By Sanjeev Verma
Cinema—and I usually say this when the wife is out of earshot—is my first love. For me it’s cinema. Or films. Never movies. I painstakingly—and I am sure gratingly—object to even my nine-year-old son calling them movies. Why, he asks? Aren’t they synonyms—films, cinema, movies, et al? No they most certainly aren't. Movies, I maintain, is what they are called in America and there’s something ephemeral, even trivial, about that word.
So, to get back to the point, I love films. Some 16-odd years ago, Sight & Sound, the film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI), asked me as a film scholar to nominate my ten favourite films of all time. This choice, the BFI letter told me, would be included in Sight & Sound’s ten-yearly poll of the best films in history. In 1952 Sight & Sound polled the world's leading film critics to compile a list of the best films of all time. The magazine has repeated this poll every ten years, to show which films stand the test of time in the face of shifting critical opinion. In 1992 (and that’s the year I was invited to nominate my ten) the magazine added a poll of directors asking them for their personal choices. In 2002, the magazine published its largest poll to date, receiving contributions from 145 film critics, writers and academics, and 108 film directors. The results were intriguing, both for their certainty in choosing intense personal films as the best, and for their lack of agreement about which films of recent times can compete with the greatest.
I remember the impact the letter from BFI had on me in 1992. I first luxuriated in the prospect of compiling a definitive list and thereafter cogitated endlessly over my choices. Starting with a shortlist of 100-plus, I then used the elimination process to zero in on my top ten. When some 40 names were left on the list, it broke my heart to scratch out names of films that have meant so much to me. Night after night, with the deadline fast approaching, I would sit on my study table agonizing over each film. Finally, seemingly unable to prune the list to anything less than 20, I picked up the phone and spoke to the head of BFI. Could I please—please, please, please—be allowed to send a list of 20? I would gladly write an essay passionately arguing why I couldn’t bring myself to strike out any more names from the list, I said.
The lady laughed heartily—a touch wickedly it seemed at the time—and told me she had received many similar calls from people around the world and her response was simple and stolid: We need a list of ten and no more.
Resigned to my fate, I spent another couple of nights, and days, and finally got a list of ten that provided that elusive sense of quietus. I still cheated having chosen 12 films; putting The Apu Trilogy down as one film helped. I never got the invitation from BFI to nominate my top ten films in 2002. I am hopeful of the letter—or e-mail in keeping with modern times—making its way to me in time for the 2012 poll.
But you know that marathon exercise, which had its moments of agony and ecstasy in equal measure, has held up nicely these 16 years. I remain faithful to the list in its entirety. Four years hence, if that e-mail does come, I won’t be surprised if that list remains unchanged. Unless, of course, an outstanding cinematic creation makes its debut in the interim period. I doubt it though. Sure, there have been a couple of stray films in these 16 years that have made me feel like reaching for the eraser and revising the list—the only ones I can recall are Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours, Stanley Kubrick’s hugely under-rated Eyes Wide Shut and the Coen brothers’ recent No Country for Old Men—but the list has survived.
Here’s my list:
1. The Apu Trilogy (1959), Satyajit Ray
2. Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica
3. Brief Encounter (1945), David Lean
4. Charulata (1964), Satyajit Ray
5. The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), Max Ophuls
6. The Leopard (1963), Luchino Visconti
7. Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Charles Chaplin
8. Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais
9. Strangers on a Train (1951), Alfred Hitchcock
10. The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed
No film after 1964. Yes. But then I am nothing if not old-fashioned. But when I run down the list of the films voted for by the 145 directors who took part in the 2002 poll, I find that these cineastes are equally old-fashioned. Here’s the list of films that received the most votes:
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Echoes of the Past