Gender explosion and the fall of the “Battleship” – Kommersant newspaper No. 230 (7431) of 12/12/2022

According to a survey by the British magazine Sight & Sound, the best film in the history of cinema was recognized by the world’s leading film critics as the Belgian “Jeanne Dielman, Quai Commerce 23, Brussels 1080” Chantal Ackerman (1975). Of course, this result can be associated with the feminization of mass, including film criticism, consciousness: after all, Zhanna Dielman is a programmatic feminist statement, moreover, innovative in film language. This is an undeniably outstanding film, but it would never have taken the top spot if it weren’t for the success of gender cult politics.

Sight & Sound has been conducting such surveys every ten years since 1952. For seven decades, this rating has become the most authoritative. For a long time, his favorite was Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Filmed back in 1941, this film did not get into the first rating of 1952, but then it topped all subsequent lists for half a century. Not only that, when the alternative directors’ poll was first conducted in 1992, both that year and a decade later, Welles’s film was in the lead in the same way as the critics: amazing unanimity! But in 2012, both critics and directors, as if on command, removed the idol. And Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a schizophrenic thriller with philosophical depths and incredible cinematic magic, was appointed the new film, the leader of film critics. But another ten years passed – and Hitchcock (convicted by his actresses of harassment) gave way to Ackerman, a feminist with a dramatic fate (she committed suicide).

I’ve taken the Critics’ Poll four times and have watched with interest how bizarrely the tastes of the film community have changed over time. Of the ten leaders in the 1952 ranking, not a single one remained in the 2022 list – even such masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein and The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir (not to mention about “The Childhood of Maxim Gorky” by Mark Donskoy, which also occupied a very honorable 14th place). Of the new ten, only two films – “A Man with a Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov and “Citizen Kane” – were filmed in the first half of the 20th century, the rest – later.

In the first poll in 1952, at the height of the neorealist fashion, all pre-war cinema was defeated by one completely new film – Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. In 1962, he moved to seventh place, but Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Adventure” came in second: cinema entered the era of Antonioniev’s dedramatization. Neither one nor the other, nor any Italian film at all, is in the newest ten.

The year 1972 leaves the pedestal of honor to the three classics (Wells, Renoir, Eisenstein), but for the first time raises the competing trio of contemporaries (Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman) up the hierarchical ladder. 8 1/2 is third, Adventure is fourth, Persona is fifth, Strawberry Field is tenth. The twelfth is shared by “Hiroshima, my love” by Alain Resnais with “Mad Pierrot” by Jean-Luc Godard. Thus, the experience of the director’s revolution and the sixties “new waves” is fixed in the consciousness of cinema, its intellectual emblems are imprinted.

But now half a century passes – and we see that in the newest ten-2002 there is not a single European film of the 1960s! And the only American of this period is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And the only French film was shot not by Renoir, not by Bresson, not by Rene, not by Godard, not by Truffaut, but by Claire Denis (Good Job, 1999), a director of an incomparably smaller caliber.

Gradually, intellectual auteur cinema is being squeezed out of the ratings by genre classics: Vertigo, Stanley Donen’s Singing in the Rain, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive are all in the top ten in 2022. Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” also touches the eye and ear. No Fellini, Godard, but also recent idols and troublemakers – Quentin Tarantino or Lars von Trier (neither of them even made it into the top 100). “Leopard” Luchino Visconti modestly stays in 90th place. More fortunate was Celine Ciamma’s Portrait of a Girl on Fire: this mediocre film, inscribed in the gender agenda, was in 30th place – between Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, as well as Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror . As one Facebook feminist said three years ago, “why do we need Visconti when there is Siamma.” Well, let’s wait until 2032: who wins.

But in the top ten for the second decade now appears “Man with a Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov. It is surprising that this is an ancient film classic, and that the film is a documentary (there was only one similar case: Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” entered the top ten in 1952). It is no less significant that the “Battleship Potemkin” dropped out – and, it seems, forever – from the top ten leaders. Yes, what of the dozens: the favorite of all the polls of the last century, Eisenstein’s film did not even make it into the first fifty, taking up 54th position. But in a 1962 poll, critics gave him a record number of votes and put him in first place in the list of the best directors in the history of cinema. A very significant fall.

Things are even worse for Eisenstein in the 2022 Director’s Poll, where he actually dropped to 100th place. The director’s rating itself is curious in many respects. It starts predictably and in a purely American way: in the top three “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Kubrick, “The Godfather” by Coppola and “Citizen Kane” by Wells. But then the unexpected begins. In 6th place – “Mirror”: never before has this film reached such a high rating position. And Tarkovsky as a whole is quoted very coolly: Stalker is in 14th place, Andrey Rublev is in 26th. On the 41st – “Come and See” by Elem Klimov. On the 72nd – “Ascent” by Larisa Shepitko: also a record, this time a family one.

The 93rd to 100th places on the directors’ list are shared by such masterpieces as The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Hidden by Michael Haneke, Pickpocket by Robert Bresson, but next to them are modern fashion features of a much more modest quality – Parasite by Bong Joon Ho , Moonlight by Barry Jenkins and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry. And right next to it, from a completely different era – “The Color of Pomegranate” by Sergei Parajanov.

As you can see, the top 100 most important films of all time included eight Soviet films – Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian and Belarusian. But not a single post-Soviet. There are African, Iranian, Far Eastern films on the list, but very few Latin American and especially Eastern European ones. There is no Miklos Jancho, no Andrzej Wajda (and no Polish cinema in general), no Otar Ioseliani (and no Georgian cinema in general). More evidence that surveys of this kind do not reveal objective truth; they talk more not about the Hamburg account, but about current trends and generational priorities.

Andrey Plakhov