1 post tagged tokyo story

Move over, Citizen Kane, and take your sled with you. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo has been declared the greatest film ever by BFI’s Sight & Sound, which polled 846 film experts (writers, academics, programmers and the like). Here’s the new top 10:

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8½ (Fellini, 1963)

Filmmakers, however, had a different point of view (Sight & Sound polled 358 of them):

1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) and Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) (tie)
4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
7. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) and Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) (tie)
9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

How, exactly, did this polling work? The Hollywood Reporter breaks it down:

The critics poll, first conducted in 1952, marks the magazine’s seventh and its most ambitious to date.

The 10-yearly survey aims to rule out fluctuations in taste and asks participants to interpret “greatest” in any way they choose.

That could mean whether the film was most important to film history, represented the aesthetic pinnacle of achievement or perhaps had a personal impact on their own view of cinema.