Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Beyond the Sight & Sound Canon

"They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" (shortened, TPSDT) - one of the most referenced film websites out there - had approached a number of film critics & cinephiles in Aug 2023, incl. yours truly, with a truly ambitious objective. They wanted to create a list of essential/greatest feature-length films that hadn't received even a single vote in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

Their final list - compiling which must have been a monster task - was published yesterday, and it can be seen, savoured & referenced at their here. Furthermore, out of the overall 839 individual ballots that they received, they've published 273, which they've labelled as "critics' ballots.

Glad & humbled to share that the list which I had shared with them features among those 273 (which includes only 6 individuals from India), and my submission can be seen here. I've also posted them below, along with links to my reviews where available.

As someone who loves exploring & savouring films that're "beyond the canon", I didn't really think twice before expressing my willingness to participate in this exciting adventure. I'd participated in a similar "Beyond the Canon" exercise (conducted by Iain Stott) a few years back, and memories of that were revived in the process.

However, only once I sat down to chalk out my list in Dec of last year, did I realize the daunting task that lay ahead of me. The reason being, a staggering 4,366 films were ruled out from being included in one's submission. The next challenge, of course, was to limit the count of films in one's list to no more than 100.

p.s. On hindsight I'm realizing that there are a few key omissions in my list - either because they skipped my mind or I missed assigning the required importance to them or saw them subsequently. But then, that's part of the fun for a crazy endeavour such as this, and hence that's okay.

Posted by Shubhajit at 23:48
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