On the cover of Sight & Sound’s Winter 2022-2023 issue Jimmy Stewart stares in terror while he dangles off a roof, a still image from the seventh decennial Critics Poll’s champion, Vertigo (1958), and a not so subtle hint at what was to be found in the pages therein. Sure enough, Vertigo did fall (albeit, softly, to second place) to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
But does anyone believe Jeanne Dielman, a three-and-a-half hour art film frequently described—even by its adherents—as boring, really is the greatest movie of all time?
That’s what I aimed to find out by tallying every last one of the 1,634 ballots (erroneously reported by S&S as 1,639) submitted by the critics. First, we’ll dispense with the Critics Poll misnomer as Sight & Sound ‘fessed up to a the inclusion of “programmers, curators, archivists, film historians, and other academics” starting in 2012; by my count, less than half the voters in 2022’s Critics Poll are professional critics (not to mention the inclusion of several lawyers and a retired pharmacist) and little more than half were in 2012. Really, the inclusion of non-critics goes back to 1992, though the ballot-stuffing didn’t begin until 2012 to achieve a “broader […] scope of contributors” by increasing the voter-base from 145 to 846 and then further doubling it in 2022.
Ditching the previous model of “chains of recommendation” for nominating voters, Sight & Sound instead hired consultants to shape the constituency. Clearly the intention in 2012 was to deliberately shake things up and hope that Citizen Kane (1941) would finally be deposed after 50 years, and they achieved that result. So why did Sight & Sound feel the need to shake things up a second time in a row? The sole reason offered as to the drastic increase in critics in 2022: Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity—“more critics of varying ages, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds, more critics with disabilities”. Or put another way, as Girish Shambu, one of the 2022 poll’s consultants, did: “let’s set the [straight white male] canon on 🔥🔥”.
The unfortunate reality is, like nearly everything else in modern life, the most renowned film poll in history has been co-opted for political ends. Not that past polls had been devoid of explicitly political selections such as films made by Nazi propagandists, Soviet theorists, or academic Marxists in the wake of 1968; however, this marks the first time an ideological agenda has been set by Sight & Sound itself to directly influence who is voting and why.
Great, but is there a difference in how the critics voted?
Yes, as it turns out.
After weeding out the non-critics Vertigo keeps its crown for the second straight poll and it is Jeanne Dielman instead who is the runner-up. Citizen Kane and Tokyo Story (1953) lock down third and fourth place where the rest of the top ten shuffle around a bit: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and In the Mood for Love (2000) trade places, The Godfather (1972) and The Rules of the Game (1939) edge out Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and Beau Travail (1999) drops back five spots.
Jeanne Dielman, at the time just three years removed from a Criterion disc release after languishing in obscurity, came in at #36 in 2012 and in 2022 has the most votes in a S&S poll ever with 215. Yet it is also the victor with the smallest percentage of votes in the poll’s 70 year history at just 13.12%—that a 0.43% swing going from “critics” to critics was enough for Vertigo to get the edge shows just how narrow Jeanne’s lead was. Doing the same exercise with 2012’s results didn’t change anything—Vertigo still thumped Kane.
In other words, the new consensus is anything but. Rather, Jeanne Dielman seems like the de facto vote amongst voters (i.e. academics) motivated to nominate a female work for ideological reasons. Not only did Sight & Sound fail to oust their previous champion but they compromised their integrity in the process: the whole affair delegitimizes the enterprise of the critics poll at a time when the opinion of critics held by general audiences has never been in lower regard.
Worse still, Sight & Sound’s gimmick is untenable because their process can’t scale indefinitely. How can they top themselves in 2032? Who else could they possibly include? If everyone is a critic, then no one is. Fact is, to quote Armond White, “you can’t democratize expertise”—that’s why we valued critics in the first place. We need experts who are paid to watch it all—the good and the bad—to help audiences understand their response to a film, to champion those too little seen, and celebrate those that unite us in our common humanity.
And if the people are really clamoring for the opinions of “programmers, curators, archivists, film historians, and other academics” (and lawyers and retired pharmacists) or amateur reviewers regurgitating a press release then give them their own polls.
You’d be hard pressed to go out on the street and find anyone who knew what Jeanne Dielman is, let alone seen it and thought it was the greatest film ever made! Nowhere is this point better articulated than by, of all things, the sketch comedy show The Kids in the Hall. Their “Citizen Kane” sketch gets belly laughs because it’s absurd not to know Citizen Kane. You couldn’t make the same sketch with Jeanne Dielman.