Re: Sight & Sound 2022
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2022 9:33 am
I don't have strong feelings about Jeanne Dielman... one way or the other, but it's definitely an aggressive choice, for lack of better term. When you consider the basic film buffs who will use this as somewhat of an entry point into film, this list provides way more barriers to entry than, say, the 2002 list, which was something of an entry point for me. The director's list is easier to get in on the ground floor, although I will say that one comes with the big caveat of me really having cooled off on Kubrick in a major way, so 2001 as their enshrined greatest film is a bit silly to me.
I wonder if timelines were shifted a bit, if In the Mood for Love would fall off a bit. Five in my opinion, is an absurdly high placement (and I really like it, although I haven't watched it in quite awhile), but I wonder if Wong's recent behavior--changing the looks of his films substantially, changing aspect ratios in some cases, re-editing them in others--will hurt his reputation long term. (He's also not doing like Coppola, who has re-edited Apocalypse Now several times but not tried to hide the previous versions.) It's a recent development, coincided with the Criterion box set that came out last year, and it may be that it's only an issue with real purists, but I do kind of wonder if that, combined with his inability to commit to a project--he has bounced around from about five different things since The Grandmaster--might indicate that his reputation is in for a downturn in the years ahead.
The bigger conversation here is probably about how Criterion is absolutely the tastemaker in terms of the greatest of all time canon--they've released something like 60 of the top 100 on the critics list, and some, like Wanda were movies that no one would really know about or be talking about if Criterion hadn't put them out there. But there's also a downside: Sure, they can't release what they don't have rights to, and it's not financially viable to release some things (which is why most Polish cinema remains off limits in the US--the rights are very expensive for some reason), but they do make choices in which filmmakers they promote and which ones they don't.
I wonder if timelines were shifted a bit, if In the Mood for Love would fall off a bit. Five in my opinion, is an absurdly high placement (and I really like it, although I haven't watched it in quite awhile), but I wonder if Wong's recent behavior--changing the looks of his films substantially, changing aspect ratios in some cases, re-editing them in others--will hurt his reputation long term. (He's also not doing like Coppola, who has re-edited Apocalypse Now several times but not tried to hide the previous versions.) It's a recent development, coincided with the Criterion box set that came out last year, and it may be that it's only an issue with real purists, but I do kind of wonder if that, combined with his inability to commit to a project--he has bounced around from about five different things since The Grandmaster--might indicate that his reputation is in for a downturn in the years ahead.
The bigger conversation here is probably about how Criterion is absolutely the tastemaker in terms of the greatest of all time canon--they've released something like 60 of the top 100 on the critics list, and some, like Wanda were movies that no one would really know about or be talking about if Criterion hadn't put them out there. But there's also a downside: Sure, they can't release what they don't have rights to, and it's not financially viable to release some things (which is why most Polish cinema remains off limits in the US--the rights are very expensive for some reason), but they do make choices in which filmmakers they promote and which ones they don't.