Yesterday I mused (data-scientifically) on whether certain 80s arthouse directors didn’t place on the Sight & Sound 2022 Poll because there just wasn’t much of a consensus yet about which ones of their movies were the best.
And the answer seemed to be “not really”.
But today I started wondering whether there really are directors where that’s a major thing — that is, are there any directors that would have placed highly if everybody that voted for a director’s films voted for the same one from that director’s oeuvre.
Tada!
So this chart plots how much further up the chart a director would be if the poll was computed cumulatively per director instead of per film. And wow, that was unexpected!
The “highest scorer” (or most unlucky director) is somebody named James Benning, who would have placed 1300 places higher up than any of his movies did. And that’s a name I don’t recognise at all! He has 14 (!) movies that somebody have voted for, but none of them received more than two votes.
I’m not familiar with him at all, and he seems to be doing mostly documentaries? Which explains me not being familiar with his work.
Next up is Raúl Ruiz, who would have jumped 800 places. He has 11 movies that received votes, but none more than 4 votes.
He’s from Chile, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of his movies? But he sounds interesting… I should fix that.
Third place is Jim Jarmusch, who would also skip ahead 800 places. He has 6 movies that people have voted for, and the one with the most votes is Stranger than Paradise with four votes.
We also see Wes Anderson (who would advance 640 places), John Houston (543 places) and Clint Eastwood (530 places), and so on. So, yes, there’s definitely a too-many-memorable-movies effect that’s going on.
Conversely, if we ranked directors by total votes, who would sink the most? Yeah, it’s directors that have just one well known movie (like Charles Laughton), or directors where people have pretty much decided on which one is their masterpiece (like Jacques Tati and Playtime).
Anyway. The Sight & Sound poll is about the “best movies”, not about favourite directors… but I thought this was moderately interesting anyway.