Vertigo is Sight & Sound's Greatest Film of All Time

World-renowned directors vying for the top spot on the list.

Since 1962, the Sight & Sound Magazine of the British Film Institute polls directors, critics, and scholars of film--846 total people--to determine the 50 greatest films of all time. Each person polled submits a top 10 list of films, and the lists are combined and tallied. According to acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert: “It is by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies--the only one most serious movie people take seriously." The top ten is usually not a surprise, as movies like Citizen Kane that are already renowned as the greatest movies of all time usually comprise the top spots in the same positions. However, in August 2012, when the Sight & Sound poll was once again released, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo had replaced Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as the number one “greatest movie of all time.” Citizen Kane had held the position for 50 years.

Citizen Kane was knocked out of the #1 spot it held for 50 years.

2012 was the first year the poll had been conducted after the internet had become the main place to discuss film, so Ian Christie speculates that the rise of Vertigo could mark the rise of a new era in film. This year, S&S also began including critics who had published the bulk or entirety of their work online instead of following a more elitist, print-focused attittude. 2012 was also the second time that the separate poll of directors--346 in 2012--was performed, and the director’s choices are quite a step away from the choices of the critics and scholars.

Hitchcock's Vertigo is now considered the greatest film of all time.

Tradition Meets the Modern Age

Paramount Pictures' centennial photograph.

Both Universal and Paramount Pictures celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2012. Universal Studios unleashed a new logo that will be played in front of all Universal movies, starting with Dr. Suess’s The Lorax. On January 10, 2012, the studio announced that their goals for 2012 are to make a commitment to film preservation, an extended home entertainment collection, as well as a more prominent social media campaign. Universal Studios will restore 13 classic films and release them to the public, including The Birds, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Out of Africa, To Kill a Mockingbird, and All Quiet on the Western Front. To celebrate their centennial, Paramount studios will also unveil a new logo. They also photographed 116 of the greatest talents to work at the studio, arranging the performers in the shape of a mountain: Paramount’s iconic symbol.

Universal Studios' new logo for their 100th anniversary.

While the studios pay lip service to film preservation, the long downturn of traditional 35mm film is finally spelling the demise of the traditional format. A 2012 report from the IHS Screen Digest found that by the end of 2013, movie studios will stop making 35mm film prints for major markets, and by 2015, all traditional film production will stop. Digital film is easier and less expensive to store, doesn’t degrade over time, and is less of a hassle to transport. Silver is needed to coat the film reels, and the price of silver shot up to $28 dollars an ounce in 2012. As many as 10 percent of US theaters could shut down over the cost, said Oregon Public Broadcasting in a report. However, the Joshua Siegel, associate curator of the department of film at the Museum of Modern Art, states: “I’m not entirely convinced that digital technology is sophisticated enough to compare with the quality of celluloid on a big screen.” This attitude was reflected in the film preservation celebration at the MOMA called To Save and Project, which opened early October 2012 for its 10th year.

Notable Hollywood Deaths of 2012

Screenwriter Nora Ephron

Actor Michael Clarke Duncan

Hollywood lost a few stars in 2012. Nora Ephron died in New York City on June 26, 2012 at the age of 71 from leukemia. She was the screenwriter of award-winning films like When Harry Met Sally..., Sleepless In Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, and also directed. Sherman Henley of “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons” died this year at 74. Character actor Ernest Borgnine who won a Best Actor oscar for his performance in Marty died at 95 in July. On July 3, the famous Andy Griffith passed away at 86 years old. Tom Davis, a writer for Saturday Night Live who worked on famous sketches died from tonsil cancer in July at 59. Adam Yauch, founding member and songwriter of The Beastie Boys, succumbed to a battle with cancer on May 4. He had forayed into the film industry by becoming a film distributor with Oscilloscope, and distributed movies like Exit Through the Gift Shop. Bob Anderson, an Olympic fencer and swordsman, had usually anonymous but instantly recognizable roles in film. He did a lot of stunt work with the lightsabers in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in the Star Wars saga. He died at 89 on January 1. Bingham Ray, an independent film executive and executive director of the San Francisco Film Society at the time of his death, died on January 12. The Gotham Independent Film Awards honored him by creating the Bingham Ray award, which is given to “an emerging filmmaker whose work exemplifies a distinctive creative vision and stylistic adventurousness that stands apart from the mainstream and warrants championing. The goal is to bring additional attention to new artists whose work could be seen as conceivably joining the ranks of filmmakers championed by industry veteran Bingham Ray.”
Actor Michael Clarke Duncan, made famous by his role in The Green Mile, died on September 3 at only 54.

2012 Oscars

The Artist took home the Best Picture award.

The 84th Academy Awards ceremony took place on February 26, 2012, and was hosted by Billy Crystal. The Artist, an ode to silent film shot in black-and-white, won the Best Picture award, and Jean Dujardin, who starred in the film, took home the award for Best Leading Actor. The Artist’s Michel Hazanavicius won Best Director, and the film also won for Best Original Score and Best Costume Design. Meryl Streep, who holds the record for the most Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA-nominated performer, won Best Actress for her performance in the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. Christopher Plummer won his first Oscar at 82 years old for his supporting role in Beginners. Best Supporting Actress went to Octavia Spencer of The Help. Best Original Screenplay went to Woody Allen’s widely acclaimed film Midnight in Paris about a writer time-traveling to the 1920s, while Best Adapted Screenplay went to The Descendents. 

 Before the awards, Sascha Baron Cohen arrived dressed as his character in the movie The Dictator, and spilled an urn filled with “ashes” on Ryan Seacrest, a TV interviewer covering the show. Host BIlly Crystal also stirred some minor controversy with his pre-recorded opening skit in which he parodies Midnight in Paris by dressing up as Sammy Davis Jr., which included darkening his face. Comedian Paul Scheer criticized him on Twitter, saying: “Octavia Spencer's win shows just how far we've come since Billy Crystal performed in Blackface.” Additional racial controversy was caused by one of his jokes that said he wanted to hug the first black woman he saw after watching The Help. He was also accused of being out of touch, and his jokes stale and dated. Crystal’s name trended on Twitter, especially due to many young people wondering who he was.

Billy Crystal's opening skit: 

2012: Year of the Blockbuster

Several hotly anticipated films were released in 2012, especially during the summer blockbuster season. Marvel’s The Avengers, directed by the creator of cult TV shows like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was released in April 2012 to much excitement and media buzz. It also garnered the approval of critics, receiving a 92% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates the opinions of major and minor film critics. Peter Travers of The Rolling Stone said of the film: “It's Transformers with a brain, a heart and a working sense of humor.” Most critics agreed that it was a good mix of crowd-pleasing visual effects and humor with more nuanced plot and writing, though some felt it favored the former too often. It also broke numerous box office records in North America, including the most lucrative opening weekend, opening week, and second week, as well as the shortest amount of time to reach $500 million: a record previously held by James Cameron’s Avatar.

Other superhero movies were released in 2012 as well. The Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot of the 2002 Spiderman franchise starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, made $262,030,663 at the box office, landing it at #7 on the 2012 charts. Christopher Nolan’s final installment of his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, was released in July 2012 to critical acclaim and about $448 million, making it the second-highest grossing film of 2012. At #3 was The Hunger Games, based off of a bestselling YA series, followed by the James Bond film Skyfall at #4. 2012 was a great year for blockbusters.

The Hobbit’s High Frame Rate--and What it Means for Film

The Hobbit was shot at 48 fps--the first film ever to do so.

Peter Jackson’s film The Hobbit was released in December 2012, stirring up controversy not just from the fact that it was based on a widely loved and nerd-cherished Tolkien book, but because of its use of groundbreaking new technology. Movies have historically been shot and projected at 24 fps (frames per second), with TV shows falling within the 25-30 fps range, but The Hobbit was filmed using a very high-resolution camera at 48 fps--known in the industry as High Frame Rate or HFR. This adds to the amount of images captured and displayed to the viewer, so it gets rid of the motion blur, shakiness, and flickering that can occur with traditional filming techniques. HFR makes for a smoother picture--so much so that some critics on Twitter have compared it to video game graphics, and an Entertainment Weekly review panned the method by saying “it looked much more like visiting the set of a film rather than seeing the textured cinematography of a finished movie." Peter Jackson, the director of the film, stands by HFS. He praises the lack of blurriness and “strobing” of the image present in 24 fps, as well as the improved look of HFS when used with 3D.

The Hobbit is the first mass-produced film to use the new HFS technique. The frame rate in Hollywood movies was standardized at 24 fps after hand-cranked cameras were replaced by better ones, as 24 fps provided for smooth motion without using too many reels of film. However, with the vast majority of modern films being made with digital cameras and limitless memory, HFS is likely to be experimented with and even made standard in more films as time goes on.

The new HFR camera by RED