Tood McCarthy’s response: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/vertigo-citizen-kane-hitchcock-welles-best-movie-357911

As to whether participation in the poll constitutes agreement that “the question itself matters”–I’d be curious to hear more thoughts on that. The solicitation that Sight & Sound sent out to critics and directors pointedly disavows any singular meaning to the poll, any stable set of aesthetic or other criteria. Participants were invited to interpret the remit however they saw fit. Many likely submitted ballots with no concern as to how or whether they affected the general result. If the few individual ballots they’ve published from this year and the ones from 2002 still viewable online are any indication, a lot of ballots were sent with caveats insisting that they were not meant to designate the “greatest” but simply films of personal resonance. But more on this in a few weeks…

Of course polls like this aren’t likely to reveal consensus in that sense, so the question is whether it makes sense to lower the bar a bit. I’m not too concerned with this, despite the title of this blog post. Our main point was simply that what is in and out of the top ten is not all that significant, especially taken out of the context of the whole poll and its history.

It’s possible, even likely, that aside from the pseudo-consensus of the Sight & Sound top ten, there is some general agreement among film critics and scholars about the worthiness of Vertigo, Tokyo Story, and so forth. I’m not convinced that this is something the poll results can tell us.

I should also say, though, that I don’t think S&S’s poll deserves some of the blanket disdain it gets (and I’m not referring to anyone posting here), even on the basis of whether it achieves consensus. A more consensus-y consensus might require a very tiresome process that leads potential participants to opt-out. As a spectator to Oberlin College dining co-ops’ lengthy consensus procedures, I can certainly appreciate the downside to intense consensus-seeking. And, like I said, the poll certainly seems to have produced some interesting raw data.

That said, I like to imagine a beautiful world where the editors of S&S call up a group of social scientists, or what have you, and say “here’s our data (or better yet, here’s our question), can you help?” Maybe that’s what Ian Christie’s “full essay on changing fashions” will look like when published in September, but I sort of doubt it.

I, too, would love to hear from statistics experts, incidentally. It may turn out that these results, especially over the course of decades, are significant, given the “rules of the game” that S&S established, here, as well as the number of people polled.

Still, the more I think of it, the more I like one aspect of CONSENSUS–an aspect lost if we speak merely of a PLURALITY. The term consensus in some usages explicitly denotes a *judgment* rendered by a group (and implied here is that the majority view may or may not be reflected, but this does not factor into the legitimacy of the judgment). Something tells me that if the S&S people and those who participated were concerned with a process that revealed a MAJORITY opinion, then they would have argued for a different process altogether.

At least implicitly, then, consensus is what S&S was after, not a majority, even if they also see “consensus” as beneficial because, rhetorically, it legitimizes the results AND the process.

Second, I agree that it’s useful to distinguish a CONSENSUS from a MAJORITY, but I also think it’s fair to pooh-pooh, or at least qualify, the use of CONSENSUS to describe the ranking, partly because a more precise term, PLURALITY, is available. Additionally, while I’m no expert in voting or decision-making processes (and I’d love to hear from one), I think that CONSENSUS implies, even in common usage, an attempt at agreement-making that goes beyond the opting-in to a set of non-negotiable rules offered to the participants in this poll. CONSENSUS, it seems to me, is being used to validate the results (or writing about the implications of the results), rather than to accurately reflect the process used to reach them and/or the level of agreement by the participants. I take Colin’s point, though, that a significant contingent of film culture seems to have agreed that the Sight & Sound poll is an important judgment of the greatest films. But maybe that’s largely because reaching a “truer” consensus where there’s more agreement would be so much more effortful? In any case, I’m not sure that should keep us from pushing back against the use of the term CONSENSUS here.

What I’d also be interested in seeing is what experts in statistics might do with the poll results, beyond a fairly simple ranking, if they’re tasked with analyzing them in meaningful ways to yield insights into group preference. Are the results really even statistically significant, given the diversity of answers, and if so how significant are they?

But since your quibble seems to some extent to be with terminology–“S&S’s poll reveal the current *consensus*”–I wonder if one ought to give up the fight–jettison the term–so quickly. It’s worth remembering that the term consensus comes from the Latin “agreement,” and agreements don’t always reflect a majority. In ordinary language a “consensus” can simply mean “a judgment arrived at by those concerned,” according to one source.

This isn’t just a detail or a semantic issue, of course. Since the context here is canon-formation in film history, which is an exercise of judgment (as well as exercise in cultural politics, of course), a solid case could be made for viewing the S&S poll as one of among many ways to measure critical consensus. To repeat, the poll is a judgment arrived at by a group of willing participants who agree that the question itself matters and who agree to the rules of the measurement, even if (predictably) the results will not represent the majority.

One more point, which follows from this. Especially given the odds against KANE and VERTIGO (and others) rising to the top–since those polled are permitted to select any film, ever–the fact that KANE and VERTIGO have secured so many votes consistently over time does reflect something about the aesthetic judgments shaped in cinephilic culture globally. I’d be curious to see if KANE and VERTIGO do reflect global cinephilia, though, based on who voted for them.

In short, to use unpopular language, I think there’s plenty of reason to believe that the S&S poll has arrived at a consensus–a judgment.

I look forward to part two…