In film, as with all art forms we have a cannon. The films which have been accepted as those which are the most important. The most successful. Growing up I always accepted that certain films were a part of this cannon and never disputed it.
I read BFI’s sight and sounds top 50 list of all time and believed fully that Citizen Kane was the greatest there was and that modern film simply could not live up to the beauty of that film. Then once I entered college and was drawn into the world of cinematic arts I began to see a wider range of the filmic cannon and fell in love with so many films. This wide depth of incredible movies that helped build our field.
However, while being here at Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival and watching the process of restoration, seeing some of the films that were left by the wayside, forgotten only to be found and had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on it to bring it back to a watchable immersive experience. You think of Filmmakers like Abel Gance, who I was taught is a pioneer of film, his technical achievements in Napoleon certainly highlight this. And yet, he has only recently been seen as such an inspiration to the filmmaking world. For the longest time, he was left by the wayside while filmmakers like Chaplin had their work at the forefront for almost the entirety of the last century.
So here I began to question, what makes a film worthy enough to enter the filmic cannon? Is it the contribution it has had to the field, a pioneer film if you will or is it the aesthetics, the artistic, the all round of how good the film is? If you think of the first option, this is certainly a worthy reason to be seen as a cannon film. However, this reasoning does not consider how good the film is, it only takes into account the influence it had and this is very much linked to distribution which is intrinsically tied to wealth and acceptance culturally. When you think of this, you must begin to question how many important films were left by the wayside, how many first times in films that were overlooked!!! Now if film is accepted into the cannon because of the second reason there’s a very important question to ask. Who judges the aesthetics of the film?
Each culture has their own perspective of beauty that has been developed through time, with the western influence being the loudest it has become the one we accept as the universal. Yet this is simply not true. If you grew up in an urban city compared to a suburban field your idea of beauty changes based on what you know, what you see and what appeals to you growing up.
So, due to the nature of film as an industry and the dominance of the west in cinema we have a problem. Our filmic cannon is decided by those films which are given funding to be distributed which leaves certain key films untouched. And all decisions about the beauty of the film, the artistry etc. is judged by a group of Western, mainly white, mainly males and honestly most probably upper class individuals. Only a small faction of cultural indentites decide what Is good and they only get to see these films and judge them based on decisions made by wealthy investors all those years ago.
So, is this our filmic cannon? Are these the greatest films ever created?
