Richard Brody on Sight & Sound’s Top 50 films

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It’s tempting to conclude, from the list of the “Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time” compiled by Sight & Sound magazine from the ballots of eight hundred and forty-six “critics, programmers, academics and distributors” (including me), that the consensus is aesthetically conservative and thin in humor. There isn’t a downright comedy before “Singin’ in the Rain” (which comes in at twentieth place). Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” is in fourth place and deserves it, but it is as serious, even tragic, a comedy as there is. Though Dziga Vertov’s work of advanced montage “Man with a Movie Camera” comes in at No. 9, there isn’t much in the way of radical modernism, not before Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” at No. 35. (With the Vertov followed by Fellini’s “8 1/2,” it seems that carnivalesque reflexivity is in vogue.)

Among the biggest shocks are the near-disappearance of Charlie Chaplin (“City Lights,” tied for fiftieth place), the absence of any film by Howard Hawks or D. W. Griffith, Rainer Werner Fassbinder or John Cassavetes, Jerry Lewis or Nicholas Ray, and the near-vanishing of Kenji Mizoguchi (“Ugetsu,” tied for fiftieth). Meanwhile, recent decades can’t gain traction—the newest film in the top ten is Stanley Kubrick’s “2001,” from 1968; in the top twenty, “Apocalypse Now,” from 1979; the most recent film overall, “Mulholland Dr.,” by David Lynch, from 2001, at twenty-eight. There’s something about the top-ten list that invites a whiff of the sanctimonious, and I’m not immune from it myself. I posted my submission here shortly after sending it in, and, as is clear, I am, in some small measure, also to blame for some of the list’s faults (such as: no Hawks, no Mizoguchi, no Griffith, nothing newer than “King Lear,” from 1987).

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