EDIT: Scroll down to reply #177 for the Director's List. Thanks Sponge!

Results will be unveiled tomorrow via live-tweeting: @SightSoundmag

from:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/greatest-films-all-time-2012


The Greatest Films of All Time 2012

Nick James introduces the countdown to our Greatest Films of All Time poll.

To many of you it’s probably a familiar story. Every ten years, from 1952 onwards, Sight & Sound has conducted a worldwide poll of critics in order to decide which films are currently regarded as the greatest ever made. (Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist parable Bicycle Thieves won the first iteration only four years after it was shot. Famously, Citizen Kane has won ever since.)

We’re proud that the longevity of this poll means that it’s widely regarded as the most trusted guide there is to the canon of cinema greats. So for us this year is a very big moment.

About a year ago, the Sight & Sound team met to consider how we could best approach the poll this time. Given the dominance of electronic media, what became immediately apparent was that we would have to abandon the somewhat elitist exclusivity with which contributors to the poll had been chosen in the past and reach out to a much wider international group of commentators than before. We were also keen to include among them many critics who had established their careers online rather than purely in print.

To that end we approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films.

As a qualification of what ‘greatest’ means, our invitation letter stated, “We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.”

Each entry on each list counts as one vote for the film in question, so personal rankings within the top tens don’t matter. And one important rule change compared to 2002 was that The Godfather and The Godfather Part II would no longer be accepted as a single choice, since they were made as two separate films.

What the increase in numbers has – and hasn’t – done is surprising. Certainly, we have achieved a consensus on what represents ‘great cinema’ that now has a greater force of numbers behind it – and have a plausible Sight & Sound ‘Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time’.

Since 1992, we have also conducted a separate directors’ poll, which likewise has been dominated by Citizen Kane. Over 350 directors have contributed. Leaving to one side what’s number one this time, I can say that you’ll find a pronounced difference between the filmmakers’ top tens and those of the critics – not to mention many more fascinating sub-themes…


The great unveiling

1 August: live-tweeting from our evening poll announcement. (Follow us at @SightSoundmag, or use the hashtag #sightsoundpoll.) We’ll subsequently be posting the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time here online.

3-4 August: our redesigned and expanded September 2012 special poll issue is sent to subscribers, and should be available on newsstands (on Friday 3rd in London, and across the UK by Saturday 4th). The 136-page issue features the critics’ Top 100, a new essay on the top film, short essays on every film in our top 10, an essay on changing critical tastes in our poll, top 10s by decade, nationality and genre, the directors’ Top Ten, the critics’ top directors and directors’ top directors, and individual top-ten entries from 100 critics and 100 directors, from Woody Allen to Edgar Wright.

7 August: the September 2012 issue is available to download as a Digital Edition – as an individual purchase from Apple’s Newsstand, or by subscription from our Subscriptions Bureau.

15 August: the complete critics’ poll of 846 entries is published in interactive form on this website.

22 August: the complete interactive directors’ poll of 358 entries follows.


We’ll also be revealing select facts and figures gleaned from our poll results on an ongoing basis here and on Twitter. (You can also like us on Facebook for more selective postings and information.)