Beyond The Sight & Sound Canon (thanks, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?)
While waiting for the next Substack piece this week, take a look at the contribution I made to TSPDT's incredible new list. Love this website for us movie nerds who love ranking titles.
This is exciting, everyone! An excellent movie website, They Shoot Pictures Don’t They, asked me to contribute to their “Beyond Sight & Sound List” canon. I was able to choose 100 titles that didn’t make the Sight & Sound list and add my personal favorites to their archive. Several critics/talented folks participated as well. Dan Sallitt, Erik Childress, Mike D'Angelo, among many others whose work I follow (and not all of the ballots have been published).
Linked below the description is my list. Feel free to question my taste below or check out the full final list at TSPDT’s site. As of April, I would add Coming Apart (1969) plus I goofed on five titles since my final TSPDT list ended up being 95 total, due to the fact that I chose 5 films that were under 58 minutes.
Criteria: max. 100 films, none that received votes for the 2022 S&S poll, min. length 1600 meters (58 mins. @ 24 FPS)
Once per decade Sight & Sound asks critics and filmmakers to select The Greatest Films of All Time. The Sight & Sound poll is widely regarded (probably indisputably) as the most trusted guide there is to the canon of cinema greats. The 2022 poll reached a wider and more diverse group than ever before and incorporated the top 10 lists of over 2,100 participants from all corners of the globe - who, overall, voted for 4,366 unique titles. But there are more, many more, great films. And thanks to Ángel González's curiosity and drive, the Beyond the Sight & Sound Canon poll was hatched.
Beyond the Sight & Sound Canon poll is essentially a greatest films' poll, only without those 4,366 films that received at least one mention in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll (courtesy of Brett here are those 4,366 films). Back in August last year we invited critics and cinephiles to submit their ballots (numbering up to 100 titles) of their favourite feature-length films (we worked on the basis of running times of greater than 58 minutes) that didn't register a single vote in 2022's Sight & Sound poll. Willing participants were given four months (entries closed at the end of December) to come up with their ballots. Thank you very much to everyone that contributed. In the end, we received 839 ballots (including from 75 critics who also participated in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll). They were dutifully assembled and compiled by Ángel. In the end, a remarkable total of 14,560 films received at least one vote, and they have been split into four categories - TSPDT
My list available on their site
My list available in Letterboxd form
Film Stage posted the most voted-on titles here
Much more to come on several of the titles from my list here on the Substack!