I am faced once again with the task of voting in Sight & Sound magazine’s famous poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Apart from my annual year’s best lists, this is the only list I vote in. It is a challenge. After voting in 1972, 1982 and 1992, I came up with these ten titles in 2002:
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog) Apocalypse Now (Coppola) Citizen Kane (Welles) Dekalog (Kieslowski) La Dolce Vita (Fellini) The General (Keaton) Raging Bull (Scorsese) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Vertigo (Hitchcock)To add a title, I must remove one. Which film can I do without? Not a single one. One of my shifts last time was to replace Hitchcock’s “Notorious” with “Vertigo,” because after going through both a shot at a time during various campus sessions, I decided that “Vertigo” was, after all, the better of two nearly perfect films.