11/7/2023 0 Comments Night moves arthur penn![]() The newest film on the 2002 list was the combination of "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) - but they won't be allowed to count as one title for 2012. Though there's been no rule about how much time should pass between a film's initial release and its eligibility (the Library of Congress's National Film Registry requires that selections be at least ten years old), most of the selections ten to have stood the test of time for at least a decade or two. Given the much wider and younger selection of voters in 2012, ist-watchers have been speculating: Will another movie (leading candidate: Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," number 2 in 2002) supplant "Kane" at the top of the list? Will there be any silent films in the top 10? (Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" and Murnau's "Sunrise" tied for #7 on the 2002 list, but the latter was released in 1927 with a Fox Movietone sound-on-film musical score and sound effects.) But, for now at least, I'm more interested in the process. Sight & Sound has announced it will live-tweet the 2012 "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" #sightsoundpoll) August 1, and as I write this the night before, I of course don't know the results. This year, a whopping 846 top-ten ballots (mentioning 2,045 different titles) were counted, solicited from international "critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles" - including bloggers and other online-only writers. From 1962 to 2002 "Kane" has remained at the top of the poll (46 critics voted for it last time). ![]() (In 2002 only five of the 145 participating critics voted for it.) Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) flopped in its initial release but was rediscovered in the 1950s after RKO licensed its films to television in 1956. ![]() Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (1948) topped the first Sight & Sound critics' poll in 1952, only four years after it was first released, dropped to #7 in 1962, and then disappeared from the top ten never to be seen again. No other director during the volatile 1960s had his finger so securely on America's pulse, and audiences responded enthusiastically to his exploration of the relationship between outsiders and mainstream society, even though his sympathies always seemed to lie invariably with the outcasts.UPDATED (08/01/12): Scroll to the bottom of this entry to see my first impressions of the newly announced critics' and directors' poll results. His use of lighting and sound were stylistically and intellectually sophisticated, but ultimately it was his themes which propelled his pictures. Penn understood the poetry of close-up camera work, acknowledging that words were to the theater what actions were for film. Like Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, he owed a huge debt to the crucible of television's Golden Age, but it was director Elia Kazan he resembled most in his sympathy for actors, the flights of fancy he allowed, and the incredible range of expression he elicited in films like "The Miracle Worker" (1962), "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) and "Little Big Man" (1970). Arthur Penn proved himself a true triple threat during his career, achieving extraordinary success as a director of live television dramas, Broadway plays and feature films.
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