Here’s something that may interest you. Or not. (Could go either way.) I was looking over Sight & Sound’s ‘100 Greatest Films of All Time’, which has Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) at number one, having knocked Citizen Kane from the top spot in 2012. (That film always did need a more exciting reveal; would it have helped if Rosebud had turned out to be a massive fireball or dinosaur egg?)
But back to Vertigo, which is now the best film ever made. Really? That worried away at me. Who rates this film and why? The storytelling isn’t up to much. It drags and drags. (The first half is a dull schlep around San Francisco as we follow the world’s most obvious stalker.) It’s riddled with plot holes. It’s creepy, but not in a good way. It manipulates its women and then thrills in coldly punishing them while the men walk away. I have seen Vertigo on a number of occasions and every time I like it less. I have never enjoyed it once. So again: who is getting off on it? Who?
I looked at Sight & Sound’s list, which is billed as ‘the most trusted guide to the cinema greats’, in more detail. It’s compiled every decade by polling critics, directors, programmers, film academics. For the latest list 1,206 people were polled of which — wait for it — only 251 were women. So the list is 79 per cent the opinion of men? Might this also explain why, of the top 100 films, only two are directed by women? Do you want to sit with that a while? The fact that 98 per cent of the best films are by men, say men. Might this also be why it’s always Raging Bull and Seven Samurai and The Godfather and The Searchers and never Agnès Varda? Or Larisa Shepitko? Or Jane Campion? It matters because it affects what stories are told and what stories are valued, and because we have to put up with Vertigo as a ‘cinema great’, when it plainly isn’t at all.
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