That’s 264 movies. I have seen quite a few before I started this almost three years ago when the list was published, but since many of the movies are not readily available, it took me this long to see them all.
There’s actually three types of movies that were challenging to find: documentaries, movies made in India and movies directed by women.
Documentaries are understandable. Very few have found a big enough audience to be of interest to streaming services (except those of very specific types) and not that many of them are ever even released on DVD.
India has a very different market to us. Many movies have never been released on DVD, because they can remain in theaters for perpetuity. And if they can’t there isn’t that much interest anyhow, so why bother putting them on physical media? The interest outside of the country doesn’t seem to be strong enough. I go to see Indian movies here in Finland every once in a while, but I don’t have many opportunities, because they just don’t show them where I live. They only show them in the cities with large enough Indian population and I have only seen one white person besides me at those screenings and that guy was there with an Indian woman.
The movies directed by women is a bigger problem here. The whole business is antagonistic towards them. I don’t know what the situation is now, but not too long ago, only one percent of movies from Hollywood were directed by women. This shows on the list as well. There are a few American movies directed by women on the list (Daughters of the Dust, Wanda, etc), only one of them is a studio movie (The Matrix). It’s the French who seem to be winning in this department with Agnes Varda, Claire Denis and Celine Sciamma all on the list with multiple movies and Marguerite Duras having one. Then there’s the help they have given to filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman and Lucrecia Martel among others. In general, France is massively over-represented on the list. Anyhow, when women don’t get studio support, their movies will also remain harder to get your hands on, so the last movie I was able to find and see was The Intruder by Claire Denis. Considering how renowned she is, this was a bit of a surprise, but maybe the rights on the movie are disputed or in a limbo. It happens.
Part of the beauty of this list is that I was able to find all of this movies I would otherwise probably have skipped. Let me explain this mathematically, as you all love that, right.
Let’s say we have ten people and three movies. All of the ten people have seen and rated the movies. Now, you are supposed to decide, based on those ratings, which two of those movies to save for posterity. One of those movies got a 9 from each voter. Another got 8 from each voter. The final one got a 5 from 8 voters, but the two others gave it a full 10.
Now which ones would you save? Is the consensus 8 more important than the two people who saw something incredible in the third one? Maybe that’s something that’s specifically important for their culture or identity. Maybe there’s just something there that the other 8 don’t see or understand yet.
By just taking the top-rated movies, you would be following IMDb logic. The best movies are the ones everyone kind of likes. By prioritizing the third movie over the second, you would be taking a stance similar to the Sight & Sound list, which emphasizes personal choices. After all, basically everyone liked Shawshank Redemption (of course, Internet being Internet, 1.4% have rated it at 1), but is it anyone’s favorite movie? You could ask the same for many of the top movies on IMDb. In fact, the lists don’t have much overlap.
So, you would be excluding voices, while Sight & Sound have managed to do something very different. Their list includes many of the all-time great classics (Citizen Kane, Godfather, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz), but it also includes weird experiments (Wavelength), movies that would be completely outside of what we expect from the media (Blue, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty), very obscure movies (Sambizanga, La Cierta Manera), very personal works (Histoire(s) du Cinéma) and even a recognition of how TV and cinema are becoming less distinct (Twin Peaks: The Return).
For some reason there aren’t many family movies or animations on the list, but it does include two great works from Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro). I also like how there’s not restrictions on the age of the movie. The newest movie was from 2021 (Petite maman), while there were a few from 2019 (Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) – Celine Sciamma apparently having raised her profile quite fast there, but at the same time the old movies weren’t forgotten either (with one movie from 1910s and fourteen movies from 1920s). How many countries are represented? You don’t often see movies from Cuba, Thailand, Senegal or Argentina, but there’s multiple movies from each of these countries here. And of course, there’s plenty of LGBTQ+ movies as well (Paris Is Burning, Moonlight, Tropical Malady, The Matrix, etc).
Finally, to me it’s great that on this list anything can hang. We have The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Thing right next to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Color of Pomegranates. Born in Flames is right there with A Clockwork Orange, Possession and Nostalgia for the Light. Somehow Crash (the Cronenberg version) has the exact same amount of votes as The Grave of Fireflies, Je tu il elle, The Hour of Furnaces and Happy Together. There’s a movie in the top 10 that’s mostly just admiring male bodies (Beau travail) right between 2001 and Mulholland Dr. There doesn’t seem to be shame here and that in itself is good for the culture around cinema. Less elitism, more inclusivity, please.
Having now seen all of those movies, here’s the 10 favorite movies I watched based on the list. Not my favorite movies on the list, as I had seen many of them. This is limited just to movies from the list I’ve seen in the last 33 months or so.
Two notes: Five of these movies were directed by women. Probably just because they are outside of general discussions on movies and this is what is needed to make these movies accessible. Also, many of these are relatively low on the list. This is because I had seen most of the top 100 or so before.
1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Number 1 on the list.
I mean, this is kind of obvious, but sometimes not being obvious is just trying to be coy or argumentative. This is an actually great movie that deserved a lot of attention before, but I had it on my wish list for a full decade (ever since the 2012 Sight & Sound list came out), but it just wasn’t available. Now it is and I have now seen it three times. As I’ve said before, it might not be the greatest movie of all time, because nothing is, but it can definitely hang with Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane and Vertigo.
2. West Indies
Tied for 152 on the list.
It’s weird how obscure this is. It’s a great little musical about the history of slavery in Caribbeans and how it still affects the descendants today.
3. The House Is Black
Tied for 101 on the list.
This is a short made by a poet about a leper colony in Iran. It’s a documentary and as such, it’s mostly just footage of the colony with quotes from religious texts and the director’s own poetry laid over it. The director was so taken by the people there that she adopted a kid from there. Sadly, the director passed away just a few years after, leaving the kid orphan.
4. Zama
Tied for 196 on the list.
Lucrecia Martel has three movies on the list and I would assume she is the most obscure of all the directors with that number of movies on there. This is about an officer in the 17th century Paraguay just waiting for his orders to relocate to Argentina. (Well, Asuncion to Buenos Aires, the countries didn’t really exist yet, I assume.) It’s about class differences and how colonialism enforces them.
5. Happy Together
Tied for 225 on the list.
Wong Kar-Wai movie that was also pretty hard to find, but just by coincidence (or maybe someone requested it, I don’t know), this movies was screened by a local club of film (as in the technology) enthusiasts. It’s about two Chinese men who’s relationship falls apart in Argentina, where they are then stranded.
6. Cleo from 5 to 7
Number 14 on the list.
Agnes Varda is finally, after her death, of course, getting the respect she deserves with full four movies on the list. This is about Cleo. It’s almost real time, as it’s 90 minutes long and depicts the time between 5 and 7, when Cleo is waiting for results of medical tests and attempts to focus on something else instead.
7. Paris is Burninng
Tied for 196 on the list.
A documentary about the ball culture of late 80s, where LGBTQ+ folk can find hte community they so need.
8. Nostalgia for the Light
Tied for 243 on the list.
Another documentary. Whereas Paris is Burning is in a metropolis, this one happens in a desert, where we have women looking for the remains of the victims disappeared by the Pinochet regime of Chile, while in the very same place astronomers are looking at the skies.
9. Ugetsu monogatari
Tied for 90 on the list.
It’s a movie about greed and how it destroys men and those around them as well.
10. Vivre sa vie
Tied for 157 on the list.
The name of the main character is Nana Kleinfrankenheim. I thought it was some kind of a stupid joke, but apparently it’s a former municipality in Alsace. It’s a tale of a young woman in Paris, who descends into sex work as she finds life hard to manage.