When Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade poll ranking the greatest films of all time was released on Thursday, it was bound to provoke controversy and discourse within the film community. When it comes to something as arbitrary as ranking movies, such debates are inevitable: especially when a new movie is sitting at the top of the list.<\/p>\n
Sight & Sound voters selected Chantal Akerman’s \u201cJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles\u201d as this decade’s greatest film of all time. It is the fourth movie to ever receive the honor, after \u201cBicycle Thieves,\u201d \u201cCitizen Kane,\u201d and \u201cVertigo.\u201d But Paul Schrader isn’t sold on the pick.<\/p>\n
The \u201cMaster Gardener\u201d director took to his always colorful Facebook page to question the logic of the selection and question if the poll’s voters were committed to judging films by their artistic value.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor 70 years, the Sight & Sound poll has been a reliable if somewhat incremental measure of critical consensus and priorities,\u201d Schrader wrote. \u201cFilms moved up the list, others moved down; but it took time. The sudden appearance of ‘Jeanne Dielman’ in the number one slot undermines the S&S poll’s credibility. It feels off, as if someone had put their thumb on the scale. Which I suspect they did.\u201d<\/p>\n Schrader went on to explain that he has no objections to \u201cJeanne Dielman\u201d as a film, but thinks its relatively fast ascent to the list’s top slot is the result of a voting process that could be broken.<\/p>\n \u201cAs Tom Stoppard pointed out in Jumpers, in democracy it doesn’t matter who gets the votes, it matters who counts the votes,\u201d he said. \u201cBy expanding the voting community and the point system, this year’s S&S poll reflects not a historical continuum but a politically correct rejiggering. Akerman’s film is a favorite of mine, a great film, a landmark film but it’s unexpected number one rating does it no favors. ‘Jeanne Dielman’ will from this time forward be remembered not only as an important film in cinema history but also as a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.\u201d<\/p>\nRelated<\/h3>\n<\/section>\n
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