Some Came Running

Image of the day 9/1/12

Ugestu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

There has been an awful lot of...stuff written pertaining to the "Greatest Films Poll" sponsored by the British Film Institute and Sight & Sound magazine (which I was fortunate enough to have been invited to vote in); I am not inclined to contribute to any of the polemecizing per se but would like to note that the top picks in both the final poll result itself and the individual ballots is giving me an incentive to revisit some pictures I haven't seen in some time or perhaps maybe not at all. Mizoguchi's haunting ghost story, which I myself threw under the bus in favor of Sansho Dayu, and then threw Sansho Dayu under the bus and PUT NO JAPANESE FILMS AT ALL ON MY BALLOT (like many have said, in more polite ways, doing these ballots is completely fucking impossible), is now available, like Sansho, in a wonderful high-def edition from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema if you are fortunate enough to own an all-region Blu-ray player. On my coffee table right now: Arrow Cinema's U.K. Blu-ray of Wajda's Ashes And Diamonds (Martin Scorsese's ballot; also Francis Ford Coppola's ballot; it would be lovely to think they maybe hashed it out in a phone conversation but probably not, and in a sense it's sweeter to think of this affinity as having long gone un-reiterated); Tartan DVD's U.K. standard-def edition of Ingmar Bergman's 1949 Prison (Abel Ferrara's ballot; a reading of the synopsis for the film suggests an inspiration for Ferrara's own very underrated Snake Eyes/Dangerous Game); and Kino Video's Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema Of The 1920s And '30s, which features Joris Ivens' 1929 Regen, which is on Apichatpong Weerasethukal's ballot. 

My "Sight & Sound 50 Greatest Films Of All Time" Ballot

I was quite honored, this spring, to receive an invitation to participate in the British Film Institute/Sight & Sound "Greatest Films Of All Time" poll. Now that the results of that poll are being unveiled online, I figure it would not be improper for me to put up my own ballot, along with the note I attached to it. 

1) Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
3) Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)
4) Céline et Julie vent en bateau (Rivette, 1974)
5) Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
6) Belle de jour (Buñuel, 1967)
7) Boudu sauvé des eaux (Renoir, 1932)
8) Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, 1922)
9) Singin' in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 1952)
10)The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

Thanks so much for the invitation to participate in the poll. It's true; the task is not an easy one at all. I arrived at this particular list, one out of perhaps dozens of other entirely different ones, by splitting he difference between honoring convention and saying to hell with it. As it happens, the four films on the list which might conceivably be seen as "consensus" picks—Kane, Psycho, Singin' in the Rain, Searchers—are also ones close to "my heart" or at least the formation of my sensibility. The other six films came to me after a lot of debate with myself over whether I was being different for the sake of being different, or whether these were not in fact truly GREAT films that, when the time came for surveys along the lines of this one, did not get the proper recognition for being the imaginatively prodigious, paradigm-shifting, galvanic works that I believe they in fact are. OF COURSE I regret that my list cannot be longer, because surely Sansho Dayu, The General (not to mention Sherlock Jr.), The Last Temptation of Christ, and a lot more ought to have a place, and the more I think about the films and filmmakers I am leaving off (Yang! Naruse!...and, yep, Godard; what am I thinking?) the more I can twist a long knife inside both my guts and brain. And for all that this is a list that in its way satisfies me. If anybody asks me "What IS cinema," yeah, I can show them any one of these pictures and say "This is."