Last Notes on the Sight & Sound Poll

All the critics' ballots for the 2012 Sight & Sound poll went online today, along with a Top 250 films.  You can click on any film title and see who voted for it, as well as search by director, year, country or whatever.  It's today's easiest way to get lost on the internet.

I realize I never actually created my own hypothetical ballot, which should be somewhat different from the Top Ten of the last big list I put together.  Being limited to only ten movies rather than 100, or 1000, I want the list to be as representative as possible of cinema as I see it and love it, and so I'm creating some arbitrary restrictions (one film per director, genre, era etc).  With my Top 100, it's not a big deal if, for example, no Powell & Pressburger film is in the top ten because they're well represented with four in the top 100, but I can't imagine a Top Ten without them.  That said, I'm inevitably leaving out a ton anyway (Ozu, Hou, Sternberg, and Renoir, for starters.  Sigh).  Anyway, here's a stab at what my Sight & Sound ballot would look like right now, in no particular order:

1. Seven Samurai
2. Chungking Express
3. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
4. Casablanca
5. Pierrot le fou
6. Night of the Hunter
7. La Commune (Paris 1871)
8. Days of Heaven
9. Rio Bravo
10. The Red Shoes

To answer a question I raised in my last post on the poll on the chances of a consensus forming around In the Mood for Love enough to get it into the Top Ten, Wong Kar-wai films received 71 votes, 42 of which were for In the Mood leaving 29 for the rest put together, including 12 for my favorite, Chungking Express (sadly, no one voted for Fallen Angels, though Kenji Fujishima would have).  23 of those voters would have had to have voted for In the Mood this year for it to surpass 8 1/2 for tenth place.  Unlikely, but with some new voters added, it's not impossible to see it moving up that high in the next couple decades.

Finally, here are the 45 films in the Top 250 that I have yet to see, most of which I'm looking forward to watching over the next decade:

Shoah
Pather Panchali
La Maman et la putain
Beau travail
Fanny & Alexander
A Brighter Summer Day
Touki Bouki
Fear Eats the Soul
Wavelength
The Traveling Players
Los olvidados
Performance

L'Age D'or
Mouchette
Amarcord
Out 1
L'Argent (Bresson)
Memories of Underdevelopment
Napoleon
Marketa Lazarova
Distant Voices, Still Lives
Werckmeister Harmonies
Breaking the Waves
Faces

Listen to Britain
Eraserhead
Red Desert
Chelsea Girls
Kings of the Road
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Videodrome
Daisies
West of the Tracks
A Tale of Tales

Wanda
Germany Year Zero
Salo
The Devil Probably
The Turin Horse
Love Streams
Floating Clouds
Melancholia
The House is Black
The World of Apu
Kes