No, this is not me complaining again about the Sight and Sound results. Just a simple observation about the great filmmakers that didn’t crack the top 250.
I should mention that it’s wild that Pedro Almodovar, Robert Altman, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Tati and Luchino Visconti only have one movie on this list.
Some of the great directors who have zero films on the list in the 2022 edition of the poll might have been the result of vote-splitting, no critical consensus having been reached as to what their best film is, they’ve got too many too choose from:
Joel and Ethan Coen, Leos Carax, Michael Haneke, John Huston, Krzyszstof Kieslowski, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, David Fincher, Brian De Palma, Jean Cocteau, Mike Leigh, Sidney Lumet, Clint Eastwood, Elia Kazan, Aki Kaurismaki, Jonathan Demme, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch, Costa-Gavras, Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Josef Von Sternberg, Milos Forman, Terry Gilliam, Ang Lee, Peter Greenaway, Ken Loach, Ida Lupino, Louis Malle, Paul Schrader, Vincente Minnelli, Jafar Panahi, Abderrehmane Sissako, William Friedkin, William Wyler, Zhang Yimou, Andrei Zyvagintsev, James Cameron, Emir Kusturica, George Melies, Jan Troell, Raoul Walsh, Souleymane Cisse, Claude Chabrol, Samuel Fuller, Hal Ashby, Paul Verhoeven, Oliver Stone
Blasphemy! Celine Sciamma has two films in the top 250 and these directors have none? Ok, I promised not to complain, I’ll stop right there.
The vote-splitting theory is more than likely what happened with many of the above names. How do you choose the best Coen movie? There are fans who believe it is “No Country For Old Men,” “Fargo,” or even “The Big Lebowski.”
How about Haneke? Cache/Hidden, Amour, Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon … I don’t believe, like others, that Haneke’s stock has dwindled over the years, but, rather, he’s just had too many great movies.
It most certainly must have been the case for Kieslowski as his Three Colors trilogy must have had its own split (most pertinently with “Blue” and “Red”) and then there’s of course Decalogue and his 1991 masterpiece “The Double Life of Veronique”).