loaded canons: contemporary film canons, film studies, and film discourse

Loaded Canons: Contemporary

Film Canons, Film Studies,

and Film DiscourseJonathan Lupo

Introduction

What is the greatest movie of all time? To findout, you could research high-profile polls fromthe American Film Institute, Britain’s Sight andSound, Time magazine, or check out recent bookslike 1001 Movies to See Before You Die (2009),the New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000Movies Ever Made (2004), or even the ZagatGuide to Movies (2008). You could Google the“best films of all time” and sift through nearly50,000 hits or click on one particular site, TheyShoot Pictures, which gathers over 2,000 per-sonal “best of” lists from critics and filmmakersalong with over 1,000 “greatest film” polls fromvarious print and online publications, andweighs each list (a canon of canons!) to deliver alist of 1,000 movies “a range of films … deserv-ing of everybody’s time” (Georgaris 2010).

Tellingly, none of these lists is sponsored byacademic institutions, underlining the relativedisinterest in overt canon making in Film Stud-ies. Part of the reason for this avoidance is dueto concerns over hegemony, that is, the powerof canons to represent and validate dominantvalues as “universal” and “timeless” at theexpense of nondominant cultures (Staiger, “The

Politics” 10). As witnessed by the “culturewars” of the 1980s and 1990s, this concern ishardly endemic to Film Studies within the acad-emy.1 More specifically, the lack of explicitcanon making is due to the decline of aes-thetic evaluation in Film Studies, which, sincethe 1970s, has steadily moved away from thehumanist and auteurist criteria on whichthe field was first introduced and instead filmscholars increasingly read films contextually andas symptomatic of various ideological, psycho-analytical, and context-stressing reception-oriented theories. This is not to say that implicitcanons do not circulate in Film Studies, butcanon making comparable to those offered byjournalistic critics and nonacademic institutionshas not occurred with the same consistency andzeal. Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued that muchof this discontinuity is due to the fact that USfilm culture discourse is segmented into threerelatively autonomous spheres: mainstreamjournalistic reviewers, academic critics, and thefilm industry (Movie Wars 81). If we agree withthis model, what are the stakes for canons bothwithin and across these discourses?

In this essay, I discuss popular film canonsand the discourse they instigated as well as theconverse lack of overt Film Studies canon

Jonathan Lupo is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, where heteaches classes in popular culture and media studies. He has published work on the film biopic and is currently co-editing ananthology on the television series Friday Night Lights.

The Journal of American Culture, 34:3© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Loaded Canons � Jonathan Lupo 219

formation. I argue that the film canon-buildingenterprise within popular discourse is in part theresult of the successful democratization of artsince the 1960s, which was in major part fueledby film critics who pushed for the inclusion offilm as an art form. This move, accomplished sowell that it is hard today to imagine an argu-ment against film as art, challenged establishedhierarchies of taste, and also contributed to alarger shift toward the decentralization of criti-cism and the diffusion of cultural authorityacross many fields of art. Such evolving recon-figurations have clear implications for canons inboth the popular and academic spheres since themain rationale for canon building—namely,inclusion and exclusion—is evaluation. Finally,the preponderance of canon making among non-academic critics and mainstream media hasunderlined its role as a mode of popular criti-cism. In canon formation, we see explicit asser-tions of individual and institutional tastes pittedagainst one other, as the “cultural sovereignty”of each system is deployed as an ostensiblyunimpeachable rationale for or against eachcanon (Collins 207). By examining the two mosthigh-profile popular canon building efforts ofthe last twenty-five years—the 2002 edition ofthe decadal “Greatest Films Poll” conducted bySight and Sound and the 1998 American FilmInstitute’s “100 Greatest Films” poll—I contendthat while academic Film Studies had clear rea-sons for wanting to avoid explicit canon build-ing with their own field, this abdicationexacerbated clefts in the relationship betweenjournalistic critics and the academy, the latterthereby missing an opportunity to fully contrib-ute to the wider film community.

Defining and DisavowingCanons

For many in academia, the term canon is syn-onymous with the Western literary canon,which is, according to E. Dean Kolbas, “a cor-pus of works comprising the ‘classics’ of art and

literature, the very summit of cultural achieve-ment in the West” (1). The literary canon hasbeen at the center of controversies surroundinguniversity liberal arts education throughout the“culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in theUnited States. These controversies centered onthe perceived totality and ageless nature of thecanon and the inherent political power in theseclaims. Conservative critics, such as AllanBloom and Harold Bloom, viewed the literarycanon as being assailed by the ubiquity (andperceived coarseness) of popular culture, jargon-laden theories, and various social groups’ agen-das. Progressive critics like Paul Lauter andEmory Elliot saw the Western literary canon asrestrictive, marginalizing achievements byminorities and promoting the values of a domi-nant society, the result of which is that thecanon is seen “as an elitist, patriarchal, racist, orethnocentric construction” (Kolbas 1). Somegroups, like women and gay men, have offeredtheir own canons of literature, as ways of mark-ing legitimacy both within and outside of thosegroups (Schlueter; Drake).

Film canons are part of this struggle, albeit ina less contentious manner, since film history isrelatively new. Canon making in both the acad-emy and in mainstream film culture hasoccurred only recently. In film, the “power” indetermining canonical texts is diffuse; critics,academics, and even the public (who “vote” viabuying tickets) all have a “say” in how andwhich films are most valued and ultimatelyremembered. In “The Politics of Film Canons,”Janet Staiger defines canon formation in popularand academic film criticism, theoretical work,and in history writing as the practice of choos-ing certain films for study while ignoring others(4). Staiger argues that film canons are used byvarious groups, from journalistic film reviewers(the Ten Best list), to professional organizations(the Academy Awards, the American Film Insti-tute) to academics (in choosing what films toshow or discuss in classes or to write about).Canons are not going away, either, mainlybecause of the stakes the groups above have intheir formation. The goal then, according to

220 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 34, Number 3 � September 2011

Staiger, is to “encourage as knowledgeable,humane, and progressive a choice as possibleamong the various politics” that guide canonformation (4).

Staiger locates the impulses dictating canon-formation as falling under the politics of threespheres of influence: admission, selection andthe academy, the order of which is historical innature. Since Film Studies as an academic disci-pline did not begin until the mid 1960s (and atthat point centered mostly on aesthetic apprecia-tion), much of the early-published work aboutfilm was by journalistic critics and theorists ofother artistic disciplines.2 This point is crucial,for, as Staiger details, this early writing wasinterested in legitimizing film as an art amongother arts, and therefore was concerned withadmission into a larger artistic discourse. As themove to cement film as an art became moreassured, the number of films available for con-sideration also increased and became too large,necessitating selective criteria, with which “usu-ally comes a politics of inclusion and exclusion.Some films are moved to the center of attention;others, to the margins” (Staiger, “The Politics”8). Within the academy there is also politics,since “not only a canon of films exists but also acanon of literature about film and a canon offilm methodologies” (Staiger, “The Politics” 18).

The initial Film Studies canon was based onevaluative auteurist criticism. Adapted from theEuropean “auteur theory” and advocated byVillage Voice film critic (and occasional Colum-bia University film instructor) Andrew Sarris,the auteur model centered on the idea that thefilm director was the ultimate author of a film,and through careful study of the director’s sty-listic and thematic predilections across one’swork, one could uncover cinema’s masterpieces.Sarris focused much of his attention on Holly-wood directors he and French critics regarded asneglected, but whose individuality and personalsignature shone through the confining Holly-wood machine. This generous act of reevalua-tion was not granted to every director; a keyelement of Sarris’ concept was the selection ofthose directors whom the critic deemed worthy

enough to enter the “Director’s Pantheon,” thehighest level of Sarris’ canon, with “lesser”directors in descending categories. While seenthen (and to a degree now) as a film buff parlorgame, Sarris’ auteurism left important legaciesfor film criticism and Film Studies. The auteurtheory elevated film criticism as much as itvaulted certain Hollywood directors and theirfilms, and because it focused on authors, auteur-ism allowed films to be treated like other artobjects, paving the way for film’s inclusion intothe Academy (Staiger, “Janet Staiger Replies” 8).

Sarris’ 1960s auteurism took place against abackdrop of great generational and culturalchange in which the traditional principles of artwere being reoriented toward more inclusiveand less dogmatic standards. Movies were a keypart of this countercultural movement becausetheir status as mass-produced entertainmentdirectly confronted such norms. In this way,auteurism was doubly empowering because itvalorized objects dismissed by high culture and,like their French counterparts, US auteur criticschose films and directors for canonization thatalso served as thinly veiled attacks on “respect-able” middlebrow filmmakers and the criticswho championed them. Importantly, Sarris didnot popularize his critical method via mono-graphs, but rather through a reliance on pithy“summary judgments” of directors in variousarticles and books, which, added together, takethe unmistakable shape of canons. According toGreg Taylor, Sarris’ canon formation and thechoices contained therein were as much aboutasserting Sarris’ cultural authority and showingoff his knowledge of film as they were part ofan “ongoing commitment to ranking and catego-rization as valuable and interactive ends inthemselves” (92). That Sarris admittedly calledhis choices provocative and personal, explicitlyinviting objections and counter-proposals,helped work to extend his cultural authority toother critics and readers.

The first generation of film scholars joinedprofessors in English departments in using amodified form of auteurism that focused on thedirector and classic Hollywood films, among


other interests. However, auteurism’s influencewould wane relatively quickly in academia, chal-lenged by the early 1970s by a new wave of crit-icism, which focused less on evaluating filmsusing the critic’s taste and judgment as definingfactors than in analyzing films within specificsocial, historical, and political contexts. Further-more, critical movements in other areas of aca-demia questioned the ideological construction ofthe author, fatally disarming auteurism’s alreadyshaky theoretical foundation and making canon-formation via auteurism seem provincial at bestand at worse ideologically suspect. Rosenbaumargues that this theoretical turn de-canonizedfilms and filmmakers and replaced them with acanon of theorists such as Michel Foucault,Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and JacquesLacan and by “the practice of viewing films assymptoms of social formations, economic condi-tions, or psychological predilections, rather thanaesthetic objects” (Movie Wars 86).

Rosenbaum views the growing disinterest incanon formation in Film Studies as disastrousfor the field (Movie Wars; Movie Mutations;Essential Cinema). For Rosenbaum, the dis-placement of evaluative-based canons and canonmaking in general, in addition to a privileging oftheories and theorists over films and filmmakers,left the project of canon making to mainstreamcritics, and more importantly, to the market-place. Many journalistic film critics and film cul-ture embraced auteurism in general, and iteventually filtered its way down to become aubiquitous critical frame as well as a successfulpromotional and advertising angle. Helping tocement auteurism’s place in criticism as well aspopular culture vernacular was the fact that itspopularization in the late 1960s and early 1970sdovetailed with the end of the studio systemand the rise of the so-called “New Hollywood.”By the end of the 1970s, however, “New Holly-wood” had turned to chasing blockbusters, anddirectors would be judged as much if not moreby their gross receipts than their recurringthemes or unique sensibilities. Auteurism, how-ever, remained a useful marketing hook for suc-cessful directors, both at the blockbuster and art

cinema levels (as well as for journalistic critics,interviewers, and book publishers). Around thesame time, USA Today and other national publi-cations began reporting weekend box office fig-ures. New York Times critic A. O. Scott assertsthat the amplified attention paid to the publica-tion of weekly box-office results is increasinglymaking them “the universal measurements ofsuccess, failure and cultural relevance” (23).Mainstream media attention to weekly andyearly box office returns has arguably becomethe ultimate populist film canon. Critics’ “bestof” lists, institutional and media polls, and otheractivity discussed in this essay must contendwith a canon based on financial success, if notultimately concede to it.

The Best of the Greatestof All Time

While the widespread focus on box-officereturns has made grosses the most disseminatedcanon in popular culture, it has hardly damp-ened other canon-making efforts by critics, pop-ular media, and institutions. Indeed, since the1980s, the number of “best of” polls, “greatest”guides and internet-initiated lists has steadilyincreased, part of what James F. English hascharted as an overall rise in the number of prizesand awards being given out across numerousfields across the globe. While English notes thatthe amount of film, literary, and televisual con-tent has also grown exponentially over the lastforty years, the quantity of media-based prizes“has risen along a distinct and much steepercurve” (20). English attributes such a spike to anumber of factors emerging over the last cen-tury, but intensifying over the last few decades.3

The result is

The proliferation of prizes has meant that relativelymore artists and authors, and relatively more works,can today claim the distinction of a prize. But offset-ting this apparent democratic dispersal of symboliccultural wealth – often lamented as a “leveling” ofaesthetic standards or a “Miss Congeniality syn-drome” – has been the even more pronounced


tendency for huge numbers of prizes to accrue to ahandful of winners. (English 334)

As an example, English compares the numberof awards won by Steven Spielberg between1970 and 2004, finding the director had amassedninety awards, compared to twenty-seven forJohn Ford, twenty-one for Alfred Hitchcock,and sixteen for Charlie Chaplin, given to themover their entire careers (337–39). Furthermore,English notes that Lord of the Rings: Return ofthe King (2003) has been honored with seventy-nine awards, as compared to ten wins for GoneWith the Wind (1939) and three for Casablanca(1942) (339–40).4 As English demonstrates, ourcontemporary society is awash in the giving andreceiving of awards, and the increase in canon-making occurring during the same time frame issurely part of the same trend. But if, as Englishnotes, awards like the Oscars or critics’ grouphonors have their own internal circuits of valueand meanings specific to the organization and itsprize, are there similar contours for “best of”lists and polls and the canons they fuel?Although the surplus of lists and polls providesnumerous examples, I will focus on the twomost high profile canons between 1995 and2004: the decennial Sight and Sound poll (2002)and the American Film Institute’s 100 Years/100Movies list (1998).

Arguably the most respected “best of” filmsurvey, Sight and Sound’s “Ten Greatest Filmsof All Time” poll has the luxury of a fifty-yearlegacy from which to trace the changing (and insome cases, static) nature of film canons. TheBritish magazine, which was founded in 1932,began in 1952 canvassing a select group of criticsand filmmakers asking for their choices for theirten greatest films. The 1992 edition of the listsfeatured two important changes: the lists of thecritics and filmmakers were split, revealing twotop-ten rankings; and both groups were asked toname their top ten directors. One of the manystriking features of the 2002 lists5 is that despitea ten percent increase in the number of voters6

and a concerted effort to attain a diverse, globalperspective, the lists were nearly the same as1992 lists.7 Another notable continuity between

the 1992 and 2002 lists was that the most recentfilms on each list remained the same: RagingBull (1980) for the critics’ lists and The Godfa-ther Part II (1974) for the directors’ lists. In thedecade between the lists, no post-1980 filmcracked the top tens. This fact seems to under-line a common complaint against film canons:while reputable, the poll is too yoked to the leg-acies of outmoded critical orthodoxies (like thepreference toward the humanist films of the1950s or the first wave of international art houseclassics). However, the link to the past does notextend to silent films—the critics’ list namesonly two (Battleship Potemkin and Sunrise) andthe directors’ list names none. Both ignore thefilms of silent comedy, including those directedby Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, a starkcontrast to the original 1952 list,8 which foundroom for several silent films and a documentary.While the selection of Citizen Kane as top filmon both lists indicates consensus, Roger Ebertpoints out that “it is instructive that eventhough it won, Kane was voted for by only 39percent of the directors and 32 percent of thecritics.” The low percentages mean there is aremarkable variety among the lower vote-get-ters. As Philip French notes, out of the 885 filmsranked, over five hundred garnered one voteeach, which “is an encouraging tribute to theattractive diversity of world cinema.” I arguethat such figures suggest that the more interest-ing story is taking place beyond the top tens’familiar hit parades and in the striking multiplic-ity of its margins. If we agree with LauraMulvey’s remark that “no list can hope to domore than capture the level of research andaesthetic spirit of its time” what do both the toptens and the bottom five hundred say about thiscanon and the time in which it was compiled(qtd. in Martin)?

Sight and Sound editor Ian Christie attemptsto answer that question in his introductory essayfor the 2002 lists. Christie sees in the lists a ten-sion between the institutional memory of thefilm canon and a generational shift in how filmand knowledge about film circulate today.Echoing Mulvey’s point, Christie observes how


much the contemporaneous film culture affectswhich films appear on the lists. Noting the gapbetween film discourse in 1952 and today,Christie argues that the relative scarcity of filmdiscourse around the time of the first list—theonly major text on film was Paul Rotha’s 1930The Film Till Now (a work that privileged silentand realist films and contained one of the first“outstanding” film lists)—is a reason for manyof the selections (26). Ten years later, as filmculture became more dominant in world culture,critics tended to be more adventuresome,crowning Kane (a progressive choice at the time)as well as placing the decidedly nonrealist andquite experimental L’Avventura (1960) at secondplace just two years after its release. The 1972and 1982 lists reflected the widespread impact ofauteurism and the Cahiers du Cinema-instigatedreevaluation of American studio films and gen-res, privileging films by critically salvaged direc-tors like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford.Finally, the 1992 and 2002 lists solidified theAmerican hold on world cinema by claiming amajority of slots. The latter lists also signify thesuccessful institutionalization of Film Studies,and the cumulative weight the established “clas-sics” have on both critics’ and filmmakers’ col-lective memories.

However, as Christie notes, if the habitualclassics seen in the top tens “is the visible faceof the canon, there’s also a largely invisible cul-tural structure that underpins it: a tissue of quo-tations, linkages, assumptions and ultimatelymemories” (26). For Christie, this structure ofthe canon is linked to the dramatic changes inhow film and film knowledge flow in contem-porary culture; he terms it the “personalizationof film knowledge that has been made possibleby video ownership and the growth of referenceliterature” (26). In other words, Christie empha-sizes the pivotal role access plays in bothstrengthening the hold familiar titles have on thetops of lists as well as instigating the decidedlysubjective collection of one-off film choices thatmade up the majority of the 885 films cited.

Eclecticism is partly engendered by the lackof explicit criteria for inclusion supplied by

Sight and Sound. Participants were allowed toinclude a rationale with their lists, and whilemost express frustration at the limits of choos-ing only ten films, many of the explanationsturn out to be more revealing than the choicesthemselves. Critic Manohla Dargis admits, “Ihave tried to be as honest as I can, choosingmovies I feel are ‘perfect,’ at least for me.Almost all of my top ten have made me cry”(29). Scholar Tom Gunning notes “as a historianI think this is a good thing to do; not to indi-cate what the timeless masterpieces are, but togive a sense of history for our evaluations. Val-ues are mutable, but that’s the point. Theychange and have power to change” (31). Finally,what participants do not say also can be ofinterest, as in the unexplained list from Indiandirector Anurag Mehta, who stacks his top tenexclusively with recently produced US block-busters like Superman (1978), Forrest Gump(1994), and Jerry Maguire (1996) (46). The het-erogeneity in the stated list-making motivescould be read as either evidence of a lack ofshared critical standards and consequently thefurther diffusion of cultural authority or anencouraging sign of cracks in the stalwart Kanecanon, indicating the first steps toward a morediverse (or at least more subjective) trend incanon making while also echoing the postmod-ern suspicion of canons, reflecting and extendingthe “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s whilestill paying tribute to the deserved if proverbialgreats. Christie questions if the voters are “vot-ing to reinforce a sense of cinema’s culturallegitimacy or trying to topple a false structureof accepted classics? Mostly, of course, we’redoing both” (27). For Christie, a lack of willing-ness to interrogate the how and the for whom ofcanon formation risks making the Sight andSound poll more a “monster trivia quiz” thanthe worldwide consideration of film culture itaims to be (27).

Despite even its own editors’ wariness overthe state of the film canon as evidenced by themagazine’s list, the Sight and Sound poll is stillregarded as a serious endeavor in film culture—the granddaddy of the multiplicity of lists and


“greatest” rankings in film discourse. While the2002 release engendered its fair share of com-ment and debate (as any canon presumablyshould), it was hardly as attacked was as anotherhigh-profile survey released a few years earlier.In 1998, the American Film Institute releasedthe results of a poll of 1,500 film professionals,prominent Americans, and selected moviegoersto determine the greatest American movies of alltime.9 Titled “100 Years/100 Movies” andinspired by the 1995 centennial of cinema, thelist resulted in a highly rated CBS special, a ten-part cable series, a large promotional push bythe home-video arms of the major studios andsome truly scathing reviews by critics. Com-mentators lodged complaints against both theresults and the AFI itself, blasting the culturalmyopia and blandness of the list, while finding aflawed set of criteria and questioning themotives of the organization.10 In spite of andbecause of this response, the AFI list stands as auseful contrast to the Sight and Sound list, high-lighting some of the key issues involved in con-temporary canon formation like questions ofaccess, memory, and the cultural value of mar-ket-driven list making.

The AFI list featured several differences fromthe Sight and Sound poll: for one, it canvassed1,500 film production and studio personnelalong with other notables (including then Presi-dent Clinton) for their choices, a significant dif-ference from the approximately 250 critics andfilmmakers tagged for the Sight and Sound sur-vey (Molotsky). Secondly, voters had to choosefrom a pre-selected list of four hundred features,and were given six criteria from which to con-sider their choices, factors that no doubt provedessential to guiding the list toward the familiarand accessible.11 The protocols offer a reason-able (if arguably prejudicial) set of shared crite-ria of what is to be regarded as “great,” a rarityamong most other list-making enterprises, whichoften leave the standards wide open. Such movesalso make sense, if from a promotional perspec-tive, that the AFI needs to program a three-hourprimetime special with choices that viewerswould recognize and those movies need to be

readily available to be promoted by studios andvideo chains.

However, the AFI could also be simply putt-ing into guidelines what is fundamental to anyfilm’s inclusion into a canon: its visibility andaccessibility. As Donato Totaro notes, “it mayseem tautological and obvious, but a film cannotbe canonized unless it is seen frequently, contin-uously, and over a sustained period of time.”The AFI’s top twenty is made up of films thatare omnipresent, whether as past and presentbox-office hits (Gone With the Wind; Casa-blanca; The Graduate; The Godfather; StarWars); major award-winners (Schindler’s List;The African Queen; On the Waterfront; TheBridge on the River Kwai; Lawrence of Arabia;One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; All AboutEve); genre exemplaries (Singin’ in the Rain;Psycho; Chinatown); film syllabi staples (CitizenKane; Sunset Boulevard; Some Like it Hot) or,thanks to consistent television airings, belovedyearly standards (The Wizard of Oz; It’s a Won-derful Life). To these factors we must also addthe crucial facts that all have been available onvideo for at least two decades, and many arewell-represented on other lists and polls. TheAFI thus fulfills James F. English’s “Miss Con-geniality” tendency outlined above: its wide sur-vey of a comparatively narrow range of popularmovies produced a “greatest” list that also servesas a “most dominant” film primer, reassertingmovies with already well-established culturalvalue.

In a stinging column devoted to the AFIcountdown, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum aimedsquarely at the familiarity of the poll results,stating that “the list was just business as usual,symptomatic of an increasingly dumbed-down film culture that continues to outflankour shrinking expectations” (“List-o-Mania”).Rosenbaum questions its intent: “is the list sim-ply a commercial ploy dreamed up by a consor-tium of marketers to repackage familiar goods,or is a legitimate cultural contribution that’ssomehow supposed to improve the quality ofour lives? (Are we still capable of distinguishingbetween the two?)” (“List-o-Mania”). He finds


his answer in the former, arguing that the AFI“is merely recycling a lot of already overtoutedproduct, as if to prove what fine citizens we allare” (“List-o-Mania”). As we can already see,the AFI itself is Rosenbaum’s most damned cul-prit; he spends several paragraphs of the articledetailing what he perceives as the organization’sfailings and their implications.12 Yet the criticalso chides the criteria and execution of the list,both for what it includes and excludes as well asthe ultimate message it seems to give aboutAmerican cinema and its viewers. For Rosen-baum, the poll “appears to display the taste ofviewers who almost always see movies on TV orvideo and who can’t remember what they sawmore than a few years back” (“List-o-Mania”).Underscoring the critics’ role in combating thisnarrow focus and acknowledging how muchaccess and availability figure in how canons arecultivated, Rosenbaum asks that “if the AFI andits business cronies had wanted to do somethinggenuinely useful, they might have polled theirgroup of voters about the 100 most neglectedAmerican movies and then made an effort tomake them available, on film and on video”(“List-o-Mania”). For Rosenbaum, the AFI isabdicating its self-professed directive (“advanc-ing and preserving the art of the moving image”)for the short-term promotional boost of a televi-sion special and the ensuing media coverage.The true results of the list as a canon, that is,what it reveals of the state of film knowledgeand history as well as what it hopes to inspire,becomes less important than the financial reve-nue and promotional value it generates. ForRosenbaum, this shortsightedness, evidenced bythe poll’s lack of diversity and fossilized “greatesthits” feel, reduces the canon’s effectivenesstoward what it can do for us.

In the final analysis, selecting America’s 100 greatestmovies has to be an ongoing effort of explorationand discovery – something that can happen only ifwe stop to consider what we still don’t know aboutand try to set up some mechanisms for educationourselves. The saddest thing about the AFI’s list isthat it proposes that we stop looking, go home,and proceed to pick more lint out of our navelsfor the remainder of the millennium. (Rosenbaum“List-o-Mania”)

The “we” presumes a culture that knowsthese movies thoroughly enough to dismissmany of them in favor of lower-profile titles.But whom is Rosenbaum representing—thewider film culture or critics and other cine-philes? If he is considering the latter, does thisorientation open Rosenbaum up to charges ofelitism? Tom Pollock, former board chairman ofthe AFI, says those who complained about thefilm choices on the list were being snobs. “Afterwe did the first ‘100 Years’ of cinema show, thetop-rated video at Blockbuster was Citizen Kane…. If for one moment people are watching Citi-zen Kane than Dumb and Dumber, I have tothink this is a good thing in terms of celebratingAmerica’s film history” (qtd. in Goldstein).

The implicit message in Rosenbaum’s dis-avowals of the AFI poll is that he knows—through education, experience, and skill—better.He asserts his cultural authority by includinghis own list of 100 movies, and, eschewing thelimiting criteria of the AFI poll, develops a listthat was “deliberately [made to be] conservativerather than provocative and grounded in plea-sure rather than in any dutiful sense of historicalimportance”13 (“List-o-Mania”). Acknowledgingthat evaluating movies (and consequently con-structing a canon out of those judgments) isbased on “access and cultural conditioning—nottaste or intelligence in isolation from these fac-tors,” he highlights his own “cultural condition-ing” and how he believes it skews his list (“List-o-Mania”). His canon is admittedly nostalgicbut also prescriptive, looking back at films thatinspired him, and arguing they have the powerto do the same to others even in a different timeand context. In this way, the AFI list is revealedto be to Rosenbaum almost as much a personalaffront (a rejection of the critic’s taste and expe-rience) as a failure of institutional responsibil-ity.14

Rosenbaum’s privileging of the personal overthe staid “greatest” criterion proffered by theAFI brings into focus the subjective nature ofpersonal history and memory and the rolesthey play in the construction of canons. Rich-ard Schickel’s analysis and comment on the


AFI poll in Film Comment also touch on theimplications of such factors on lists like theAFI survey and for film history in general.Schickel recounts the favorite complaints of thepoll’s detractors: the exclusions of works byBuster Keaton, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch,and the films of Fred Astaire and GingerRogers; and the inclusion of too-many recenthits (like Dances with Wolves [1990], Pulp Fic-tion [1994], and Fargo [1996]) at the expenseof the omissions. Also of concern was thenear-complete shut-out of silent films (onlyfour made it; in addition to The Birth of aNation, three films by Chaplin, The GoldRush, City Lights [both 1931] and ModernTimes were also selected). Mostly, however,the arguments pivoted off the fact that sev-enty-one of the one hundred choices weremade after 1950, “with the underlying suspi-cion being that, by either accident or design,AFI had somehow contrived to serve youthfulfoolishness at the expense of mature wisdom”(14). Schickel disputes this last charge, but isinterested at examining the list to seek possiblereasons why it veered in the direction it did,noting that how a canon is organized canexplicitly and implicitly direct its results.

Schickel’s first rationale is mathematical. Henotes that despite title “100 Years/100 Movies,”the AFI in its pre-selected list of four hundredfeatures, restricted the centennial from 1915through 1997, thereby making the poll moretruthfully but decidedly less catchy “82 Years/100 Films.” By subtracting twelve years of filmsto choose from, the post-1950s decades had adistinct advantage then over the thirty-five yearspreceding it (14). With lament, Schickel writesoff the silent era because it lacks widespreadsupport beyond the scholarly community (dis-cussed below) and cites the succeeding decadalbreakdown as follows: 1920s (0); 1930s (15films); 1940s (31); 1950s (21); 1960s (17); 1970s(19); 1980s (6); 1990s (8). What Schickel finds isthe rough plotting of a bell curve, which, likeother bell curves, “is reassuring because they tellus that nothing wildly outside our expectations

is occurring” in the area where data is beingdrawn (14).

For Schickel, the curve is significant becauseit coincides with the estimated age makeup ofthe majority of the poll’s participants, under-scoring how much the developmental years ofmoviegoing (in this case, the 1930s and 1940s)affect ensuing movies tastes. That said, Schickelis less concerned with wistful nostalgia (thoughhe notes, rightly, that “movies are a sentimentalmedium—more so than a lot of us care toadmit when we are draped in our critical-his-torical finery”) than in how such exposureaffects “cultural recall” when selecting films forthis particular canon (14). Schickel then makesanother (albeit educated) supposition: thatmany of the major players in the film worldare in their sixties, with the next biggest con-stituency in their fifties and forties, which thusaccounts for the increased representation offilms of the 1940s and 1950s on the list. Tostrengthen his idea, he points to some of thejournalistic criticism of the list, noting howcommentators used a similar generationalapproach when bemoaning the exclusion ofspecific films that meant a lot to them. ForSchickel, cultural recall impacts the list inanother way, what he terms “secondhand mem-ory” (16). In selecting films for the final list,he supposes that many of the participants inthe poll relied on a movie’s accumulated repu-tation, as evidenced by the high rankings forsuch problematic films as The Birth of aNation (“First American feature, first box-office blockbuster? Check—and never mind itsracism, its lunatic sexuality, its visible Victoriandramaturgy”) and The Jazz Singer (“Firstsound feature, harbinger of a famously trau-matic technological revolution. Check again,and forget—because you don’t actually knowfrom firsthand experience—that the movie isnot merely bad but laughably so”) (16). Schic-kel, like Rosenbaum, sees a danger in thisunexamined reflection, and its impact on themovies that do not make the list. For Schickel,the AFI list signals a call to critical arms:


We are, let’s face it, two nations now far as moviesare concerned. That’s the big lesson we ought to takefrom the AFI poll. It’s up to us – the minority – tokeep the memory of Trouble in Paradise [1932] alive.And Shanghai Express [1932] …. It’s up to us totend the fringe of the garden, where Detour [1945]and The Steel Helmet [1951] and Budd Boetticher’sWesterns struggle to live on. (Schickel 19)

Schickel therefore emphasizes the roles of thecritic and the connoisseur in providing links tofilms beyond the dominant canon, arguing thatit is the films that fall between the wide gaps inthe dominant canon that offer the more robust,nuanced and personalized chronicle of film. ForSchickel, it is this film history that is most indanger of disappearing.15

Theory and Dialogue

Writing for Film Comment, Schickel’s“minority” ostensibly refers to those folks whoare interested in serious reflection and study offilm—a group that presumably includes aca-demic critics. Yet just after the above quote,Schickel adds that “It’s also up to us to keep theacademic deconstructionists—far more danger-ous than any AFI panel—from distancing us stillfurther from the movie past with their incom-prehensible prose and their distorting ideolo-gies” (19). The harshness of and the exclusionadvocated by the remark highlight the stratifica-tion between journalistic and academic criticsthat Rosenbaum blames in part for the problemshe sees in contemporary canon formation(Movie Wars; Essential Cinema). The fissureshave a greater impact beyond the ceding ofcanon making from the academy to the mediaand film industry. They forestall a useful andmutually beneficial dialogue among the majorparticipants in film culture that challenge theidea of a collective film history—both specifi-cally in the case of canons, and more broadly infilm culture.

While the introduction of Film Studies to theacademy was fueled by the critical concerns ofjournalistic critics (and often led by critics them-selves), the ensuing institutionalization of Film

Studies, which emphasized ideological theoriesand the rejection of explicit canon making, fos-tered a split between the two groups (Sklar).According to Rosenbaum, the effects of thedivide meant that:

each sphere of criticism was expected to stick to itsown turf and mind its own field, and the most pro-nounced form of interchange between the twospheres was a growing disdain and mutual lack ofrespect. What might have figured in a more interac-tive film culture as some sort of dialectic and polemi-cal struggle became instead a kind of reciprocalalienation. (Rosenbaum, Movie Wars 87)

As journalistic reviewers continued to writeevaluative criticism and academic scholars con-tinued with theory (along with other historicaland industry concerns), there became little over-lap between the groups. Jim Collins argues thatprofessional critics continued to use auteurismas a critical frame (as do studios and creators forfinancing and branding strategies), creating a riftbetween journalistic and academic critics. As thelatter moved on to ideological criticism andsymptomatic readings of film, most professionalcritics stopped taking their evaluative criteriafrom academic critics, which led to a splinteringof a dynamic film discourse into two autono-mous film cultures (199). The fact that both cul-tures can occur:

depends in large part on the ability of critics withineach culture to claim cultural sovereignty groundedin transcendent evaluative criteria used in the serviceof the common good, yet that very coexistence evi-dences only a sovereignty operative solely withinspecific networks (each with its own imagined publicsphere) that are virtually valueless outside them. Theincommensurability of the public spheres imaginedby journalists and academic critics arises from thereification of their evaluative criteria, a reificationsecured by the axiomatic usage of critical principlesthat by now have become institutionalized poses –the journalist critic assuming the role of the tradi-tional humanist critic, (champion of the people as avoice of sanity and good taste), while the academiccritic adopts the role formerly inhabited by theavant-garde artist, (champion of the people as criticaloutsider, speaking in ‘foreign’ languages that escapethe banality of the commonplace). (Collins 207–08)

Journalistic critics thus saw academic criticsas beholden to jargon-laden theories that had lit-tle to do with the film experience or popularcriticism, while academic critics were more con-cerned with the ongoing legitimization of their


field, using ideological and psychoanalytic theo-ries as currency in that effort.

Even though much of Film Studies has sincedecentered structuralist, poststructuralist andpsychoanalytic theories and broadened toinclude the study of historical, industrial andaudience-related aspects of film (among manyothers), film theory still holds a grip on theimage of what academic critics do. As RobertSklar notes, the “extreme views [of theory-cen-tered work dominant in Film Studies] were tem-pered long ago. But their legacy is an almostunbridgeable gap between how film scholars, onthe one hand, and the media and the public, onthe other, talk about movies.” Sklar notes thatwhile the rise of Film Studies in the UnitedStates paralleled Hollywood’s blockbuster-centered resurgence in the 1970s, the latter moreforcefully set the stage for a “celebrity-orientedpublic film culture, with little room for even thebest-intentioned professors to shape the public’sunderstanding of movies and their role in soci-ety.”

It is unclear whether or not Film Studies will(or can) remain open to the possibility of com-munication beyond the academy. DudleyAndrew argues that the current state of FilmStudies can be read more hopefully as one ofpluralism, and less so, as one in danger of frag-mentation (345, 350). In reviewing the evolutionof Film Studies and charting the possibilities forits future course(s), Andrew notes both a returnto and move away from the cinematic text inthe multiplicity of theoretical and historicalmethodologies employed by those working inFilm Studies. One key movement, receptionstudies, posits that “the text has no intrinsicmeaning” and it is only through the study ofspecific contexts that texts are defined (Klingerxvi). The cultural reception politics of a filmtherefore takes precedence over the film itself.“And so just as the obligatory viewing list ofkey films and auteurs has proliferated into anunmonitored web of audiovisual artifacts, sointensive readings are discounted by receptionstudies in favor of accounts of the uses made offilms in given situations by given groups of

users” says Andrew (347). It is hard (but notimpossible) then to see canon formation makinga resurgence in Film Studies if the film itself isnot evaluated as a singular text.

In another corner of the ever-expanding field,however, Andrew sees the steady march awayfrom totalizing “Grand Theory” with calls for“middle-level research” and “piecemeal theoriz-ing” that hearken a return to the film text as astarting point (Andrew 347; Bordwell andCarroll 27). Such moves seem to signal of aresurgence return of criticism as a beginningmeans toward modest theorization. Indeed, asDudley attests, Film Studies, much like film cul-ture in general, is in an interregnum as it worksto redefine itself in a new digital, transnational,post-film age. Andrew cautions against theimpetus to fold Film Studies into Media Studies,fearing the diversity of the multiple approachesand foci could lead to a dissipation of thestrength of the field. In the face of such trans-formations and challenges, the project of canonformation seems a secondary concern at best.16

However, the modest resurgence of aestheticcriticism in some corners of the discipline offerthe possibility that at some point Film Studieswill take up explicit canon formation as a pro-ject as one of its many interests. Such a movecould strengthen the core of a field as well astender a line with those critics, organizations,and institutions outside of the academy thatcurrently dominate canon making. The contin-ued growth of reception studies, too, does notnecessarily mean a wholesale dismissal of thetext for the purposes of canon formation; thefocus on how a film’s cultural value moveswithin the canon could prove a useful modera-tor for excesses and omissions endemic to anycanon, as well as provide a running commentaryon its role and effectiveness.

Perhaps a model for one solution to thedivide among the industry, critics and FilmStudies is the project of a governmental canonformation, the National Film Registry (NFR).Established in 1988 as part of an act of Congressthat created a National Film Preservation Boardin order to combat the physical deterioration of


films and provide an archive for preserved texts,the National Film Registry is selected and man-aged by the Library of Congress. In 2005, theUS government formed a public advisory boardto counsel the Librarian of Congress on selec-tions and aid in implementing a national filmpreservation plan. The board is comprised offorty-four members and alternates from the filmand television industries, as well as film scholars,members of the AFI, artists’ guild representa-tives, film critics, and filmmakers. The groupdebates nominated films (submitted by membersof the film community and the public) and coor-dinates public feedback via e-mails, letters, andWashington, DC-based screenings.

The National Film Registry adds twenty-fivefilms per year to its canon, which stands at 550selections as of May 2011.17 In contrast to theSight and Sound poll and other periodic “bestof” lists, the National Film Registry is a canonthat grows rather than changes. The NFR alsohas broad criteria: selected films must be “cul-turally, historically, or aesthetically significant,”produced in the United States, and must be atleast ten years old (“About the Board”). Nomi-nated films need not be feature length, nor dothey require a theatrical release to be considered.Beginning with the selection of the AbrahamZapruder amateur Super-8mm film of the JohnF. Kennedy assassination (1963) in 1994, theNFR has admitted such diverse works as news-reels; banned boxing films; educational shorts;music videos; as well as a host of experimentalshorts and features. Notably, the inclusion ofnon-narrative and nonprofessional films doesnot come at the expense of well-known classicfilms that have appeared in other canons; theNFR also has embraced genre films other listsfrequently ignore, including such popular hitssuch as Blazing Saddles (1974) and Halloween(1978).

According to James H. Billington, the Librar-ian of Congress, the privileging of cultural, his-torical and aesthetic significance over strictlycritical evaluative criteria means that the NFRworks to reflect the multiplicity of US film his-tory; that the list is alphabetical in nature, like

Rosenbaum’s “Alternate 100,” also assists inevading the burden (and inherent controversies)of ranking. Billington also pointedly distancesthe National Film Registry from other “great-est” lists and polls, stating that the NFR selec-tion process

involves far more than the simple naming of cher-ished and important films to a prestigious list. Theregistry should not be seen as ‘the Kennedy CenterHonors,’ ‘the Academy Awards’ or even ‘America’sMost Beloved Films.’ Rather, it is an invaluablemeans to advance public awareness of the richness,creativity and variety of American film heritage, andto dramatize the need for its preservation. (McNary)

In its inclusive deliberations, the NationalFilm Preservation Board may prove a usefulparadigm for future collaboration among theindustry, critics, and Film Studies scholars interms of canon formation. Furthermore, whilethe Board’s criteria does not wholly sidestepquestions of personal and institutional taste thatproblematize other canons, the National FilmRegistry’s focus on diversity and its ultimateemphasis on preservation may make the NFRAmerica’s most enduring canon.

Conclusion

In the last twenty-five years, canon making inthe popular sphere grew exponentially, seen inthe flood of top-ten lists at year’s end, a multi-tude of “greatest” and “best” lists and pollsoffered by the media and on the internet. Themost high-profile of these, the decennial Sightand Sound poll and the American Film Insti-tute’s “100 Years/100 Movies” survey, highlightmany of the issues involved in contemporarycanon making, including questions of intent,access, memory, and value. Supporters of thelists see the purpose of a canon to mark filmsperceived and designated as “great” perpetuallyover time. Critics of these polls point to thefamiliarity of the results as evidence that themost dominant canons recirculate well-knownfilms that have been institutionalized through-out film culture thus failing to register the


breadth and vitality of contemporary global filmculture, nor address the subjective nature of filmexperience.

Richard Schickel and Jonathan Rosenbaumstress the critics’ essential role in filling the his-torical and cultural gaps left by the AFI andsimilarly blinkered canons. Each puts their cul-tural authority on the line by offering a canonof his own—Schickel with his (and RichardCorliss’) “All Time 100 Movies,” and Rosen-baum with his “Alternate 100.” Each attemptsto rectify the perceived sobriety and myopia ofcanons decided by precedent or box-officegrosses (as embodied by the Sight and Soundand AFI polls) by championing the margins ofcinema history—not with a complete rejectionof the former canons but as an agitator, a tonicfor the still waters of complacency. Further-more, each locates film history as at least par-tially personal, stressing individual response andprivileging its power (through lists and enhancedby evaluative criticism) to arouse and influenceothers. These new canons, underlined by thepersonal and passionate tastes of its makers andgalvanized by their asserted cultural authority,also speak to Ian Christie’s aforementionedremarks on the possibility of an increasinglysubjective and tantalizingly diverse future forthe Sight and Sound poll.

Yet, it is unclear whether these emphases onsubjectivity over the consensus that a canonostensibly promises can surmount the gravita-tional pull of institutional memory a canonoften delivers. In the cases of “best of” pollaggregators They Shoot Horses and its forerun-ner survey of personal critic “greatest” lists atSenses of Cinema Web sites, the battle seemsover. Despite the claim that They Shoot Picturesis “flying in the face of consensus” in theiraggregation and the subjective diversity ofnearly seven hundred critics in the Senses ofCinema rankings, both of the most recent talliesoverwhelmingly reflect the “old fashioned”canon (Georgaris).18 The results, much like thelack of differences between the 1992 and 2002Sight and Sound polls, suggest that the pace ofcanon change, in contrast to that of film culture

in general, is glacial. However, the diversity inthe margins of the Sight and Sound and Sensesof Cinema surveys, along with current andfuture generations’ unparalleled access to globalfilms and to each other point to the possibilityof substantial changes in the dominant canons.The changes may be both challenged and ener-gized by an ever-growing affirmation of per-sonal, taste-based canons.

Amid all this personal and institutional canon-making, academic Film Studies has been rela-tively silent due to concerns about the hegemonicnature of canon formation, and more saliently, toa host of other theoretical, historical and media-centered interests, none of which involve thebasic building block of canons: evaluative aes-thetic criticism. Critics Jonathan Rosenbaum andJim Collins contend that the vacuum left by FilmStudies leaves the project of canon making to themainstream media, nonacademic institutions andstudio marketing departments, and their com-mercial goals and that more reciprocal communi-cation among the spheres would benefit allparties, and especially global film discourse. InEssential Cinema: On the Necessity of FilmCanons, Rosenbaum argues that is imperativethat journalistic critics and academic film schol-ars contribute to a “prescriptive (and proscrip-tive)” canon (xx). Such a canon would work tostem the tide against a mainstream canon whichviews box-office gross and multi million dollarpromotional campaigns as ultimate measures oflasting value, and politically blinkered, Ameri-centric, or simply ignorant “best of” lists, pollsand guidebooks accepted as serious criticism andhistory-writing (xx). Since de-facto canons dopropagate in Film Studies, based on what filmsget chosen for study by academic critics andselected for screenings, Collins notes that aca-demic critics must be more reflexive about howevaluative standards are disseminated amongstthemselves (188). Staiger, for her part, cautionsagainst relativism in the academy and pushes fora “dialectical pluralism” that envisions not just amultiplicity of ideas but the act of joining themtogether toward both dialogue and confrontation(Staiger, “Janet Staiger Replies” 62).


Since the underlying rationales that fuel canonmaking include issues of personal, professionaland institutional taste, along with their attendant(and often discordant) declarations of culturalauthority, canons remain a pivotal and potentsite for exploration of these concerns as well asmajor form of evaluative criticism that circulatesin film discourse. I contend that there is muchto be gained in more reciprocity between FilmStudies scholars and journalistic critics, includ-ing a role in popular canon making, and byoffering historical and theoretical perspective tocontemporary debates and trends in film culture.While there are sharp differences in what aca-demic and journalistic critics do, there are alsomany goals the two groups share, and the healthand vibrancy of film culture can gain greatlyfrom substantial collaboration.

Notes

1. See Hendin for more on the debates over the literary canon.

2. See Polan; Grieveson and Wasson for broader histories offilm education that predate the institutionalization of Film Studiesas a scholarly discipline in the 1960s.

3. English cites the following factors toward the increase ofawards: “the dependency of many prizes on journalistic visibilityand hence on the logic of celebrity … the tendency of prizes overtime to drift toward the center of their respective fields … and thatfact that prizes often function as a credential or mark of eligibilityfor other prizes … all contribute to the intensification of the win-ner-take-all character of the symbolic economy in arts and enter-tainment” (334).

4. The awards totals for both sets of films consider only con-temporaneous wins.

5. The 2002 Critics’ Top Ten Films: 1. Citizen Kane (1941); 2.Vertigo (1958); 3. The Rules of the Game (1939); 4. The Godfather(1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974); 5. Tokyo Story (1953); 6.2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); 7. Battleship Potemkin; Sunrise(1927); 9. 8 ½ (1963); 10. Singin’ in the Rain (1951). The 2002Directors’ Top Ten Films: 1. Citizen Kane; 2. The Godfatherand The Godfather Part II; 3. 8 1/2; 4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962); 5.Dr. Strangelove (1963); 6. Bicycle Thieves; Raging Bull (1980);Vertigo; 9. Rashomon (1950); The Rules of the Game; Seven Samurai(1954).

6. 145 critics and 108 directors responded to the 2002 survey.

7. The 1992 Critics’ Top Ten Films: 1. Citizen Kane; 2. TheRules of the Game; 3. Tokyo Story; 4. Vertigo; 5. The Searchers(1956); 6. L’Atalante (1934); The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928);Panther Panchali; Battleship Potemkin; 10. 2001: A Space Odyssey.The 1992 Directors’ Top Ten Films: 1. Citizen Kane; 2. 8 ½;

Raging Bull; 4. La Strada; 5. L’Atalante; 6. The Godfather; Mod-ern Times (1936); Vertigo; 9. The Godfather, Part II; The Passionof Joan of Arc; Rashomon; Seven Samurai.

8. The 1952 Critics’ Survey: 1. Bicycle Thieves 2. City Lights(1931); The Gold Rush (1925); 4. The Battleship Potemkin; 5. Loui-siana Story (1947); Intolerance (1916); 7. Greed (1924); Daybreak(1939); The Passion of Joan of Arc; 10. Brief Encounter (1945); LeMillion (1931); The Rules of the Game. Only two films from thisoriginal list (Battleship Potemkin and The Rules of the Game)remain in the 2002 top ten lists.

9. The top 20 films in the AFI “100 Years/100 Movies” poll: 1.Citizen Kane; 2. Casablanca (1942); 3. The Godfather; 4. Gonewith the Wind (1939); 5. Lawrence of Arabia; 6. The Wizard ofOz (1939); 7. The Graduate (1967); 8. On the Waterfront (1954);9. Schindler’s List (1993); 10. Singin’ in the Rain; 11. It’s a Won-derful Life (1946); 12. Sunset Boulevard (1950); 13. The Bridge onthe River Kwai (1957); 14. Some Like it Hot (1959); 15. Star Wars;16. All About Eve (1950); 17. The African Queen (1951); 18. Psy-cho (1960); 19. Chinatown (1974); 20. One Flew Over the Cuck-oo’s Nest (1975). For the rest of the list, see http://www.afi.com/Docs/tvevents/pdf/movies100.pdf.

10. See Howell for a summary of negative responses to theAFI list.

11. The AFI criteria for selection: “Feature-Length FictionFilm”; “American Film”; “Critical Recognition”; “Popularity OverTime”; “Historical Significance”; “Cultural Impact”; and “MajorAward Winner” (Totaro).

12. See Rosenbaum (“List-o-Mania”) and Goldstein for cri-tiques of AFI practices.

13. For Rosenbaum’s “Alternate 100,” see Rosenbaum (MovieWars 103–06).

14. However, Brian Hu argues that Rosenbaum’s self-describedpersonal canon “is something of a rhetorical oxymoron” since hisexpertise is used to devise a list that “no matter how personalcomes off as even more monolithic and authoritative [than thecanon he seeks to replace], and thus questionable and problem-atic.”

15. Taking a cue from the Sight and Sound decadal poll, in2007 the AFI released a “10th Anniversary” update of its 1998 pollwith justification that “our perception of films can change throughthe cultural temperature of the times. We have a criteria [sic] thatit’s about the test of time and the times change” (qtd. in Reed).The new list swapped 23 titles, dropping several films (like TheJazz Singer, The Birth of a Nation, and Dances With Wolves) thathad perturbed many critics of the original ranking and includedselections from filmmakers like Buster Keaton and Preston Sturges,who were absent from the 1998 polling. Critical reaction was lessvitriolic as many noted the above changes. Although Rosenbaumhimself did not respond, many critics reacted to the new poll byoffering their own list, echoing Rosenbaum’s “Alternate 100” (seeCopeland; Nehme). For other changes to the 1998 list, see http://www.afi.com/drop/07facts.pdf.

16. As partially evidenced by the 2003 name change of theleading Film Studies scholarly organization from Society for Cin-ema Studies to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

17. The National Film Registry receives approximately 1,000nominations a year for the twenty-five slots (“About the Board”).

18. See http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_all1000films.htm for the January 2010 They Shoot Horses “1,000 GreatestFilms” and http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/top_tens/#tallyjulsept for the July/September 2007 Senses of Cinema tally of682 critics’ lists.


Works Cited

“About the Board.” Loc.gov/film. National Film PreservationBoard. 12 Jan 2011. Web. 18 June 2011.

Andrew, Dudley. “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and theAge to Come.” PMLA 115.1 (May 2000): 341–51. Print.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How HigherEducation Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soulsof Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Print.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of theAges. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Print.

Bordwell, David, and Noel Carroll (Eds.). Post-Theory: Recon-structing Film Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. Print.

Christie, Ian. “The Rules of the Game.” Sight and Sound Sep.(2002): 24–27. Print.

Collins, Jim. Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Informa-tion Age. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Copeland, Edward. “100 Reasons for Another TV List Special.”Eddieonfilm.blogspot.com. Edward Copeland on Film … andMore. 20 June 2007. Web. 10 June 2011 <http://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2007/06/100-reasons-for-another-tv-list-special.html>.

Dargis, Manohla. “Ten Best List.” Sight and Sound Sep. (2002): 29.Print.

Drake, Robert. The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay ManShould Read. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell PublishingGroup, 1998. Print.

Ebert, Roger. “Citizen Kane Fave Film of World’s Movie Elite.”Rogerebert.com. Chicago-Sun Times. 11 Aug. 2002. Web. 19June 2011.

Elliot, Emory (Ed.). The Columbia History of the American Novel.New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.

English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, andthe Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: UP, 2005. Print.

French, Philip. “Lights, Camera, Controversy.” The Guardian(UK). 11 Aug. 2002. Web. 16 June 2011.

Georgaris, Bill. “Ain’t Nobody’s Blues … But My Own: Flying inthe Face of Consenus.” Theyshootpictures.com. They Shoot Pic-tures, Don’t They? 8 Feb. 2010. Web. 27 Dec. 2010.

Goldstein, Patrick. “AFI’s Declining ‘Best of’ Moments.” LATimes. 17 June 2003. Web. 19 June 2011.

Grieveson, Lee, and Haidee Wasson (Eds.). Inventing Film Studies.Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

Gunning, Tom. “Top Ten List.” Sight and Sound Sep. (2002): 31.Print.

Hendin, Josephine (Ed.). A Concise Companion to Postwar Ameri-can Literature and Culture. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

Howell, Peter. “Top 100 has Net Buzzing.” Toronto Star 24 June(1998): E8. Print.

Hu, Brian. “Taking Film Studies to the Streets (and Back Again):On the Necessity of Film Criticism.” Mediascape. Universityof California Los Angeles 1.1 Spring 2005. Web. 17 June 2011.

Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, andthe Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print.

Kolbas, E. Dean. Critical Theory and the Literary Canon. Boulder:Westview Press, 2001. Print.

Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.Print.

Martin, Adrian. “Light My Fire (The Geology and Geography ofFilm Canons).” AFCA.com. Feb. 2008. (April 2001). Web. 19July 2011.

McNary, Dave. “Fargo, Rocky Make Film History.” Variety. 26Dec. 2006. Web. 17 June 2011.

Mehta, Anurag. “Top Ten List.” Sight and Sound Sep. (2002): 46.Print.

Molotsky, Irvin. “Top Movies? It’s Up to the Voters; AmericanFilm Institute Ballot is Narrowing a List of 400 down to 100.”New York Times. 15 June 1998. Web. 19 June 2011.

Nehme, Farran Smith. “The Siren’s Alterna-List.” Selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com. Self-Styled Siren. 25 June 2007. Web. 15 June 2011.

Polan, Dana. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S.Study of Film. Berkely: U of California P, 2007. Print.

Reed, Orrin. “An Interview with a Rep from the AFI.” Thesopho-morecritic.com. 15 Aug. 2007. Web. 6 June 2011.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of FilmCanons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. Print.

——. “List-o-Mania or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned toLove American Movies.” Chicagoreader.com. June 1998. Web.12 Dec. 2010.

——. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia.London: British Film Institute, 2003. Print.

——. Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire toLimit What Films We Can See. Chicago: A Cappella Books,2000. Print.

Schickel, Richard. “Mind Slips: Remembering and DisrememberingMovies.” Film Comment 34.5 (Sep.–Oct. 1998): 12–19. Print.

Schlueter, June (Ed.). Modern American Drama: The FemaleCanon. Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1996. Print.

Scott, A. O. “When Movies are Too Much with Us.” New YorkTimes. 3 Oct. 2004. Web. 19 June 2011.

Sklar, Robert. “Narrowing the Gap Between Academe and theWorld of Movies.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 27 June1997. Web. 10 Dec. 2010.

Staiger, Janet. “Janet Staiger replies to Dudley Andrew and GeraldMast.” Cinema Journal 25.1 (Fall 1985): 61–64. Print.

——. “The Politics of Film Canons.” Cinema Journal 24.3 (Spring1985): 4–23. Print.

Taylor, Greg. Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and AmericanFilm Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.

Totaro, Donato. “The Sight and Sound of Canons.” Offscreen.com.31 Jan 2003. Web. 19 June 2011.


loaded canons: contemporary film canons, film studies, and film discourse

Documents