“I portray what should not be possible as if it should be possible, but Ozu portrays what should be possible as if it were possible, and that is much more difficult.” — Kenji Mizoguchi

Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll 2012

1. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles)
3. Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
4. The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. F.W. Murnau)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
7. The Searchers (dir. John Ford)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Th. Dreyer)
10. 8½ (dir. Federico Fellini)

And the loser is – Citizen Kane. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors. [More…, x]

Setsuko Hara in Tokyo Story.