S&S 2012 Canon (1) : Number 1

Why it's a good thing that Citizen Kane finally takes the back seat? And why the number one shouldn't matter...

"I'm not a number. I'm a free man"

Citizen Kane was certainly one of the best films made in 1941, even though Sight and Sound, like all American critics, failed to acknowledge it right away back then. So it was anointed late (only since the 1962 poll, 21 years after its première!), and now overstays its welcome by 5 or 6 decades...

Orson Welles's debut is a solid all around masterpiece, the perfect candidate for a canon no doubt, for all its accomplishments, stylistically and dramaturgically. Nobody should discount its presence in a Top100, meanwhile its spot in the Top10 is at least debatable, and the 1st spot is not its exclusive property. Crowning the canon all by itself for 60 years is close to ridiculous.

Ossifying a canon around a single film sends the wrong message in film culture : it suggests that cinema hasn't evolved since 1941, or could not possibly improve on Welles's achievements. It totally ignores the fruitful production of the 60ies for one (Bresson, Bergman, Antonioni, Satyajit Ray, Cassavetes, Fellini, Tati, Resnais, Kurosawa, Herzog, Sembene, Leone...), one of the best decades in cinema history by all standards, and all the subsequent masterpieces made more recently (Angelopoulos, Kieslowski, Lynch, Kiarostami, Sokurov, Tarr, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhang-ke, Weerasethakul, Ceylan...). And these candidates can easily measure up to Citizen Kane. When we remember that the 40ies were the all-time peak of cinema attendance in the USA and in the UK (3 times the number of today's spectators), it comes as no surprise why titles from that period left a more enduring mark in the collective consciousness...

Apparently this year each title on the ballot is worth exactly the same point as the others, so all ballots are effectively unranked for all intent and purpose. I don't know if this was always the case in the past for all the older polls, but it sounds to me to be the best compromise. It relieves the pressure put on having to determine if such film is really better than that one. All voters need to do is to pick 10 films worthy of a top10. It's a puzzle to be asked to order such equally great masterpieces in so little spots. Ranking them is rendered meaningless when thinking about all the runner ups left out in the rest of the top100.

This is also how readers should consider this final top100 canon : only as a bulk, regardless for the fine details of the ranking which only reflect the popularity of each title among voters, the one that most voters thought about (or saw at all) and wanted to include on their ballot. This distinction usually goes to the most "mainstream" film among equally deserving masterpieces, because it is the most widely known, watched,  written about, talked about, analysed, taught, published, cited. So Citizen Kane is this "idol", this diva, this pundit's favourite, this fetish, this token name-drop, this default reference. For this reason, it snatches the most ballots, and therefore, trumpeted as the all-time NUMBER ONE by appearing on every canon... it continues to feed this unquestioned reputation, and more people vote for it because they've been told it is THE "numero uno". It's a cliché perpetuating the cliché to remain a cliché.

The benevolent "anti-Citizen Kane campaign", this past couple years, in the anticipation of the new utterance of the decennial poll, achieved its goal against all odds, even if the means were not really fair play. Making a point NOT TO vote for Citizen Kane (157 votes in the Top50) helped to end its reign, only to let the ex-number 2 (Vertigo : 191 votes) fill the void artificially created. A necessary evil maybe to break the streak.
Sight and Sound also campaigned in their own pages (since January 2011), by promoting potential Citizen Kane substitutes in a written appreciation : Vertigo (191 votes), L'Atalante (58), L'Avventura (43), Mulholland Dr. (40), La Grande Illusion (22), Beau Travail (21), The Magnificent Ambersons (20), The hour of the Furnaces (0)... (not the most decisive list of number 1 contenders... more like random personal favourites)

Unfotunately, Vertigo only moves the top spot toward a slightly more recent era (17 years forward)... The epitome of greatness still remains entrenched in the 50ies, with a very CLASSICAL film if truly masterful. But for a postmodern title to win the prize, it will take more rounds of film education to freshen up the conservative taste of the voters, and maybe by asking them to WATCH more films before being allowed to vote.

Voting for an ALL-TIME GREATEST FILM CANON should be a privilege, requiring a minimal qualification, rather than being a VIP invitation sent out to colleagues and friends as a form of flattery...

You'll never reach an educated consensus by asking 846 random reviewers to share their idiosyncratic taste. But we'll look into this aspect deeper when they publish the detailed ballots online.

Related :

• Forgotten Obsolete English Word #7 : Canon 
• Citizen Kane (Ishaghpour)
• Sight & Sound Film Poll: Critics’ Picks (Kevin B Lee, David Jenkins, Vadim Rizov, Bill Greorgaris; Press Play, indieWIRE; 18 April 2012) / Not simply the best  (Press Play, indieWIRE; 18 April 2012)
• John Ford and the Citizen Kane assumption (Kristin Thompson; 6 March 2012)
• Is Citizen Kane still the greatest? (Matthew Sweet; Telegraph, 27 July 2012)
• The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996) 1h53'