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Hitchcock Film Vertigo Voted Best Of All Time

Hitchcock Film Vertigo Voted Best Of All Time

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has been named the greatest film of all time in a prestigious poll, knocking Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane off the top spot for the first time in 50 years.

Almost 900 film critics, academics, distributors and programmers from around the globe took part in the once-in-a-decade survey held by the British Film Institute (BFI) Sight and Sound magazine.

Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound, said this year’s results reflect transformations in the culture of film criticism.

"The new cinephilia seems to be not so much about films that strive to be great art, such as Citizen Kane, and that use cinema's entire arsenal of effects to make a grand statement, but more about works that have personal meaning to the critic," he said.

"Vertigo is the ultimate critics' film because it is a dreamlike film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soulmate."

Other classics that made the top 10 in the poll, which started in 1952, include Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, which bagged the third spot, and Kuberick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most recent film listed, came sixth.

The list also featured three silent films, two of which - Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov and The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer - made the cut for the first time.

Vertigo, a 1958 psychological suspense drama about a detective with a phobia of heights, was largely overlooked by critics for most of Hitchcock’s career.

It first appeared in the Sight and Sound poll in the seventh spot in 1982 - two years after Hitchcock died.

The acclaimed British director, whose other works include Psycho and The Birds, is heralded as a master of filmmaking.

BFI said his rise in this year’s film poll is a testament to how his reputation has progressively increased over time.

A separate poll of 358 film directors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola voted Tokyo Story the greatest film of all time ahead of Citizen Kane.