David Thomson: My top ten

Having begun with movies when I was four or five, and having been reduced to tears by both Son of Lassie and Olivier's Henry V, I have mixed feelings about the medium and about any attempt to list the "best" pictures ever made.

I am not crazy for movies at the expense of the rest of life. I have never understood why all films deserve to be reviewed, when most books are ignored. I am still not sure, having reached 60, whether movies have been good for me, or the rest of us. My view of them is like that of Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) on cars in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. I am deeply involved in the passion and the business of them while acknowledging that the world might have been better off without them. Maybe mixed feelings are the ones most worth writing about. I do think that the movies have been a pretext for writing – as necessary as the walls in a squash court.

The basic principle in what I am about to propose is choice and choosing, so you might as well have two openings. Take your pick: the idea of the 10 best films ever made is entirely personal, so fatuously academic or (at best) a form of play – therefore let us take it as seriously as possible. Alternatively, the question of what represents quality, superiority, or even "the best" in an art and entertainment as dynamic and visceral as film is so grave, so important, that it can only be dealt with lightly.

This September, the magazine of the British Film Institute, Sight and Sound, will publish the results of its international poll among critics and film-makers on the 10 best films ever made. In seeking lists, it has encouraged voters to think historically and artistically, not just to list favourites – after all, we may "know" that Kieslowski, say, is "better" than Norman Wisdom; but we may crave a little bit of Norman when drawing up our desert-island programme. So the voters have behaved more or less responsibly. As one of them, I set aside my primitive urge to just have 10 Howard Hawks films; I have allowed myself only one. The nine by other hands, I think, I hope, are as "legitimate" as the one Hawks movie I have to keep.

This is the sixth time Sight and Sound has done its poll. In 1952 (its debut), the 12 films filling the top places were Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica), City Lights and The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein), Intolerance (D W Griffith), Louisiana Story (Robert J Flaherty), Greed (Erich von Stroheim), Le jour se lève (Marcel Carné), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer), Brief Encounter (David Lean), Le million (René Clair), and The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir).

Analysis? Six silent films. Not, really, one mainstream Hollywood picture. And no Citizen Kane (made in 1941, but a commercial failure at the time, and thus very hard to see in the late Forties, an era without television, let alone VCRs). Ten years later (thanks to being reissued and acclaimed by young French critics), Citizen Kane was top. And it has held that position ever since, in '72, '82 and '92. One of the most fascinating questions hanging over this year's results is whether Citizen Kane will have maintained its power and position. Or has a younger generation grown bored with its eminence, its black-and-white longevity and the really offensive idea in a young medium that in 60 years no one has been able to improve on a cocksure young show-off who surely set out to grasp history by the balls.

The top films in 1992, by the way, were Kane, Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu), Vertigo (Hitchcock), The Searchers (John Ford), Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray); 2001 (Kubrick), L'Atalante (Jean Vigo), Modern Times (Chaplin), The Godfather (Coppola), Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa), The Passion of Joan of Arc, Raging Bull (Scorsese) and 8½ and La Strada (both by Federico Fellini).

Analysis? Only The Passion of Joan of Arc (one of the greatest films about the face or the close-up) had survived from 1952. Ten of the films had been made since 1952. But Vertigo, The Searchers and The Godfather could all claim to be mainstream Hollywood. I grant that that is a controversial term. Still, just as Welles with Kane and von Stroheim with Greed were making films dramatically beyond American norms, the Ford, the Hitchcock and the Coppola were all Hollywood pictures with conventional releases. Indeed, The Godfather was, in its day, a resounding box-office champion. As such, it was a very welcome rediscovery of the fundamental notion (held by Griffith and Chaplin, even if both were rather "outside" figures) that it might be possible to make a "great" movie – by which I mean a picture that impressed the artistically educated classes – and a box-office smash at the same time. I suspect the 2002 results will reveal a lot about how far that hope endures.

On the other hand, as film's history grows longer, so it becomes harder for even the critic and scholar to keep up. Who now has seen everything, or can really compare Paramount in 1923 with Tehran in 2002?

Of course, you don't have to struggle with that dilemma: you can argue that, ipso facto, the most popular films must be the best; or you can say that no film seen by "too many" people has credibility as a work of art. Thus, the 2002 lists will include a lot of films you've never heard of, as well as things like ET, Titanic, Star Wars and, still, I suspect, The Godfather. Nevertheless, enough people will have responded to the poll to average things out, and the results will tell us something useful about where "film culture" stands.

Starting this week and running through the summer, I am going to propose, and do what I can to explain, my top 10 in the Film Studies column. In arriving at my list, I was affected by a game I played in preparing the fourth edition of my book A Biographical Dictionary of Film, to be published in October. As usual, I had to thank many people with whom I've talked about film a lot over the years. In listing their names, I also asked them to give me their three favourite pictures – the films they'd want if they had just three for the rest of their lives.

Naturally enough, I asked a lot of people in my age range – 60 or so – and, naturally enough, "we" prefer the films we discovered when young, the ones that made us fall in love with the medium. That meant that my gang had very few favourites from the last 20 years or so, coinciding with the widespread feeling among movie people of my generation that the medium, the art and the entertainment have had sad times lately. Yet I know there is a generation out there that reckons movies began with Star Wars and Jaws. That bloc could sway the results – if enough of them have been polled. But, of course, so far they figure lightly among critics and film-makers.

Still, I suspect there is a historical shift under way akin to the general abandonment of silent films after 1952. For instance, I would not be amazed to see films like The Matrix, Memento or Se7en doing quite well in this poll (films of real "brilliance", deliberate modernity and a chill that puts me off). Equally, there is a rediscovery of silent film going on, which may show up, though it won't reclaim Potemkin and Intolerance so much as Sunrise, Pandora's Box, The Wind or even Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera. (As I write this I can see how far The Man with a Movie Camera and The Matrix share the same kind of technological excitement.)

The "humanist" film may not do so well. The days of Bicycle Thieves, I suspect, are not coming back. I'm not sure how well Mizoguchi, Ozu, Ophuls, Satyajit Ray or Renoir may fare in 2002. I cannot work out where Hitchcock will stand – is he greater than he was 10 years ago? The same applies to John Ford. Is The Searchers still profound, or as hopelessly compromised as the false eyelashes of Natalie Wood, playing a woman who has lived with the Comanche?

Of course, the real point of the game is that you should wonder over your choices – and at least discover the problems there are in arriving at 10, only 10. Sight and Sound wants to sell a lot of magazines. In the same way, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences survives all year round on its revenue from Oscars night – and survives intellectually on the broad claim that there are "best" films, ones worthy of prizes.

But as I begin my 10, I respond most warmly to those films that were on my short-list but didn't make it. So let me close with a "Love you, too" note to Sunrise, The Passenger, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, In a Lonely Place, L'Atalante, Madame de..., The Red Shoes, Point Blank, Persona, The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth, The Shop Around the Corner, Rear Window, Meet Me in St Louis, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Night of the Hunter, The Eclipse, Providence, Belle de jour, Chinatown, Mulholland Drive and just about everything else by Howard Hawks except the one I will come to, eventually.

I should add that my 10 are not listed in rising order of merit. I begin with the earliest, but the list is shaped for fun.