Daily Archives: December 2, 2022

My 2022 Sight and Sound List

Name: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Job title: film critic, teacher
Country: USA

Your votes

  1. Greed
    Year: 1924
    Director: Erich von Stroheim
  2. M
    Year: 1931
    Director: Fritz Lang
  3. Spring in a Small Town
    Year: 1948
    Director: Fei Mu
    Comment: The most neglected great film on my list, at least in the Western world.
  4. Ordet
    Year: 1955
    Director: Carl Dreyer
  5. A Man Escaped
    Year: 1956
    Director: Robert Bresson
  6. Ivan the Terrible, Part II
    Year: 1958
    Director: Sergei Eisenstein

  Comment: Like Welles’ equally worthy Touch of Evil, a monument to hyperbolic excess.

  • PlayTime
    Year: 1967
    Director: Jacques Tati
  • Vagabond
    Year:1985
    Director: Agnès Varda

Comment: Like Resnais’ Providence and Françoise Romand’s Mix-up, a masterpiece of magisterial juxtapositions.

  • Satantango
    Year: 1994
    Director(s): Bela Tarr
  • A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Year: 2000
    Director: Steven Spielberg

Comment: Not only Spielberg’s best picture but also Kubrick’s;  a collaboration between a dead director and a friend who survived him seems appropriate for a meditation on the differences between human and nonhuman, living and dead that comprises a searing allegory about cinema itself.

Further remarks: I’ve omitted Chaplin (City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux) Hitchcock (Rear Window, North by Northwest), and Welles (Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight) as “goes without saying”. Read more

Edinburgh Encounters

From Sight and Sound, Winter 1975/1976; also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. — J.R.

Edinburgh Encounters:

A Consumers/Producers Guide-in-Progress to Four Recent Avant-Garde Films

 

The role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror. If the artist has a role, it is to confront people — and himself first of all — with this horror, this feeling that one has when one learns about the death of someone one has loved.

 — Jacques Rivette interview, circa 1967

 

For interpersonal communication, [the modernist text] substitutes the idea of collective production; writer and reader are indifferently critics of the text and it is through their collaboration that meanings are collectively produced . . .

The text then becomes the location of thought, rather than the mind. The mind is the factory where thought is at work, rather than the transport system which conveys the finished product. Hence the danger of the myths of clarity and transparency and of the receptive mind; they present thought as prepackaged, available, given, from the point of view of the consumer . . .Within a modernist text, however, all work is work in progress, the circle is never closed. Read more