Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll 2012

Sight and Sound magazine have published the complete version of their decennial 'Greatest films poll' for 2012, which includes all balloted films and voters.

Here is an excerpt of the guidelines that I received:

Please draw up a list of ten films only, in order of preference or, if you’d rather, alphabetically. The order does not matter to the voting system – we will allot one vote only to each of your ten films. We also invite you to add a short commentary after the list explaining why you have chosen the films in your top ten. 

As for what we mean by ‘Greatest’, 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.

My aim was to attempt an arc mid-way between those last three criteria, with one mind on distributing my selection across a global scope of film history, and the other on unmitigated pleasure. Or in other words, the impossible!

Nevertheless, here is what I eventually decided upon; each one of these titles remains exceptional in film history, and, for me, they are inexhaustibly rewarding.

Since their website lists films only in alphabetical order I reproduce below my ballot as I intended it to appear, chronologically with no preference:

• Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931) 
• Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)
• Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
• A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
• Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 1960)
• The Seasons (Artzavad Pelechian, 1975)
• Too Early, Too Late (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1982)
• The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)
• West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2003)

Image: Still from Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town.