Comments on the list
Even back in 1952, when this poll began, it must have seemed absurd to try and identify the Greatest Films of All Time. Now, as the cumulative database of moving image history seems to be expanding ever faster towards infinity - and, you could easily fear, to hitherto uncharted realms of futility - we have new problems to contend with. Are we trying to identify convincingly - and perhaps for the very last time - the monuments and monoliths of an art form perilously close to extinction, and that in any case thrives not on the monumental, but on fluidity and transience?
And what do the terms mean, anyway? How do you define 'great'? How do you define 'film'? What does 'all time' mean, with its evocation of a clear origin and a very unclear sort of posterity (as if we particularly cared these days about that dusty notion, posterity). In a period during which the purpose and meaning of any artistic activity has become a matter for debate, more urgently than it has
