I've never seen the best film of all-time

Until this month, I had never even heard of it

The release of the once-a-decade Sight and Sound poll this December was stunning. The shock stems almost entirely from the scale and breadth of the change to its composition.

This was the eighth edition of the poll, and its reputation coming in to 2022 was one of stability - of measured, deliberate, slow reconsideration. The simplest proof point for this perceived steadiness is found in the top spot. Citizen Kane held it in five straight polls (1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, 2002) before tumbling all the way down to No. 2 in 2012, with Vertigo completing a steady ascent to the top spot.

This kind of plodding progression feels natural, just even, for a poll that canvasses critics and directors alike (the groups I would trust most to make sensible assessments) and does it just once a decade. The Sight and Sound poll feels geared specifically toward identifying films that stand the test of time. It is released so infrequently that you can rave about and then forget about countless films between editions. As The New York Times’ wonderful infographic points out, all but one of the top 10 in the 2012 poll had appeared on a previous version of the list.

History, though - even film history - is not linear. Change can be slow, then feel like it is happening all at once. And 2022 is an all-at-once moment.

Back to the Times’ infographic for a moment to highlight the sea change:

• Half of the top 10 were newcomers.

• Three of the new top 10 were released within the last 25 years. The 1992 list was the last to include even a single a newcomer released within the last quarter-century in its top 10.

• There were nine female directors with a film on the list in 2022. There were only two 10 years ago, and that was the first time any women had their work appear on the list.

One of the bigger surprises to me was the sheer volume of new films included, even beyond the top 10. Get Out, Parasite and Moonlight are all films from the past decade that felt like they would stand the test of time when I saw them. I just didn’t expect to see them on the unofficial standing-the-test-of-time list for another decade or two.

But the biggest shock of all lies in the top spot, that place I was just pointing to as the hallmark of the Sight and Sound poll’s stability a few paragraphs above. There, we find Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Unlike Vertigo, it first entered the list in 2012, and one edition later it finds itself at the top. Its ascent represents a bit of a smash and grab rather than a methodical climb.

And that’s the short explanation for how this film - the one now sitting atop the ultimate summit - had escaped my radar entirely until a few weeks ago. As a younger man, I wouldn’t have been comfortable even making that kind of admission. Film is one of my “things,” and here I am saying I am a bit ignorant about one of my things. Had Jeanne Dielman risen to the top of the list in 2012 and then come up in conversation at a bar or restaurant, I would have feigned some knowledge of it so as to not pose some imagined threat to my persona.

Now, approaching 40, I see this as one of the things I so love about my lifelong relationship with film as a medium. There is always more to know, more to see, more to understand about this artform. If I’m lucky, I’ll get 80 or so years to nurture that relationship. But even if I had 180 years, there is no way I’d ever touch bottom on film in toto. Part of what makes it so awesome is its vastness, and the complex, unmappable web of conversation and connection within that vastness.

If you love film, what you really love is neverending discovery. You watch Star Wars countless times as a kid and as an adult, and then you learn George Lucas borrowed heavily from The Hidden Fortress. So you start going deep on Akira Kurosawa. And then you wind your way back to a 1950s American Western like The Magnificent Seven. And this continues for your whole life, your appetite insatiable mostly because of your own human limits.

There’s always a Jeanne Dielman out there waiting to be discovered. How fortunate that, for many of us, it is just an app away from being discovered in full.