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:

Vertigo

Citizen Kane

Tokyo Story

The Rules of the Game

Sunrise: A Song For Two Humans

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Searchers

Man With a Movie Camera

The Passion of Joan of Arc

8½  

Fade to black: film's death is nearly complete

This article originally ran in the West Valley View on June 22, 2012. 

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Technology brings about change. It also brings about death. Just look at the graveyard: VHS, cassette tapes, dial-up modems, typewriters, rotary phones.

Add to that list film projectors, which, at nearly 118 years old, had a longer shelf life than most.

The 35mm film format will get a quiet send-off this week when Dickinson Theatres, operator of the Palm Valley 14 theater in Goodyear, brings in a dozen new digital projectors to replace a dozen film projectors. They are the last film projectors showing first-run movies in the West Valley, and some of the last ones in the entire state. AMC Theatres is now entirely digital, as is Valley-based Harkins Theatres with exception to one theater, Arcadia 8 in Phoenix, that will likely be closing within the next year.

The movies will always be called films, but now it’s nearly impossible to see one on actual film.

“It had to change eventually,” Daniel Pineda, projectionist at the Dickinson theater, said recently as he bounded up the stairs to the Goodyear projection booth. “35mm was a great format, but it’s time has come.”

Pineda’s workspace is a long dark corridor high in the guts of Palm Valley 14. Up there, amid 12 clicking and clacking film projectors (and 2 silently humming digital projectors), the air is hot, but luckily, Pineda said, he doesn’t have a dress code.

Today he’s wearing a T-shirt with the Punisher skull on it, which is an ominous image to see as he stalks the dark corridor, zigging and zagging between the projectors and the massive film platters attached to them. These spinning platters, held in place by a metal frame called a tree, are where the film prints sit while the movies play. They’re as round as pitcher’s mounds, and as Pineda zips past them he gives them a big spin, which sends the tail of the film print flapping through the air.

He can reel up — or, as he calls it, “lace up” — a film in under two minutes, which involves weaving a piece of film from a platter through a series of wheels, gears and a roller-festooned brain. The process involves big, sweeping movements from platter to tree to projector, but also small intricate articulations when the film is guided through the projector housing, where the light beams through the film, moving at 24 frames per second, on its way to the screen down below.

Pineda, a Buckeye resident who’s worked as a projectionist for two years, doesn’t romanticize film’s passing.

“This is my job, so digital or film it doesn’t really matter to me,” he said while he guided the tail of a Prometheus print from platter to projector. “I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t miss having to worry about the humidity and all the problems that film has.”

Humidity is a film projectionist’s worst enemy. Too much and the film starts sticking to itself, which can lead to film calamity: “One time I came over here and the film was on the floor looking like spaghetti noodles,” Pineda said. “It was a mess.”

There are other pros to the demise of film: no more annoying scratches in the film prints, no more late nights assembling the films (they as separate reels in boxes or cans), and no more reeling up the movies to the projectors, which may take only two minutes each but it all adds up, Pineda said. The digital systems are run on keystrokes and single buttons. The movies are on hard drives or just downloaded from the studios. They aren’t without their little quirks, though. For instance, troubleshooting a problem with a digital projector is nearly impossible without calling the company that made it.

“And it might get boring,” Pineda said. “Right now, I’m busy while I lace up movies and then there won’t be anything to do up here for like 30 minutes, but then it starts all over again. With the digital systems there will be a lot more down time.”

Palm Valley 14 general manager Rick Kasting said there were no immediate plans for the 12 film projectors and the equipment that goes with them, things like film splicers, building tables and metal reels.

“I just don’t know what’s eventually going to happen to all this stuff. Nobody knows,” he said. “Film won’t be made anymore, so there’s really no reason to have it around.”

Until Dickinson — which is headquartered in Kansas and has theaters throughout the central time zone as well as in Goodyear and Mesa — decides what to do with the projectors they will most likely just stay in storage at the Goodyear theater, Kasting said.

From the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison in the 1890s to mothballs in the 21st Century, film has had a long and full life. Kasting said he would be sad to see it go.

“Film had its ups and downs, but it was a great format. I loved working with it all these years,” Kasting, a former projectionist said. “When 35mm first started, it was easily breakable and would catch fire and all that good stuff. Now it’s like plastic, so it can stretch. Working with it really made you appreciate film. Yeah, I’ll miss it.”