The best film of all time is not, like the past sixty years, about a twistedman, but about a single mother who earns extra money as a prostitute. The filmcame in the ten-year poll among 1600 film connoisseurs Joan Dielman (1975)by the Belgian Chantal Akerman emerged as the winner, ahead of AlfredHitchcocks Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Ten years ago,Akerman’s film came in at number 35 out of nowhere.
The poll has been organized by the magazine every ten years since 1952 Sightand Sound from the British Film Institute. This year more than 1600 filmcritics worldwide took part, almost twice as many as in 2012. Directors have aseparate top 100: Stanley Kubricks won there 2001: A Space Odyssey andjerked Joan Dielman up to fourth place.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) is the first female winner; before her, VittorioDe Sica performed with The Bicycle Thieves (1952), Orson Welles with_Citizen Kane_ (1962-2002) and Alfred Hitchcock with Vertigo (2012) to thelist.
The full title of her minimalist, three and a half hour long feminist film is_Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles_. Akerman’s static,distant camera follows the joyless affairs of an apparently ‘respectable’single mother: cooking, eating with her dead son, shopping, entertaininggentlemen. Each act shows Akerman in full, without commentary or plot.However, there are increasingly hints of emotion on Jeanne’s stoic face andominous hairline cracks break up in her daily activities. Joan Dielman dealswith the mind-numbing hypocrisy of petty-bourgeois existence for women; herhouse is a prison. Telling a story through the environment and subtly shiftingroutines has made school as a film method, although it is and will remain_Joan Dielman_ too demanding to attract a large audience.
From and about woman
It is not surprising that a film by a woman about a woman wins. Sight andSound has significantly expanded its participant pool to reflect a world ofcinema that – especially from Hollywood – has changed dramatically in adecade. 2012, the year of the last poll, was also the year that the LosAngeles Times took a close look at membership in The Academy, the group ofmovie insiders who vote on the Oscars. That turned out to be a country club:94 percent white, 77 percent male, average 62 years old. Since then, multiplehashtags – #OscarSoWhite, #MeToo – have plowed through the film industry,opening much more space for female, non-white and queer perspectives andfilmmakers.
However, even this attempt to introduce more diversity into the list has itslimits. A movie has to gather a respectable layer of dust before we know ifit’s a bona fide classic. For that reason, the top ten remains a musicalchairs of ‘usual suspects’: ____the serene Tokyo Story (1953) by Ozu onfour, Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey at six and Dzigo Vertov’s avant-gardefilm The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) at nine.
Two fairly current films make it into the top ten: Wong Kar Wai’s broodingmeditation on love, longing and loss In The Mood For Love from 2000 rosefrom number 24 to number five, David Lynch’s Hollywood nightmare MulhollandDrive from 2001 from 28 to eight. The top ten is closed with the only musicalin the list: Singing in the Rain from 1953, about Hollywood and the adventof the sound film.
Twenty years of aging seems the least for the status of a classic; for thatreason, choosing Céline feels like Sciamma’s delicate lesbian romance_Portrait de la jeune fille en feu_ (30) and the Korean thriller Parasite(90), both from 2019, rather premature. The same goes for Barry Jenkins’moving portrait of a black gay Moonlight (60) from 2016 and black horrorcomedy Get Out (95) from 2017. These choices seem to be motivated in part bya defensible need for better representation of black and women. Spike Lee’sdebut, Do The Right Thing from 1989, at number 24, on the other hand, feelslike a belated recognition: a visionary film about latent ethnic tensions inNew York that erupt into a riot on a summer night.
Of the hundred titles, ten are directed by women. It is now in seventh place_Beau Travail_ (1999) by Claire Denis, visually as hard and sharp as thebodies of the Foreign Legionnaires in Djibouti that she portrays. There aretwo films by Chantal Akerman and two by the recently deceased French filmlegend Agnès Varda: Cleo the 5 a 7 (1962) and – surprisingly – Les glaneurset la glaneuse (2000), a self-shot documentary about people who live off theleftovers of our consumer society. There are also ‘rediscoveries’ such as_Daisies_ from 1966 by the Czech Vera Chytilová.
Big men
Yet great men need not fear. Hitchcock is well represented with four films;next Vertigo also Psycho (31), rearwindow (38) and North by Northwest(45). Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrej Tarkovsky havethree films in the list. A striking newcomer is the Japanese Hayao Miyazakiwith Spirited Away (75) and My Neighbor Totoro (72), also the onlyanimated films. Ingmar Bergman seems to be falling out of favor among theveterans. Last time the Swedish maestro was good for four films, now he onlymaintains Persona (18) themselves.
Mildly surprising is the absence of Paul Thomas Anderson; on There Will BeBlood , about a toxic oil tycoon, had been calculated a bit. His absenceprobably reflects a certain aversion to films about violent thugs: compared toten years ago, Lawrence of Arabia, boxer Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull_Werner Herzog _Aguirre, Wrath of God and Peckingpah’s The Wild Bunch pack