I'm still going to watch the 16 films I’ve yet to see on the 2022 #SightAndSoundPoll because I'm confident all of the recommendations, in aggregate, remain highly worthwhile.

It's just that the actual ranking can no longer be trusted until Sight & Sound shores up its polling methods.

If you'd like to discuss the great #JeanneDielman after seeing it some time, feel free to reach out.

And if you've made it this far, thanks for reading. It's my very first thread on #Mastodon.

/end

Fixating upon exact positions in the #SightandSoundPoll ranking is a mistake because the poll's design needs to be revised to measure voter intent correctly.

So, if you want to blame something, blame the brokenness of the survey.

The voters operated out of a sense of altruism.

Remember, all #art (including #film) is a collective reflection of ourselves.

When the work ceases to represent us as in our entirety, the promise inherent in that art is undermined.

50/

In the end, if all of these flaws in research methodology mean that the #SightandSoundPoll can't really tell us what their pool of experts think the Greatest Film of All Time is anymore, or even provide a sensible ranking of voters' intent in answering that question, what DOES it tell us?

Only high-level (though still valuable) learnings:

47/

I predicted in my earlier thread that we'd see some paring among the works of OG masters of #cinema that were likely over-indexed if we wanted to have a #SightandSoundPoll list more representative of contemporary film.

The order I called the likelihood of cuts was:

Bergman > Bresson > Dreyer > Godard > Tarkovsky > Hitchcock

And that was precisely the order of works cut, with the last three spared.

37/

One film I'm particularly delighted to see benefit from a #SightandSoundPoll reset was Do the Right Thing.

That #film shamefully sat at #127 last time, despite being one of the most transformative films of the last 40 years, well beyond its context of race relations in the U.S.

I earlier proclaimed Do the Right Thing belonged in the Top 20 without thinking it had any chance of rising that high.

Instead, it jumped 103 spots to land at #24, and I'm quite pleased with that result.

35/