Sight & Sound Top Ten 2022: The Greatest Films of All Time: My Top Ten

Louis Lumière: Barque sortant du port / Boat Leaving the Port (FR 1897). Société Lumière. Catalogue Lumière, vue N° 9.

1.    Barque sortant du port / Boat Leaving the Port
Year: 1897
Director(s): Louis Lumière
Comment: Société Lumière. Catalogue Lumière, vue N° 9. The art of observation, the art of the poetic image, a timeless vision in less than a minute.

2.    Lyudyna z kinoaparatom / Man with a Movie Camera
Year: 1929
Director(s): Dziga Vertov
Comment: Dziga Vertov's Cine-Eye vision at its most exciting. All possibilities of the moving image are dynamized, including the capacity of self-reflection. Cinema like this is not for passive consumption but for changing the world, yet a wake-up call like this is also stimulating entertainment.

3.    City Lights
Year: 1931
Director(s): Charles Chaplin
Comment: "You can see now?" The finale is unforgettable, and its grandeur is based on all that has happened before. The figure of the Tramp has never been more topical. There will be hundreds of millions of tramps as refugees from the global climate crisis.

4.    Letter from an Unknown Woman
Year: 1948
Director(s): Max Ophuls
Comment: One of the best-known and least-known films. We seem always to miss the point just like Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) always forgets Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine) who has loved him all his life. This story of the mysterious power of transference is an anti-romantic tale told in the most tenderly romantic manner as a double narrative.

5.    Kahdeksan surmanluotia / Eight Deadly Shots
Year: 1972
Director(s): Mikko Niskanen
Comment: A rich and engrossing family saga from a period of a violent transformation of an agricultural country. People who have always lived in harmony with nature are about to face modernization, urbanization and globalization. The universal theme is that of being out of time, obsolete: what happens when the world we knew suddenly vanishes around us. It is also a seismic blow to patriarchy and masculinity in general. The father is no longer able to sustain his family and loses respect and self-respect. As a director, Mikko Niskanen is equally talented in scenes of action and duration. As an actor in the leading role he creates an enduring portrait of an alcoholic.

6.    Sambizanga
Year: 1972
Director(s): Sarah Maldoror
Comment: Sarah Maldoror's revolutionary masterpiece about the liberation and resistance movement of the Angolan people against Portuguese colonizers is also a great story of love strong as death, told in the glorious colours of the African light.

7.    Yek etefagh sadeh / A Simple Event
Year: 1973
Director(s): Sohrab Shahid Saless
Comment: Before Abbas Kiarostami, there was Sohrab Shahid Saless and his A Simple Event, focusing on the ordeal of a little boy. The intensity in the account of the everyday is tremendous. Such cinema of duration is about being itself in the same sense as the concept of byt (быт) in Russian literature. In the cinema, Shahib Saless is most clearly a heir to Anton Chekhov.

8.    Hotaru no haka / Grave of the Fireflies
Year: 1988
Director(s): Isao Takahata
Comment: The ordeal of children in the firebombings of the Second World War is a subject that transcends the limits of understanding. Animation is the very means to handle even such a subject. From Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story Isao Takahata created an anti-war masterpiece of cosmic grandeur.

9.    Dekalog / Decalogue
Year: 1987–1989
Director(s): Krzysztof Kieslowski
Comment: The culmination of Kieslowski's "cinema of moral anxiety": a panorama of life inspired by the ten commandments. In collaboration with the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and the composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieslowski obeys the classical unities of action, time and space to a certain extent, although all episodes tell differents stories with different actors and almost all have different cinematographers pursuing different visual expressions. TO THE EDITOR: if Dekalog is ineligible, my selection is: Krotki film o milosci / A Short Film About Love, 1988.

10.    Nomadland
Year: 2020
Director(s): Chloë Zhao
Comment: Female directors have been reinventing the Western, and it took a Chinawoman, Chloë Zhao, to create the greatest work of this recent trend. The powerfully landscape-driven film brings fresh insight into the classic Western figure of the wanderer. It also evokes The Grapes of Wrath, Dersu Uzala and The Ballad of Narayama. It includes a topical sequence at Amazon, and opens to the cosmic view of Shakespeare: "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" from Macbeth's "sound and fury" monologue.

Antti Alanen
Film Programmer
National Audiovisual Institute
Helsinki

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