Журнал «Sight and Sound»: История и Кинорейтинги

British film magazine

Sight and Sound (formerly written Sight & Sound) is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well known decennial Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time.

Sight and Sound was first published in Spring 1932 as "A quarterly review of modern aids to learning published under the auspices of the British Institute of Adult Education". In 1934, management of the magazine was handed to the nascent British Film Institute (BFI), which still publishes the magazine today. Sight and Sound was published quarterly for most of its history until the early 1990s, apart from a brief run as a monthly publication in the early 1950s, but in 1991 it merged with another BFI publication, the Monthly Film Bulletin, and started to appear monthly. In 1949, Gavin Lambert, co founder of film journal Sequence, was hired as the editor, and also brought with him Sequence editor Penelope Houston as assistant editor as well as co founders and future film directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. Lambert edited the journal until 1956, with Houston taking over as editor until 1990. Philip Dodd became the editor following the merging of Monthly Film Bulletin with Nick James taking over in 1997. James was editor until August 2019. Until 2020, the magazine's American counterpart was Film Comment, a magazine that was published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

Since 1952, Sight and Sound has conducted a decennial poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Until 1992, the votes of the invited critics and directors were compiled in one list;, since 1992, directors have been invited to participate in separate poll. The Sight and Sound poll has come to be regarded as the most important of the "greatest ever film" lists. The critic Roger Ebert described it as "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously." Sight and Sound first ran the poll in 1952 following publication earlier in the year of a list of the Top Ten Films, headed by Battleship Potemkin, based on a poll of mostly directors conducted by the committee of the Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux Arts de Belgique. Following publication of that poll, Sight and Sound decided to poll film critics for their choices and announced the results in their next issue. 85 critics from Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were asked but only 63 responded including Lindsay Anderson, Lotte H. Eisner, Curtis Harrington, Henri Langlois, Friedrich Luft, Claude Mauriac, Dilys Powell, Jean Queval, Terry Ramsaye, Karel Reisz, G. W. Stonier (under the name William Whitebait) and Archer Winsten. Most critics found the question unfair. The first poll was topped by Bicycle Thieves with 25 out of 63 votes and contained six silent films. For the 2012 poll, Sight and Sound listened to decades of criticism about the lack of diversity of its poll participants and made a huge effort to invite a much wider variety of critics and filmmakers from around the world to participate, taking into account gender, ethnicity, race, geographical region, socioeconomic status, and other kinds of underrepresentation.

This list was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films that the critics and the directors polled voted for. 2002 was the only year Sight & Sound compiled the list.