Sight and Sound's new movie poll is a woke joke

Sight and Sound magazine has announced the results of its latest poll of the greatest films ever made, and there is a new number one, a film with the inelegant title Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, made in 1975 and directed by Chantal Akerman. Vertigo and Citizen Kane have been shuffled back a place. And at a stroke, the BFI’s mouthpiece has destroyed its credibility for at least the next decade, when the next poll will be published (there’s been one every ten years since 1952).

I have in-depth knowledge of cinema* yet I haven’t seen Jeanne Dielman (though I now intend to). But I know it isn’t the best film ever made, and I doubt it is among the best 100 films ever made. On IMDb 9.4K viewers give it 7.6/10, although if you only count votes from IMDb’s Top 1000 voters it receives just 6.8/10. User reviews are wildly split between those proclaiming it a masterpiece (“The greatest film of all time”, “Hypnotic”) and damning it as boring and unfathomable (“I am trying to think of a worse film and failing”, “What do you do when the filmmaker’s INTENTION is to bore you?”). The 201-minute picture concerns a widowed housewife who leads a mundane existence, does a lot of cooking and occasionally turns tricks to make money; it is an expressly feminist film by a feminist director, a lesbian who committed suicide.

When I did search a Google search on the verdict it not surprisingly threw up most prominently approving nods by exclusively Left-wing publications The Guardian, The Independent, Vox and The New York Times. (Search results on Bing are very different, the most prominent being neutral comments on the result from Collider and Yahoo. Oh, if only Elon Musk would also buy Google (and YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia), as he has Twitter, and dismantle the nefarious algorithms that have warped the world in unimaginably malign ways in the last decade or so.)

The Guardian’s headline reads: ‘Chantal Akerman first woman to top Sight and Sound’s greatest all-time films poll’. Yes, you identitarian lunatics, that’s the reason why it got first prize. Because it was directed by a woman. And you know that, and the fact that you’ve highlighted it proves that you know it, but your deep intellectual dishonesty means you will not admit that that is the case (the BBC website’s take is equally boneheaded).

The decision confirms what many of us have feared for years would happen: that such polls are now worthless. The late, great Christopher Hitchens contended that religion poisons everything; I think we can update that to “identity politics poisons everything”. Previous Sight and Sound polls, especially those in the 20th century, would be voted on by critics based on the quality of films. The race and sex of those involved in the making of the movie would not have been a factor critics would have considered – sure, everyone has their personal biases and there will always be anomalies, but generally speaking critics voted for the films they considered the best ones. Now, in these absurdly politicised times, merit is a distant second place. Many films on the list are there purely because of the race or sex of those making them, or because of the subject matter. How can this be seen as progress? This is society and culture going backwards.

The BFI might point to the fact that 1,639 participants were involved in submitting their top tens, so how could the results be rigged to produce Jeanne Dielman as victor? There are many subtle and unsubtle ways in which this could have been orchestrated. Having worked in print and broadcast journalism for nearly 30 years I am very aware of how the desired result can be fostered. On the men’s magazine I once worked on, Gillian Anderson won the 100 Sexiest Women poll one year – not because she was voted into that position but because the editor fancied her. Other women only won it if they were available for photoshoots. At Capital Radio in the 1990s our competition winners were often not the actual winners, I’ll leave it at that.** It is quite possible that Jeanne Dielman was mooted in critical circles early on as the voting commenced, and individuals well-connected by technology soon got wind of the idea that this film ticked the necessary boxes to achieve success. Momentum would have then built. Intrinsically Left-leaning, flattered by inclusion in the voting process and not minded to break cover because of loyalty to the publication that believes it’s the world’s most prestigious film magazine, none will speak out about any collusion or subterfuge.

There are also several films in the list that almost certainly do not deserve to be there, such as Beau Travail (1999), Cleo From 5 To 7 (1962), Daisies (1966), Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), Wanda (1970) and Daughters Of The Dust (1991) – they are there because, again, they have been directed by a woman. 

Much of the list is political and artsy, and, quite frankly, pretty unfathomable; many masterworks are not present. There are no films by Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, presumably because they are both now persona non grata in progressive circles, and Stanley Kubrick has just three entries***. Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest film director ever, gets just four entries. Well, they are straight white men. It’s a poll conducted amongst academics and cinéastes that brazenly celebrates their distance from ordinary people.

It still matters, though, and that’s why it stings. And far from increasing the stock of female film directors, the poll demeans them. To repeat, most of their films are there because of the makers' immutable characteristics, not because their films are necessarily superb. They might be good films – many of them are – but a question mark now hovers over them. Thanks to Sight and Sound’s clodhopping attempt to fight the fight and crowbar female-directed films into the list, doubt is cast over all of them.

The Telegraph’s Tim Robey, in an otherwise intelligent article on Jeanne Dielman’s triumph, makes the silly comment that previous S&S lists were “ridiculously male”. All the previous lists were doing was reflecting the fact that the vast majority of films have been directed by men, and therefore the vast majority of the best films have been directed by men. Another day we could go into the reasons why this is so – biology and psychology would likely tell us – but to attribute the discrepancy in numbers between male and female directors to prejudice does not seem that likely, especially in the last half century or so. The movie industry has made stars and multi-millionaires of thousands of actresses – if there is prejudice, it is curiously selective.

Why does any of this matter? Why is it worth complaining about Jeanne Dielman now being the ‘best film ever’? Because we can’t trust the ‘experts’ any more; the result is a microcosm of the disingenuous, unhelpful, unreliable information that we are fed by the media on a daily basis. Plus, injustice reigns, with rewards being unfairly distributed and genuine talent being downplayed or ignored. As this leaks into wider society, it has grave consequences. Identity politics poisons everything. 

It’s worth noting one final thing. Compilers of these sorts of lists will often go for an eye-catching, controversial, sometimes seemingly anomalous number one because it garners attention or makes a point. Rolling Stone magazine did it when it awarded the best album of the 1980s to The Clash’s London Calling, an album released in 1979 (in the UK, but in 1980 in the US). That was pretty harmless (and it’s a brilliant album!). Sight and Sound’s modern-day woke version of this cheapens arts commentary way more. Yes, it is desirable to widen viewers’ horizons but this is bigger than that – making Jeanne Dielman number one is way OTT and speaks of child-like contrarinesses. However, since the postmodernists and the Neo-Marxists, who will make up a chunk of the voters, disdain the objective and embrace the subjective, they might claim that the very concept of a list of ‘best’ things is fraudulent – so why not make a mockery of the whole thing by installing a non-worthy ‘winner’? Perhaps that is our best explanation for this daft decision.

 

*By way of illustration, I have penned some 7,000 film reviews, and I’ve seen all Best Picture Oscar winners (and virtually all of those nominated), all Golden Globes winners, all Bafta Best Film winners, film site.org’s top 100, most of IMDb’s top 250 and nearly all four-star films in Halliwell’s Film Guide. 

**You could come up with many cases of how media puts its thumb on the scales to steer a TV show to certain outcomes. Random example: Masterchef: The Professionals has done much in its recent run to minimise the amount of white male chefs in its final stages, in contrast to just a couple of years ago when finalists were overwhelmingly in that category. 

***Is it conspiratorial to note that all three of these directors are Jewish?