Blindspot 2023

Posted on January 11, 2023 by badblokebob

This is my 11th year doing a version of Blindspot (not to mention that various other bloggers do it too… or used to. Do other people still do this? Is there a whole world of it going on that I’m somehow cut off from? Or am I a lone proponent, still plugging ahead with a near-decade-old fad, because I really like it? I don’t know…)

Anyway, if you somehow still don’t know what it is or how it works, the premise is simple: choose 12 films you should have seen but haven’t, then watch one a month throughout the year. (My 12 also contribute to my 100 Films in a Year Challenge.)

Some people just choose their 12 films. I normally do it via an elaborate system of compiling “great movies” lists in various configurations to spit out some general consensus of which 12 well-regarded films I should watch next, rejigging which lists are included and how they’re factored in to provide new results each year. But 2023 is a bit different, thanks to a significant event last month: the publication of a new edition of Sight & Sound’s decennial 100 Greatest Movies poll, one of — nay, the most widely respected list of its kind among cinephiles. There were 27 films I hadn’t seen on the latest edition of the list — more than enough to fuel my Blindspot selections for this year.

I’ll explain how I whittled those 27 down (it wasn’t a long process, but it’s more than just “the top 12”) after listing the films themselves. In the order they ranked in Sight & Sound’s poll, this year I must watch…

Jeanne Dielman…

Beau Travail

Cléo from 5 to 7

Close-Up

Au hasard Balthazar

Shoah

Killer of Sheep

Fear Eats the Soul

A Brighter Summer Day

Pierrot le Fou

Tropical Malady

Black Girl

With just 12 slots but 27 films I hadn’t seen, obviously I had to pare the list down somehow. One method would’ve been to just take the 12 highest ranked — they’re meant to be the best of the best, after all. But that didn’t allow for the fact that, to be blunt, there were films further down the list that I was more interested in seeing. Another method would’ve been to run the 27 films through one of my usual list-of-lists calculations and see which 12 emerged victorious. But in a year where I’d simplified the selection process, it seemed silly to overcomplicated it again.

So, here’s what happened: I already owned some of the films on disc; when the list came out, after I had a look at it, there were a couple of highly-ranked films that I’d already been considering purchasing, so I ordered them; and there were a few more that, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to, um, download. When I stopped to take stock of this flurry of activity, the number of films in my possession added up to 13. They weren’t necessarily the films I had envisioned being in my final 12 (for starters, two from the top 50 were missing), but there we were.

The only remaining question: which to ditch? It was nearly Au hasard Balthazar. I wasn’t sure I’m ready for the “a donkey’s miserable life” movie. I’m still not. But this seemed as good a time as any to bite the bullet and get it seen. What about approaching it from the other angle — which had to be included? Well, I don’t think I’m going to like Jeanne Dielman, but I’ve felt I should watch it for some time now… and, more importantly, it’s #1 — of course #1 had to go in! Then there’s the ones I already owned on disc: Shoah, A Brighter Summer Day, and Black Girl (also Yi Yi, but that was on last year’s list, so I ruled it out on the presumption I’d watch it in December. Oops). Then, the ones I’d freshly ordered: Beau Travail and Close-Up. Even if I hadn’t bought them, both are among the top four I hadn’t seen.

That just left narrowing the remaining seven downloads to six. I could talk you through my process, such as it was, on a film by film basis, but in the end it came down to a gut feeling. You can already see which films made it in — the loser, for what it’s worth, was Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. I couldn’t really tell you why; it’s just what I decided.

One other thing: I can’t usually have wildcards from Blindspot — it’s a list of 12 films taking up 12 slots; there aren’t any to be wildcards. But this year is an exception in that respect, too: I figure that, as the entire list is chosen from Sight & Sound’s list, then the 15 unchosen films were the only other eligible options, and therefore they could be eligible for wildcard slots. Disagree? Tough, it’s my game. Will I actually watch any of them, when getting through the 12 actual picks can be challenge enough some years? Maybe not. But the possibility is there.

Before we leave Blindspot behind and head to “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” (or, if you’ve come to this post second, before you head back to your life), here’s a dash of additional info. You see, just because these 12 films were all taken from the Sight & Sound list, that doesn’t mean they don’t contribute towards my completion of other lists — unsurprisingly, there’s some degree of overlap between different “great films” lists. So, in case you were curious (because I was), other key lists that some of these films appear on (at time of writing) include…

TSPDT’s The 1,000 Greatest Films (16th edition) — all 12, ranging from 34th (Au hasard Balthazar) to 869th (Black Girl).

BBC’s The 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films — Jeanne Dielman; Beau Travail; Cléo from 5 to 7; Close-Up; Au hasard Balthazar; Shoah; Fear Eats the Soul; A Brighter Summer Day; Pierrot le Fou.

BBC’s The 100 Greatest Films Directed by Women — Jeanne Dielman; Beau Travail; Cléo from 5 to 7.

iCheckMovies’s Most Favorited — Jeanne Dielman; Close-Up; A Brighter Summer Day.

Letterboxd’s Top 250 Narrative Feature Films — Jeanne Dielman; A Brighter Summer Day.

IMDb’s Top 250 — nothing (can’t say I’m surprised).

Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2022 edition)

Posted on December 2, 2022 by badblokebob

Well, well, well — the latest iteration of Sight & Sound’s decennial poll is here, and if you thought the last one upset the applecart by displacing Citizen Kane at #1 for the first time in 50 years, this edition has flipped the cart over, set it on fire, pushed it off a cliff, and dropped a nuke on it for good measure.

Okay, maybe that’s a slightly exaggeration — the previous top two are still both in the top three — but the new #1 is a bit out of leftfield. Sure, it’s a film that’s fairly well known in cinephile circles (though I’ve seen multiple people on Film Twitter confess to never having heard of it), but to normies it probably sounds like something that’s been made up as a spoof of The Kind Of Film That Tops These Lists: it’s a 3-and-a-half-hour Belgian film about a woman doing household chores.

While I imagine regular folk are getting mad about that in comments sections across the internet (it’s also directed by a woman, which will undoubtedly have set off a certain kind of comment section dweller), Film Twitter seems to have largely taken the news in its stride, instead choosing to get worked up about the inclusion of very recent films, like Portrait of a Lady on Fire at #30, Moonlight at #60, Parasite at #90, and Get Out at #95. Can any film so new be already deserving of a place on a list of the greatest films ever made? Some people think not, reckoning a movie needs a good length of time to settle in to a place in ‘the canon’. Others say why wait? A great movie is a great movie.

Personally, I tend towards the latter; especially in a poll like this, which is the results of thousands of individual top tens, not of a group of people sitting down together to hash out every inclusion and their relative merits. I mean, if you saw Get Out on its release five years ago, but only watched Citizen Kane for the first time last week, which do you have a longer-considered personal opinion on? Sure, you know the latter is a long-assessed Great Movie, but how much should that matter in your personal assessment? Such external knowledge isn’t necessarily a negative when processing your own reaction to a movie, but if we were only ever allowed to consider certified classics as classics, nothing would ever change. If enough individuals consider Portrait of a Lady on Fire to be in their personal top ten movies that, when all the votes are added up, it places 30th overall, why is there anything wrong with that?

On a personal note, despite a raft of changes throughout the 100 (a good many previously-well-established films have plummeted out of the list, replaced by brand-new entries), the number I myself have seen goes from 72 to… 73.

The issue of Sight & Sound with their full write-up of the poll is out next week, and can be preordered here (with four covers to choose from). The full list, and at least some of the related writing, can be found online here — and summarised below, of course. As with last time, I’ve copied Sight & Sound’s ordering for ties (still don’t know their methodology), I’ve used the same titles as them for non-English films (some have changed since the last poll), and any links are to my own reviews (either here or on Letterboxd).