Assignment 2:

 

See part one: Here

See part two: Here

 

By Olivia Hough

Part II (5 of 15% total)

The Canon depletes the artistry of femininity and plasters men upon gravestones of excellence.

 

The canon is tired

It needs to go to bed

 

Film and its greatness is elderly and sagging, dragging upon the loose skin of veterans who have been long forgotten, whose photos still hang on halls without followers or people to adorn them with awards like yonder years.

Canon Fodder Assignment 2 – By Olivia Hough

Part I (10 of 15% total) – 1200-1500 word reflect

MANIFESTO!

MANIFESTO!

MANIFESTO!

In weeks 3-5 of Canon Fodder, I became inspired by the many manifestos we viewed and read, and increasingly spiteful for The Canon (Sight and Sound 2012) and the issues I have with its formation and inclusions. My issues on inclusion, exclusion, form, criterion, and rules remain at the front of my mind when I think of The Canon.

Firstly, I struggle to distinguish between short films and feature length films but more specifically, what divides them within the context of The Canon. Other than their length and structure, I deeply feel that the forms are closely enough related that they should be regarded as the same.

The Street (Caroline Leaf 1976) highlighted the quality I look for amongst films to consider their greatness. Emotion. I was completely invested in the story of The Street and I couldn’t understand why it was excluded from The Canon. It moved me, captured me, and even had me watching it again. If art and film’s purpose is to make people feel, then The Street was the greatest film I had seen in class yet. It asked me to interrogate what I consider great compared to what The Canon deems as great.

Thus, one of my greatest issues of The Canon is highlighted by Dogma 95 (1995), and that is the idea of Rules. I find Dogma 95’s list of arbitrary rules dictating what makes something worthy of The Canon an evil and twisted necessity. The manifesto lends itself to the idea that as a true artist, one should refrain from personal taste. Not only does this sound exhausting but it also sounds elitist. I believe that any value scale frustrating because art, in my opinion, cannot be objectively judged. It confines peoples creatively as they try to adhere to the rules and aims to elevate a group of people based on their exclusive knowledge. Even though the Canon is not built upon Dogman 95 exclusively, those tyo agree with the list become esteemed in some sort of film classism in which, in my opinion, as encouraged The Canon to remain somewhat the same for many decades.

And yet I try to define the greatest films by their ability to create an emotional response? I keep my own lists on Letterboxd? I’m confused and conflicted with myself. But I think the greatest issue is the universality of such value judgements and forcing a criterion upon other people; telling them what should be considered great. My list is for me! And believe me, The Canon is not for me.

In Schrader’s article ‘Canon Fodder’ he outlines said criteria for an objectively great film. Beauty, strangeness, unity of subject and from, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, morality and so on (Schrader 2006). Whilst this clarified the Canon for me and provided me a lens to understand the films through, it did not make many of the old films any more interesting or thrilling to me. It did not turn Citizen Kane into a film I wanted to see again or Vertigo a masterpiece. No matter the criteria, it is up to my personal taste. People will disagree with The Canon as long as it exists.

The short films Bygone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart 1949) and Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Svankmajer 1982) were both well-constructed and excellent short films which blew my mind. Whether it was really their technical skill or just the breath of fresh air these shorts offered me compared to the ancient feature length films we had seems so far, their production felt more impressive than any of the other films I had seen so far – despite their lack of a traditional narrative. It was almost because of this that I fell in love with them.

In my pervious reflection, I noted a lack of diversity in The Canon noting the exclusion of women, people of colour and queer people, and yet now my grievances lay with a lack of form and genre diversity. Why do all the films on the list feel the same? They’re old, by men for men, centred around war and action.

Jesse Wente speaks to a revolution, one of which that takes place within the film industry surrounding stories and the change in who are the emerging story tellers of today (Wente 2019). The manifesto reminded me of the power of cinema and the ways representations and the stories we tell affect people and society.

So in a bid to broaden my horizons, I was excited to view a MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) film! Connor and I chose to view Neptune Frost (dir. Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman 2022), a sci-fi, Afrofuturist Queer film to combat everything I hated about The Canon. I was ready to make my point, state that this was the best film I had ever seen and wrap my argument up in nice big pink bow – I wanted to prove diversity is better. And don’t get me wrong, diversity is better – but Neptune Frost alone is…not. Or so I thought.

The film was so different from anything I had seen before that I didn’t understand the conventions they employed. We were perpetually confused and honestly disappointed. This only showed me that The Canon, the status quo and the accepted has narrowed my ability to understand other types of cinema. I’m so used to dissecting the male gaze, analysing the three-act structure, recognising the tropes and reused plot lines that I ultimately dubbed Neptune Frost a bad film because it didn’t have the qualities that I have been fighting against for six weeks. I felt hypocritical.

In the manifesto ‘A Queer(’s) Cinema’, Manuel Betancourt states that ‘the queer imagination can surely move beyond what’s been done’ (Betancourt 2019, pg 17) and the celebration of films made by minorities is what The Canon so desperately lacks. Betancourt continues ‘queer cinema must push against decades of tradition to create itself anew’ (Betancourt 2019, pg 15) and this was exhibited in Neptune Frost. It was revolutionary in its conception and execution. Despite my cluelessness, it taught me that the queer experience is universal, and the fear of oppression and judgement, hate and joy that comes with being queer still imprinted on me. Through everything I didn’t understand, the desire for acceptance still reached me. And upon reflection, Neptune Frost grew on me.

The Canon has ebbed and flowed over the years with minor changes, but remains reminiscent of a whiteness, maleness and straightness of an outdated world and the stories it ranks no longer reflect what I, a queer woman of the 21^st century wants to watch. Whilst these films were revolutionary in their making, why not make a ‘most influential films’ list, and have the Sight and Sound list reflect societies values and interest of today? I believe The Canon provides a narrow view of the world, one that is disinterring, misrepresentative and exclusive.

The film ‘Manifesto’ (dir. Julian Rosefeldt, 2015) ignited a desire to create and perform my own manifesto. The power and drive I felt in Cate Blanchett’s performance is something I hope to channel in my own manifesto. The manifesto as a political and outrageous statement of beliefs is right up my alley, and I would be enthralled to make an unconventional film (short film, unconventional narrative) to dismantle the canon with my words, and with the form of my final piece too. I hope to make something that the grandfathers of cinema would be appalled to see. Let’s break some rules.

~ 1252 words

 

(see part 2 here)

 

References

Caroline Leaf (1976), The Street, short film, National Film Board of Canada.

Dogma 95, “Manifesto”, 1995, Dogme95.dk – A tribute to the official Dogme95, accessed 28 August 2022.

Jan Svankmajer (1982), Dimensions of Dialogue, short film, YouTube.

Jesse Wente, “Doing All Things Differently” in Film Quarterly vol. 72 no. 3, Spring 2019, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2019, pp. 42-43.

Lambart E & McLaren N (1949), Bygone Bull Care, short film, National Film Board of Canada.

Manuel Betancourt, “A Queer(’s) Cinema” in Film Quarterly vol. 72 no. 3, Spring 2019, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2019, pp. 15-17.

Paul Schrader, “Canon Fodder” in Film Comment, vol. 42, no. 5, September-October 2006, pp. 33-49

Various, “The Greatest Films of All Time”, Sight & Sound, September 2012, pp. 39-71.

Wells, O (1941), Citizen Kane, film, New York: Mercury Theater for RKO Radio Pictures Corp.

Williams S $ Uzeyman A (2022), Neptune Frost, film, Melbourne International Film Festival.

 

Here are the links to both parts of my first assignment for Canon Fodder!

For Part 1 Click Here!

For Part 2 Click Here!

Truth

The first two weeks of Canon Fodder have taught me to interrogate what is true and what we accept to be truth from knowledge holders whilst illuminating the flaws in the film Canon.

The sequential viewing of Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (dir. Pamela B. Green, 2018) and Forgotten Silver (dirs Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, 1995) was to be one of my greatest lessons at university so far. Be Natural cast Alice Guy-Blache into the limelight after her contribution to early cinema, film narrative and her production house Solax were buried under the men that followed her in a tale as old as time. Despite her milestones in film history, she is not on Sight and Sounds ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ list. In parallel, Forgotten Silver seeks to document and uncover the works of Kiwi Colin McKenzie and the technical advancements he made to film and cinema which also became buried (physically and metaphorically) in an effort to preserve his vision of his four hour feature ‘Salone’. 

Whilst Guy-Blache’s story was true, Forgotten Silver was fake (TO MY SHOCK AND HORROR). Upon viewing, I accepted both films as truth as I naively onboarded the information I was given – rather than critique it. To me it ultimately highlighted how easily the white male story tellers were able to rewrite history and for their narrative to flourish unchallenged. The Canon, and the greatness it represents, speaks to a history of whiteness and maleness; a knowledge bank passed down through generations of critics, film makers and students accepting history from the lone perspective of white men.

 

The battle between Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941) and which one deserves the top spot on the Sight and Sound’s “The Greatest Films of All Time’ list was a contest I did not overly care for. I was underwhelmed at both films’ greatness as I found their subject matter dated. Owen Gleiberman eagerly critiques both films in his article “‘Vertigo’ over ‘Citizen Kane’?’ stating that Citizen Kane may have fallen to the second position on the list due to its inability to relate to more modern audiences stating ‘for a movie to be the greatest of all time, it can’t be a monument. It has to be a movie that you feel close to’ (Gleiberman 2012 para. 4) and I agree. I felt disconnected from the story and confused by the film’s structure. He continues to state (and I paraphrase) that Vertigo’s place on the list was a choice to ‘fanboy… academics’ (Gleiberman 2012 para. ) and thus I reach my main issue with the list, it feels incredibly dated. Even though I am unsure if a films ability for it to ‘age well’ should effect it placement on the list in an academic sense, my personal taste was not too fond of both films.

However I did enjoy the composition of the shots in Citizen Kane and the use of colour in Vertigo, but in my opinion, beauty alone can not put either film on a pedestal. it was mostly the only positive feedback our class gave the films.

L’Avventura (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) and Robert Koehler’s “What makes Antonioni’s L’avventura great” opened my eyes to why these films top the list beyond my personal prejudice against old films (that’s too harsh, I’m sorry). Koehler speaks to L’Avventura’s revolutionary nature. The lack of a conclusion, the disappearance of a protagonist and the extended empty shots were appalling – in a fantastic way. Even though I thought the film was slow, I began entranced in the lore of its opening at the Cannes film festival and the dramatic good and bad reactions it conjured.

And whilst I think about the fairness of the list, I am confronted with inner turmoil. Even though Citizen Kane, Vertigo and L’Avventura were not what I consider great on their own but their revolutionary nature is what makes them great. Their ability to invent, shock and wow people, their legacy is their greatness. And yet, Alice Guy-Blache was revolutionary in her technical ability and her narrative style… but where is her spot on the list?

 

 

References:

Gleiberman, O (2012), ‘Vertigo’ over ‘Citizen Kane’? Why the new Sight and Sound critics’ poll is full of itself’, Entertainment Weekly <https://ew.com/article/2012/08/07/the-sight-and-sound-poll-is-full-of-it/>

Koehler, R (2012), ‘What Makes Antonioni’s L’avventura Great’,  BFI.org.uk<https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/l-avventura-michelangelo-antonioni-1960-greatest-films-poll>