“Canon” is described in Owen Gleiberman’s “’Vertigo’ over ‘Citizen Kane’? Why the new Sight and Sound critics’ poll is full of itself” as, “the films that our most respected thinkers about film believe will, and should, live on”. In another word, those films that continue their vitality by having impact on films in the future, at the same time, are recognized by film makers and critics. To evaluate a canon, might start from what’s a new technique or a new way of storytelling used, and how it’s inherited by the films released after it. 

Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver and Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché  have discussed the importance of canon from the beginning of film history. Alice Guy-Blache is a female pioneer in film industry, whose name unfortunately was written off the film history somehow. She invented “close-up”, made one of the first feature films in the world, and one of the first films featuring an entirely black cast. Technically Blache’s films could be said as canons, because the techniques she invented are still largely used in film industry, and it’s officially recognized. In the journal “The Forgotten Mother of Cinema” Green says to Tonnian Fernandez “You realize watching her films how little has changed.” “many of them look completely modern.” However, since lots of her films are lost, we can hardly say how relatable her films are to the modern films. After all, similarity does not mean inspiration. Plus, if her films still existed through the last decades, “we would have a different landscape of what filmmaking has looked like for women in the history of cinema as a whole”. So, comparing the impact Guy-Blache’s films could have had on filmmaking and the impact they had on it, maybe they are not so “canon” and that’s not her fault. Forgotten Silver is a mockumentary made by Jackson, though it’s completely fictional, it still illustrates how important those breakthroughs are in the film history. Especially in the area of silent film, the experiment in color film, comedy and live action. The significance of those experiment is reinforced by the excitement of New Zealanders, Colin McKenzie’s films really got a chance to be canons, if they were ever real. 

Take a specific example, in L’avventura directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, some of cinema’s old props are “kicked away”, such as Hollywood’s insistence on happy and closed ending (as “Great wide open: L’Avventura” by Robert Koehler form BFI illustrates, though L’avventura is an Italian film), and explored and expanded the concept of the ‘open film’, which is why many filmmakers and critics are so fond of it. In some modern films like Inception by Christopher Nolan, the audience never knows for sure whether Cobb wakes up eventually (or his tractricoid stops spinning, same thing). As well as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he did not just invent the famous “Vertigo Shot” (a movement of camera on dolly while changing the focal length of the lens), he also adopted a plot that “is desconstructing itself as it goes along”, and developed a study in fetishism and the inner luridness of romantic tragedy, which many filmmakers and critics would describe as “poetic”.  David Lynch is “profoundly influenced” by Vertigo that he adapted the twisting and undermining narrative into his Mulholland Drive.