Sight and Sound magazine has again issued two lists of the allegedly greatest films ever made—one lineup based on a poll of critics, the other on a poll of directors. At a time when movie listicles are as common as sweeping trend pieces extrapolated from two tweets and a vibe, this might not seem like anything special. But the Sight and Sound surveys have maintained a special distinction among cineastes, mostly by virtue of appearing only once every 10 years. Besides giving them an aura of rarity and value, this lets you chart the course of highbrow (or at least upper-middlebrow) opinion over the decades, watching one motion picture's stock rise as another one falls.
Ten years ago, the big news was that Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane was no longer in first place. In the great continental drift that is film-buff fashion, this was the equivalent of Pangea splitting: While Kane had not made the top 10 in the first critics' poll, way back in 1952, it had topped the list in 1962 and stayed there for half a century. When Sight and Sound started surveying filmmakers as well as critics, Kane dominated the new poll too. But in 2012, the directors voted for Yasujirō Ozu's family drama Tokyo Story and the critics voted for Alfred Hitchcock's immortal mindfuck Vertigo. A decade later, Kane has not regained its throne: The directors have crowned Stanley Kubrick's evolutionary epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, while the critics have selected Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the least salacious movie ever made about a prostitute. Old Kane is now second on the directors' list (back ahead of Tokyo Story) and third among the critics (still behind Vertigo).
