A critics’ poll conducted by the BBC has voted Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 swordsman epic Seven Samurai as the greatest ever non-English-speaking film.
The BBC culture website polled more than 200 “film experts” from more than 40 countries, including critics, academics and curators to create a top-100 list. Seven Samurai beat Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Tokyo Story (1953), which came in second and third respectively. Another Kurosawa film, the multi-perspective crime fable Rashomon (1950), was in fourth place, while his Ikiru (1952) and Ran (1985) also made the list, at 72 and 79.
However, the most repeatedly acclaimed film-makers were Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel, who each recorded five entries.
French proved the most popular non-English cinematic language, with 27 films (led by Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterwork The Rules of the Game), followed by 12 in Mandarin and 11 in Japanese and Italian.
Only a handful of films directed by women made the list, despite 45% of the voters being female. The highest rated is Chantal Akerman’s 1975 art-film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, at number 14. The other female directors in the list are Claire Denis (with Beau Travail at number 43) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), and Kátia Lund, the co-director of the 2002 Brazilian drama City of God.
Gabrielle Kelly, editor of Celluloid Ceiling: Women Film Directors Breaking Through, told the BBC: “Film studies have always focused on men because men have controlled most aspects of film, ever since it became a profitable business in the US.”
The results showed that it will take time for more recent films to accrue critical favour: the newest film in the top 100 is Michael Haneke’s Amour from 2012 at number 69, while the only other film made this decade is Iranian Oscar-winner A Separation (2011), at number 21. The top 20 is notably light on films made after the 1970s, with only In the Mood for Love (2000), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and A City of Sadness (1989) registering at numbers nine, 12, and 18 respectively.
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