Though top ten lists are often criticised for their perceived encouragement of critical myopia and crude categorisation, they can still offer illuminating insights into how different critics in different countries judge films. In this spirit, it is interesting to compare the best of 2010 polls from three leading film magazines: Britain’s Sight and Sound, America’s Film Comment and France’s Cahiers du Cinéma.
There are immediate differences in the compilation of these lists, which must be acknowledged before making more general comments on them. Both Sight and Sound and Film Comment‘s lists are formed from critics’ opinions taken from within their editorial team and from outside of it, and Sight and Sound‘s list also includes the choices of international critics (including some from Cahiers and Film Comment). Only one (Cahiers‘ house editorial only list) is actually a top ten, with Sight and Sound having a top 12 and Film Comment having a top 50 of 2010.
Having accepted these differences though the polls still offer tantalising comparisons. Several observations jump out when looking at the lists side by side. The first is the European predominance in both the Sight and Sound list (eight of the top 12 films) and Film Comment‘s list (six out of the top ten), and the contrary lack of European films in that most iconic of European film journals, Cahiers du Cinéma, which has five American films in its top ten and only three from Europe (a confirmation of Emilie Bickerton‘s pessimistic view of Cahiers’‘ current direction.) The second is the almost complete absence of documentary films from the lists (Sight and Sound has two documentaries in its top 12, Film Comment has one in its top ten and Cahiers has none), though given how poorly distributed documentaries are in both the US and Britain this is relatively unsurprising.
It is intriguing to look at Film Comment‘s top 20 unreleased films (i.e. films which have not yet come out in cinemas in America), a list often condemned for its connotations of cinéaste festival-circuit snobbery but one that is in fact very necessary, given the notoriously poor distribution of foreign films in America. This list is headed by the runaway winner of the Cahiers‘ poll (and runner up of Sight and Sound‘s list), Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Other interesting points include the high placing of Olivier Assayas’s French produced terrorist biopic, Carlos, in both Film Comment‘s list (where it came out on top) and Sight and Sound‘s poll, where it was placed fourth, and its surprising absence from the Cahiers‘ top ten where it only featured in one of the thirteen separate writer’s lists. This might be partially due to the fact that Carlos was originally shown on television in France, but it still seems a bizarre omission for such a blisteringly cinematic film.
Film Comment‘s and Cahiers’ lists compare particularly oddly because many of the films on Film Comment‘s top 50 came out in 2009 in France (such as A Prophet and Wild Grass.) The absence of Werner Herzog’s well received Bad Lieutenant from Sight and Sound‘s list is slightly odd, as is the high placing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (as of yet unreleased in the UK) in all the polls. The three lists certainly give a good view of the contradictions and contentions at play in the world’s film industry.
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