and so it begins

Because it seems to evoke the spirit of my project, I have been thinking about the term, "summer reading list." I’m not certain how many of you have heard of this term – it seems to be almost uniquely American. If you happened to attend high school in the United States, or junior high, or even elementary school, you might have come across it only once, or every couple of years, or more frequently. The gist of it is this: over the summer, it was highly recommended that you should read. Books. Not comic books, not magazines, not newspapers, but books books. For the sake of young readers, schools or parent groups would have put together the "summer reading list." It was implied that these books were endorsed by the writer-issuers of the list - it was, effectively, a rudimentary form of taste-making that, in all likelihood, for good or for ill, had a significant impact on those students who chose to use the list. If you take someone's recommendations and put them into effect in your life, even as a trial, you are impacted by that choice. (Of course, if you were me, you spent your summers on the computer or in front of the television, and basically avoided anything with the word "reading" in it.)

 

Literary canons differ from reading lists, not just because they address different-sized crowds (reading list:Mr. Malone’s inbound 10th-grade English class::Western canon:Earth), but they are expressed with a greater degree of prescription than the 3-page, mimeographed “good books” lineup we were handed on our way out the door, into the waiting, mellow summertime. The summer reading list consisted of suggested titles; with middling effort applied, you may get through two or three before the beginning of the new school year. The canon requires respect without obedience – in other words, there’s no apparatus to make you read these titles, but qualified thinkers, readers, and teachers have vaulted them into the pantheon, and any disagreement on your part is unlikely to have much of an impact.

 

Film canons are intended to play the same cultural role, with some key differences, chief among them the “middlebrow” accusation commonly leveled against them – a label that literary tastemakers have more or less evaded. (Something to do with listing Harvard University as your credentials, instead of Warner Brothers.) Rather than getting too much into detail, film canons are malleable, open to controversy and challenge, yet with enough consistency to be regarded as entities. They’re out there, and they dominate discussion. They’re like health insurance companies – they have specific benefits, but we need other options.

 

Which brings me to…me!

 

Instead of exploring canons and their formation by naming or explaining, I’d prefer to work under them, within the negative space created by their admission/omission mechanism, taking the mechanism apart and rebuilding it to suit my objectives. Rather than dispute canon selectees, many of which genuinely deserve the magnitude of their ascension, my objective is to corral – name – recognize – the films that have not crossed the cultural-appreciative “tipping point” into broad acceptance.

These films are essential but unexamined. We’ve either forgotten about them, they haven’t popped up on our radar, or we dismissed them out of hand.

 

The seed of inspiration for this is our consideration of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. As you have no doubt heard everyone say, this is generally considered to be one of the greatest films – and in some circles (Sight & Sound polls, the American Film Institute) it takes the top spot. It deserves the honors but its reputation has engendered a powerful downside: all other Welles films remain in its shadow. The undervaluation/underexposure of Welles’ non-Kane films has been alleviated somewhat in recent years by overdue recognition of Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, and even Chimes at Midnight. This noble effort, however, has failed to address the elephant in the room regarding Welles’s standing in the canon: the fact that every single project that Welles worked on as a director, complete or incomplete, is special and likely as not as great as the named selectees. Let’s not even talk about the non-great, incomplete titles (like London) that are nevertheless well worth seeing; the most troublesome of Welles’s feature films are greater than almost everything else around – it is possible to be so taken by Confidential Report that you develop a distaste for the precise but bland lighting, effects, and editing of some more anonymous studio product that emerged from the same period. The problems of the Welles films not previously named (Confidential Report, F for Fake, The Immortal Story, even The Stranger, and others) is less to do with their aesthetic power and more to do with the problems moviegoers experience in being asked to extend themselves beyond their comfort zone, i.e. the viewer’s ability to manage what he or she experiences, rather than what the artist has created.

 

Does this mean I will include films on solely Welles-based criteria? No – my name isn’t Andrew Sarris, and, anyway, that wouldn’t be fair. Almost no filmmakers have the ability to transform the most casual, tossed-off bit of film and infuse it with their personal sensibility. What I said was, my rebuttal to the “Kane is all we need, I mean what else did he make that was good?” problem is the inspiration for my project, not the definition.

 

Let me level with you – this talk is going to extend into one structured by pro-auteurist attitudes. But two quick disclaimers:

 

1. Auteurism gets a bad rap because participants are sometimes ridiculed for their commonalities, which they may or may not have created. An auteurist is like a political liberal: you can screw it up and look like an ass, but the concept in itself is worthwhile and, done right, can lead to benefits which transcend its libelous opponents’ inability (or unwillingness) to deal. An intelligent critic with auteurist inclinations exists in a constant state of (a) exploration – what some have designated the “Daniel Boone” instinct, always striking out for more elbow room, and (b) renegotiation, refusing to let personal opinions calcify into dogma. If I have failed in the above paragraph to make the concept more scalable, Dan Sallitt succeeds, here.
2. I’m not above non-directorial assets in films. The best example I can come up with is Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (1950). Some people think I’m off my medication when I say that her performance, which is as heartbreakingly sincere as it is thoroughly outsized and overdone, is one of the greatest performances the cinema has ever seen, but in this instance, I am using the example to illustrate my willingness to leave my auteurist armband at home from time to time. The film itself isn’t really very good – there isn’t anything about the direction that compels me to investigate George Sidney further. (This is not an outright dismissal – I have encountered Sidney fans.)

 

The list project will be structured around speculative/exploratory auteurism, relying less on the survival-of-the-fittest processes that usually assist in canon formation, i.e. representing Howard Hawks by listing Rio Bravo, Only Angels Have Wings, and maybe a half dozen others, but keeping the focus on directors. This is a clumsy way of saying that I won’t list movies from the (2) category – i.e. movies that are only worthwhile for their performances, score, dialogue, etc. As regards my biographical admission in (2), let’s just say that, when it comes to auteurism, I’m an independent, but my name isn’t Joe Lieberman.

 

The role of direction is – echoing my earlier toe-in-water remarks on canon formation – far too complex to lay out here. In any case, it’s the wrong place and the wrong time. Let me leave it at: great cinema is usually but not always powered by the unifying capability of the director, but the films excluded by the not always clause are not going to be represented here.

 

There are several categories that, for the sake of…a number of things, such as personal bias, effect for effort, and simplicity, will also not be represented here, either. I know it’s not fair, but at the end of the day, I’d rather not put myself in the position to be overwhelmed by the wealth of brilliant, creative work in the field of the avant-garde (that embattled term, sorry), documentary, video, television, or short form. By the close of 2010, I am sure I can be persuaded to expand the garden to include those achievements. For now, however, I must restrict the scope to what Fred Camper has on occasion designated “that tiny portion of cinema devoted to moving people walking around and talking in lip sync as part of a story…” He goes on to mention union crews and corporate subsidies as qualifiers – I will gladly free my project from those two restrictions.

 

A crucial disclaimer regarding authorship: I am presently flying solo in the planning, execution, and, for the foreseeable future, the custody of this project. This is not the same as personally endorsing every single film – that would be nothing other than a reprinting of my “favorite films” list, which is (if I may say so myself) quite extensive and complex, and can be found here.

 

Instead, the titles will be culled from various sources in my sphere of film reference: other cinephiles, critics, and academics. At its most democratic, the list will include titles of films I don’t care for, possibly championed by people with whom I have personal differences. (Don’t ask.) I have enough faith in the intelligence of the endorsers of each film, that admission based on their judgment of the film’s aesthetic merit becomes something I feel secure in extending, even if it pains me to do so.

 

Another big reason for looking back on my personal, aesthetic judgment and not proclaiming it the end-all, be-all of the list project is that, frankly, I don’t always recognize a great film when I see one. As intelligent and capable I am as a viewer, I’m still growing, and there are many films in my experience that I can call “great” towards which I was lukewarm or worse upon my first encounter. This has happened enough – well, once is enough, really – to make me measure out a grain of mistrust towards my instincts if I didn’t immediately take a liking to a film that certain people have told me is great.

 

Final disclaimer: there are laughable selections on this list. Just…get ready. Some are laughable by pedigree (“You can’t be serious – that romantic comedy movie starring so-and-so?!”), some by reputation (post-2000 movies by the Wachowskis), but they’re there. If anything, these inclusions are intended to fend off interpretations of the lists as “All films are great, and, given that, they’re all equally great.” Not the case. Please don’t think I’m saying anything of the kind. Instead, some of the harder-to-swallow inclusions are intended to endorse films with non-traditional but waiting-to-be-explored aesthetic value. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the first two kinds of films we write off without even the requisite curiosity to enable ourselves to make a mental note to see some time in the future (as we might do for a straight-to-video feature we’ve heard good things about) are (1) big-budget features with pre-auteur-tipping-point (or, less kindly, “no name”) directors, especially when they fail at the box office (schadenfreude), and (2) films that acquire a lasting reputation as Really Bad Movies, which can often take decades to escape. Contemporary examples are numerous; a classic example is John Ford’s Mary of Scotland. (If you have any “auteurists have their mitts in everything” suspicions, ask yourself this question: why did Katherine Hepburn outlast her label as “box office poison,” but we didn’t go back and revisit the movies that gave her the name?)

 

IMPORTANT: The project carries no warranty, expressed or implied. You’re free to discount or disregard the whole thing, set off by one eensy-weensy title that turns your stomach. Have a great day. Regarding omissions, however, I am eager to hear a case made for anything - ANYTHING - especially because the map of the cinema is so huge, none of us can know all of it, let alone appreciate all that’s worthwhile. A good example is Frank Capra’s Rain or Shine (1930). If I had begun this project on New Years, 2009, I would already have completed the 1930s without giving Rain or Shine a second thought. Within the last few days, however, a few contributors over at Dave Kehr.com have sung its praises. (If the link doesn't take you directly, Rain or Shine talk begins with Joseph McBride's comment on 12/29/2009 at 7:46pm.) Now, just try and get me to forget it.

 

Look – canons are what they are, and great films should stand and be recognized. I’m not looking to denounce any of the various film canons, no matter how boring or wrongheaded (hello, American Film Institute) they can be. If anything, I am mounting a “termite attack,” nipping at the beams and frames, not blasting down the front door with a Howitzer. In assembling a directory – a really big one – of films that we should use as a map of the must-see films of the century that’s past, as well as the one in progress, call this an insurgent attack, not a blitzkrieg. Or, so as not to disrespect the resistance, call it a summer reading list.