Try to Remember: Cinematic Year in Review 2002

Festival des Films du Monde Montréal, August 22-September 2, 2002; Atom Egoyan, Out of Use,Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, August 29-October 20, 2002; New Directors/New Films, New York, March 22-April 7, 2002; New York Film Festival, September 22-October 13, 2002; New York Expo of Short Films and Video, December 6-9, 2002.

In September of 2002, Sight & Sound published its annual "Top Ten" poll, a ritual enacted every decade since 1952; what surprised even the editors of that journal was how similar the poll was to previous polls: Citizen Kane was the number one choice, as it has been in every one of the Sight & Sound polls since 1962. La Regle du Jeu placed third: it remains the one film that has placed consistently in the Top Ten since the poll was initiated in 1952. In each of the polls, one could discern the vagaries of the educational, cultural, and critical contexts of the period. Nick James, in an editorial comment in the December 2002 issue, wrote: "When Sight & Sound's 2002 Critics' and Directors' Polls to establish the top ten films of all time were first faxed and emailed into action, we were quietly hoping to see some fresh graffiti on the concrete edifice of cinema's canon. If this was an urgent wish, it was mainly because talk of the 'death of cinema' during the seventh art's centenary in 1996 threatened to make a list largely unchanged from that of ten years ago look too much like an epitaph." Well, the Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll of 2002 was largely an epitaph, with most of the choices culled from the years prior to 1960. Even as the poll cast its net wider and wider, with more critics from what used to be called the Third World included, the results were more conclusively established.

In previous decades, when the Sight & Sound poll came out, there would be a flurry of critical activity internationally, as debates would form as to the significance of, say, the predominance of Hollywood "classics" (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Singin' in the Rain) even assuming a more global perspective. But this recent poll came out after the spate of polls initiated during the centenary of cinema by such organizations as the American Film Institute, and people were polled out. And the predictability of the poll (Citizen Kane again?) depressed any urgency of debate. (For the record, the Sight & Sound Top Ten of 2002 were: Citizen Kane, Vertigo, La Regle du jeu, The Godfather/The Godfather, Part II, Tokyo Monogatari, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Battleship Potemkin tied with Sunrise, 8 1/2, and Singin' in the Rain.) In the listing of critics included in the 2002 poll, what was also depressing was the exclusion, either intentionally or not, of the many critics who had contributed in previous decades; three notable examples would be Stanley Kauffmann, Jonas Mekas, and Annette Michelson. What was interesting was that the exclusion spoke to the fact that the editorial board of Sight & Sound finally changed in the 1990s, and the new, younger editors hoped to find fresher, more adventurous choices. What's hilarious is that this didn't happen, and the poll turned out to be one of the stodgiest in Sight & Sound's five-decade history.

We bring up the Sight & Sound poll in order to point to the consensus that has formed as to the canon of the cinema: Citizen Kane, La Regle du jeu, Battleship Potemkin, and at least one other classic silent (this time, it was Murnau's Sunrise; in previous decades, it had been Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc or the Keaton-Bruckman The General). Since 1962, when the Japanese cinema established itself as one of the premier national cinemas, there has always been a Japanese film: Mizoguchi...