TMS Discussion: What Qualifies a Movie to be Named 'The Best'?

(Mercury Productions / RKO Radio Pictures)

This past week the film fandom sector of social media brought some of the most polarizing, extreme, pretentious and eye-roll inducing discourse to hit this year. Sight and Sound, the respected, nearly century year old UK based cinema magazine, released their once-a-decade annual ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ list by critics and filmmakers invited to share their choices. In the poll’s first year of voting, 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) was no. 1. From 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) owned the top. In 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) surprised fans and readers by suddenly overtaking the highest spot. Now in 2022, the most voted is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975). That 2012 update was when this famous poll first got on my radar, and I remember thinking it was kind of hipster-y and cliché for critics to choose Vertigo as the best film ever made; as if Citizen Kane or Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) would be too obvious and not ‘artsy’ enough. But Jeanne Dielman winning now makes Vertigo look like David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) in comparison. When I initially clicked on and saw the 2022 updated results, I honestly laughed. Some film fans were aghast at a legend like Welles or Hitchcock not directing the top contender. Others were baffled since this win was completely out of left field, with many readers spending a decade predicting Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) would be the next classic to reach the top. Anyone else who got caught up in the hysteria online was mostly thinking, “What the hell is Jeanne Dielman?”

This is an over three-hour long, isolated character study of a single mother [played by Delphine Seyrig] who moonlights as a prostitute in Brussels, Belgium. We spend the whole film watching her clean her apartment, cook dinner in the kitchen and ‘entertain’ three clients in the bedroom. That’s it. I mean, there’s a point and plenty of social commentary through Akerman’s direction and Seyrig’s acting with the slowly paced ‘slice of life’ experience. Akerman set out to make extremely radically feminist pictures in her directing career and mainly succeeded. The reactions from people who have seen Jeanne Dielman usually range from “this is brilliant” to “this is very boring.” It is truly tedious to anyone who loves movies but is interested in something more along the lines of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) or James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Let me reiterate even further. If you saw Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019) within the past couple of years, and thought you wasted your time watching Julia Garner’s character spend a whole movie going through her daily routine at an NYC studio; then you’re definitely not going to enjoy or frankly appreciate Jeanne Dielman. I’m not sounding snooty. I actually don’t even consider myself much of an Akerman fan. My point is that Citizen Kane and Vertigo are plot driven and great examples of a film succeeding at artistic direction and quality storytelling. Thus either is a logical choice for ‘greatest film of all time,’ as they can be accessible to any viewer. The fact that out of all the well-made, visually stunning and influential films, from all regions of the world; this one-woman minimalism piece is what 1600 critics and historians chose as the number one film to exist is just so chaotic and subversive, I can’t help but find the public response entertaining.

(Paramount Pictures)

Like most things on the internet though, what starts as amusing gets old and stale incredibly fast. Male film fans over 40 [including a cringe worthy Facebook post from Oscar nominated filmmaker and S&S voter Paul Schrader] are suddenly dog whistling with terms like ‘woke’ and ‘PC’ to claim S&S’ update has some kind of agenda. Some are irrelevantly claiming Akerman doesn’t have the universal respect or appeal to be at the top along with Welles, Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. The one that’s annoying me the most are people acting like ‘women in film’ is a single screen genre. “If you voted for Jeanne Dielman, you only wanted to see a woman directed film win the poll.” Which is clearly not true, because Akerman is incredibly anti-mainstream and anti-commercial as an artist. If someone just wanted to win progressive points by plugging a female filmmaker as the director of the best movie made, then something more like Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) or Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972) would be voted in or higher in Campion’s case. “If you don’t agree with Jeanne Dielman winning Sight & Sound’s legendary poll, you just don’t support women in filmmaking.” Again, it’s not so much that Jeanne Dielman was made by a woman about a woman that’s baffling people, it’s that the film is just does not have the same entertainment value or popularity most people watch movies for.

Honestly, this whole controversy is actually just making me so, so glad I’m at the point of my life where I can comfortably admit I am a genuine fan of crowd-pleasers and don’t feel pressure to embrace film snobbery. I’ve seen plenty of arthouse films and even enjoy some of them, ranging all over from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). As a woman, I have no issue with Akerman or her efforts. But I would rather watch Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) or Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) or Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (1998) or Francine McDougall’s Sugar and Spice (2001), do you get where I’m going with this? Claiming a person doesn’t support women in film because they don’t like one arthouse feature that was well-received by critics, filmmakers and arthouse fans is dumb. There are women directing numerous types of films just like men. And honestly, Jeanne Dielman shooting to the top of Sight & Sound’s annual poll isn’t even the most shocking and perplexing part of this decade’s inclusions.

(Olympic Films)

Voters this time around took a huge dump on both old and new Hollywood, surprisingly enough. David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) are nowhere to be found in the top 100; godfather to American independent film, John Cassavetes, is completely absent; and Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman only received a sole slot with Persona (1966). Quite a few contemporary movies pleasantly made it in more than previously, like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019); but virtually nothing by critical darlings the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) missed by one single vote back in 2012. Now, Tree of Life is still MIA and Malick’s classics Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) aren’t even featured in the top 100 either. Why are there virtually no films from Latin America represented on this list? Not even Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964) and Kátia Lund & Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2002), both of which are usually the token Latino picks for ‘best of’ lists? At face value, it appears as if Sight & Sound voters are claiming France is the most important international film community, particularly pictures directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.

On the other hand, I find it super impressive anything directed by John Ford appearing on this list, but especially The Searchers (1956), which is still hanging on in the top 20 so many decades later, even with how much racial discourse has historically surrounded this specific western. No one in Gen Z wants to associate with John Wayne, yet no one can deny the influence the classic westerns he starred in either, apparently. Also love that fun, carefree musical-comedy classics of Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are still high on the list. But who cares what some supposedly prestigious group of people consider the best films of all time? Why am I going into so much about a poll the average person hasn’t even heard about? Didn’t I just write nine months ago why awards shows are useless? Am I jumping the gun since the full 250 films still hasn’t been published? So what, who cares?

Anyways, here’s my top 10 favorite films if anyone asks:

·       Annie Hall (1977), dir. Woody Allen

·       Beauty & the Beast (1991), dir. Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise

·       The Wizard of Oz (1939), dir. Victor Fleming

·       E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), dir. Steven Spielberg

·       GoodFellas (1990), dir. Martin Scorsese

·       The Women (1939), dir. George Cukor

·       Chicago (2002), dir. Rob Marshall

·       Sunset Blvd. (1950), dir. Billy Wilder

·       A Hard Day’s Night (1964), dir. Richard Lester

·       The Cat’s Meow (2001), dir. Peter Bogdanovich