Guest Post: Andrew Seal on Canon Formation and the Sight & Sound Poll

Guest blogger Andrew Seal follows up today on my post from last week on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Andrew is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale.  His dissertation concerns politics and print culture in the twentieth century Midwest. His other research interests include Jewish studies, queer studies, and 20th/21st century US literature.

Thanks, first of all, to Ben Alpers for allowing me to respond at greater length than a comment might allow to his very sharp and insightful post about the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. He is very right to see the poll as a valuable resource in trying to get a handle on many of the kinds of questions which intellectual historians might ask about film criticism and (mostly elite) film consumption.

It is especially valuable, as he notes, as a snapshot of contemporary cultural politics surrounding canons, which has certainly changed in the past twenty or even ten years, although perhaps not quite, I think, the way that Ben argues it has. Ben makes the case that the positive responses to the Sight & Sound canon reflect an embrace of a sort of DIY approach to canon formation, where even the most authoritative canons are seen more as “conversation-starters,” and less as tools for indoctrination or discrimination. Furthermore, he very compellingly links this new attitude toward the massive increase in casual availability of all kinds of films—an increase which has made it possible for an avid cineaste to feel that she is, as Ben says, “no longer constrained by the programming choices of others.”

Yet I would argue that, far from reflecting a “mixtape” approach to canon formation, the 2012 Sight & Sound poll still shows all the fingerprints of a quite deliberately programmed approach to the cinema and to its history. Less important than the relatively anarchic, “make-your-own-queue” influences of YouTube and Netflix have been the still quite top-down institutions like the Criterion Collection of DVDs, the New York arts cinemas like Film Forum and the IFC Center, and prestigious film festivals like those at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice.


First let me say why I think it has been rather difficult to see this less anarchic spirit in the coverage of the release of the 2012 poll. First of all, a huge percentage of discussion of the poll has centered around what is, in my opinion, a non-issue: the toppling of Citizen Kane from the number one spot in the critics’ poll (by Vertigo) and in the directors’ poll (by Tokyo Story). As Ben noted in the comments to his post, “no film came close to appearing on a majority of ballots,” but not only that, the difference between Kane and the two films displacing it was, proportionately, pretty small: Kane appeared on only 4% fewer ballots than Vertigo in the critics’ poll, and less than 2% fewer than Tokyo Story in the directors’. Yet this switch has been granted enormous magnitude: in the words of the Scott Tobias of the Onion AV Club, it’s “like having to orbit around a different sun.”

Secondly and somewhat contradictorily, as that Onion AV Club article also points out, the rest of the top of the list has remained remarkably steady (or stodgy) over the decades and resolutely resistant to more recent films: the “newest” film in the critics’ Top Ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out two years before Paul Thomas Anderson, director of There Will Be Blood, was born. Together, these two factors—the Citizen Kane shake-up and the stodginess—make it seem as if the voters are collectively both a little capricious (why the ascendancy of Vertigo after all these years?) and also not paying close attention to the ongoing development of cinema (can it really be the case that nothing since 1968 deserves the hyper-immortalization of Top Ten status?). The picture one might be forgiven for forming is of a voter exploring the back catalogue of films somewhat idiosyncratically, championing a few favorites, but generally insulating herself from newer, fresher currents, or, more charitably, remaining aloof from trendy directors-of-the-moment and cause célèbres.

 I think this picture is inaccurate, though, and a closer look at the whole 2012 list compared to the whole 2002 list shows why. First off, it’s important to note that Sight & Sound itself has made impressive efforts to adapt to a quite different landscape of film criticism and production; most significantly, it has massively expanded its voting pool: from 145 critics in 2002 to 846 in 2012 (a nearly six-fold increase!) and from 108 directors in 2002 to 359 in 2012 (about three-and-a-third times larger). This expansion has meant that the total number of films voted for has increased abundantly as well, but not quite in line with the ballooning of voters: from 884 films in 2002 to 2556 in 2012—an impressive enlargement, but less than three-fold.

Moreover, a detailed look at what the new films on the 2012 list are indicates that this healthy but not overwhelming expansion of the canon also seems to be along some definite, and relatively specific, lines. As Tobias notes in the Onion AV Club article cited above, the one big change in the Top Ten is the introduction of the Soviet documentarian Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and this greater enthusiasm for non-narrative film extends strongly to the broader field. While I can’t, unfortunately, be precise in quantifying how many documentaries, avant-garde shorts, and pieces of filmic installation art have been added (Sight & Sound doesn’t have a column for genre, and it would be rather laborious—and subjective—for me to supply it), I can approximate it by listing some of the non-narrative or experimental directors who gained the most from the poll’s expansion: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who had no films in 2002 and now have fifteen; Stan Brakhage, whose tally increased by nine; the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who went up from a single film to ten; and Robert Beavers, Jan Svankmajer, and Bruce Baillie, none of whom were represented in 2002, but who each have seven films listed in 2012. By contrast, Federico Fellini, whose films are artsy but not, I would argue, truly experimental, lost four films from 2002 to 2012. (For more, I have created a spreadsheet with all the data mentioned above and below in this post; it can be found here.)

Most of these non-narrative directors’ films are not available via Netflix, and one would have to look fairly hard to find many of them on YouTube or other free streaming sites (I’m speaking from experience here). And that’s also the point—if one is on one’s own, one has to look hard for them, and to know where to look and what to look for. The presence of so many non-narrative films on the 2012 list suggests to me that the changes between 2002 and 2012 are not due to casual exploration, but rather to focused and guided recuperation of certain films and certain kinds of films.

The Criterion Collection is probably the most famous and most admired effort along these lines and, while it doesn’t have a large number of experimental or documentary films in its inventory, its influence on the list is fairly evident. Alongside the more mainstream re-releases of fairly well-known classics, Criterion runs a series called Eclipse, which “is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.” Almost every Eclipse series contains a film that was new on the 2012 Sight & Sound list. A striking number of other new Criterion releases also joined the 2012 list.

The films selected for the Criterion Collection have often been recovered first at New York art cinemas like IFC or Film Forum: a sensible connection, after all, because the curatorial and technical restoration of a film is an expensive and labor-intensive process, and, while the Criterion Collection’s yearly output is impressive, the number of films that can be restored is quite limited, and it is wise to get both a theatrical re-release and a deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray out of each restored film print.

Finally, I think it’s worth putting some numbers out there to check whether the poll’s reputation for stodginess holds over the broader list. (Again, the data for this can be found in the spreadsheet linked above.) Over the full 2012 list (all critics and all directors), the median year of production is 1973, and the average year for the 2012 list is about 1972. So both the median and the mean for the list as a whole are four or five years later than the “newest” film in the Top Ten. Not only that, but both figures represent a full seven-year advance over the 2002 list (median: 1966; mean: 1965). Moving a list this size seven years in just a decade is fairly impressive, and suggests a much more than random movement in the voting pool.

Which leads me to my last, and most conjectural, point, which, like my sense that there are many more non-narrative films in this poll’s results, is more impressionistic than quantified. It seems to me that there are far more films in the 2012 list which are from the global south and from the old Soviet bloc than there were in 2002, and I think it is this, largely, that is pushing the median year forward in time, as more of these nation’s film industries only really took off in the last third of the 20th century, or at the very least only after World War II. This shift is paralleled by what I believe to be a (proportional) decline in the number of films in the 2012 list which could be considered products of Classical Hollywood Cinema, and I would point to this chart to back this claim up.





The decades of greatest change between 2002 and 2012—other than the 2000s, for obvious reasons—are the 1950s and the 1940s. The percentage of films from these two decades declined from 15.3% and 10.2% (respectively) in 2002 to 10.1% and 5.8% in 2012. Now, not all of these films are necessarily Hollywood products, but if we’re talking the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of them are. Furthermore, I did a little bit of checking, and only about three-fourths (663 of 884) of the films on the 2002 list repeated on the 2012 list (in the spreadsheet, I’ve marked the years of those films in italics), and it seems to me that Classical Hollywood Cinema is over-represented in those that didn’t return.

The availability of films from the global South and from ex-Soviet bloc countries on DVD or streaming has swelled since 2002, but it is still much more difficult to view even some of the most acclaimed products of these parts of the world than it is to see a product of Classical Hollywood Cinema. It’s a little easier if one has a multi-region DVD player (which I imagine many professional critics do), but I would offer that the best possibility for seeing these films is not home viewing and not even an arts cinema, but at one of the many international film festivals.

As much as I love Classical Hollywood Cinema, I personally find these shifts very healthy, and I hope they do presage greater availability of some of these (for now) obscure classics. But the shape of the 2012 Sight & Sound list is not really the product of critics and directors programming their own viewing. At festivals, through the Criterion Collection, at arts cinemas, the choices are very much decided, not deliberated. I think most cineastes are happy with that—Criterion and the others do an exceptional job of dusting off mouldering gems. But it is important not to confuse satisfaction with the current arrangement of taste-making and gate-keeping institutions with autonomy. If the Sight & Sound poll teaches us something about how canons work today, I’d say it tells us that the institutions which form canons have gotten better at selling them, not that they’ve ceded authority to make—or re-make—them.

Book Review: Seal on Horowitz's Consuming Pleasures

Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). ISBN: 9780812243956. 491 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew Seal
Yale University

The book under review is the third that Daniel Horowitz has published on consumer culture in the United States, and it both is and isn’t useful to think of it as part of a trilogy, along with The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (1985) and The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2004). One reason in favor of doing so is simply that it puts Horowitz’s efforts into perspective: Horowitz has produced an achievement in many ways on par with Richard Slotkin’s dense and sweeping trio chronicling the place of the West in the American imagination, one of the very few other instances of such sustained scholarly diligence.[1]

It is clear that Horowitz himself sees Consuming Pleasures as building on the arguments of the previous two works, providing a further development of “the subject I have been working on since the early 1970s, the story of how intellectuals have responded to affluence and consumer culture” (x). Consuming Pleasures advances this story by tracking a new development in this debate: the emergence of a “postmoralism” or an “anthropological outlook on culture” which superseded the “new moralism” of modernist disdain and paternalistic expertise (the subject of Anxieties of Affluence), the position which in its own day had supplanted the more traditional moralism of self-restraint and parsimony (The Morality of Spending).

Horowitz argues that, in the heady first flush of the postwar U.S. economic boom, and in the slowly reconstructing and still rationing European envy of that prosperity, the seeds were sown for what was at first, for figures like David Riesman, the early Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, and Richard Hoggart, a hesitant détente between intellectuals and “popular culture.” That thaw then gradually became, for Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Stuart Hall, and Susan Sontag, a more engaged if not fully appreciative approach to the study of “consumer culture.” Pluralist assessments of cultural validity and worth reluctantly edged out hierarchical standards and fixed canons, with critics locating newfound resources for bottom-up creativity and even individuality within what was previously considered the top-down and stultifying domains of mass culture. By 1972, Horowitz argues, cultural critics like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had begun not only to tinker with the distinctions between high and low culture, but to argue for the suspension of such segmentations altogether. Such critics emphasized the emancipatory or even utopian promise of consumption, identifying within it an entirely malleable system of communication, a realm of free play and self-creation.

Like the prior two works, Consuming Pleasurestracks the shifts and rearticulations of these broad, society-wide dispositions through the writings of a deep roster of prominent intellectuals. It has long been one of Horowitz’s signal strengths to work over the contents of important texts and corpora in subtle ways through novel juxtapositions and insightful re-readings. Horowitz has expanded the boundaries of intellectual history in small but appreciable ways by, as he put it in The Morality of Spending, “insist[ing] on the benefits of exploring the interplay between the related stories of how Americans spent their money and how writers thought they should. The juxtapositions of data and advice enables us to see how changes in the standard of living prompted reconsiderations of the dilemmas of affluence, as well as how attitudes toward spending shaped the investigations” (Morality, xix).

In fact, Consuming Pleasures is far less interested in the data and investigations of consumer spending. The intellectuals it treats are more like organic intellectuals than were the figures covered in Morality of Spending or Anxieties of Affluence, speaking less as policy or corporate experts and more often as critics attempting, like the rest of the populace, to make a life inside consumer culture. Yet the feedback loop between prescription and description, between is and ought, is still the dominant motif of Consuming Pleasures. While the intellectuals of this book were not as insistent on knowing better as were figures like Simon Patten, Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Christopher Lasch, the “postmoralist” critics—Wolfe, McLuhan, Sontag, Venturi and Scott Brown—still insisted on being in the know. And being on the cultural bleeding edge often pushed these postmoralists to turn prescriptive in spite of themselves, becoming advocates if by nothing other than the momentum of their predictions of consumer culture’s success and of its viability as a permanent and versatile social force. Part of the book’s own pleasures lie in Horowitz’s skillful reconstruction of these vexed and overdetermined positions.

While Horowitz’s ability to excavate the nuances of tone and disposition from a rich archival trove is impressively graceful, the foregoing account may not overturn or greatly complicate what the reader already knows of the intellectual transformations of the postwar decades, and indeed Horowitz freely admits in Consuming Pleasures that “some of what I say about individual books or authors is not especially new.” But he also asserts that “I demonstrate patterns and connections previously obscured by treating these texts and their authors in isolation” (11). The texts and authors covered in Consuming Pleasures do range widely, although as with the prior two works, the book’s structure has a loose, almost episodic quality which prompts the reader to wish more often for the addition or substitution of alternative authors and texts than might have been the case were Horowitz to have written a more synthetic, more argumentative account. But it is actually the question of breadth that makes Consuming Pleasures in some ways an odd man out in this trilogy, and its differences from Morality of Spending and Anxieties of Affluence provide both its greatest strengths and its disappointments.

For one thing, to characterize Consuming Pleasures as responding primarily or even principally to Horowitz’s previous works is to parochialize it excessively, for it is in many ways as much or more in dialogue with other scholars’ work than with Horowitz’s own, as tight as the thematic and methodological approaches may be. Horowitz is inordinately generous in his citations of other works, patiently reconstructing the arguments and historiographies of a formidably voluminous reservoir of scholarship. (Graduate students like myself ought both to cheer and quail at such an example.) Citing previous work by Eugene Lunn, Michael Denning, Lawrence Levine, Paul Gorman, and Andrew Ross early and often, Horowitz makes great use of this body of scholarship to take some productive shortcuts, allowing him to cover more ground and extend his reach considerably past the specific intellectuals whom he highlights.[2] Consuming Pleasures, although it was, according to Horowitz’s preface, written in about only seven years, is a work of formidable patience and detail, an aggregation and synthesis of decades worth of reading in the secondary sources. Horowitz’s command of these literatures almost redeems the standard scholarly excuse for an abbreviated, cover-your-behind footnote “The literature on this topic is vast, but… here’s what I can claim to have read.” Horowitz’s style is more, “The literature on this topic is vast, and here’s what you should know from it.”

Moving from secondary to primary sources offers another way in which Consuming Pleasures does much more than build on Horowitz’s previous work. While he drew on understudied sources before, in Consuming Pleasures, Horowitz retrieves for the English-speaking scholar an exciting new clutch of previously untranslated or exceedingly obscure articles by Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Jürgen Habermas, and revives a now neglected but germinal text on popular culture, the 1964 Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel collaboration, The Popular Arts.[3] He also continues the recuperation of C. L. R. James as a major figure of the middle decades of the twentieth century, an indispensable voice for understanding those years, despite his obscurity during them.

A large part of the excitement of opening up these documents to current scholarship is that they come as something of a historiographical surprise—not even missed in prior treatments of U.S. consumer culture, their authors considered to be part of other formations tangential at best to the “domestic” debates over mass culture, affluence, and consumerism in America. The singular methodological innovation of Consuming Pleasures is its insistence on setting the intellectual discourse on postwar consumer culture within a transatlantic frame, and doing so is, I feel, a major advance for the study of these debates and the intellectuals involved in them.

Setting forth the agenda of writing a transatlantic history of intellectual responses to consumer culture is considerably easier than writing it, however, and Consuming Pleasures accomplishes this task somewhat unevenly. Horowitz dealt with émigré intellectuals before in The Anxieties of Affluence (George Katona and Ernest Dichter), but rightly adds to that category a wider-angle consideration of transnationality, one less defined by the space of the nation-state. “The main focus here,” Horowitz writes, “is on the consequences of the flow (or blockage) of people and ideas across national borders, what the historian Thomas Bender has called the result of ‘the permeability of the nation at boundaries, the zones of contact and exchange among people, money, knowledges, and things’” (13).[4]

That indecision between “flow (or blockage)” is a risky move, but it is one that Horowitz makes central to his project, emphasizing repeatedly the ways that intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic rather stubbornly failed to look around themselves properly to take advantage of the many concurrent ideas for how to come to terms with the postwar consumer landscape. Yet documenting—much less theorizing—how these ideas became “lost in translation,” as Horowitz prefers to describe these blockages, often requires more fancy footwork than proving a connection did occur, and the temptation for the historian to reconstruct a debate that he or she feels should have happened over those that did is a challenge to resist. At least it ensnares Horowitz a little too often, even though he admits that, while “[o]ne can only speculate about what difference it would have made to American discussions of popular culture had the works of Barthes, Benjamin, Eco, Habermas, and James been available in the immediate postwar period… [n]ot much is the best guess” (121). Still, the desire to force these texts into circulations they did not have is palpable in Consuming Pleasures, and its counterfactuality adds a touch of awkwardness.

Horowitz notes repeatedly that many of the western European texts which today can provide us with such a rich record of responses to the idea of American consumer culture were not translated into English until the tail end of the period he covers, if not later (as with the untranslated Eco, Habermas, and Barthes essays he works with).[5] Horowitz does not explore this curious fact very much, or attempt to track down the specific circumstances of when and why they were finally translated. Nor does he really make as much use as he might have of the transatlantic connections within cultural criticism generally, and the study of popular or mass culture more specifically, that preceded World War II—sources which, like José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, massively impacted the postwar debates on mass culture. The only prewar transatlantic intellectual given much treatment is T. S. Eliot.

To be fair, though, that lack of prewar coverage is not an oversight on Horowitz’s part, but a conscious argument, albeit one that is, I would argue, overly mechanical. Horowitz sees the emergence of these new attitudes toward consumer or mass culture as the ineluctable product of its postwar inundation: “[postwar c]hanges in the economy [i.e., the period of sustained prosperity through the 1950s] made consumerism so prevalent that it was hard to ascribe the consumption of goods simply or primarily to moral weakness” (8). Horowitz adds further down the page that, along with these transformations in the economic base come important superstructural considerations: “shifts in attitudes, ideas, and approaches deserve at least equal attention.” Yet the main shift Horowitz outlines is a simplistic ideological turnover: “Generational shifts played important roles, especially the waning of the memories of totalitarianism and of the prominence of writers for whom Stalinism and Nazism were central… A new set of imperatives emerged over time, in part as a result of how the waning or reconfiguration of Marxism underwrote these changes” (9). Yet Horowitz is too good a historian for these somewhat schematic arguments to bleach the nuance and subtlety of the actual content of the rest of the book; holdovers from the prewar period—including the irrepressible Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg as well as the fraught memories of the Popular Front—hover over much of Horowitz’s analysis, even if they might have been more directly and profitably engaged. Horowitz’s charming preface begins with an anecdote about stumbling on a 1937 essay written by one of his high school teachers, a woman with a Yale Ph.D., on the culturally redemptive possibilities present in moviegoing. In many ways, that initial move toward the Thirties encapsulates the persistent problem Horowitz faces that so much of his history is a sequence of almost random discoveries and undiscoveries—moments when a text like his high school teacher’s essay could be swallowed for years before popping up poignantly if also somewhat inconsequentially.

The emphasis on missed connections overall gives Consuming Pleasures a rather ghostly feel—an effect heightened by the continuing reverberations of the death of Susan Sontag, who in many ways anchors the back half of the book. Horowitz makes wonderful use of her recently published journals, and the opening up of these hidden sides of Sontag’s personality and experiences to the public eye adds a startlingly sharp dimension to the more sedate reflections of the other figures in the book. Yet Consuming Pleasures is haunted not just by the belated translations of Eco or Barthes or by Sontag’s journals, although Sontag herself brings together the two larger presences which Horowitz draws upon. Consuming Pleasures is, not too far under the surface, a story about how (some) Jews and (some) gay men and women fought simultaneously to use popular culture to achieve an identity and a place in American society and to justify to the more rarefied strata of that society the importance of popular culture. And because it tells that story, the Holocaust and homophobia loom in the shadows of the book. Unfortunately, that’s all they really do, though, as Horowitz does not fully engage with why Jews and gays seemed to have been so central to the repudiation of traditional hierarchies of high and low culture, and he often comes off as using these categories fairly reductively. There is even an interesting footnote in which he says, “I am grateful to Herbert J. Gans [also one of the subjects of Consuming Pleasures] for helping me think about the relationships of Jews to popular culture, even though we did not always agree” (376). That footnote follows the sentence “Whatever the sociological origins of concerns among Jews about popular culture, it is hard to overestimate the impact on them of an awareness of how Hitler had used mass media to advance Nazism” (21).

As uneven as these hauntings can be, they do make Consuming Pleasures a much richer book, and, together with the truly monumental feats of research and synthesis which Horowitz has performed, they promise readers a rewarding and deeply provoking experience.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notes

[1] Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985); and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992).

[2] The principal works here are Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, CA, 1982); Michael Denning, “The End of Mass Culture,” International Labor and Working-Class History 37 (Spring 1990): 4-18, and The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996); Lawrence Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97.5 (Dec. 1992): 1369-1399; Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996); Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, 1989).

[3] Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (Boston, 1967). It is interesting to note that the U.S. paperback edition—cited here—came out in a series edited by David Manning White, the editor of what Horowitz refers to as the “locus classicus of these [1950s] debates [on mass culture]… the 1957 book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White” (19).

[4] Horowitz is quoting from Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), 7.

[5] Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) was not translated until 1972, and even then only partially; Walter Benjamin’s key essays of the 1930s were not published in an accessible manner until 1968; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 landmark book Dialektik der Aufklärung, with its crucial chapter on the Culture Industry, was not available in English until 1972; Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (1962) and Diario Minimo (1963) were incompletely translated as The Open Work (1989) and Misreadings (1993); The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) by Jürgen Habermas only came out in English in 1989; and, while C. L. R. James’s American Civilization (1950) didn’t have to wait for a translation, as Horowitz points out, it nevertheless was not in print until 1993.