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Sight and Sound
Sight and Sound (formerly written Sight & Sound) is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well-known decennial Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.
Sight and Sound was first published in Spring 1932 as "A quarterly review of modern aids to learning published under the auspices of the British Institute of Adult Education". In 1934, management of the magazine was handed to the nascent British Film Institute (BFI), which still publishes the magazine today.[better source needed] Sight and Sound was published quarterly for most of its history until the early 1990s, apart from a brief run as a monthly publication in the early 1950s, but in 1991 it merged with another BFI publication, the Monthly Film Bulletin, and started to appear monthly.
In 1949, Gavin Lambert, co-founder of film journal Sequence, was hired as the editor, and also brought with him Sequence editor Penelope Houston as assistant editor as well as co-founders and future film directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. Lambert edited the journal until 1956, with Houston taking over as editor until 1990. Philip Dodd became the editor following the merging of Monthly Film Bulletin with Nick James taking over in 1997. James was editor until August 2019. It is currently[when?] edited by Mike Williams. The magazine reviews all film releases each month, including those with a limited (art house) release, as opposed to most film magazines which concentrate on those films with a general release.
Sight and Sound has in the past been the subject of criticism, notably from Raymond Durgnat, who often accused it of elitism, puritanism and snobbery, although he did write for it in the 1950s, and again in the 1990s. Until 2020, the magazine's American counterpart was Film Comment, a magazine that was published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
Since 1952, Sight and Sound has conducted a decennial poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Until 1992, the votes of the invited critics and directors were compiled in one list; since 1992, directors have been invited to participate in a separate poll.
The Sight and Sound poll has come to be regarded as the most important of the "greatest ever film" lists. The critic Roger Ebert described it as "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously."
Sight and Sound first ran the poll in 1952 following publication earlier in the year of a list of the Top Ten Films, headed by Battleship Potemkin, based on a poll of mostly directors conducted by the committee of the Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Following publication of that poll, Sight and Sound decided to poll film critics for their choices and announced the results in their next issue. 85 critics from Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were asked but only 63 responded including Lindsay Anderson, Lotte H. Eisner, Curtis Harrington, Henri Langlois, Friedrich Luft, Claude Mauriac, Dilys Powell, Jean Queval, Terry Ramsaye, Karel Reisz, G. W. Stonier (under the name William Whitebait) and Archer Winsten. Most critics found the question unfair. The first poll was topped by Bicycle Thieves with 25 out of 63 votes and contained six silent films. The five subsequent polls (1962–2002) were won by Citizen Kane (which finished 13th in 1952).
For the 2012 poll, Sight and Sound listened to decades of criticism about the lack of diversity of its poll participants and made a huge effort to invite a much wider variety of critics and filmmakers from around the world to participate, taking into account gender, ethnicity, race, geographical region, socioeconomic status, and other kinds of underrepresentation. The list of people polled for the critics' poll expanded significantly from 145 to 846 and also included programmers, curators, archivists, film historians and other academics for the first time. Following the change, Citizen Kane only received the second highest number of votes, with Vertigo receiving the most. The directors' poll also expanded from 108 to 358 directors and Tokyo Story received the most votes with Citizen Kane receiving the joint second-most together with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sight and Sound
Sight and Sound (formerly written Sight & Sound) is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well-known decennial Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.
Sight and Sound was first published in Spring 1932 as "A quarterly review of modern aids to learning published under the auspices of the British Institute of Adult Education". In 1934, management of the magazine was handed to the nascent British Film Institute (BFI), which still publishes the magazine today.[better source needed] Sight and Sound was published quarterly for most of its history until the early 1990s, apart from a brief run as a monthly publication in the early 1950s, but in 1991 it merged with another BFI publication, the Monthly Film Bulletin, and started to appear monthly.
In 1949, Gavin Lambert, co-founder of film journal Sequence, was hired as the editor, and also brought with him Sequence editor Penelope Houston as assistant editor as well as co-founders and future film directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. Lambert edited the journal until 1956, with Houston taking over as editor until 1990. Philip Dodd became the editor following the merging of Monthly Film Bulletin with Nick James taking over in 1997. James was editor until August 2019. It is currently[when?] edited by Mike Williams. The magazine reviews all film releases each month, including those with a limited (art house) release, as opposed to most film magazines which concentrate on those films with a general release.
Sight and Sound has in the past been the subject of criticism, notably from Raymond Durgnat, who often accused it of elitism, puritanism and snobbery, although he did write for it in the 1950s, and again in the 1990s. Until 2020, the magazine's American counterpart was Film Comment, a magazine that was published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
Since 1952, Sight and Sound has conducted a decennial poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Until 1992, the votes of the invited critics and directors were compiled in one list; since 1992, directors have been invited to participate in a separate poll.
The Sight and Sound poll has come to be regarded as the most important of the "greatest ever film" lists. The critic Roger Ebert described it as "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously."
Sight and Sound first ran the poll in 1952 following publication earlier in the year of a list of the Top Ten Films, headed by Battleship Potemkin, based on a poll of mostly directors conducted by the committee of the Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Following publication of that poll, Sight and Sound decided to poll film critics for their choices and announced the results in their next issue. 85 critics from Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were asked but only 63 responded including Lindsay Anderson, Lotte H. Eisner, Curtis Harrington, Henri Langlois, Friedrich Luft, Claude Mauriac, Dilys Powell, Jean Queval, Terry Ramsaye, Karel Reisz, G. W. Stonier (under the name William Whitebait) and Archer Winsten. Most critics found the question unfair. The first poll was topped by Bicycle Thieves with 25 out of 63 votes and contained six silent films. The five subsequent polls (1962–2002) were won by Citizen Kane (which finished 13th in 1952).
For the 2012 poll, Sight and Sound listened to decades of criticism about the lack of diversity of its poll participants and made a huge effort to invite a much wider variety of critics and filmmakers from around the world to participate, taking into account gender, ethnicity, race, geographical region, socioeconomic status, and other kinds of underrepresentation. The list of people polled for the critics' poll expanded significantly from 145 to 846 and also included programmers, curators, archivists, film historians and other academics for the first time. Following the change, Citizen Kane only received the second highest number of votes, with Vertigo receiving the most. The directors' poll also expanded from 108 to 358 directors and Tokyo Story received the most votes with Citizen Kane receiving the joint second-most together with 2001: A Space Odyssey.