What is the greatest movie ever made?

It seems like a highly subjective question that's impossible to answer.

However, in 1952, the magazine of the British Film Institute

took it upon itself to come up with an answer to the question. They surveyed an international group of film

professionals to ask them what they thought the greatest films of all time were. And they have

conducted the survey every decade for the last 70 years.

Learn more about the Sight and Sound Decatal Survey

and the greatest movies of all time

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. See? Whenever you get into discussions of what is the greatest of all time, regardless of the

subject, it's going to elicit controversy. The impetus behind the survey

conducted by Sight and Sound magazine was simple enough. Try to determine what

is considered by critics to be the greatest film of all time. The methodology

that Sight and Sound used was pretty simple and with

only some minor changes it's been the method used for every single survey taken

since 1952. For the first survey they sent it to 85 film critics who lived in the United

Kingdom the United States France Italy Germany Denmark Sweden Belgium

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Each of the critics was given a blank sheet of paper and asked to write down what they considered to be their 10 greatest movies of all time, in no particular order.

The results were tabulated by simply counting what film was mentioned on the most lists.

That's it.

There is no weighted ranking system.

So the film which they dubbed the greatest

was simply the film that was put on the list of the top 10

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