Another was the need to have a legally sound list that would stand up in court.
And that's all to the good many of the greatest movies (including most of the ones on the Sight & Sound list) arose from the mainstream of the industry (whether here or abroad).
What's of particular interest regarding the Sight and Sound list — and where it coheres with my own, despite the lack of overlap of particular titles — is its Franco-centrism (apart, of course, from Thomson's magnum opus).
And that's what the Sight & Sound list is good for: a call to look again, and with a renewed urgency, at what's on it — and at what's not.
The Sight and Sound list first came out at a time when the fight was still on to establish cinema as a respectable art form, when there was a generally accepted canon of cinematic classics, and when it appeared that the job of movie critic was going the way of the saddler.
Stimuli consisted of 25 sounds selected to be representative of a typical outdoor urban or suburban environment (see Table 1 for the sound list).
Murnau's "Sunrise" is the first such film on the Sight & Sound list to do so.
In 2009, Matt Melis of Consequence of Sound listed it sixth among his "Top Ten Songs by Ex-Beatles", writing: "it's arguable that Harrison's All Things Must Pass is the best solo album put out by a Beatle.
As Roger Ebert (a Sight & Sound voter) once wrote of the Sight & Sound List: "It is by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies--the only one most serious movie people take seriously".
