I wanted to get a loose cross-section of English tastes in film, as a matter of pure documentary interest. And although its pedagogic value is undoubtedly limited, it does provide the impatient student with some potentially stimulating short-cuts. It gave me certain initial hints about which critics to read, for one thing (in terms of which writers chose to stand by which films). All things considered, I suspect it probably wasn’t and isn’t such a bad method to start off with. I acknowledge the important role that lists had in my early film education, when I began to use the results of an international critics’ poll in the Winter 1961-62 Sight and Sound as a casual guide to my explorations. I basically had three motives: (1) Recalling my early days as a cinephile, in Manhattan in the early Sixties. Being interested in individual lists rather than tabulations, I also encouraged idiosyncrasy and permitted cheating (via ties, alternate choices or whatever), generally promoting the notion that I wanted existential self-definitions of some kind. I invited each participant to add a brief explanation or description if she or he wanted to, with the idea that many quite reasonably feel that the entire notion of a ten-best list is debatable.

Although, in order to narrow my scope, I deliberately refrained from including any of the local critics who published “ten best” lists in the Winter 1971-72 Sight and Sound or the October 1969 Cinema, my essential aim wasn’t to supplement these lists but to try something a bit different. I recently conducted a survey which consisted of asking thirty-five people in the U.K., all connected in some way to film, to provide me with two lists: twelve film titles and six texts or authors relevant to cinema.

For once, though, I haven’t bothered with French accents. In the remaining 27, I’ve corrected a few typos for the first time, and accidentally introduced a few others, but thanks to the generous efforts of my good friend and best proofreader, Ehsan Khoshbakht, on Decem(as well as Adrian Martin three days later, who caught a few more glitches), these are now corrected, and five additional illustrations (again, courtesy of Ehsan) have been added. I’m still indebted to Laura Mulvey for introducing me to Zoo, or Letters Not About Love in her own list, which has subsequently become a touchstone for me.įor illustrations, I’ve selected the first film cited in each list whenever possible, even when there’s no particular significance to the order (when I couldn’t come up with one for The Nightcleaners, at least until Ehsan Khoshbakht - see below - furnished me with production stills or framegrabs I accorded the late Claire Johnston two others)….Because of a scanning error and oversight, I originally had to omit two entries, those of David Pirie and Paul Willemen, which are now included. From the November-December 1976 Film Comment and exhumed now mainly as a telling time capsule of this period in the world of English film criticism.

Egar malist