'Vertigo' tops 'Citizen Kane' in film critics survey

[RayKelly]

http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/08/vertigo_tops_citizen_kane_film.html

NEW YORK (AP) – Alfred Hitchcock has finally usurped Orson Welles.

Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” took the top spot in the 10 greatest-movies-ever list compiled by Sight & Sound, ending the 50-year-long run for Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” The magazine, published by the British Film Institute, surveys international film critics every decade.

“Citizen Kane” slid to second, making way for Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological drama starring James Stewart and Kim Novak.

The list also includes a new addition: Dziga Vertov’s documentary, “Man With a Movie Camera,” coming in at eighth place.

Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” ranked third, followed by Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game”; F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise”; Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”; and John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Carl Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” ranks ninth followed by Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2.”

[Roger Ryan]

I think it's okay to give KANE a rest. You see an awful lot of comments from younger viewers who dislike the movie because they were told it was the "greatest film ever made" when they saw it in a high school or college film class (a "not gonna eat my vegetables" response). One can imagine a future where KANE has slipped into obscurity only to be rediscovered by a new generation who can't believe no one ever talks about this incredible film from the middle of the 20th century.

VERTIGO would not be the film I'd pick to topple KANE, however. This Hitchcock psycho-drama has always seemed a little shallow to me. The subject matter is dynamic and strange enough, but the film lacks the emotional pull it needs to make the drama feel fully formed. Hitchcock was credited as saying that his films were finished at the storyboard stage and the actual shooting and editing were something of a necessary nuisance. This odd detachment works fine (and even enhances) much of his work, but VERTIGO needed something more.

All the same, I think the Sight & Sound choices are exemplary.

[Le Chiffre]

David Thomson's probably jumping for joy at KANE's dethroning.

[atcolomb]

Vertigo is a great movie but i would have picked The Godfather as one of the best. Man With a Movie Camera is a big suprise to me...good film but other
films should be on the list instead. Second place is not a bad spot to be.....

[Le Chiffre]

From Larry French on Wellesnet Facebook:
This years results are no great surprise, since SIGHT AND SOUND opened the polling for 2012 to so many more people... as Orson Welles might say, even the janitor at the BFI could vote. I doubt if Penelope Huston would approve, but like FILM COMMENT, SIGHT AND SOUND is no longer a magazine I read, or even respect! Much better writing is now being done at Indiewire.com for free!

Atcolomb said:
Second place is not a bad spot to be.....

*
Nevertheless, I think it’s a slightly ominous development. The Sight and Sound poll is still the most prestigious of all movie polls, the one with the most influence on school curriculums, restoration funding, etc. Since the 60’s, Welles stature in the film world has risen to the heights it has mainly because of the Sight and Sound poll declaring him to have made “the greatest film of all time”, a rise in stature that has continued for the past 50 years. Now the giant pillar holding up that stature has been removed, and it appears that the “Welles Age”, as it were, may be drawing to a close, and giving way to “the Age of Hitchcock”, or someone else. We don’t know if CITIZEN KANE will ever regain the crown someday, or if it’s reputation will continue to slide downhill, perhaps even dragging Welles’s reputation down with it.

Considering the increasingly younger (and more iconoclastic?) demographic among today’s film critics, as well as all the best films of the last 30 years - which as noted by many, were barely recognized in this year’s poll - it seems to me that the competition for the coveted “greatest film of all time” prize can only get stiffer and stiffer with each passing decade. Is it possible that the magnificent House of Welles is destined to go the way of the Amberson Mansion?

[edmoney]

Now the giant pillar holding up that stature has been removed, and it appears that the “Welles Age”, as it were, may be drawing to a close

Furthermore, it's disheartening to see that TOUCH OF EVIL (tied for 15th in the 2002 poll) and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (tied for 35th in 2002) have fallen out of the top 50 in 2012. That's quite a fall for AMBERSONS, which ranked as high as 7th in 1982.

[RayKelly]

Ed,
That bit of news had escaped me. I cannot believe MA is off the list.

[Le Chiffre]

That is unfortunate about AMBERSONS, but this Wellesnet post excerpt from a few years ago by "Coldspur" eloquently offers a strong possibility as to why it's slipped so badly:

The rise in popularity of The Magnificent Ambersons is evident in the popular film magazine Sight and Sound, and its famous “Top 10 Films” articles (conducted every ten years). In their 1972 poll, ten years after Kane’s emergence as the magazine’s #1 film of all time, Ambersons appeared on the list, tied for 8th place. It was on the list again in 1982 (then tied for 7th place), but it hasn’t appeared on the list since. The reasoning behind this sudden resurgence in the film’s popularity is fairly understandable—the film had been a rather obscure title until a renewed interest in Welles erupted in the late 60s (as more and more new filmmakers wished to claim Welles as their director), however, the popularity for Ambersons was eventually quelled as people’s initial excitement for the film lessened because of the inherent flaws contained within the movie due to its glaring mutilation. The film began to be admired for the missing footage that couldn’t be seen—that could only be imagined—rather than the 88-minute cut that remains.

[Glenn Anders]

Beautiful, mostly judicious comments, in my opinion.

Yes, Mike, cold spur nails it or, as we like to say, "canes it."

All those years, youngsters (by then, "film students") had hopes that the legendary MA footage in Brazil would be found. "CITIZEN KANE was 'the greatest film ever made'" -- and "THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS was BETTER!" (a silly view, again my opinion), but the missing footage would make it even better yet! How could Welles' reputation, CITIZEN KANE, and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS not gain some gas in such a fantasy? Now that colder truths are emerging, and Orson Welles as an artist and a human being put in perspective -- no small way due to Christopher's poignant and "tough love" memoir, discussed often here) -- it may save Wellesnetters from becoming simply hagiographers.

In the long run, as you and Roger suggest, Orson Welles and his many works will do all right.

He was "some kind of man," and a great artist, and one of several cantankerous mavericks who took on Hollywood's factory system and changed it [as yes . . . William Randolph Hearst changed the American Newspaper (Media) passing now] . . . Von Stroheim . . . .

Think what time and truth have done to poor old southern gentleman artiste D. W. Griffiths --

Now THERE's a "falling off," Wellesnetters!

Glenn . . . WHO?

[ToddBaesen]

Of course, KANE is still # 1 in the AFI poll, although I find that one much more ludicrous than the S & S / BFI list, but for some reason the editor of SIGHT AND SOUND wanted to have KANE replaced... probably so it would garner the mag bigger publicity, which seems to have worked.

Of course all such lists are totally arbitrary, so you can't really take them very seriously, especially when Welles's own favorite film FALSTAFF isn't anywhere to be found. Also, many critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum no longer feel any need to list KANE or any Welles films, in preference for newer and much more unknown work from other directors, which I agree with.

[Glenn Anders]

I agree, Todd, for CITIZEN KANE is the triumph of a young tyro looking forward while FALSTAFF is the meditation of an old hero looking back. On the other hand, we would probably NOT be here at Wellesnet if we only wanted to play movies in our subconscious. ---- LOST PART OF THIS -- SORRY, UNDER SEVERE EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL STRESS . . . .

[Son Guy and I are watching Dennis Potter's THE SINGING DETECTIVE, courtesy of Wayne the K., first time since recording it on VHS, nearly 25 years ago. [That's a profound work about playing movies in our heads (instead of creating them, or even going to a theater to watch them). Where's the list of great TV "long forms," or "the future," as Huston said in CHINATOWN? [And where's that film on THE LIST(s)? A contender for VERTIGO? I would say, myself.]

[Or if I were British, still reading Sight and Sound seriously (as you suggest most readers are not), I would ask, where's Michael Powell and THE RED SHOES. There's the Masterpiece (and the Artist) that should be be #1, in my opinion. Powell made his "perfect redhead" (in his obsession and on film) human, tragic, mythic, and wrapped her up in superb (Jack Cardiff) color, (Brian Easdale) music, and (Leonide Massine) choreography; then, wrote a world class autobiography, which he died trying to complete. Ask Ms. Schoonover.

Here's what I said about the subject at hand [but was not able to attach to Mike's citing because of making a new wi-fi connection at our fourth (temporary) lodging after the fire, Frisco's venerable Granada Hotel]:

'I go by the theory that what we like in Movies (or what we think we like in movies) says something about ourselves.
[Maybe, if you don't much like them, more into video games, you might say MEMENTO or STAR WARS; an older generation, GONE WITH THE WIND -- as in, genius PR and the financial guarantee from "The South shall rise again" . . . "for tomorrow is another day," or "What the hell -- . . . .?" may form a standard conventional reply for #1.]

'But I also go by the theory, that a "great movie" says something about the Maker of the Movie, which is why there [are] so few "Hollywood great ones. By that theory (mine?}, Alfred Hitchcock, at his best, was working through his guilt at being a sensitive artist in a commercial medium, and his increasingly difficult and absorbing task of explaining to himself and his audience a common and vulgar jones of his time for "the perfect Blonde." In VERTIGO, he came to a profound but simple conclusion that his Art (as his conventional Victorian marriage to . . . brilliant screen writer, Alma Hitchcock, was (fortunately?) not, involved a complete and even pathetic desire [for] control of that "Perfect Blonde." [Ironically, in my opinion, Kim Novak, convent educated, was both artistically and largely in her personal life, the "perfect blonde" for this role (really a red head . . . or maybe a brunette), [BUT] HITCHCOCK THOUGHT HER CHEAP, AND REJECTED HER). It is a GREAT Film!

'[The photography, setting -- and Bernard Herrmann's [Straussian] score (most of all) aids, immeasurably.]

'CITIZEN KANE, on the other hand, has Herman Mankiewicz's knowing political screenplay basis, Genius Photographer Gregg Toland's lighting/ camera/editing techniques," and becomes in Orson Welles' hands, a sadly projective meditation on how both American Idealism and [a] young artist's ambitions will be weighed down by "original sins" from our present and his/her(?) past. CITIZEN KANE is the greatest Hollywood B&W film of the early sound period: a text book of Cinematic and 'Robber Baron" American Political History, as well as a tragic self-prediction of Welles' life -- in almost every sense. (Welles' gnawing grief for his beautiful, accomplished, feminist mother, dead when he was nine, prevent him, perhaps, from giving his leading ladies the warmth women might crave in a grand tragic hero. Hence, an inevitable falling off in "the lists," as women's rightful place in the artistic world has been recognized.)

'It still deserves to be #1 on the Sight and Sound List, as it has been for 50 years.'

* * * * * * *

------- Missed you, Todd, at the Grenada Hotel (free!) "Happy Hour" last night. The Gin may not be up to your standard, but . . .

What about next Friday? Orson Welles would have loved to consider this place as a setting (and casting area) for THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (and probably did).

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

Glenn:

I did come by the Granada around 4:30 but you weren't there, so I went over to "your old apartment" to find you and discovered it had been burnt out!

So sorry to hear about that!

I walked back to the Granada and still didn't see you, so didn't stick around. What if funny is I
brought my VERTIGO lobby cards with me, as I thought we could go to The VERTIGO hotel around the
corner on Sutter Street and maybe get a few free drinks there!

[Le Chiffre]

All those years, youngsters (by then, "film students") had hopes that the legendary MA footage in Brazil would be found. "CITIZEN KANE was 'the greatest film ever made'" -- and "THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS was BETTER!" …How could Welles' reputation, CITIZEN KANE, and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS not gain some gas in such a fantasy? Now that colder truths are emerging, and Orson Welles as an artist and a human being put in perspective … it may save Wellesnetters from becoming simply hagiographers… Think what time and truth have done to poor old southern gentleman artiste D. W. Griffiths –

Well said, Glenn. I wrote on Facebook not too long ago about all the amazing strides that have been made since Welles’s death in making his more obscure work more readily available to see, thanks in no small part to Sight and Sound. But there’s still a lot more to do in this area. Will the interest in still-unseen Welles work go by the wayside if his reputation begins to decline, like Griffiths? Interesting that both Welles and Griffith's notorious BIRTH OF A NATION have their centennials in 2015. We’ll see how much is made of each when that time comes.

Of course, KANE is still # 1 in the AFI poll,

Yes Todd, For a few more years, anyway. The AFI poll seems influenced (or cowed?) by the S&S poll. VERTIGO was #61 in their ’97 list, then when it finished a close second to KANE in the 2002 S&S poll, it suddenly jumped all the way up to the top 10 for the 2007 AFI poll. But my guess is that KANE will be overtaken in the next AFI poll by THE GODFATHER, not VERTIGO. If that happens, the giant reps of both Kane and Welles may start going into freefall.

Many critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum no longer feel any need to list KANE or any Welles films, in preference for newer and much more unknown work from other directors, which I agree with. …the editor of SIGHT AND SOUND wanted to have KANE replaced... probably so it would garner the mag bigger publicity, which seems to have worked.

No question. Also, if more critics start thinking like Rosenbaum, it would seem another reason why the competition can only get stiffer.

Where's Michael Powell and THE RED SHOES? There's the Masterpiece (and the Artist) that should be be #1, in my opinion. Powell made his "perfect redhead"… Alfred Hitchcock was working through his …increasingly difficult and absorbing task of explaining to himself and his audience a common and vulgar jones of his time for "the perfect Blonde."… Kim Novak, convent educated, was…really a red head . . . or maybe a brunette…

Deberah Kerr was a redhead too, wasn’t she? GB Shaw’s Pygmalion is what that’s reminiscent of, something Welles was guilty of too, when he turned redhead Rita Hayworth into a “perfect blonde” for THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Interesting that both KANE and VERTIGO, in addition to Bernard Hermann music, feature obsessive men attempting to manipulate and dominate a woman. Looks like there’s a new movie coming out with Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock that I believe deals with the subject of Hitchcock’s blonde obsession. Pretty good timing.

[mido505]

Hitchcock is a superb director, and made a number of extraordinary films, but Vertigo is not, IMHO, one of them. Vertigo is a great idea for a film, one of the earliest major studio pictures to fully project its creator’s somewhat perverse psychology through a fairly mainstream thriller narrative, but the execution is lacking. The two lead actors, so important in this story of morbid sexual obsession, are completely miscast; moreover, Hitchcock knew it and admitted it. The great James Stewart is clearly uncomfortable in his part, and only occasionally effective; Kim Novack is awful. I’m not sure this is her fault; Hitchcock hated her, having wanted Grace Kelly, and then Vera Miles for the part. Hitchcock tries to turn the sultry Novack into one of his glacial ice princesses, and fails. Novack, not knowing what to do, just gives up. A radiant Kelly would have been great in the part; Miles may have been O.K.; I think that the vastly underrated Tippi Hedren would have done a better job than Novack.

Hitchcock did make one movie deserving a place on a list like this: Psycho, which invented the modern horror film. The history of film would be unimaginable without Psycho; I don’t think the absence of Vertigo would make much of a difference.

Citizen Kane is the anti-Vertigo, in that it is anti-psychology. It is a “shallow masterpiece”, as Pauline Kael once noted (although she missed the point of her own observation); despite the big reveal at the end we really know as little about Kane at the picture’s finish as we do at the beginning. Citizen Kane is a film about surfaces because life is about surfaces; human psychology is ultimately an impenetrable mystery, and motivation can only be guessed at without certainty. Citizen Kane initially appears to be the more superficial of the two films, but is ultimately the more profound, in that it respects the inscrutability of a man’s soul, instead of reducing it to one director’s kinky obsessions.

Pretentious film critics like the fact that Vertigo is all about Hitchcock, because it gives them something to write about. Vertigo’s prominence is a holdover from the days of the auteur theory, when critics were looking for examples of a personal directorial sensibility conveyed through the old studio system, which was more like a factory than an artist’s loft. A film like The Searchers, a superb picture by any criterion, is on this list for the same reason. It is darker, more obsessive, more psychological than, say, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Of course, Stagecoach, the movie where Ford invented the modern Western, is the film that should be on the list instead of The Searchers.

Ultimately, these lists are stupid. Welles made many films, including Touch of Evil, Falstaff, and The Trial, that are better than Kane. Rear Window, Rebecca, Notorious, the first half of Marnie, Frenzy, North by Northwest and, above all, The Birds, are all better than Vertigo. To each his own, and who cares what Martin Scorcese thinks. He directed Taxi Driver, but he also directed Gangs of New York. Anyone want to make a case for that one?

[RayKelly]

Zvezdan Matović on FB alerted us to this Peter Bogdanovich piece

http://blogs.indiewire.com/peterbogdanovich/the-sight-and-sound-poll

The Sight and Sound Poll
By Peter Bogdanovich
August 10, 2012 7:23 AM

Every ten years, the much-respected British film magazine, Sight and Sound, polls critics, filmmakers, professors, etc., for their choice of the ten greatest films ever made. This year Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, a long-time winner, was dislodged from first place by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; Kane came in second. The magazine asked me to contribute my choices for the poll, and I tried, but found the exercise impossible to complete. I submitted my reaction and the editor asked if I could elaborate on my point: that the whole thing was not a very good idea in the first place; I believe they’re running my piece in their poll issue. My comments for them follow this brief preamble.

Of course, I didn’t know at the time that Vertigo was going to win. Personally, it has never been my favorite Hitchcock, nor was it a popular success in its initial release. I think Jimmy Stewart’s performance is quite extraordinary, and his final moments are among the finest of movie acting, but I prefer other films by Hitch much more: Notorious, for instance, or Rear Window or North by Northwest are pictures I return to with much more enjoyment than Vertigo, which is profoundly depressing. Maybe that’s why it’s suddenly so popular among tastemakers: it fits our depressing times; happy endings are out, miserable conclusions are in. Citizen Kane is no more cheerful, certainly, though there are at least a few laughs in it, but perhaps things have to be bleak to get on the critical radar these days. Which is not to say that I don’t like Vertigo, but only that there are many better pictures: at least five I can think of by Jean Renoir, for example, including The Rules of the Game (which came in fourth) and Grand Illusion. Anyhow, here’s what I wrote for Sight and Sound:

SIGHT AND SOUND TOP TEN PICTURES POLL 2012

After struggling with a ten best list for quite a while, I have decided that for me it is an impossible task. I could maybe---at gunpoint---narrow down a list of directors to ten absolute ultra-greats, but then to name each of their best works becomes daunting. Take Jean Renoir, for my money the best director of all time in the West: How to choose between Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, La Bete Humaine, or even French CanCan, The River, or Le Crime de M. Lange? I’d have to put at least three Renoir pictures on the ten best list, and then where are we?

Or take John Ford, arguably the best American director: Do we honor his Westerns, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, Stagecoach, or his memorable family sagas, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, or his most personal film, The Quiet Man, or his essential war drama, They Were Expendable?

This dilemma holds true for all the finest filmmakers: Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not, Only Angels Have Wings, or Rio Bravo), Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious, Rear Window, or North by Northwest), Orson Welles (Chimes at Midnight, Citizen Kane, or Touch of Evil), Ernst Lubitsch (The Shop Around the Corner, Trouble in Paradise, or The Merry Widow), Buster Keaton (The Navigator, The General, or Steamboat Bill, Jr.).

And what about D. W. Griffith? Probably the most influential and indeed essential director of all time; how to choose between films like Orphans of the Storm, True Heart Susie, or Broken Blossoms, or even Isn’t Life Wonderful?

Or take the finest Eastern director, Kenji Mizoguchi: virtually all his pictures are masterworks, so how to pick between such extraordinary Japanese scrolls come to life as Ugetsu, or Sansho the Bailiff, or The Life of Oharu?

And what to do with individual classics that are certainly among the best of all time: pictures like King Vidor’s The Crowd or The Big Parade, or Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of A Murder? Or Carol Reed’s The Third Man? Or Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running? Or Rossellini’s Open City? Or Fellini’s I Vitelloni? Or John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, or Faces?

This still doesn’t really do more than scratch the surface of the classics. As usual, comedies get short shrift: Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, for instance, or Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, or Mr. Hawks’ own His Girl Friday, or George Cukor’s Holiday? And we haven’t yet mentioned Charlie Chaplin. And all the musicals? Or Jo von Sternberg, either, or Erich von Stroheim or Frank Borzage or F.W. Murnau or Fritz Lang or Allan Dwan, or Raoul Walsh, for that matter, or Max Ophuls. In fact, rarely remembered now is most of the amazing silent era (1895-1928), the basic foundation of the moving picture art of telling stories visually. As Chaplin put it at the coming of full sound (1929): “Just when we got it right, it was over.”

No, this is not possible. All these films and so many more should be seen by every civilized person on earth, and the whole rating idea is anti-artistic, anti-film culture, just absurdly reductive: There are so many wonderful pictures to see, that to reduce them down to a Top Ten is a disservice to all the great work that has been done with that haunting 20th century medium of humanity, born just at the end of the 19th century: a now nearly mythical visual history of more than an entire 100 years of life in the world. The first century in history. We currently have a lot to live up to; a lot more than ten.