It’s time to rethink the established film canon | Little White Lies

It’s time to rethink the estab­lished film canon

13 Jan 2021

Words by Lillian Crawford

A person walking alone on a beach, with discarded clothing on the sand in the foreground.
A person walking alone on a beach, with discarded clothing on the sand in the foreground.
By con­tin­u­ing to pro­mote diver­si­ty in cin­e­ma, we can devel­op an alter­na­tive canon that includes everyone.

All cinephiles have to start some­where – but where to begin? There are so many great­est films’ lists out there that web­sites like They Shoot Pic­tures, Don’t They? have had to rank the lists them­selves. Go into any book­shop and you’ll find 1001 Movies to See Before You Die’ along­side dozens of hand­books for build­ing your own watch­list. Even stream­ing ser­vices have sec­tions of Clas­sics’ to help you out.

But it hasn’t always been easy. In the ear­ly days of what his­to­ri­an Tom Gun­ning calls the Cin­e­ma of Attrac­tions’, film­mak­ers like Thomas Edi­son and the Lumière broth­ers churned out hun­dreds of films which they toured as cir­cus acts. It wasn’t until DW Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was screened at the White House for Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son that cin­e­ma came to be seen as art.

The unprece­dent­ed sta­tus and pop­u­lar­i­ty of The Birth of a Nation meant that the cin­e­mat­ic canon – the stan­dard by which films are judged – was born of a white suprema­cist film cel­e­brat­ing the first incar­na­tion of Ku Klux Klan dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War. Its glo­ri­fi­ca­tion was so pow­er­ful that a sec­ond Klan formed after its release, inspir­ing racist vio­lence into the 1920s.

A cen­tu­ry on, the prece­dent of taste Grif­fith estab­lished hasn’t been shak­en off. Hol­ly­wood stu­dios have always catered to the assumed inter­ests of West­ern audi­ences, lead­ing to the dom­i­nance of cis white het­ero­sex­u­al nar­ra­tives in film which con­tin­ues today.

Of course, this bias was embed­ded in West­ern art and lit­er­a­ture long before the birth of film. How­ev­er, canon­i­cal cin­e­ma start­ed from con­ser­vatism rather than mov­ing with changes in oth­er art forms. There’s lit­tle to be seen of the Harlem Renais­sance, a pro­lif­er­a­tion of African-Amer­i­can voic­es in 1920s Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture includ­ing Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hugh­es, in cin­e­ma until Isaac Julien direct­ed Look­ing for Langston in 1989.

Impres­sion­ism and Expres­sion­ism may have influ­enced French and Ger­man films, but it was absent in Amer­i­ca until FW Mur­nau moved to Hol­ly­wood and direct­ed Sun­rise: A Song of Two Humans in 1927. It’s lit­tle won­der that when Orson Welles made Cit­i­zen Kane in 1941, with its non-lin­ear nar­ra­tive and exper­i­men­tal cin­e­matog­ra­phy, it was dis­missed as incom­pre­hen­si­ble avant-gardism by Amer­i­can crit­ics. West­ern tastes were bland.

In 1955, Hol­ly­wood stu­dios began to sell film rights to tele­vi­sion. Sud­den­ly films screened in cin­e­mas decades before could be watched at home. New access devel­oped the canon, con­tin­u­ing to do so through home media from VHS and Beta­max to DVD, Blu-ray and now Net­flix. It comes down to what’s on the tel­ly – the more peo­ple tune in, the more it’s repeated.

When the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute com­piled their list of the 100 Great­est Amer­i­can Movies of All Time in 1998, the cri­te­ria stip­u­lat­ed that every film had to have been shown reg­u­lar­ly on TV. The films list­ed include nos­tal­gic paeans to colo­nial­ism, gaslight­ing musi­cals, trans­misog­y­nis­tic slash­ers, and more films made by sex­u­al preda­tors than by women or peo­ple of colour.

When many of us start watch­ing films seri­ous­ly, we make our way through lists like the AFI and Sight & Sound polls. Some­times we con­vince our­selves films are mas­ter­pieces because the canon says they are. But read the 1975 essay Visu­al Plea­sure and Nar­ra­tive Cin­e­ma’ by Lau­ra Mul­vey or bell hooks’ 1992 essay The Oppo­si­tion­al Gaze’ and you’ll realise that feel­ing poor­ly rep­re­sent­ed by a film is a valid cri­te­ri­on to dis­like it. Trou­ble is, because the canon was most­ly curat­ed by straight white cis men, the cri­te­ri­on for suc­cess is their rep­re­sen­ta­tion and no one else’s.

Black-and-white image showing a group of people with surveying equipment outdoors in a forested area.

Oth­er voic­es have been side­lined or silenced from the begin­ning. In 1986, the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of pio­neer­ing direc­tor Alice Guy-Blaché was pub­lished. She wrote it in the 1940s but, since few peo­ple knew who she was, she couldn’t find a pub­lish­er. The book ques­tions Guy-Blaché’s omis­sion from the annals of cin­e­ma, despite hav­ing direct­ed the first nar­ra­tive film, 1896’s The Cab­bage-Patch Fairy, 19 years before The Birth of a Nation.

There are hun­dreds of exam­ples of women, POC and LGBT+ film­mak­ers and nar­ra­tives being exor­cised from the canon – some are includ­ed in the canon time­line I com­piled for the recent Mank issue of LWLies. Attempts have been made to reverse the estab­lished canon, such as HBO Max remov­ing Gone with the Wind from its library. Yet change doesn’t come through cen­sor­ship. What we need is an alter­na­tive – not a sin­gu­lar canon, but many.

In Sep­tem­ber 2020invit­ed peo­ple on Twit­ter who iden­ti­fied as any­thing oth­er than any one of white, cis, het­ero­sex­u­al, or male to list their top 10 films. Over 300 peo­ple from across the globe respond­ed with­in 24 hours, includ­ing a large num­ber of crit­ics and film­mak­ers. The most fre­quent choice was Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light (50 votes), close­ly fol­lowed by Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site (34 votes) and Céline Sciamma’s Por­trait of a Lady on Fire (32 votes).

For women, POC and LGBT+ audi­ences, it’s only been rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly that crit­i­cal­ly-praised, award-win­ning cin­e­ma has rep­re­sent­ed them on screen. Where old­er films fea­ture, they often use queer aes­thet­ics or sub­texts and com­plex female char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly the films of Wong Kar-wai, includ­ing In the Mood for Love (21 votes) and David Lynch, topped by Mul­hol­land Dri­ve (21 votes).

It’s also notable that more acces­si­ble films, such as new­er releas­es and films avail­able to stream, rank high­ly. For many, Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is a gate­way into inter­na­tion­al cin­e­ma (Spir­it­ed Away came fourth with 25 votes) as their films are reg­u­lar­ly screened on Film4 in the UK and are now avail­able on Net­flix. By con­trast, many films direct­ed by women only fea­tured on lists by crit­ics and film­mak­ers, such as Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Chan­tal Akerman’s Jeanne Diel­man (13 votes each), pos­si­bly because they are only avail­able from spe­cial­ist dis­trib­u­tors like the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, many of which aren’t avail­able in the UK.

It’s a small sam­ple, but it offers a glimpse at what an alter­na­tive film canon might look like. Rather than a catch-all Great­est Films of All Time’, the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of taste and per­son­al invest­ment should be con­sid­ered when carv­ing out a path for new cinephiles to nav­i­gate the vast labyrinth of cin­e­ma. While there are increas­ing num­bers of films being made that rep­re­sent minor­i­ty nar­ra­tives, there are very few pos­i­tive on-screen por­tray­als of trans* lives and non-bina­ry iden­ti­ties. By cel­e­brat­ing diver­si­ty in cin­e­ma, and employ­ing a range of crit­i­cal voic­es, it might be pos­si­ble to devel­op a cin­e­mat­ic canon that includes everyone.

You might like