BFI's 101 Hidden Gems from the 2022 Sight & Sound Poll
Below is a list of 101 of the greatest films of all time – but not the kind of list that you might expect from that description. No Citizen Kane. No Vertigo. Not even Jeanne Dielman.
Each of these films is one of the greatest according to just one voter in our recent Greatest Films of All Time poll; they are some of the hidden gems among the more than 4,300 films voted for by more than 2,000 participants. (For the pedantic reader, the films that got one vote each – more than we can fit in here – are all technically joint 1,956th greatest film of all time, combining the tallies of our critics’ and directors’ polls.)
It’s clear, looking through this list, that cinema is more accessible than ever: the keys to the gate have been thrown away, and at the same time the advocacy work of archivists and restorers has been making its way through the festival circuit and on to discs and streaming services, helping to satisfy a public ever hungrier for new kinds of cinema. Hailing from every continent but Antarctica and spanning more than 120 years, this selection is, in its way, as representative of the riches of cinema history as that other list we released at the end of last year. Fiction rubs shoulders with nonfiction, films made by collectives sit alongside hand-crafted animation, and a healthy dose of comedy sidles up to heartbreaking drama – and then there are the films that defy all categorisation.
That’s not to say that these films will never trouble the higher rankings of our Greatest Films poll. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) wasn’t even a one-vote wonder in our 2012 poll – it didn’t receive a single vote – and yet it placed joint 60th in the 2022 poll. When, nearly 16 years ago, we asked contributors to pluck out films “unduly obscure and worthy of greater eminence” (‘75 Hidden Gems’, S&S, August 2007), Amy Taubin selected Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) – since then, with the help of a 2010 restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive, it has made it into the poll’s top 50. It’s far from impossible that some of our new cohort of one-vote wonders will be in the top 250 when we repeat the poll, in 2032.
So why did these 101 films receive just one vote rather than the dozens needed to make it into the official top 100 pantheon? Perhaps they are little-seen or hard to find; perhaps they have been overshadowed by a different film from the same director or the same movement; perhaps they aren’t the sort of film people think fit into discussions of the canon – too unusual, too light-hearted, too low-budget; or perhaps their appeal is simply too particular. Why isn’t Fear (1954), voted for by Michelangelo Frammartino, the best-loved of Roberto Rossellini’s films? Why isn’t the Māori anthology film Waru (2017) – picked by Alisa Lebow – deemed a modern classic, or Mike Leigh’s choice How a Mosquito Operates (1912) canonised for its importance to early animation?
Whatever the reasons, we hope that presenting them here alongside the heartfelt recommendations of their lone voters encourages you to delve further into the darker recesses of cinema history, and maybe even to reconsider what makes a film the ‘greatest’.
Missing:
6 et 12 (1968)
Ahmed Bouanani, Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi and Abdelmajid Rechiche, Morocco
Mouth to Mouth (1975)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, US/South Korea
The Terror and the Time (1978)
The Victor Jara Collective, Guyana
Qabyo 2 (2003)
Ibrahim Abdulkadir Ibrahim and Abdulrahman Issa Kahin, Somalia/USA
Each of these films is one of the greatest according to just one voter in our recent Greatest Films of All Time poll; they are some of the hidden gems among the more than 4,300 films voted for by more than 2,000 participants. (For the pedantic reader, the films that got one vote each – more than we can fit in here – are all technically joint 1,956th greatest film of all time, combining the tallies of our critics’ and directors’ polls.)
It’s clear, looking through this list, that cinema is more accessible than ever: the keys to the gate have been thrown away, and at the same time the advocacy work of archivists and restorers has been making its way through the festival circuit and on to discs and streaming services, helping to satisfy a public ever hungrier for new kinds of cinema. Hailing from every continent but Antarctica and spanning more than 120 years, this selection is, in its way, as representative of the riches of cinema history as that other list we released at the end of last year. Fiction rubs shoulders with nonfiction, films made by collectives sit alongside hand-crafted animation, and a healthy dose of comedy sidles up to heartbreaking drama – and then there are the films that defy all categorisation.
That’s not to say that these films will never trouble the higher rankings of our Greatest Films poll. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) wasn’t even a one-vote wonder in our 2012 poll – it didn’t receive a single vote – and yet it placed joint 60th in the 2022 poll. When, nearly 16 years ago, we asked contributors to pluck out films “unduly obscure and worthy of greater eminence” (‘75 Hidden Gems’, S&S, August 2007), Amy Taubin selected Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) – since then, with the help of a 2010 restoration by UCLA Film & Television Archive, it has made it into the poll’s top 50. It’s far from impossible that some of our new cohort of one-vote wonders will be in the top 250 when we repeat the poll, in 2032.
So why did these 101 films receive just one vote rather than the dozens needed to make it into the official top 100 pantheon? Perhaps they are little-seen or hard to find; perhaps they have been overshadowed by a different film from the same director or the same movement; perhaps they aren’t the sort of film people think fit into discussions of the canon – too unusual, too light-hearted, too low-budget; or perhaps their appeal is simply too particular. Why isn’t Fear (1954), voted for by Michelangelo Frammartino, the best-loved of Roberto Rossellini’s films? Why isn’t the Māori anthology film Waru (2017) – picked by Alisa Lebow – deemed a modern classic, or Mike Leigh’s choice How a Mosquito Operates (1912) canonised for its importance to early animation?
Whatever the reasons, we hope that presenting them here alongside the heartfelt recommendations of their lone voters encourages you to delve further into the darker recesses of cinema history, and maybe even to reconsider what makes a film the ‘greatest’.
Missing:
6 et 12 (1968)
Ahmed Bouanani, Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi and Abdelmajid Rechiche, Morocco
Mouth to Mouth (1975)
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, US/South Korea
The Terror and the Time (1978)
The Victor Jara Collective, Guyana
Qabyo 2 (2003)
Ibrahim Abdulkadir Ibrahim and Abdulrahman Issa Kahin, Somalia/USA
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