C'est quoi un bon film ?

• The mother prefers In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai because everything in the film is beautiful • The French teacher prefers a film that makes you unhappy • The author prefers Pacific Rim for the robots fighting dinosaurs

Serious critics answer either Pacific Rim or Citizen Kane, showing major divergence of opinion.

If loving a film is entirely subjective, how can we establish an objective list of the greatest films of all time?

The author decides to watch films from the Sight and Sound list to understand the objective criteria.

Sight and Sound is an extremely respected magazine that publishes a survey every 10 years with hundreds of film professionals and directors from around the world.

Citizen Kane dominated the ranking for 50 years across five consecutive surveys.

Vertigo recently dethroned Citizen Kane for the top spot on the ranking.

The author wonders why these particular films deserve to be at the top of the list.

Instead of saying Kane is rich, the film uses very slow dissolves showing successively his mansion, his park, his river, his boats, and his waters.

The viewer must activate their brain and conclude for themselves that no one can own all of this at once in a single image.

This visual approach shows how cinema can communicate complex ideas without explicit dialogue.

The author notices that all the great films on the list use this strategy of visual rather than verbal narration.

The film clearly shows two distinct worlds: the modern world of settlers inside and the wild world of the West outside, revealing the hero's belonging without saying it explicitly.

The ending communicates the heroes' departure through the mist of the airport lit like stars, visually placing them among the clouds.

The final scene where Chaplin is recognized by touch by the young woman he loved, expressing a world of emotion on his face without words.

These moments cannot be translated into books or radio; they are pure cinema moments possible only through the camera and close-up.

All the examples presented share one key thing: the image speaks as much as the actors, sometimes more.

The top 100 films list is not a list of the best stories, but of works that demonstrate the superiority of visual storytelling.

Writing beautiful stories has existed for 20,000 years, but only cinema can use light printed on film.

• Editing: moving from one image to another to speak visually • Mise-en-scène: composing an image to speak visually • The whole: simply cinema, what sets it apart from other arts

The YouTube channel argues that American comedies where everyone is filmed the same way and the image serves no purpose are not really films, but filmed acting.

If you could listen to the film on the radio and retain 95% of its substance, then it's not really cinema but filmed acting.

Though this film about bankers and economic crisis is narratively interesting, visually it's just people filmed identically discussing in meeting rooms.

Even if a story is exciting, it cannot make the top 100 if it doesn't show what distinguishes cinema from other arts.

• Little Miss Sunshine which visually shows a character's colorblindness • Pacific Rim which poetically associates smoke and anger • Films using framing and lighting in revolutionary ways

All top 100 films are at least 25 years old, while we now have more knowledge and technical means than ever before.

Why in 25 years, despite enormous technological advances, has no modern film earned a place in the top 100?

It may be related to when these films came out rather than their inherent quality.

Citizen Kane comes out at a time when all Hollywood films use tight frames on actors. Citizen Kane proposes using wide shots and emphasizes everything, creating images as interesting to watch as to listen to.

City Lights comes out several years after sound arrives in cinema as Chaplin's final great challenge, proving great films can be made without dialogue.

Vertigo announces the beginning of the French New Wave in the United States, a moment when directors understand they are authors whose style can be recognized in the image.

The list is not just the strongest films visually, but those that innovated so much they expanded cinema's horizons for everyone.

Rashomon by Kurosawa seemed to challenge the author's theory because its main interest seemed to be its narrative story rather than its visual storytelling.

• A samurai was killed and his wife violated in a forest • A bandit is arrested and immediately admits his crime • The real debate concerns honor and reputation, each of three witnesses telling a version where they behave honorably

The film influenced culture so much that the term 'Rashomon effect' today describes any scenario where witnesses tell different versions of the same event.

Rashomon is the first film to show the sun directly on screen and uses innovative mirrors to light actors in a forest, opening new shooting possibilities.

The true genius of Rashomon lies in the fact that Kurosawa films the witnesses not as they actually are, but as the viewer thinks they are, creating intentional manipulation.

• All three witnesses lie about the event to preserve their honor • A fourth witness, the woodcutter, appears and seems honest • But even the woodcutter had a reason to lie, revealing that truth is impossible to know without seeing the event yourself

You cannot trust human beings; if you haven't seen something yourself, you will never know 100% what actually happened.

Kurosawa shows how the visual composition of the image influences viewer belief, revealing cinema's power to manipulate perception.

Vertigo invents the dolly zoom, a technique where the camera pulls back while zooming in, creating a strange effect where the background of the image moves closer while the foreground stays in place.

This effect creates a feeling of unease or vertigo because visually it's impossible in real life; no one sees a landscape where only the background moves.

This technique, invented for one specific scene in Vertigo, has been used in hundreds of films since and has become an essential tool of cinematic language.

Hitchcock found how to create this impression of vertigo with 1950s equipment, something modern filmmakers understand and admire immediately.

The people voting for this list are professionals, directors, and film enthusiasts who have devoted their lives to telling stories with images.

When a film comes out and shows a technique so advanced it opens new narrative possibilities, directors recognize it immediately as revolutionary.

If a film expands cinema's horizon itself, professionals remember it 60 years later and keep it at the top of the list.

For someone passionate about cinema, expanding the horizons of their art is the greatest gift they can receive.

Cinema is a visual art that has developed sophisticated techniques for telling stories, techniques other visual arts can learn from.

There is another highly visual art that often tells stories: video games. Can the magic of cinema be transposed to video games?

The second video will explore the question 'What has video gaming learned from cinema?' and will come out very soon because it's already written and shot, only editing remains.

The author emphasizes that the sequel is ready and only needs a few weeks for final editing.