What Does “Greatest Movie of All Time” Mean, Exactly?

When the BFI’s magazine Sight & Sound released in 2022 the results of its decennial poll of the greatest films of all time, it caused quite a stir by giving the top spot to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The film, a landmark of feminist cinema pulling heavily from avant-garde tradition in its meticulous detailing of the daily routine of a Belgian housewife, shot up 35 spots from the previous decade’s list to usurp Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which had itself overtaken five-time champion Citizen Kane in 2012. The Sight & Sound poll is widely held as the most reputable of all the “best movies of all time” lists, and its adaptation to changing tastes has historically been slow as molasses in January. So Jeanne Dielman’s ascendance represented a seismic shift in Sight & Sound’s list and the cinematic culture that list represents.

In the wake of the list’s release, I saw plenty of celebration of the recognition that historically undervalued filmmaking traditions were finally getting, but also plenty of balking. Many friends of mine who were casual cinephiles had never heard of the film, and had a puzzled reaction when I explained its most famous scene was an interminable static shot of its main character peeling potatoes. Notoriously humble director Paul Schrader spoke for another sect of the film world in a Facebook post where he called Jeanne Dielman’s placement on the list “a politically correct rejiggering” and “landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.”

To be clear, the “rejiggering” Schrader was referring to was the magazine polling a much wider body of voters than ever before (1,639 ballots were cast, almost double the 2012 body), thus achieving a more representative sample of the worldwide film community not as dominated by white men. I would be very interested in hearing Schrader elaborate on why he thinks this is a bad thing. But I digress. My aim in this article is not to argue for or against Jeanne Dielman as the best movie of all time or evaluate the legitimacy of the Sight & Sound poll. I want to tackle a question that in some ways is much simpler and in other ways is much more difficult: what does it mean to call a film “the greatest of all time”?

An important point to note about any of these “best of” lists, whether they be Sight & Sound’s prestigious list, the AFI’s Top 100 American Movies, or the Letterboxd Top 250, is that they are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. They hold no authority, and the greatest films are not the greatest films because the lists say they are. Those films are on the lists because they are great. (An analogous case: a dictionary’s definition doesn’t determine a word’s meaning, a word’s meaning determines its dictionary definition.) These lists are not arbiters of greatness, they are tools of measurement. But it’s unclear what exactly they’re measuring. What are we meant to conclude about Jeanne Dielman from its being the #1 movie of all time? What traits does this outcome provide evidence for the film having? What does such a list actually tell us about these films?

The easiest approach to this problem might be to deflate my question altogether, and assert that “best of” lists are not meant to measure qualities of the films themselves, but rather the collective perception of film. This is in fact precisely how the Sight & Sound poll describes itself, as “a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema” and “a litmus test for where film culture stands.” There is nothing new we are necessarily meant to learn about Jeanne Dielman, but we have learned a great deal about how critical conception of film has shifted in the last decade towards a more diverse canon, as evidenced by both the new #1 film and the increase in representation for both female and Black filmmakers. Likewise, The Shawshank Redemption being the #1 movie on the IMDb Top 250 doesn’t tell us much about The Shawshank Redemption, but it tells us a lot about the tastes of IMDb users.

Under this claim, then, the purpose of such “best of” lists is not to actually identify the greatest films, but to take the temperature of the film culture they represent and shed light on where tastes lie. I will not accept this as a final answer, though, since it just begs my original question. If these lists show what films our culture considers the greatest of all time, then I ask again what such a consideration means. And I would press the same question if given the common response that these lists are really meant to curate a canon that represents the best of cinema and provides an entry point for those interested in the medium: what qualities are we attributing to a film when we canonize it? And especially given the lists I am concerned with do not just create a canon but rank it, what qualities of a film make it rank higher than others in the canon, and what qualities of a film make it deserving of the #1 spot? No matter what circumlocutions you use to describe what these lists are for, somewhere in there some person or group of people is making determinations about a film’s greatness, and I want to know what exactly those determinations signify.

Along with their Top 100 list, since expanded to 250 films, Sight & Sound also publicly released each individual ten-film ballot. I spent a good deal of time poking through them when they were released and then again when researching this piece, at first just curious what certain people picked and then to see if I could glean any insights about how people approached their voting. Sight & Sound, rather unhelpfully for my purposes, allowed voters to interpret “greatest” in whatever way they chose, and so much of my focus turned to how voters did so.

Most voters made a clear effort to curate diversity amidst their selection, refusing to select the work of a director more than once and trying to pull from as many countries as they could. There were exceptions, though: Luca Guadagnino used half his selections just on films directed by Roberto Rossellini or Bernardo Bertolucci, Frederick Wiseman picked three Marx Brothers films and two Chaplins, Richard Kelly (director of Donnie Darko) pulled exclusively from Hollywood, and Wes Anderson narrowed his scope to just his ten favorite French films. Among the more offbeat selections, Michael Moore used a slot on Borat, Jane Schoenbrun picked Speed Racer, and Daniel Scheinert (one half of the Daniels) picked the music video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” and Wet Hot American Summer. The champions of unapologetically bold selections, though, were Canadian avant-garde icon Michael Snow, who picked only four films – Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and then three of his own – and American avant-garde icon James Benning, who picked ten of his own films with the comment, “Since I don’t see many films, my only reference is my own.”

Of particular interest to me, though, were the written comments in which voters explained the methodology behind their choices. A few gave a general principle they used. New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote that he focused on “conceptual difficulty,” which he thought of as the ability of a film “to push the art of cinema drastically and definitively ahead, to blow a hole in the history of the aesthetic.” Film scholar and video essayist Kevin B. Lee emphasized “films that give an idea of how to exist in the world, that reflect conscientiously on the existence of others.” Against these considered principles, however, the overwhelming sentiment of these comments was along the lines of, “This is impossible, this is silly, there are no ten greatest films of all time.” And this sentiment is probably right. We are talking about art, after all, something inherently subjective. How can we really expect to make an objective account of greatness out of a subjective medium?

Admitting this probable fact that there is no objective greatest film of all time does not give me cause to abandon my question, however. On the contrary, it makes me even more curious: if we discard the notion that by labelling a film the greatest we are trying to get at some essential inherent property of cinema, then what are we trying to get at? For in spite of how silly most of us recognize these lists are, they still captivate us. We keep making them, we keep discussing and debating them, and the placement of Jeanne Dielman at #1 still sets the film world ablaze. If we really viewed these lists as insignificant, none of that would happen. So clearly there must be something to the exercise.

Despairing of the ability to make any kind of objective list, most of the Sight & Sound voters instead opted for personal ones. They picked films that resonated with them, and many emphasized that if you were to ask them again in a day, they may well pick ten entirely different films. Such personal lists do have the quality I have been searching for throughout these canons, namely of saying something about the films they contain, even if that “something” is just that on that particular day they resounded the strongest with that particular person. These individual lists do give solid pictures of what qualities their authors value in a film. What they lack is objectivity, that ability to take the temperature of the culture as a whole. In tabulating together all 1,639 ballots, we may achieve that objectivity, but at the cost of the conceptual poignancy these individual lists can possess. You might end up with a list of films that accurately reflects what your population of concern thinks are the best, but when you have 1,639 people all working on their own conception of what “the best” means, it averages out to nothing. The Sight & Sound poll in this way is much like the computer Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: it has thought long and hard about the answer to art, the cinema, and everything, and has come up with it. The only trouble is it has lost the question.

There are other “best of” lists besides Sight & Sound’s, of course, and I also looked at some of those to see if they might provide more clarity on what they seek to measure. The online platform-based ones like the IMDb and Letterboxd Top 250 are non-starters, though – they hold no principles besides aggregating the ratings of a throng of internet users. The most well-known list after Sight & Sound’s is probably the AFI’s Top 100 American Movies (and here I am focusing on the most recent version, the 2007 updated list). Now this list narrows its focus strictly to U.S.-produced films, so it holds no claim to “best movie of all time” discussions, but nevertheless it might give a better idea of what greatness entails. The good news is that this list provides much clearer methodology and criteria than Sight & Sound for determining the greatest film. The bad news is that the methodology and criteria it uses horrify me.

To begin with, unlike the Sight & Sound method of letting voters choose any ten films they want, AFI made them select from a list of 400 nominated films. Voters could select up to 100 films, and were allowed no more than five write-ins as part of that 100. So right away, any notion that this list is meant to measure out the culture and establish a canon goes out the window. The canon has already been determined and voters are merely choosing between outcomes the AFI has already deemed favorable. Letting voters select a full quarter of nominated films also does away with much of the rigor such a poll is supposed to provide. Then there are the criteria the AFI encourages considering when voting: critical recognition, awards success, popularity over time (as measured through box office, DVD sales, etc.), historical significance, and cultural impact. The last two criteria seem valid considerations to me. The first three I think have no business impacting estimations of a film’s greatness. Note that missing from this list of criteria are evaluations of a film’s quality or aesthetic achievement. One might think that “critical recognition” would encompass these features, but that criterion only values that a film has been praised, not what it has been praised for. These criteria in general seem to care a lot more about all the attributes surrounding a film than any deep consideration of the film itself. This is one way to measure a film’s greatness, but I contend it is from the right way.

The best account of greatness in a film that I have found comes from a source that is not technically one of these “best of” projects: the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which selects 25 American films per year for preservation based on “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance.” The Registry specifies, “These films are not selected as the ‘best’ American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture. They reflect who we are as a people and as a nation.” Nevertheless, “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” does pretty well to capture the qualities that might make us consider a film great. It could stand for some elaboration, especially the “significance” part, which is somewhat question-begging, but it’s a good start, and far better than what the projects that actually purport to identify the best films of all time have done.

Throughout this article, I have looked at various attempts to crown a greatest film of all time and sought to figure out what they are actually measuring, what, for these projects, the “greatest of all time” label means. My takeaway is that for the most part, these lists do not measure much of anything. They give us a handful of films that are widely considered good and important, but struggle to say anything beyond that. They prioritize objectivity by aggregating many opinions, but doing so clouds the project’s conceptual clarity. Comprehensiveness and purpose are at odds with each other.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook here, though. I have just spent more than 2,000 words pressing the Sight & Sound list and its peers to divulge some sort of mission, some account of film greatness, and have offered no such account myself. What principle would I encourage people to consider in selecting the greatest film of all time? The best I can do is this: the greatest film of all time is the film that is most representative of the artistic and cultural powers of the cinematic form. I think this definition encapsulates most of what we look for in our great films: something that represents high artistic achievement, something that can sway culture, something that uses the medium to its full potential, something we can display as representative of the best the art form has to offer. I know it is not perfect, probably not even satisfactory, and I welcome any feedback or competing definitions. Since I strongly suspect there is no objective attribute of film greatness, any account of it will likely be as subjective as the films themselves. But getting such a discussion going is a valuable end in itself. If we are going to keep endlessly debating which film is the GOAT (and we surely will), it’s worth our time to step back and consider seriously what that even means.

There is one more question I know you are asking: given my proposed definition of “greatest film of all time,” which film would I select as best meeting that definition, as the true GOAT? Here, unlike with the primary question of this article, there is a clear, unambiguous answer: Space Chimps.