Vertigo knocks Kane off top spot

Saul Bass’ poster for Vertigo

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Regle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

BFI’s top ten films 2012. See the full hundred here.

If Chris Marker had lived a few days past his 91st birthday he would have been pleased to see one of his favourite films, Vertigo, knock Citizen Kane off number one place in the BFI’s influential list of the top hundred greatest films, which they compile once a decade and has just been published in Sight & Sound magazine. A decent, if dull list, with Ozu, Coppola and Kubrick featuring too heavily for my liking, but a good dose of Tarkovsky and Dreyer, Vigo’s L’Atalante at No. 12 and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive the most recent film (2001) in at No. 28. Chris Marker’s own La Jetée just makes the list at No. 50. La Jetée and Sans Soleil both make reference to Hitchcock’s classic, and are, like Vertigo, concerned with the power of memory, both real and imagined.