“Greatest Film Of All Time” Title Changes Hands

Once a decade, the British film magazine Sight & Sound takes a poll to reveal what is the “Greatest Film Of All Time”. While there has been movement in the ranking beneath the top spot, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been Number One for the last half-century.

No longer.

The new “Greatest Film Of All Time”? The picture above should be a clue. It’s Alfred Hitchcock. His 1958 classic Vertigo took the top spot in this year’s survey. Around 850 critics, distributors and academics took part in the poll.

Vertigo’s margin of victory was not huge: the last poll, in 2002, saw it lose to “Kane” by just five votes. This time around, it out-polled the Welles classic by 34 tallies.

Here’s the Top Ten, in order:

"Vertigo" (Hitchcock, 1958)
"Citizen Kane" (Welles, 1941)
"Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
"La Règle du jeu" [The Rules Of The Game] (Jean Renoir, 1939)
"Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans" (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
"The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956)
"Man with a Movie Camera" (Vertov, 1929)
"The Passion of Joan of Arc" (Dreyer, 1927)
"8 ½" (Federico Fellini, 1963)

I’m thinking only the serious film students out there are going to recognize all of these releases. And did you notice that the most-recently made film on the list, “2001”, is more than 40 years old? Hasn’t anything good come out lately?

[BBC News]