Enlisting agony

Enlisting agony

Choosing the greatest films of all time is enough to inspire vertigo

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Enlisting agony

Two weeks ago, Alfred Hitchcock got a little help from bleary-eyed, worldwide critics to stare down Orson Welles. "King Kane dethroned," this page headlined the news that Vertigo finally unseated Citizen Kane, the champion of the past 50 years, to take the top spot in a once-every-10-year poll to find the Greatest Films of All Time. Such cinephilic pursuit, done by sedentary experts, is not remotely as stimulating as Bolt's or Phelps's photo-finish performances of recent memories, but greatness, like election, has to be justified at an appropriate interval, for public benefit. The canon needs to be reinforced, and here we're lulled into the land of the list.

This year the famous poll, conducted by British Film Institute and Sight & Sound magazine and starting in 1952, asked 846 critics, academics, writers and distributors to list their top 10 movies. On Wednesday the BFI's website published the complete poll _ all 846 entries.

I was one of the voters and my list is up there, so allow me to take this opportunity to say something about it so that I won't feel obliged to think about the endlessly debatable list again until 2022 (if I'm still around, if movies are still around). I'd been asked several times before about my top 10 films _ why not 13 or 17 or 25, I'm not sure _ and I believe every time my answer varied depending on... what? I'm really not sure, maybe hormone level, the devious haze in the brain, my age at that time, or the phase of the moon. But of course, this is a respectable list by a respectable institute _ this is the list, no matter how lists are meaningless _ and I agonised for a week as I jotted down 20, 30, maybe 50 titles that swam like metaphysical sharks in my head. The BFI allows each voter to define "great" by himself, and perhaps that's the most difficult dimension of this endeavour.

After a while, the giddiness was too much and the realisation _ it had always been there, like a sleeping crocodile _ that this was an utterly futile pursuit began to take charge (other voters from other countries I talked to seemed to be clutching their hair too). The impossibility of the task is its central mechanism, and then we were aware of a crucial fact: that the titles we'd list would say more about ourselves than about the movies.

What most voters do, I believe, is to start thinking of the directors we admire. We need a Welles, a Griffith, an Epstien, a Chaplin, a Hawks, a Bergman, a Fellini, a Rossellini, an Eisenstein, an Ozu, a Mizoguchi, an Immamura, a Suzuki, a Bunuel, a Fassbinder, a Godard, a Truffaut, a Coppola, a Scorsese, a Herzog, a Cronenberg, a Speilberg (why not) _ wait, that's more than 10. Most of the names above are also deceased film-makers, and the implication is "great" means "classic" means "death", and the BFI's result demonstrates that clearly.

Then there's that thorny issue about "greatness": the poll asked what I think are the greatest films, not the films I like the most, and even though the interpretation of "greatness" is liberally left open, the magnitude, reputation and intellectual self-importance of this poll has a tendency to persuade us to adhere more to the sacred and the institutionalised _ and less to the voluptuous, the whimsical, or the downright pleasurable.

Eventually I slept and woke up and decided to just get it over with. I decided to heed the call of history as well as the urgency of the now, but in all I guess I merely try to recall the moment the hammer hit me _ it's more than 10 times _ the moment when I knew that cinema has something for everyone on this cruel Earth. I also remember the films that try to test the invisible borders of what film can be or can do to us. To defend each of the films listed below, I can be as cavalier, as giddy, as rapturous as defending the women loved or lost. It means everything, but it also means nothing, because your list, any list, is as good as mine.

Here's my list, not in any order.

- A Bout De Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard, now 82, has made many films that remain alive despite the fog in my head _ Pierrot Le Fou, Masculin Feminin, Histoire(s) du Cinema _ but his first film in 1960 about an enigmatic robber and his American lover was, like I said above, the hammer that hit me.

- L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)

We tend to remember Blow-up, but L'Avventura still gives me an icy tremor. All the hip tropes of contemporary second-raters _ alienation, bourgeois ennui, sensuous despair _ were done with formalist conviction and assured mastery by the Italian since 1960.

- La Regle Du Jeu (Jean Renoir)

Renoir's 1939 film is an absolute masterpiece, not an ordinary masterpiece.

- Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Tarkovsky's 1975 film about childhood has sadness, humanity and heartbreaking evocations that stay with me even though I haven't seen it in a long time.

- Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)

Some films make you fear. Real fear, as if while you're not watching it, it is watching you. Lynch's 2001 film, starring Naomi Watts in a haunting vortex of surrealist meta-cinema, is one of them.

- That Obscure Object Of Desire (Luis Bunuel)

It's hard to pick one of my favourite Bunuel _ Un Chien Andalou, Viridiana, Phantom Of Liberty, Los Olvidados _ but I settle for this late work in which the absurd (of course) and the terrifying come together.

- Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

Why not Psycho? Why not Rebecca, Notorious, Strangers On A Train, Rear Window? Well, why not Vertigo? The dream sequence alone displays what cinema can do to your soul.

- Tokyo Story (Yazujiro Ozu)

I sort of hoped that Tokyo Story (1953) would stage a coup and overtake Citizen Kane (an Asian film as the greatest!). Ozu's Late Autumn may touch me more deeply, but Tokyo Story has a fuller form and shape. Let's watch both of them again.

- Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

This is not a nationalistic choice. The youngest film in the pack, Tropical Malady made me float out of the theatre when I saw it in Cannes eight years ago, where quite a few people booed it. It may still need to be vetted by time, but its fire-baptism converted us all. It remains a film that greatly expands the possibility of cinema _ Thai or otherwise.

- Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

I could've chosen Yang's Brighter Summer Day, but somehow Yi Yi (2000), a film about family, love, weddings, funerals and the imperfection of life, sticks with me like destiny.

And here's the result of the BFI's poll, in order of most votes received:

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)

Tokyo Story (Yazujiro Ozu)

La Regle Du Jeu (Jean Renoir)

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (FW Murnau)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)

The Searchers (John Ford)

Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov)

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Carl Dreyer)

81/2 (Federico Fellini)

Ask me again today about my top 10, and it may already change, and really I don't think that's such a bad thing at all. So let's see what happens in 10 years' time.

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