Ranking your favorites films, listing them, has been part of cinephile culture for years. Critics’ year-end ten best lists have been around since, at least, the late ‘60s. However, Martin Scorsese wants no part in that tradition.
Last month, a video started circulating which had Scorsese saying that he was “against” making Top 10 lists of movies:
I’ve tried to make lists over the years of films I personally feel are my favorites, whatever that means, and then you find out that the word ‘favorite’ has different levels: Films that have impressed you the most, as opposed to films you just like to keep watching, as opposed to those you keep watching and learning from, or experiencing anew. So, they’re varied. And I’m always sort of against ‘10 best’ lists.
And yet, last December, Sight and Sound managed to convince Scorsese to participate in their iconic greatest films of all-time poll. Scorsese’s personal list was as strong as one might have expected it to be. It's a wonderful collage of established cinematic powerhouses.
Sight and Sound made an exception, just for Scorsese, maybe that’s how they convinced him to participate, and allowed him to include 15 films. I love the inclusions of “Ordet” and “Ugetsu,” two of the most haunting movies I’ve ever seen. The rest were as follows:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda)
Citizen Kane (Wells)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson)
Ikiru (Kurosawa)
The Leopard (Visconti)
Ordet (Dreyer)
Paisa (Rossellini)
The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger)
The River (Renoir)
Salvatore Giuliano (Rosi)
The Searchers (Ford)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
Out of the fifteen films he chose — no female director? no black director? How dare you Martin Scorsese! Don’t you know that the times have changed? GET WITH THE PROGRAM, OLD MAN!
A few months prior to that, Scorsese had stated, in an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, that his all-time best film was probably Powell & Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes.” A fabulously dreamy film.
In a recent interview with Sight and Sound, Scorsese looked back on his 2022 list and it’s a real chuckler. He actually pleads with the magazine to stop the “nonsense” polling people for their best films.
Those lists, we’ve got to stop. We’ve got to stop: it’s over. Don’t you understand, a hundred years has gone by! It’s enough! You can’t […] You’re the guys at Sight and Sound. You’re the ones who started this! I know it wasn’t your idea, but it’s them.
But I do think, “Oh no, I would have to redo that list completely!” I don’t like those lists any more. I’ve lived too long. I mean, I should have put even new films on there. I would have a Joanna Hogg film on there. But those ten or twelve or fifteen just keep circling around…
Scorsese is a huge Joanna Hogg fan, so it’s not surprising to read his mention of her. Scorsese has praised Hogg’s “Archipelago” and “Exhibition” in the past, and went on to produce her last three films (“The Souvenir,” “The Souvenir: Part II,” and “The Eternal Daughter”).