The BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine today announced that the winner of its hugely anticipated and world-renowned Greatest Films of All Time poll is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, ending the 50-year reign of Orson Welles’ mighty Citizen Kane, winner of the once-a-decade poll since 1962 and now in second place. 846 film experts participated in the poll, placing Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story 3rd and Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu 4th.
Two new films to make the Top Ten are both silent – Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera at no.8, the first documentary to make the Top Ten since 1952, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in 9th place. The most recent film in the Top Ten is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in 6th place. The poll is Sight & Sound’s seventh and most ambitious to date; the full results are published in the September issue, on sale from August 4th which also celebrates the magazine’s 80th birthday and a new re-launch, with a new look and new digital edition and archive. Visit the link above for the list in full.
In a separate poll, 358 film directors from all over the world, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola (who has three films in the Top 50), Woody Allen and Mike Leigh, voted Ozu’s Tokyo Story the Greatest Film of All Time, again knocking Citizen Kane off the top spot to share the no.2 position with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; Vertigo was voted 7th place.
Made in 1958, psychological suspense drama Vertigo first entered the Sight And Sound poll only in 1982 in 7th place - two years after the director died. Vertigo was largely ignored by the critics for most of his career; its rise in the poll is testament to how Hitchcock’s reputation has steadily increased over time. He is now generally regarded as a master filmmaker, innovator and genius of cinema. Starring Kim Novak and James Stewart, Vertigo trumped Citizen Kane by 34 votes this time around, compared to the 5 votes short of Kane that Vertigo achieved 10 years ago.
