Sight & Sound released their list of the 100 greatest films of all time list yesterday. For context, Sight & Sound polls critics and directors every 10 years to compile a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Citizen Kane is always near the top of the list, as is Vertigo, Tokyo Story, etc. The data is always really interesting to look at, and as someone who loves film and also loves data, I had a bit of a field day yesterday.
I found out about the Sight & Sound list through discussing film history at my lab (shoutout to the Penn Price Lab <3), and I did some data analysis work on the Sight & Sound 2012 list earlier this year, so I was pretty excited for the 2022 list, both from a film lover perspective and from a data analysis perspective. I’m focusing mostly on the critics’ poll here, since I think people take that one a little more seriously, but there are some interesting trends in the directors’ poll as well. Here are some of the trends I identified:
(Anti-)recency bias
There seems to be a real shift toward recent films in the 2022 list, which I find slightly troubling. 24 films from the 2012 list were cut going into the 2022 list; these titles are: The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, Touch of Evil, The Mother and the Whore, Wild Strawberries, Pickpocket, Rio Bravo, L’eclisse, Children of Paradise, La Grande Illusion, Nashville, Chinatown, The Magnificent Ambersons, Lawrence of Arabia, Fanny and Alexander, The Color of Pomegranates, Greed, The Wild Bunch, Partie de campagne, Aguirre, Wrath of God, The Seventh Seal, Un chien andalou, Intolerance, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
24% turnover is not insignificant, especially for a list that should (at least in my opinion) stay relatively stable. It makes sense to reevaluate what films we consider truly “great,” and I think the 10-year gap that Sight & Sound takes between polls is important specifically because it prevents constant iteration. A list in which entries are swapped out so easily feels rather ephemeral, which seems counterproductive to the aim of the Sight & Sound list.
I think it’s also notable that a lot of the films that were cut are, for lack of a better word, old—the average release year of those films is 1956, which is surprising given Sight & Sound’s history. Sight & Sound has historically had what I’ll call an anti-recency bias; on the 2012 list, there were only three films from the 21st century: In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, and Yi Yi. The latest release year for any film on the 2012 list was 2001. I wasn’t able to find a reputable 2002 list (the one I found on Mubi was user-generated and also included 130 films, which seemed inaccurate), but that one contained only one 21st century film, which was Yi Yi.
By contrast, there are 10 21st century films on the 2022 list: Get Out, Tropical Malady, Yi Yi, Parasite, Spirited Away, The Gleaners and I, Moonlight, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Mulholland Drive, and In the Mood for Love. The latest release year for any film on the 2022 list is 2019. While Parasite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (both 2019 releases) are critically acclaimed films, putting them on a list of the greatest films of all time a mere three years after release does not feel like a particularly strategic move. Perhaps this is because I dislike Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but I find it hard to believe that it’ll be in the top 100 films of all time by the time 2032 comes around, and I think constantly changing the films on the top 100 list is probably a mark of failure.
In my opinion, the purpose of the Sight & Sound list is not to capture what the state of cinema and film criticism looks like in 2022, but rather to iterate on the living project of capturing the greatest films of all time, to be as canonical as possible. If that is the intention of Sight & Sound, I would say that they have potentially failed this year. Of course films will enter and leave the list as more films are created and evaluated—that’s the purpose of iteration!—but the 2022 list seems like a significant shift from the 2012 one, and only time will tell, but I personally do not see that shift as a positive one.
Ranking
In 2012, Vertigo took the top spot, which was a bit of an upset; Citizen Kane had been #1 for the last five polls, i.e., the last 50 years. This year, Vertigo has been unseated by Jeanne Dielman (I’m not typing out the full title, since it’s too long), which it seems like some people are upset about. I personally don’t think Vertigo is that great, so this isn’t particularly upsetting to me, but I also haven’t watched Jeanne Dielman (or Citizen Kane, for that matter), so I have no real input here, other than to say that I think Vertigo is pretty massively overrated. It’s not bad! Just so overrated.
Sight & Sound tends to award “arthouse” cinema, and not just acclaimed film, although this definition is a little slippery. There are four Hitchcock films on the list, three Kubrick films, three Tarkovsky, two Kurosawa, two Wong Kar Wai, two Dreyer, two Varda, two Coppola (Francis Ford, not Sofia), two David Lynch. There are also notably zero Malick films, which made some people in the Letterboxd comments section of the Letterboxd list for Sight & Sound 2022 quite mad. It’s not entirely clear to me what constitutes a Sight & Sound-worthy director—why is no one outraged over zero Coen brothers or Wes Anderson or Tarantino, or if we’re moving in a slightly less mainstream direction, zero Haneke, zero Lumet, zero Cronenberg?
Part of this has to do with how Sight & Sound gets its votes. From what I can tell, they mass-poll “critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics”—according to the site, there are 1,639 of them counted in this year’s Sight & Sound—to submit their top 10 films. They then aggregate these lists, and the top 100 films with the most votes become the Sight & Sound list.
From a purely mathematical perspective, there are a few things wrong with this approach. First, while I am not advocating for the gatekeeping of cinema, 1,639 is an incredibly large number of opinions to be considering. While I haven’t been able to find the data on how many critics were polled for 2012 or 2002, I have to imagine that historically, the number has been much smaller. Diversity of thought is good, and diversity of opinion is good, but I also think it’s entirely possible that the pool has become a little watered down. Why 1,639 opinions? Why not 1,000? Are the 639 individuals who were cut contributing particularly important and radical votes to the Sight & Sound pool? Also, to call it a critics’ poll and then include those whose opinions are often the opposite those of critics (programmers, curators, archivists, and academics) is a little ironic, and perhaps not entirely true to the intention of an actual critics’ poll. Film criticism is an important and dying art. Not everyone can be an expert, and not everyone should be. Additionally, knowing how to read a film well does not make you a critic. This is also part of a larger project for the Price Lab, but the age of household name film critics seems to be largely over, which is a shame.
Second, the issue with compiling a top 10 list is that every individual will try to make their top 10 balanced. The Letterboxd comments section people got a little sexist with this argument (“Chantal Akerman is the only good female director people could think of, and that’s why Jeanne Dielman won first!”), but I do think there’s some truth to the idea that there is social pressure to make your top 10 list balanced, i.e., not all white men. I think diversity in film is a great thing, but when everyone uses the same few films as their “diversity picks,” you end up with those films inflated in the rankings. This is not an issue with the films themselves but rather an issue with the idea of representation for the sake of representation, e.g., the logic of “I need a woman film, a race film, a queer film, etc.” as though one is ticking off boxes. Another part of the problem is the echo chamber of film criticism, where one or two films are considered eminent “woman films,” “race films,” “queer films,” etc. The state of film criticism in 2022 is such that we are now exposed to more opinions than ever before, but there’s also an incredible degree of social conformity. This is also part of a larger issue with the rise of anti-intellectualism (which I have also been thinking about Substacking about…potentially coming soon), but disliking movies is less socially possible than before.
Third, this system weights a critic’s #1 film and #10 film equally. This seems illogical to me, since although you should probably like both your #1 film and your #10 film in your list of the top 10 greatest films of all time, it would make sense if your opinion of them differed in a significant manner. This could be solved through ranked-choice voting, but given that BFI’s site crashed four times before I was able to access this year’s Sight & Sound results, I’m not entirely sure that this is technologically possible for them.
At the end of the day, though, I think it’s a good thing that Sight & Sound exists. It’s good and important that this practice has been kept up for the past 70 years, and I’m glad that critics are still willing to participate in compiling these lists. I’m glad there’s still conversation about films that are great and what makes them great, and I’m glad that Sight & Sound 2022 was published so that I could think about it and write about it.
P.S.: I started this Substack in senior year of high school, where I planned to write about how a lot of Twitter pundits at the time (Matt Yglesias, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan) were all leaving their mainstream news outlets and switching to Substack. I never ended up writing this and it’s also a lot less culturally relevant now. Even if I’m not writing about political pundits, however, I think having a Substack is something I want to do. I plan on potentially writing more about film here, along with whatever else interests me, on a very sporadic basis. Thank you for reading this far!
Correction: I previously had written that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was cut from the 2012 list going into the 2022 list; Jonathan Schneiderman, a high school classmate who also wrote about Sight & Sound 2022 on his Substack, noted that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is actually on the 2022 list. I’ve updated the statistics in this piece accordingly.
may! i love this post! kind of mind boggling that the critics’ poll includes people who are not critics. i also think it would be great if household-name film critics were a thing again…
this is so interesting and it's so cool to investigate it from a data-driven perspective!! ur mind!!