'Citizen Kane' bumped by 'Vertigo' as greatest film ever made on BFI's Sight and Sound poll
Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' dominated the British Film Institute's magazine's all-time list of the greatest films for 50 years, until this year when 'Vertigo' received the top honor.BY MICHAEL WALSH / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2012
Just as Charles Foster Kane longed for Rosebud, the character might start yearning for his film's previously unrivaled critical status.
Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" has dethroned Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" as the greatest film of all time on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' film poll. "Citizen Kane" topped the list for 50 years, from 1962 on. But the 2012 worldwide survey of 846 cinema experts passed the
accolade to Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller "Vertigo."
The first Sight & Sound poll in 1952 awarded Vittorio De Sica's neorealist "Bicycle Thieves" with the title. "Citizen Kane" wasn't even in the top 10 the first year.
Since that first survey, the journal Sight & Sound has generated a new list every 10 years. For cinephiles, it is easily the most respected great-movie poll. Even film critic Roger Ebert described it as "the only one most serious movie people take seriously."
Every subsequent poll named Welles' magnum opus the greatest ever, until this year when it lost the crown by 34 votes: "Vertigo" received 191 votes - "Citizen Kane" got 157.
About one year ago, the team at Sight & Sound met to consider how to approach the list this time given the past decade's exponential growth of electronic media. This was "the first poll to be conducted since the internet became almost certainly the main channel of communication about films," cinema scholar Ian Christie wrote in an introduction to the 2012 ranking.
They decided to abandon the "somewhat elitist exclusivity" by which they chose poll contributors. Nick James, editor for Sight & Sound, explained that they were eager to pull from a wider international pool, including critics who established their careers online in addition to print.
"To that end we approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films," James explained.
The invitation to participate in the survey included the following clarification as to what "greatest" entails: "We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema."
Movie fans will undoubtedly debate the merits of such canons, but the enduring appeal of "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo" certainly highlights each film as a major aesthetic accomplishment.
"Kane and Vertigo don't top the chart by divine right," wrote film critic Nigel Andrews. "But those two films are just still the best at doing what great cinema ought to do: extending the everyday into the visionary."
Here are the top 10 greatest films of all time according to the critics' poll:
1. "Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2. "Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles, 1941)
3. "Tokyo Story" (Ozu Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. "The Rules of the Game" (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. "Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans" (F.W. Murnau, 1927)6. "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956)
8. "Man with a Movie Camera" (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (Carl Dreyer, 1927)
10. "8½" (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Since 1992, "Sight & Sound" has also conducted a separate directors' poll. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino and Mike Leigh participated, according to the BBC. Here are the results:
1. "Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
2 "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
2 "Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. "8 ½" (Federico Fellini, 1963)
5. "Taxi Driver" (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
6. "Apocalypse Now" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
7. "The Godfather" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
7. "Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
9. "Mirror" (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
10. "Bicycle Thieves" (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
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