Terminal Volume: Vertigo bumps Citizen Kane from top slot

Move over Charles Foster Kane, here comes Scottie Ferguson.

That second name not ringing a bell? It’s Jimmy Stewart’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 mystery Vertigo, which was just named the greatest movie of all time by British film magazine Sight & Sound. It bumped Citizen Kane from the top spot, where it’s been on every Sight & Sound list since 1962. Orson Welles’ Kane still made the list, this time from a new position, the No. 2 slot.

The rest of the list follows, in order: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Ford’s The Searchers, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Camera, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Federico Fellini’s 8½.

The Sight & Sound list, started in 1952 and voted on by film professionals around the world, is widely regarded as the go-to list of cinema greats. Refreshed every decade, the list is also known for its diverse assortment of movies, many of which average moviegoers might not recognize. Man With a Movie Camera, for instance, is a highly complex and technical experimental film from 1929; Tokyo Story is Ozu’s 1953 meditation on family and death; and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a silent film from 1927 is about a man’s dalliances with a mysterious woman, is much lesser known than Murnau’s more famous movie, Nosferatu.

As eclectic as the choices are, though, critics, film buffs and others flock to the Sight & Sound list above all others. Film critic Roger Ebert, who has notoriously disapproved of “greatest film” lists, votes every decade and usually discusses his choices before and after the list is released.

In a blog posted yesterday, Ebert wrote: “But let’s remember that all movie lists, even this most-respected one, are ultimately meaningless. Their tangible value is to provide movie lovers with viewing ideas. In the era of DVD, all of the films on the list are available; in 1952, unless you had unusual resources, most of them could be found only in a few big cities.”

This year’s top pick, Vertigo, is no stranger to the list; it has appeared at different heights starting in 1982. The once-forgotten and nearly lost Alfred Hitchcock mystery starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes, is about a police detective haunted by the fear of heights as he falls — get it, falls — in love with a dead woman, or perhaps her ghost. Shot in and around San Francisco, the film often resembles a dream, with Bernard Hermann’s hypnotic, dizzying score twirling around the edges. The picture is full of dread, doom and despair, but it all resonates on a higher plane of consciousness, like a theater of fantasy. First-time viewers often question whether it’s all a dream or not. (It’s not, but I will let you discover the rest.)

Vertigo also invented the famous reverse tracking shot, sometimes called a dolly zoom, where the camera moves away from a subject while the camera lens is simultaneously zoomed in. The effect, which can be unsettling to some, was used to simulate the film’s vertigo effect. The trick has since been used in hundreds of other movies, most noticeably in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

As for Citizen Kane, it may be at the No. 2 position on the list, but it will most likely still be called — by film scholars and movie snobs alike — the greatest film ever made. Welles directed the picture and starred as Charles Foster Kane, a media tycoon whose sudden rise and eventual fall perplexes some newsmen trying write his obituary. Their efforts are complicated when Kane utters his final word: “Rosebud.”

The 1941 film was nearly buried by history when newspaper industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who Kane was based upon, attempted to kill the picture before it was ever seen. It survived, though, especially in film schools, where students were taught about the film’s technical achievements including its many unique and groundbreaking camera effects.

Most of the pictures on the list are older films, including five that were released before World War II. The most recent film on the list is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. To find a more recent movie than that you’ll have to turn to Sight & Sound’s director’s list, a separate ranking of movies voted on by film directors. That list includes slightly more modern movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

When it comes to finding some of these titles in the West Valley, it might be an adventure in and of itself. None of the West Valley libraries carry any of the titles in their limited DVD sections. Some of the films, like Kane and 2001, including many of the titles on the director’s list, are widely available at most video or electronics stores. Other films, like Tokyo Story or The Rules of the Game, are much harder to find. All of the films can be viewed using Netflix or similar subscription-based disc-by-mail services.

Here is the top 10 again, this time in pictures: