-echo the sentiment for Black Girl. Agreed it's humble and sincere, and conveys a strong narrative. But it's channeled in such a blunt, melodramatic fashion that I didn't find very interesting to watch. It also didn't help how amateur it looked, and the overuse of the mask as colonial symbolism. Watching Black Girl felt more like a homework assignment, an intro to African cinema. Which is indeed important, for Black Girl is [from my research] the first major film from Africa. But importance doesn't equal greatness. I'd much rather re-watch Atlantics.

[MadhattanJack]

This story has now made the New York Times, and well, just about every other major daily and news site, really.

I swear on a stack of Go 2's that this comment did not come from me, though it's pretty much exactly what I would have written if I were a New York Times subscriber with a few minutes to spare.

Anyway, I guess I've made my peace with it at this point — I even bought some Brussels sprouts at the grocery store today, just so they can sit in the fridge for a few weeks before I realize I'm never going to eat them and finally throw them away.

[Applerill]

Darn, y'all have clearly never hung around a queer arts space, because Jeanne Dielman is universally beloved as you can get (with News From Home not far behind).

I do have to say, though, that this phenomenon DOES show a certain kind of hypocrisy for how conservatives look at art. Because on one hand, they'll claim that this happened because too many people were invited, "diluting" the contributions of hardcore cinephiles. In the same breath, though, they'll claim that the problem with Jeanne Dielman taking the top spot is one of accessibility, since such a difficult film shouldn't be so assumed to be seen by everyone.

Now, Jeanne Dielman is not an absolute favorite of mine (though I still love it, there are at least a half-dozen other Akerman films I far prefer, including her debut feature Je Tu Il Elle, which was a huge influence on We're All Going to the World's Fair); but the arguments against it feel so much like those from Objectivists who hated the way critics voted for Ulysses as the greatest novel of the 20th century.

Anyway, here is the ballot I composed for it this past summer. It's not particularly diverse, but I think it pretty well captures most of the biggest influences on my own filmmaking (there's no Akerman, but no Godard or Lynch or Von Trier either), and I can't imagine taking any of these out.
https://twitter.com/cookierill/status/1...6912806912

[MadhattanJack]

[EyeKanFly]

As someone who had never heard of Jeanne Dielman before this poll... 1) I'm a tad embarrassed because I do have family members who are huge film buffs and involved in film and I tend to get recommendations from them. 2) I'm super intrigued to watch it now. I suppose that might be like a music novice saying they've never heard of Marvin Gaye and were compelled to listen after the new Rolling Stone 500 dropped in 2020. But I'm glad that my horizons are being broadened by this type of thing. Even when I should be broadening on my own and broadening even more than this poll has done for me.

[cestuneblague]

Yeah I'm never quite sold on how these all come together, but it seems like there was definitely a different vibe around this one- which perhaps make sense in context. I donno if Jeanne Dielmann was definitively a "Make a Statement"-type of number one choice, though in general it fits with the Critics who often look more towards overall cultural impact while directors are often much more focused intently on the language of film (though not that the latter is absent completely). Beyond just the influence of it's screenplay and all-women behind-the-camera team and how important it was to a lot more often-underrepresented-at-the-time film fans, it did really kind of streamline and perfect the fluid, faux real-time structure that became much more common in the 90s and onwards, so again it does have a lot of impact on the filmmaking process and future ideas to go along with it's outside cultural impact. But did it really want to be #1? Not only how much that got "Citizen Kane" backlash for a long time but also Tokyo Story (which was #1 on one of the polls recently, am I wrong?), again I agree now it's going to be picked apart and, like those films, viewed often beyond just what it initially planned to do as a film by itself. And again Im sure there are going to be loads of fun conversations revolving around if you disagree with this at #1 you're some sort of bigot or putting it this at #1 is just tokenism and trying to appeal to modern "wokeness" (whatever the fuck that means anymore). Again is any major film viewed beyond that argument these days? Though again you can't really say this film or women-directed movies in general are ignored in mainstream critics circles anymore either. Still some lost gems underrepresented, maybe, but not all ignored.

One interesting question I do have is the inclusion of films that have are quite recent, which do feel more blatant as trying to hit on the modern zeitgeist. However, it really does seem like movies really need to weather the change of time to cement themselves as classics, as I can already remember a bunch of late 90s and 2000s-era films that were viewed as groundbreaking and instant classics that have been completely forgotten (or even last decade, I mean do we need to go over the hype for "Boyhood"? Did that make the list here?), so I feel like inclusions of films like Get Out and Parasite to be a bit pre-mature, though they could very well hold up a decade down the line. However I'm fine with the usual kind of waiting on the films that were released between the last poll and this one.

[AfterHours]

[Applerill]

Let me try to make the most utilitarian case for Jeanne Dielman I can: It takes a lot of the structuralism of Michael Snow and puts it in the frame of a chamber drama. A lot of people find that combination extremely engaging. On the Criterion Channel, for instance, you can find clips featuring artists ranging from Sofia Coppola to Karyn Kusama to Jhumpa Lahiri discussing how amazing VISCERAL it is. But I think that it's harder to understand that if you frame it JUST in terms of contemporary slow cinema and ignore how it was so influenced by the New American Cinema and other 60s experimental film artists.

ANYWAY, RE: Satantango, I think Tarr is actually trying to do something very different than Akerman. I know this sounds like a shitpost, but I genuinely think that, of all the major "slow cinema" auteurs, Tarr is the closest thing to Spielberg (though Angelopoulos might be a close second). Someone very close to me IRL once panned Satantango by saying it's "a bunch of guys trying to remake Tarkovsky Be Kind Rewind style", but I think that's missing the point. Tarr wants to bring out almost a sentimentality of cynicism towards you, and uses basically and extended version of the "Spielberg oner" to bring that upon you. As Rosenbaum put it, he and Kiarostami "use the tools of Hollywood to beat them at their own game".

(Also, Satantango has 12 chapter markers, and I think going through 2 a night is pretty manageable. I also recommend having a "Satantango party" where you invite friends over)