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Vertigo is named 'greatest film of all time'
Kim Novak starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 suspense thriller
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has replaced Orson Welles's Citizen Kane at the top of a poll that sets out to name one film "the greatest of all time".
The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine polls a selected panel once a decade and Citizen Kane has been its top pick for the last 50 years.
This time 846 distributors, critics and academics championed Vertigo, about a retired cop with a fear of heights.
Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo beat Citizen Kane by 34 votes.
In the last poll held 10 years ago, Hitchcock's 1958 thriller came five votes behind Welles's 1941 classic.
Its triumph coincides with the launch of the BFI's Genius of Hitchcock season, a major retrospective celebrating the acclaimed "master of suspense".
Camera trickVertigo, the film Hitchcock regarded as his most personal, sees the director tackle obsessional love, one of his recurring themes.
It opens with police officer Scotty Ferguson, played by Stewart, retiring after his vertigo inadvertently leads to the death of a colleague.
SIGHT AND SOUND'S TOP 10
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Regle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8½ (Fellini, 1963)
He is then hired by an old friend whose beautiful wife - played by Novak - is behaving strangely.
As the story plays out against a San Francisco skyline, there are several revelations that challenge the audience's preconceptions about characters and events.
The film is famous for a camera trick Hitchcock invented to represent Scotty's vertigo - a simultaneous zoom-in and pull-back of the camera that creates a disorientating depth of field.
The visual, often imitated, has become known as a "dolly zoom" or "trombone shot".
Like Citizen Kane, Vertigo received mixed reviews on release but has grown in stature as the years have passed.
The Sight and Sound list contains few surprises, with all of the films cited more than 40 years old.
Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, from 1953, is ranked third - bettering its 2002 placement at five - while Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) drops one place, from three to four.
Silent filmsBoth new entries in the Top 10 are silent - Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera at eight, and Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc at nine.
The newest film in the Top 10 is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, which charts at six.
The top British film in the countdown is The Third Man, which came in at the relatively low placing of number 73.
DIRECTORS' TOP 10 FILMS
1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
2= 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
2= Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
7= The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
7= Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
Source: Sight & Sound
The panel, which voted for 2,045 films overall, was asked to interpret "greatest" how it saw fit.
Its results, said Sight and Sound editor Nick James, "reflects changes in the culture of film criticism".
Vertigo, he continued, was "the ultimate critics' film".
"It is a dream-like film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul-mate."
In a separate poll run by the monthly publication involving 358 film directors, Ozu's Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film ever made.
Citizen Kane is ranked at number two jointly with 2001, while Vertigo occupies seventh place.
Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Mike Leigh were among the participants in the poll.
The full results are published in Sight and Sound's September issue.
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Comment number 211.
B_Stockwell3rd August 2012 - 0:33
How can anything artistic EVER be the best or greatest? You can't use a yardstick to make an unassailable claim. One can declare the longest, costliest, most financially successful, oldest, etc., the same way a stopwatch or other neutral system can declare the fastest runner or best performance in a sporting event. There's no such objectivity in the arts. Greatest film? Take your pick . . .
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Comment number 209.
Mr_Soma2nd August 2012 - 23:35
I've not seen that many of these. I'm sure they're great films, and I will certainly make an effort to watch more of them, but again I find it suspicious that there are NO movies from the past 30 years included here. It suggests to me that a degree of elitism - or perhaps groupthink operated here?
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Comment number 193.
Knut Largerson2nd August 2012 - 21:10
So how is Citizen Kane the best Film last year, and suddenly Vertigo overtakes it.
Vertigo isn't a new film, what's changed that suddenly make it better?
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Comment number 192.
mikehunt2nd August 2012 - 21:06
can't really argue with their choice ,
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Comment number 141.
ichabod2nd August 2012 - 13:19
Vertigo - the greatest - never. Great backdrop of San Fransico but why would Kim Novak's character fancy a man double her age? Credibility is needed as well as style. Barbara Bel Geddes character is irritating, none of the main characters are that likeable. North by North West is much better. Citizen Kane is truly awesome. Casablanca has the best script and the warmest glow.
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Comments 5 of 12