Poll position: a taxing task

 A poll tax is a levy of a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources.

Long ago, as a cub reporter/film critic, I enjoyed the practice of list-making for polls like this. Sight and Sound! It was pleasant to be invited into the world of importance and pretension, where folks of note could play jury, arbitrating a set of values that would culminate in The List. But no more: I gave up list-making years ago. Why? Here’s my answer.

If professions need gatekeepers to maintain a set of standards and decorum, then in the case of film critics and scholars the function has become twisted and all too predictable in its mix of sobriety and pretension, genteel shock value and barely controlled narcissism.

There are basic ground rules, to be sure, as easily discernible as a recipe book’s ingredients: something mainstream to show populism, something avant-garde to show hipness, something old, something new, something borrowed (from another culture, perhaps), something blue, or more likely noir. Be sure to include a title that nobody knows as well as a title that everyone knows, include one long scorned or long treasured.

My own lists back in the day were no better, apart from championing women and queer filmmakers and films from Latin America or the Latinx diaspora. I sweated over them like everyone else, then dashed them off at the last minute, often forgetting a key film in my haste. Ah, the choices. To include the list’s perennial favourite Citizen Kane (1941) or deliberately leave it off, or tweak those who worship it by choosing Touch of Evil (1958) instead (yes, I’ve done that), a mild manoeuvre that hardly counts as subversive. Yet today, I still watch interviews with young filmmakers from around the globe and witness with dismay the same short, deadening list of directors to whom they pay homage, whose pantheons they yearn to join.

List-making is by nature polemical. Maybe a true expansion of the Greatest Films of All Time Poll could at least have an impact in one modest way – to get a new generation to pay attention to filmmakers other than those who hog the attention (Scorsese, Herzog, Godard, Tarantino, yawn). A grander list might revive other figures from the past who deserve to be visible again, not out of nostalgia but for a fierce power in short supply today.

The films seen as having changed film history are often the ones saluted today; the ones that tried and failed are left off. Those outsiders have my heart.

Consider Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Yes, Melvin Van Peebles received attention in his old age, and posthumously, in part thanks to his son Mario. But I’ve long lamented the injustice of this film (and some of his other early work) not being recognised as the wellspring of the American independent film movement, its origin instead always credited to Cassavetes. Putting Sweetback at the top of a list could remedy that. But that would require acknowledging a film that broke such new ground it didn’t even belong properly to a genre, though it spawned one.

And there’s Pink Flamingos (1972), the John Waters tour de force. Waters could be the alternative pick for an origin point, with his no-budget filmmaking, casting friends who became his Baltimore Superstars. And unlike Warhol, it was never a Factory there, no one was tossed aside.

Stephanie Rothman is a genre filmmaker revived and celebrated by the first round of feminist film festivals and writers like Pam Cook in the 1970s. She mixed female empowerment and solidarity into sexcapades. Terminal Island (1974), her best, was widely written about but quickly forgotten, even though it deploys tropes of female power, racism and the carceral state in, gulp, a softcore setting.

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), another discovery of the early feminist film years, remains one of the most brilliant, aesthetically brazen and politically defiant films I’ve ever seen. Its inventiveness, and colour scheme, deliver an explosive lesson in revolt and impunity made at the moment Prague was opening up to the West. A wildly empowering fantasia, it’s an anti-capitalism shape-shifter that has moved successive generations of young women to go wild after seeing it. The only comparable US film is Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), which gains in power and stature with each passing year and deserves all that attention and more.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman… (1975) justifiably appears on lists of the greats, though when it was released Jonas Mekas attacked her for selling out. Today, it’s a sacred text. Lucrecia Martel started out with video, a camera her father brought home, and then? La Ciénaga (2001)! Meanwhile, documentaries are, by some unstated standard, downgraded when polls come knocking. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) is the Rosetta Stone of modern documentary, mixing the quotidian with reflexivity. And contenders for genre brilliance have emerged every decade, whether it’s Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) or Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010).

Finally, though, I am not convinced that polls make sense. Life today is lived through a set of contradictions: on the one hand, an era of image overload, a streaming firehose of ‘content’ beguiles a public with websites, channels, platforms, festivals and, less often, cinemas; on the other, the pressing demands of Covid, Trump/Boris horrors, Ukraine and the Russian invasion, the rise of fascism, climate catastrophes, inflation, threatened recession. The disconnect between screen and lived reality could not be more stark.

In such times of crisis so brutal as to make the body shiver, it is clear that we who make lists pick these titles, in fact, not for any one work’s intrinsic value so much as a way to place snapshots of our own past into the grand photo album of history. We are not ranking films, nor cinema history – we are ranking ourselves.

And if films get mentioned along the way… it’s a trick. Bravado covers a lot of sins where polls are involved. But there’s a poll tax in effect, too, that would replace affection and worship with a list of choices, a ranking of affections, a betrayal of generosity. These films were in sync with their moments, but what is in sync today? Only the list of 2072 can say.