Should we be dizzy at Vertigo's rise to the top?

The Hitchcock film has topped the only poll that matters – ‘Sight & Sound’ – a list that offers a strong argument for the virtues of patience and serious thinking when assessing cinema

SO, AFTER A STEADY, 30-year creep up the charts, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo has finally overtaken Citizen Kane to take the top spot on the Sight & Sound poll to find the greatest films of all time. Should we care? Well, dispatches concerning the Munich agreement or the fall of the USSR were probably of greater significance. But, for the educated film enthusiast, this is more interesting news than anything emanating from that running-and-jumping jamboree in east London. Listen carefully.

The Sight & Sound poll is the only one that matters.

Oh, he would say that, wouldn’t he? After all, both Donald Clarke and Tara Brady from this newspaper were among the critics invited to vote.

Never mind that. First instituted in 1952 and restaged every 10 years, the Sight & Sound poll was delivering its verdict decades before list-making became an epidemic. Rather than reacting to momentary whims, it follows tectonic alterations in critical thinking. It establishes a canon. Its findings are carved in granite rather than written in water.

This year, acknowledging the widening of the conversation, Sight Sound magazine, official organ of the British Film Institute, increased the worldwide electorate from a tight 144 to a more cluttered 846.

Programmers and other related professionals now join critics in voting. The organisers also decided to compile an official top 50 for the first time.

How has this altered the tone? Barely at all. Whingers will point out that, not only does no film made before 1968 register in the top 10, only two movies released in the current century make the top 50. (David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, since you ask.) Just one picture in the top 10 has failed to figure in any previous Sight Sound poll, and that project, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, is an experimental quasi-documentary from the silent era. Quentin Tarantino is nowhere in sight. The Dark Knight? I think your mummy is waiting for you at reception, young man.

Every decade, accusations of elitism are flung at the poll. Surely the top 10 (and now the top 50) serves only to confirm how out of touch movie critics (and now programmers) are with mainstream film-goers. The poll of directors, carried out simultaneously, offers no good news for the populist wing. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, a sad, timeless Japanese drama, now heads that list. Citizen Kane still lurks in second place.

The argument is not worth entertaining. As the digital universe has expanded – and Nick Hornby’s list-making generation has grabbed the levers of power – we have become bombarded with populist charts from every corner of the battlefield. If, like many, you hold the (perfectly reasonable) view that either The Dark Knight or The Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film of all time, you can relax in the knowledge that you have won the battle. A million lists on the internet support your view.

Meanwhile, the Sight & Sound poll quietly and unhurriedly – only once every 10 years, remember – makes that case for a class of serious cinema that blossomed from the late silent era to the art-house boom in the early 1960s.

Indifferently reviewed on its release in 1958, Vertigo now seems like the perfect figurehead for that loosely defined sensibility. It is, of course, less forbidding than Man with a Movie Camera. For all its oddness, it is never quite as crazed as Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, the silent fever dream that re-enters the chart at number nine. It’s rarely as aloof as Stanley Kubrick’s durable 2001: A Space Odyssey, still in the top five. But it is very definitely some class of art film. Following James Stewart’s crazed ex-cop as he works through an obsession with a dead woman, the picture features long stretches where nothing much happens. Yet its queasy poetry has hung about the body cinema and influenced a generation of Hitchcock acolytes.

Vertigo first entered the chart in 1982, just two years after Hitchcock’s death, and has risen a few places every decade. In 2002, it was lurking in second place. The film’s eventual triumph does nothing to damage Citizen Kane’s reputation. Indeed, freed from the burden of supremacy, Orson Welles’s great film may now enjoy some fresh, uncluttered re-evaluation.

There are things worth arguing about in the charts. The movie at the head of my list, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, did not even register in the expanded top 50. (Ms Brady’s top choice, The Searchers, made the top 10.) It is disappointing to see only one film by Ingmar Bergman and one by Billy Wilder in the expanded chart. Never mind. The list offers a strong argument for the virtues of patience and serious thinking when assessing cinema. Maybe it takes 40 years to establish if a work of art is really worthwhile. We’ll have this discussion again in 2022.

Details of The Irish Times' critics' selections for the poll can be found on Donald Clarke's blog, Screenwriter. irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter