Part I: Greatest Films of all Time Video

Part II: Reflection

The first two weeks of Canon Fodder have passed, meaning it’s now time to reflect on them and how they’ve changed and illuminated my views of the film canon. Going into this class, I had no idea what defined ‘film canon’. I had never explored it to any reasonable depth, so having it clearly laid out and defined was a great start. 

I almost immediately began to disagree with some of the decisions made to dictate said canon. The Sight and Sound “Greatest Films of all Time” contains almost no films after the turn of the century, with the top film being made in the 1950s. Surely film hadn’t peaked 80 years ago, and, in my opinion, many more recent films deserved to be on that list, taking the places of more older, outdated counterparts. 

It was then I realised how difficult dictating canon truly was. When finding the ‘Greatest movies of all time’, how do you take into account the influence a film has? A film like Vertigo was insanely influential for its time, but with its context in wider film history taken away, and evaluated as film in current times, it lags behind more modern mystery thrillers like The Usual Suspects and Memento. However, just because a film is highly influential, does that automatically make it one of the greatest movies of all time? If that is so, surely the Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat would be the greatest film of all time, since it invented the medium itself. In my opinion, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is to Citizen Kane and Vertigo what those films are to modern ones created today: films that were insanely revolutionary and mind-boggling at the time, but ones that, once stripped of their context and taken as just films, have been supplanted by greater ‘films’ that execute their ideas better, and I feel that should be represented more in the Sight and Sound poll. 

I also think there is something to be said about the biases that informs the ‘canon’ too; the poll is bereft of comedies or animation, mostly populated by serious think pieces that break film conventions, which appeal to their tastes more than other genres. The Gleiberman reading highlights this, with him believing that Vertigo’s more unsatisfying ending and how it breaks convention is one of the reasons critics placed it at the top of their lists. I agree with this; I do believe Citizen Kane is a better film than Vertigo, but I also think this exemplifies the fact that the people who dictated the canon like very particular films, such as Vertigo and L’avventura, and if a film does not fit into that category, such as Hot Fuzz, an extremely well executed comedy that’s a fun time with no particular deep meaning, it doesn’t make the list. 

One part that struck me about the canon was how easily it can change, however. The Fernandez reading about Alice Guy-Blanche, as well as Be Natural were enlightening, showing how many ‘firsts’ and great films in cinema can be falsely attributed, and how film canon can change on a dime based on discovery, whereas Forgotten Silver showed how easy it is to manipulate the canon in the eyes of many. If the canon is so easy to manipulate like that, then why do we hold it to such a high regard as the ‘be all and end all’ of great films and film history?

Overall, these first two weeks have opened my eyes to so many aspects of film and its canon, ranging from how its dictated and who dictates it, to how great films are decided, and how the history of film can be manipulated and (often) corrected, even if it is decades after the fact.