This seems a good point to get my film blog underway, don't you think? Welcome to the Hurt List... read on if you want to know more.
As well as being a cinephile, I am a big fan of lists. I think lists are a good way of presenting information for easy digestion. It is a default setting if nothing else, even if you don’t apply any values or an order of preference. People who disagree with polls in principle argue that they are reductive. Yes, true, but the discussion they arouse needn’t be. Disagree with a list all you like. The debate can be enjoyable as well as informative.
Sight & Sound as a magazine is in a rarefied position as a hybrid of a trade, fan and academic publication. It appeals to people who want to look at films intelligently, people who regard film as an art-form as well as entertainment, and who are also able to see film as historically, socially and culturally significant. In other words, it is a bit poncy. Which is probably why I’m a subscriber.
So, let the debate begin. While I am in wholehearted agreement of the number one spot. (If pushed, I would probably place Vertigo at the top of my own list.) I have some knee-jerk observations which I am going to share. This is where it gets personal.
The Top Ten looks like this
- Vertigo (1958)
- Citizen Kane (1941)
- Tokyo Story (1953)
- La Regle du Jeu (1939)
- Sunrise: A Story Of Two Humans (1927)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- The Searchers (1956)
- Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
- The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1927)
- 8 ½ (1963)
The most recent in the top ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, making Kubrick still one of the most overrated directors of all time, in my opinion. The most recent film in the full list is Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, from 2000, from whom Kubrick could have learnt something about the pleasures of pacing. There is, I think, a semi-justifiable snobbery around commercial cinema and its frantic pacing. Serious critics favour films that savour the stories they tell. In general, we have grown too accustomed to rapid-editing and bite size delivery: And yes, polls do fall into the latter category.
Only two female directors feature in the list. OK, I get this, sort of. There aren’t enough female film directors throughout the history of cinema to make a massive splash if it is just a numbers game. I am no statistician, but from a cursory glance I’d say that two in 100 is about right for the ratio of female directors to male directors working today, never mind stretched over the history of cinema.
Most film experts will agree that women are still under-represented within film production, either artistic or commercial, but there are now fewer reasons why this should be the case and numbers of women working in technical roles, and as the ‘auteurs’ favoured by S&S, should grow.
There is an outside chance that in another ten years, when S&S compile another list, we will see the work of Lynne Ramsay or Andrea Arnold (of the really obvious ones; if not my personal favourite Catherine Breillat) included. But then, they still have to be good films, don’t they? Indeed, not just good, but the ‘greatest of all time’.
I am not a champion of reverse or positive discrimination. I did not agree with the noise made when no women were nominated at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I do not believe that women should be represented, tokenistically or otherwise, by virtue of sex alone. I believe in merit. Credit where it’s due.
Which brings me to the two films in the list that were directed by women (which, incidentally, the S&S press release chose to flag up). The highest placed is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles at number 35, with Claire Denis’s Beau Travail at number 78.
Hands up, I haven’t seen Akerman’s film and I must confess to a dearth of knowledge around her work that I must rectify. And while I am no big fan of Denis I recognize Beau Travail as the better of her films.
I could argue in favour of a film directed by a woman to replace several in the Top 100. But I won’t. Because I don’t disagree with the Sight & Sound list per se. My list would be very different, but it wouldn’t be tempered by the opinions of 845 other cinephiles. It would be my list and selfishly personal - like this blog.
The S&S list has delivered on its promise. It has consulted with a substantial number of film experts, from all sides (they are critics, directors, academics, historians etc). By contrast, the last poll consulted only 144 experts. The 2012 poll covers not just 110 plus years of film production, but films from all major film-producing countries. It is actually a mindboggling exercise to truly represent the diversity of cinema.
I doff my hat to the S&S effort. It has given me plenty of food for thought, and some homework. My first project is to stop my knee from jumping and watch Chantal Akerman’s film. The film's Wikipedia entry (sorry to lower the tone) cites the New York Times description of it as the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema”. It is a film about a woman whose daily duties include prostitution, alongside doing the dinner and dishes.
I hope to find that we have come a long way from having to address the ‘feminine’ in these terms. Jeanne Dielman... was released in 1975 (around my first birthday). I am hoping to observe that progress has been made in the intervening years.
So, remind me, how many films directed by women feature in the list, from post 1975? Oh yes, just the one.
Is that progress...?
What are The Hurt Lists?
A blog on films I watch with my fetish/BDSM goggles on (they're a bit like the ones Anne Hathaway wears in The Dark Knight Rises). I won't limit myself to films described as kinky, or ones that have BDSM themes (I'd run out of material very quickly), but I am a dominant woman and there will be bias. My observations will be fabulously skewed by my FemDomme world view.
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