top 100 poll - SCFZ fifth annual

[pabs]

OK, mine's done.

Except for one of them, I restricted my top five to films I gave at least 4 stars to that were made in the last 10 years.

The only major change to my top 50 is that it's now completely unranked.

[wba]

I think it shouldn't be a problem, if one hasn't anything to change about one's Top 50 from last year. I only exchanged half a dozen titles, I believe.

The exercise is for the forum, for all of us, to see if overall there's been some shifts.

Also I must say that I find it more than slightly irritating if some people post a list of only silents, or only films from the 21st century or only films they have recently watched, or only films they've reviewed, or whatever else comes to mind.

This thread is here to post your overall Top 50 favorite films of all time. It's pretty simple.

If you don't have such a list, find it too difficult compiling one or find such a thread or task boring, that's perfectly fine!

No one is forced to participate in this endeavor, no one is forced to post a Top 50 in this thread.

Like everything else, this is a voluntary exercise.

I am not running this, but if I were, I would exclude any and all such lists, unless the person who posted it told me that those 50 actually are what she currently considers her 50 favorite movies of all time.
Cause that's what this thread and exercise is actually about.

If we do a John Ford poll, I don't see people posting Howard Hawks ballots in it.
And if we do a favorite silents poll, I don't see people posting their favorite Hongkong comedies from the 80s there either.
I guess you get my point.

Maybe I sound like a grumpy old guy, but it honestly baffles my mind when I read stuff like "I'm gonna shake this up a bit...", etc. etc. in this thread.

[Zulawski]

I am entirely in favor of wba's point here. It really is fairly simple, and it skews the results enormously when everybody uses a different strategy to compile their list.

[brian d]

and yet! if the idea of this site is discovering new films, and finding films that aren’t discussed on other sites, or haven’t been released commercially in years, or should be re-evaluated, or just that we’re so god damned eclectic around here, and that finding a film that we’ve never heard of until someone mentioned it in the 100 best poll, or the 1936 poll, or the segundo de chomón poll, and realizing that it’s really great and fun and we’re so happy we watched it, then isn’t an eclectic list better? i’m more baffled by the value of a list that keeps running 2001 or citizen kane out there.

but in the end, everyone here has more than 50 films they could include in a list of favorites, so if someone posts 50 silent films that they’d consider favorites (that’s me) or 50 films from the 21st century (like greg), but it helps people start seeing the names of films they’d want to check out because it’s somebody's favorite, then what’s the harm? it seems to me that it actually reaffirms the value of the exercise in that case. and anyway by the time i’m at 45 films, there are several options for those last 5 spots anyway and things start to get arbitrarily chosen, so it’s not like this is ever going to be that scientific for most people.

[wba]

and yet! if the idea of this site is discovering new films, and finding films that aren’t discussed on other sites, or haven’t been released commercially in years, or should be re-evaluated, or just that we’re so god damned eclectic around here, and that finding a film that we’ve never heard of until someone mentioned it in the 100 best poll, or the 1936 poll, or the segundo de chomón poll, and realizing that it’s really great and fun and we’re so happy we watched it, then isn’t an eclectic list better? i’m more baffled by the value of a list that keeps running 2001 or citizen kane out there.

yeah, that's totally the point, and we have many polls and exercises for such a purpose.,

But I don't think any of what you mention is the point in a thread that says "list your 50 favorite films of all time".

This thread (and this particular endeavor) is pretty simple. Posting your 50 favorite films of all time, no matter what they are.
If that bores someone, or somebody finds this utterly useless, it's fine. Nobody has to do this. There are thousands of other things to do.
Just not in this thread (is what I think).

Why on earth should the outcome of this particular poll be interesting or eclectic? It is what it is.

[wba]

but in the end, everyone here has more than 50 films they could include in a list of favorites, so if someone posts 50 silent films that they’d consider favorites (that’s me) or 50 films from the 21st century (like greg), but it helps people start seeing the names of films they’d want to check out because it’s somebody's favorite, then what’s the harm? it seems to me that it actually reaffirms the value of the exercise in that case. and anyway by the time i’m at 45 films, there are several options for those last 5 spots anyway and things start to get arbitrarily chosen, so it’s not like this is ever going to be that scientific for most people.

I have somewhere from 1.500 to 2.000 favorite films. (I know, some find this amount of favorites ridiculous, but that's just how it is with me.)
But choosing 50 random films from those would not lead automatically to a list I'd call "my 50 favorite films of all time".
So for me, this is a very difficult and time-consuming task, which I take seriously, cause I enjoy it, and I also want to find out for myself which 50 actually are my favorites.
It's not scientific, but I try to be as honest as possible with myself. And I find that very rewarding and challenging, to actually find out what I love most.
Before I did my first Top 50 (or top 100) list, a long time ago, I didn't know what films would end up on it. So afterwards I was very surprised.
And such a list has also changed considerably for me over the last decades.

[brian d]

sure, but among the points i was making is that every list thats been posted, no matter how arbitrary some of them seem, includes 50 films that the poster would consider among their favorites of all time. I can’t separate my 12th favorite film of all time from my 37th favorite, because i don’t know what they are so specifically. i’d guess that’s the same for most people here. so the list you get is 50 of my favorite films of all time, yes all within an arbitrary confine. if i’m in a silent film mood, then no question those 50 belong there. it’s arbitrary, but really not much more than what other people consider when posting a list. what you’re asking for might be better reflected with a statistical compilation from letterboxd.

[wba]

sure, but among the points i was making is that every list thats been posted, no matter how arbitrary some of them seem, includes 50 films that the poster would consider among their favorites of all time. I can’t separate my 12th favorite film of all time from my 37th favorite, because i don’t know what they are so specifically. i’d guess that’s the same for most people here. so the list you get is 50 of my favorite films of all time, yes all within an arbitrary confine. if i’m in a silent film mood, then no question those 50 belong there. it’s arbitrary, but really not much more than what other people consider when posting a list. what you’re asking for might be better reflected with a statistical compilation from letterboxd.

If that's the case (and if that's the case with all lists in this thread) than everything is perfectly fine.

I had just a creeping suspicion that it might not be the case, after reading through this thread and all the lists a few times.

I also wasn't trying to single you out or anything (the "all silents list" just came to my mind, as did all the other examples I mentioned above, and I didn't look them up to see who had actually posted them), if that may have also been on your mind, and what you write there makes perfect sense to me.

I just hope everyone is taking the approach you or I are taking, cause my impression (it's just a hook, though - I haven't sent private messages to anybody who's poll "seemed" fishy to me, and asked them if they are actually serious with their list - and as I'm not running this poll I don't intend to) was that someone who might have stumbled over your silents list or another more eclectic looking list, might have thought to themselves, "hey, why not just post something "different" here, instead of my "boring" top 50?" or something similar to this.

PS: I also find it more important that we will have a rule that will exclude anybody's lists in this poll who is not or was not a SCFZ regular at some point in time. Like, say, someone who has less than 50 or 40 posts in this forum or had less than 100 in the last one. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading all the polls by newcomers to SCFZ in this thread and don't hope that they'll stick around and be eligible for next years incarnation of the final list! I honestly do!

[brian d]

I also wasn't trying to single you out or anything (the "all silents list" just came to my mind, as did all the other examples I mentioned above, and I didn't look them up to see who had actually posted them)

I didn’t think you were singling me out, but would be fine with it if you were.

[wba]

glad you said that. I still can't really assess my written english or the impression it makes, and if what I write generally sounds friendly or bitchy. Foreign languages are tough (let alone getting into all the "cultural" and behavioral stuff...)

[brian d]

no problem there, i teach another language. nuance and humor are always hard to get. funny though, it’s easier to cuss in other languages than in your first language.

[wba]

Hehe, yeah cussing is great, but I think partially even more difficult, cause you have to know which curse is appropriate at which time and with what person - and how you cuss can be as important (the overall tone, the inflection, etc.). As someone coming from the balkans, I can tell you that can be pretty tough (or an unsolvable mystery) for foreigners (and sometimes even for myself).

[brian d]

i have a colleague from latin america who curses all the time in english, but it’s always a bit off. i always get what she’s trying to say but it’s like with a brechtian estrangement effect going on. but it’s psychologically easier to just say the words if they’re in a language that’s not your mother tongue. it creates a distance, so it’s like it’s not fully your word.

and i think we’re off topic.

[flip]

This thread is here to post your overall Top 50 favorite films of all time. It's pretty simple.

I am not running this, but if I were, I would exclude any and all such lists, unless the person who posted it told me that those 50 actually are what she currently considers her 50 favorite movies of all time.
Cause that's what this thread and exercise is actually about.

No, it's really up to each voter to decide what this exercise is "about". As brian points out, anyone making a "50 favourite films" list is making some arbitrary choices anyway, and I don't mind how people make those arbitrary choices. If someone thinks they're able to make such fine-grained distinctions about their own taste that they can truly identify their precise 50 favourite films, that's great. If someone instead wants to post "50 amazing films I like about as much as any of my other favourites but I wish we could talk about here sometime" or "50 great films I'd like to recommend to other scfz'ers because they're largely unseen" or "50 films I love that I'd like to see on an SCFZ top 100 because they might attract new people to the community who I'd like to talk to about films" or "50 films that should be on some of those greatest films canon lists but aren't" or "50 films that most perfectly reflect what I'm into right at this moment about film because I've been watching a lot of silent era cinema" or whatever, that's all cool, everyone should vote how they like, and everyone should interpret the purpose of this exercise however they want to.

The whole exercise is fairly arbitrary anyway (there's no 'correct' way to decide how many points each film gets on a ranked ballot, or even a 'correct' length of ballot, so the final list is only ever going to be the vaguest approximation of our community's tastes). I've always found the individual ballots the most interesting thing about exercises like this, and those ballots are sometimes all the more interesting when the voter observes some restrictions. I personally like ballots that highlight more obscure films I might not otherwise learn about, but that's just me, I'm sure other people find these polls worthwhile or worthless for other reasons, and that's a good thing imo, I like being in a community where people think in different ways.

[Pretentious Hipster]

Sorry for the delay. Here's my ballot:

5 underseen favourites outside of the top 50 (equal or under 25 checks on icm):

Diary of a Lover (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1977)
The Red Thread (Carl Brown, 1994)
Flamenco (Edgar Neville, 1952)
A Light in the Fog (Panahbarkhoda Rezaee, 2008)
Over the Years (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2015)

Tier 1:

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, 2011)
Fire in Castilla (Tactilvision from the Moor of the Fright) (José Val del Omar, 1961)
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Black Harvest (Robin Anderson & Bob Connolly, 1992)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1997)
Combat de boxe (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1927)
A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)
Hindle Wakes (Maurice Elvey, 1927)

Tier 2:

The Hole (Jacques Becker, 1960)
Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
Film Ist. A Girl & a Gun (Gustav Deutsch, 2009)
Demons (Toshio Matsumoto, 1971)
The Outrageous Baron Munchausen (Karel Zeman, 1962)
Misery Loves Company (Carl Brown, 1993)
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, 2010)
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Main Street (Juan Antonio Bardem,1956)
Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)

Tier 3:

Horse Money (Pedro Costa, 2014)
Brouillard: Passage #14 (Alexandre Larose, 2014)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995)
A Simple Event (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)
The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1976)
Family Life (Ken Loach, 1971)

Tier 4:

2012 (Takashi Makino, 2013)
The Fear (Kostas Manoussakis, 1966)
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (Karel Zeman, 1958)
Twisted Pair (Neil Breen, 2018)
Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr,, 2000)
Os Faroleiros (Maurice Mariaud, 1922)
The Holy Innocents (Mario Camus, 1984)
Phase IV (Saul Bass, 1974)
Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997)

Tier 5:

There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)
Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman, 1973)
Little Fugitive (Morris Engel & Ray Ashley, 1953)
Yanco (Servando Gonzalez, 1961)
Blow Out (Brain de Palma, 1981)
Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)
Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Eclipse (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
The Pearl (emilio Fernandez, 1947)

[charulata]

I don't want to get into it but am fine not having my ballot counted. I enjoyed the process of making the list regardless. Also, tastes and proclivities can shift a lot over time in terms of art as I'm sure everyone here understands. You can get into a movement or period or genre/subgenre and so on because it fuels where you might be with your own creative pursuits etc etc. Lots of reasons. Just that the bad faith argument may not always apply. I only have 9 posts here esp. on this version of the forum and have never been a regular poster. But have always been in the shadows like a GHOST. I won't go away that easily either.

[flip]

i'm running this poll, and i promise your ballot will be counted

[wba]

This thread is here to post your overall Top 50 favorite films of all time. It's pretty simple.

I am not running this, but if I were, I would exclude any and all such lists, unless the person who posted it told me that those 50 actually are what she currently considers her 50 favorite movies of all time.
Cause that's what this thread and exercise is actually about.

No, it's really up to each voter to decide what this exercise is "about". As brian points out, anyone making a "50 favourite films" list is making some arbitrary choices anyway, and I don't mind how people make those arbitrary choices. If someone thinks they're able to make such fine-grained distinctions about their own taste that they can truly identify their precise 50 favourite films, that's great. If someone instead wants to post "50 amazing films I like about as much as any of my other favourites but I wish we could talk about here sometime" or "50 great films I'd like to recommend to other scfz'ers because they're largely unseen" or "50 films I love that I'd like to see on an SCFZ top 100 because they might attract new people to the community who I'd like to talk to about films" or "50 films that should be on some of those greatest films canon lists but aren't" or "50 films that most perfectly reflect what I'm into right at this moment about film because I've been watching a lot of silent era cinema" or whatever, that's all cool, everyone should vote how they like, and everyone should interpret the purpose of this exercise however they want to.

The whole exercise is fairly arbitrary anyway (there's no 'correct' way to decide how many points each film gets on a ranked ballot, or even a 'correct' length of ballot, so the final list is only ever going to be the vaguest approximation of our community's tastes). I've always found the individual ballots the most interesting thing about exercises like this, and those ballots are sometimes all the more interesting when the voter observes some restrictions. I personally like ballots that highlight more obscure films I might not otherwise learn about, but that's just me, I'm sure other people find these polls worthwhile or worthless for other reasons, and that's a good thing imo, I like being in a community where people think in different ways.

Yeah, we certainly think in different ways, regarding the purpose of this thread, cause I'm wondering why then people should be encouraged at all to "post a ballot of your favourite 50 films" (as stated in your intro, and as, I recall, stated in the previous 4 incarnations of this effort) and instead the purpose of this exercise isn't changed into "post a ballot of 50 films", which can then include "50 films I love that I'd like to see on an SCFZ top 100 because they might attract new people to the community who I'd like to talk to about films" or "50 films that should be on some of those greatest films canon lists but aren't" or "50 great films I'd like to recommend to other scfz'ers because they're largely unseen" or anything else anybody posting wishes their list to reflect.

What I was suggesting, was to actually take this task seriously, and at least try to come up with a list resembling a personal canon of your 50 most beloved films. If you try that and out come all silents, that's perfectly fine with me, as I wrote earlier in response to Brian.

And if one isn't interested in this kind of exercise,it's perfectly ok as well.

I don't see a problem why we can't run numerous other polls, where the purpose of the exercise is, for example, "50 films I love that I'd like to see on an SCFZ top 100 because they might attract new people to the community who I'd like to talk to about films" or "50 films that should be on some of those greatest films canon lists but aren't", - all exercies I would love to participate in and lists I would love to read, but I honestly don't see how that fits here.

But you're running this poll, so of course you can run it any which way you like.

[karl]

Here you go, Flip, since you wanted one. A dull list, I suppose, as my favorites haven't changed too terribly much since the first enthusiasms in those long ago days of youth: these are (with a few exceptions) the ones I've remained fond of over the years. Though I admit that some, seen recently with the lady, have lost a little shine for me (Sunrise and Bicycle Thieves, for example), I still couldn't leave them off there. I could've done a list with 50 "obscurities," but that wouldn't be honest, mostly because those I've only seen once.

I kept to max two per director to whittle down to 50. Otherwise it would've been impossible. Ask me again a week from now and I'd swap out half of them for others.



The Magic Five (East European version):

Nobody's Calling (Kazmierz Kutz)
The Lady with the Dog (Iosif Kheifits)
Manly Times (Eduard Sachariev)
The Constant Factor (Krzysztof Zanussi)
Me, Grandma, Iliko and Ilarion (Tengiz Abuladze)


The rest:

Floating Weeds
Early Summer
Sansho the Bailiff
Osaka Elegy
Nest of the Gentry (Konchalovsky)
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Mother (Naruse)
Samurai Rebellion
Ornamental Hairpin
The Straits of Love and Hate aka A Fugitive from the Past (Uchida)
A Distant Cry from Spring (Yamada)
The Searchers
Farewell, Home Sweet Home (Iosseliani)
He Who Gets Slapped
Ashes and Diamonds
Moana (Flaherty)
A Matter of Dignity (Cacoyannis)
The Cranes Are Flying
Epitome (Shindo)
Dust in the Wind
A Brighter Summer Day
Larks on a String (Menzel)
L'age d'or
Seven Samurai
Through the Olive Trees
The Shop around the Corner
The Student Prince (Lubitsch)
La Dolce Vita
Bicycle Thieves
L'avventura
City Girl
Sunrise
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The Travelling Players
Charulata
The Big City (Satyajit Ray)
Andrei Rublev
Nostalgia
Letter from an Unknown Woman
City Lights
The Gold Rush
Grand Illusion
Mr. Hulot's Holiday
The 39 Steps
Notorious
A Man Escaped
Au Hasard Balthazar
The Seventh Seal
The Death of Yazdgerd
Wings (Shepitko)



OK, now I wash my hands of it.

[wba]

forgot you were so big on Japanese cinema, Karl, cause you were dilligently championing eastern european stuff in recent years (rightly so!), which curiously doesn't make a huge impact on your list.

[karl]

Excepting the Magic Five, there are fewer than ten on there I've seen for the first time in the last ten years.

But you know what, you're right. I'm gonna make a new Magic Five of the East Europeans.

[wba]

Excepting the Magic Five, there are fewer than ten on there I've seen for the first time in the last ten years.

But you know what, you're right. I'm gonna make a new Magic Five of the East Europeans.

[Zulawski]

Hey Karl, you're on Letterboxd again!

[karl]

Yes, sort of, but don't tell anyone.

[flip]

I'm wondering why then people should be encouraged at all to "post a ballot of your favourite 50 films"

i don't see how it's possible to even identify one's "favourite 50 films" -- how do i compare a buster keaton film with a james benning film? that was the premise of what i said afterwards: given the impossibility of the task, i'm fine with people applying additional criteria to narrow down their favourites to fifty films, on whatever basis they want.

[flip]

great to get your ballot karl!

[flip]

and the only ballots i wasn't planning to count were ballots from posters with one or two posts in total, and only when those ballots seemed totally out of line with scfz interests. so if someone unknown around here posted a ballot full of best picture nominees from the last ten years, i was probably going to ignore it. i don't think there have been any ballots like that (i haven't checked recently though), so i'll probably end up counting every ballot, even from posters with low post counts.

[john ryan]

Tier 1:

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2003)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2000)
The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

Tier 2:

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
Day for Night (Francois Truffaut, 1973)
Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen, 2000)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
M. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)

Tier 3:

Kanal (Andrzej Wajda, 1957)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
Public Housing (Frederick Wiseman, 1997)
The Bandwagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

Tier 4:

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou, 1987)
The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
Head-on (Fatih Akin, 2004)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
Ordet (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955)
Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)
The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)

Tier 5:

Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, 1939)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Anthony Mann, 1962)
The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)
One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920)
Week-End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
It Rains in My Village (Aleksandar Petrovic, 1968)
The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971)
The Emperor's New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000)

[liquidnature]

very cool to see someone else champion The Emperor's New Groove

[DT.]

For flip’s sake people, format your lists correctly.