SCFZ 10th Anniversary Poll: Ballots

[MrCarmady]

sorry!

i managed to include your votes in the final results (though if you could follow the instructions next time -- english titles, no accented characters, full director names -- i'd appreciate it!)

My bad, there was some copy pasting going on. Thank you for including the votes and cleaning up the formatting, appreciate it.

[RogerTheMovieManiac]

Lubitsch would seem to be a good shout for one of the 10+ directors.

Bergman and Hitchcock the other two, perhaps? Hitch may not be THAT popular here though...

[flip]

two of the three directors with 10+ films have been guessed already, one (the director in third place with exactly 10 films) hasn't even been mentioned...

in a couple of hours, i'll post a list of all of the directors who had many different films that got votes.

[rischka]

i'd be concerned if ford isn't one

-- iirc one of his films won last time?

[flip]

i think this was the most recent poll -- ford's highest ranked film was 54th (the sun shines bright)

https://letterboxd.com/fliptrotsky/list ... sary-poll/

directors like ford and ozu and many others i think often don't do all that well in these polls because their votes are spread across so many films

[flip]

the director of the greatest number of different films that received a vote in our poll is Ernst Lubitsch (wba guessed it right!) with a staggering 14 different films that got some support:

Die Puppe (Ernest Lubitsch, 1919)
The Oyster Princess (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
Madame DuBarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
The Wildcat (Ernst Lubitsch, 1921)
So This Is Paris (Ernst Lubitsch, 1926)
Eternal Love (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
One Hour With You (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
Broken Lullaby (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)
Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

[flip]

Jean-Luc Godard was next (as st gloede guessed) with 11 different films, followed by Luis Bunuel, with 10.

nearly 60 directors received votes for 5 or more different films -- a lot of names you might guess, and a lot of potential surprises. perhaps somewhat shocking, only five john ford films got a vote:

14 films
ernst lubitsch

11 films
jean-luc godard

9 films
luis bunuel
peter greenaway
ingmar bergman
rainer werner fassbinder

8 films
joao cesar monteiro
alain resnais
jacques rivette
jacques tourneur
buster keaton
eric rohmer
akira kurosawa

7 films
mikio naruse
chantal akerman
helmut kautner
andrzej zulawski
marguerite duras
yasujiro ozu
pier paolo pasolini
robert bresson

6 films
douglas sirk
george cukor
nicholas ray
orson welles
francois truffaut
sidney lumet

5 films
yoshishige yoshida
hiroshi shimizu
agnes varda
alfred hitchcock
andrei tarkovsky
roberto rossellini
stanley kubrick
fw murnau
jacques demy
manoel de oliveira
anthony asquith
billy wilder
kenji mizoguchi
alain robbe-grillet
david lynch
michelangelo antonioni
john ford
tsai ming-liang
frank borzage
carl theodor dreyer
miklos jancso
max ophuls
jean renoir
victor sjostrom
michael powell (and emeric pressburger)
satyajit ray
terrence malick
edgar ulmer
tod browning

[Curtis, baby]

was gonna guess the third big homie as one of "those 2 portuguese guys i've still somehow never seen anything by" i.e. oliveira or monteiro, was kinda close on the latter i guess

for top films im gonna be WACKY and guess News From Home (im guessing this won), Jeanne Dielman (covering for my NFH bet), and The Shop Around the Corner

[flip]

all of our top ten films came from the 1920s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. i'm listing the top films from each decade below, but i'll withhold the top ten films for now. some of the films below ranked very well (one is in a tie for 11th), while others won't even make a top 250 list. i imagine it may come as a mild surprise that vertigo doesn't make our top ten:

scfz's top films by decade
1890s: Panorama de l’arrivee à Aix-les-Bains pris du train (temps de neige) (Freres Lumieres, 1896)
1900s: The Flying Train (unknown director, 1902)
1910s (tie): Different from the Others (Richard Oswald, 1919)
The Oyster Princess (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
Suspense (Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber, 1913)
1920s: top ten film
1930s: Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931)
1940s (tie): Under the Bridges (Helmut Kautner, 1946)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
1950s: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
1960s: top ten film
1970s: top ten film
1980s: top ten film
1990s: Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
2000s: As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000)
2010s: Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018)
2020s: Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)

[flip]

for top films im gonna be WACKY and guess News From Home (im guessing this won), Jeanne Dielman (covering for my NFH bet), and The Shop Around the Corner

shop around the corner was (tied for) the top film of the 1940s! but it won't quite make the top ten...

[flip]

and perhaps interesting: our best-of-the-decade choices are almost completely different this time than last. only two of the films are the same (vertigo, and one other from our top ten that i'll reveal later).

[Mauries]

I had the feeling that Mr. Thank You was doing well, but apparently it didn't make the top 10 .
I hope that Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors will take it this time, but I now think it'll be Playtime.

[rischka]

well ok as long as ford did as well as billy wilder lol

i forgot to vote for a renoir and i still feel weird about it

[flip]

some more data -- i counted the number of different films that got votes from each decade:

1890s: 1 film
1900s: 7 films
1910s: 30 films
1920s: 78 films
1930s: 112 films
1940s: 130 films
1950s: 177 films
1960s: 237 films
1970s: 231 films
1980s: 191 films
1990s: 169 films
2000s: 126 films
2010s: 99 films
2020s: 11 films

i think if you did a similar poll on letterboxd, say, the numbers would steadily increase through the 2010s. but ours go up until the 1960s, then steadily fall again. if you listed the years of each of our films that got votes, i think you'd get almost a normal distribution, with an average of around 1965, and a standard deviation of about 22 years (with slight skew towards more recent years).

pedantic note: some of the numbers i'm posting will be off by one or two or three, because of how i'm counting things (for example, to count films from the 2000s, i search for the string "200", and see how many copies of that string are in the document, which means 2001: A Space Odyssey is included in the count initially, i fix that when i notice it but it's a 31 page document, so i don't check everything and i clearly missed three, because the numbers don't quite add up to the right total)

[MrCarmady]

Oh man I love the Mekas, forgot to vote for it. Wonder if that cost it a top 10 spot...

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

What a delightful poll! Thank you for it, flip.

Not sure about the '20s, maybe Finis Terræ? or a Keaton, say Our Hospitality? Limite would have been my guess for the #1 overall film based on how often it was showing up. (Still haven't seen it.) But since it's probably a film from the '60s, '70s, or '80s, I'm not sure I'll know for guessing. Maybe Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors ?

[rischka]

i'd bet on shadows too

[flip]

Oh man I love the Mekas, forgot to vote for it. Wonder if that cost it a top 10 spot...

since you and rischka have both expressed some regret about what you voted for, i can allow everyone to make one change to their ballot -- everyone can add one film (to their bottom tier, if the ballot was ranked) and remove one film, by posting the names of the film to add, and the film to remove (don't edit your ballot directly, please make a new post). i'll give everyone 24 hours to do that, then announce the results some time on monday!

[flip]

i know the results, so i'll make one change that won't affect the top 100:

remove: Tuvalu (Veit Helmer, 1999)
add: Bitter Rice (Giuseppe de Santis, 1949)

[flip]

Not sure about the '20s, maybe Finis Terræ? or a Keaton, say Our Hospitality?

you are right... but have not named the right film.

[oOgiandujaOo]

Transit becomes an immediate priority watch. Very happy to see Malmkrog get recognized as top film of 2020s, a brain and soul expanding film.

[rischka]

ok remove this: His Motorbike, Her Island (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

and add this: The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

obviously i'd prefer it wasn't in the bottom tier but i'll take it. THX FLIP

[rischka]

Not sure about the '20s, maybe Finis Terræ? or a Keaton, say Our Hospitality?

you are right... but have not named the right film.

my money's on the cameraman

[St. Gloede]

Really looking forward to the results!

[Monsieur Arkadin]

If I remember, back in the mubi days (?) the cameraman won the Buster Keaton director's poll to some controversy. So that seems a likely choice to me. (And remains a personal favorite of mine.)

When I lived in Palestine I had a rooftop garden, and there were no cinemas in town. So I'd sometimes invite over a group of 5-10 people and project films against a sheet on my roof. The Cameraman was far and away the favorite film I screened even among those who had never watched a silent film before.

[rischka]

that's awesome!! it's hard to convince people to give silent films a chance but buster is a great ambassador

[wba]

I also invited my parents to the cinema twice (who don't give a shit for silent films), and both times didn't tell them that we were gonna watch a silent film, cause I knew they'd love the experience, if I showed them a Chaplin or a Keaton - and so it was. The one by Keaton was by chance THE CAMERAMAN.

[shara]

Oh man I love the Mekas, forgot to vote for it. Wonder if that cost it a top 10 spot...

since you and rischka have both expressed some regret about what you voted for, i can allow everyone to make one change to their ballot -- everyone can add one film (to their bottom tier, if the ballot was ranked) and remove one film, by posting the names of the film to add, and the film to remove (don't edit your ballot directly, please make a new post). i'll give everyone 24 hours to do that, then announce the results some time on monday!

to add: In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976)

to remove: Few of Us (Sharunas Bartas, 1996)

thanks!

[oOgiandujaOo]

OK I'll play along with this fun little sprinkling of strategy at the end. I imagine very few have seen Семнадцать мгновений весны / Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesny / Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973 - Tatyana Lioznova), so I'll take that out and put in:

Transit (2018 - Christian Petzold)

I watched this last night, very disorienting and emotional, the decision to not have swastikas, any reference to Judaism, and to set it in modern times is brilliant.

[Mauries]

If still possible, a little strategic swap here as well:

You can replace Kiarostami's 'Where is the friend's home' for King Hu's 'Dragon Inn'.