Dahomey (2024)Why Do We Poll? the editors January 2025 World Poll Issue 112 Who are end-of-year lists for? I wonder about this all the time. If a cinephile writes a list on the internet, does it have a reader…? “Lists of films will not save you.” Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Against Lists’ for Another Gaze. 2019.1 Gorfinkel is right. Some years ago, I tried to watch as many films as I could (with a view to completion) of the Library of Congress’ Complete National Film Registry Listing, or maybe it was the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films (memory for such details has never been my forte).2 Either way, I think it was a screening of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) at ACMI that had me decide I simply didn’t want to be a list completist anymore. If I don’t like extreme violence, Westerns generally, and a bunch of other stuff in cinema, then why should I watch it? So that I can tick a box on a list? Is that really what life is all about? No, watching Peckinpah and some other guy and some other guy and some other guy’s films will not save me. “Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power,” Gorfinkel writes.3 At university, I had to watch D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). I wish I’d never seen that film. “Lists won’t create new canons – especially not of lost women, queer, trans, Black, Latinx, global south, decolonial and anti-colonial filmmakers,” Gorfinkel continues.4 More than 15 years after completing my MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures, I still know almost nothing about cinema from global majority countries like India. I have seen Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), RRR (S.S. Rajamouli, 2022) and Thar (Raj Singh Chaudhary, 2022). As I increasingly see fewer films each year, but with ever-more lists being made, I wonder what the purpose of list production is. Is it for readers who don’t have time to watch the hundreds of films the writers of such lists imbibe? Or is it, like VHS, DVD and BluRay used to do, a sort of Bourdieu-like signifier of ‘good taste’? Or, perhaps even more cynically, is it a stamp of status to show to others – that you were ‘invited’ to participate? When I see people post their Sight & Sound list on insta, I think it’s the latter. So, why do we, at Senses, continue to poll? To reach a cinematic consensus? To show the world how many avid cinephiles contribute to our journal? To collect listed mimicry of personal taste so that we can play along in the great aggregation game of our times? I don’t know. We don’t ‘invite’ individuals to participate in our poll. It’s open to anyone – as long as you read our style guide and format accordingly. But that’s its own problematic: it’s necessary for a journal to have a style guide – there’s an internal logic that keeps us somewhere on the same page. But it’s also limiting: who can’t contribute because they can’t write the way we ask? Or because they don’t think in lists and sentences. How do the many non-English speakers and writers engage and participate with our ideas and ideology? Do they even want to? Do we even know – beyond the metrics of Google analytics – who is reading, and more importantly, who isn’t? (Tara Judah) * Most lists repeat themselves, and ours is no exception, except for the always present outsiders (only-Hollywooders, China and experimental cinema specialists, etc.). In the end, we mostly reproduced whatever was canonized the previous year. Maybe if lists should be anything they should be discussions inviting to explore a certain amount of experiences, more than Olympic-medal or everything-I-saw-in-the-year accounts. Perhaps choosing only five films and commenting on them could make a valuable list… (Could 5 to 10 outstanding or provoking films with a max of 1,000 words to explain your reasons for the selection be our bet?) (Abel Muñoz-Hénonin) * In our call for World Poll contributions in December, we (the editors) wrote: ‘What are end-of-the-year best-of polls good for? What (or whose) interests and ideological ends do they serve? In a world super-speeding toward environmental cataclysm and ethnonationalist tyranny, why spend precious time rating and ranking film titles when one could instead be scheming, conspiring, and tacticising toward a future worth living? (Which is to say – reading and writing about the films that deserve a future.) At worst, retrospective lists abandon critique in favour of violent metricization, commodity fetishism, and turbo-patriarchal posturing. At best, curating a compilation of favourites opens up a rare opportunity for reflection not just on the world that was, but also on the one that could have been and that might still be. At Senses of Cinema, our annual World Poll makes us wary but also hopeful: wary that the project might reproduce the world’s oppressive pathologies, but also hopeful that it might upend them. There is danger, joy, and subversive potential in the exercise; or, as Serge Daney put it in 1980 to preface his top-of-the-decade selection for Cahiers du Cinéma: “The childish pleasure of lists … let’s give in to it.”’ This year, we opted to try out a new, somewhat modified format: in addition to the 1000-word limit, we asked contributors to restrict their lists to ten entries in total. In recent years, editing long lists became unmanageable for our small, more or less volunteer team. In addition, speaking from my personal perspective, I believe that interesting, worthwhile contributions can still be concocted within the stricter format, perhaps even more so. But of course I might be wrong. Here, I echo Abel’s suggestion above: perhaps, if lists should be anything (that is a big if) they should work as invitations, springboards or portals for discussion and the creation of ideas, as opposed to tools for capital accumulation, the reification of an already hyper-visible canon, and the more or less arbitrary advancement of individual tastes above all others. This is not to advocate for a rigid prescriptivism of what best-of film lists should and shouldn’t be, but rather to propose understanding formal restriction – in our case, limiting ballots to ten – as an expansion of discursive possibility, and not its spoilsport closing. The fewer entries in a list, the more room ideas have to grow and breathe. (This is why I like our 1000-word condition: ample space, enough for thoughts to germinate.) Ideally, there would be no list necessary at all, but unfortunately that is not (yet) the world we live in. Perhaps a world without lists – which is to say a world in which ‘violent metricization, commodity fetishism, and turbo-patriarchal posturing’ are remnants of historical horror – is the better world we could be building toward. But perhaps it is exactly through lists (understood as discursive openings) that such a world can be imagined and thought. As always, all thoughts, suggestions, and comments are welcome; to join in on the discourse, forget the list and consider putting together a proposal for a text. (Nace Zavrl) Endnotes Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Against Lists’, Another Gaze, 29 November 2019. ↩ Library of Congress, ‘Complete National Film Registry Listing’, 2025. ↩ Gorfinkel, ibid. ↩ Gorfinkel, ibid. ↩