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.

Canon Wars, The Informationalization of Cinema, and the Sight & Sound Poll

As most readers of this blog are probably aware, Sight & Sound, the venerable monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute, announced the results of their once-a-decade poll of critics and directors earlier this month.  Since 1952, the magazine has asked a select group of film critics to name the ten greatest films of all time.  The lists are submitted unranked.  The magazine then simply adds up the number of mentions of each film and produces a ranked list of the greatest films of all time. Since 1992, a parallel poll of critics has also taken place.  The big news from this year's polls is that, for the first time since the inaugural poll of 1952, when De Sica's Bicycle Thieves grabbed the top slot, a film other than Citizen Kane finished in first place in the critics' poll: Vertigo, which appeared on 191 of the 846 top-ten lists, beat out Kane (which was on 157 lists). In the directors' poll, for the first time, Kane also lost the top slot, which went to Ozu's Tokyo Story (#3 on the critics' poll).   The results of both the critics' and directors' poll can be found here.

From the moment of its release, the poll has been the talk of both film blogs and film podcasts (e.g. this and this...but the volume of commentary on it has been truly extraordinary).  The conversation has also spilled into more general-interest blogs.  I find the Sight and Sound polls oddly fascinating and wanted to do a post taking an intellectual-history angle on them.*  My first thought was to do a fairly comprehensive review what people were saying about the polls, but I quickly got lost in the endless commentary on them.   However, two aspects of the polls--and the discussion of them--that I found interesting seem to be getting little mention.  So they are the subject of this post.

The Sight & Sound poll emerged in 1952, toward the end of a long period in film criticism in which establishing that cinema was a serious art was one of the perennial tasks of those who wrote on film.  Canon construction was an important part of this task. And it's hard to imagine a purer example of canon construction than the Sight & Sound poll, with its technique of simply counting the mentions that each film receives from those polled.  While this year's poll has been praised by some and criticized by others, I've been struck both by how few people have questioned the entire enterprise and by how mild such criticism has been when it has come. 

Not so long ago, canons were an important front in our ongoing culture wars.  Now, however, they seem to have lost their status as a cultural flashpoint. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the epicenter of the canon wars was, of course, college campuses. But these days, as far as I can tell, the struggles over great books courses and reading lists in general have eased, even as the underlying issues of those struggles very much remain.**

If once canons seemed to some like an invidious attempt to draw a sharp line between a handful of great works (almost inevitably authored by Dead White European Males) and the rest of human culture, today they are more often treated as one might treat a mixtape: a suggestion of what one might profitably consume that represents a personal opinion on the matter more than an authoritative statement from on high.  The status of those taking part in Sight & Sound poll--as professional critics or directors--makes the poll potentially worth listening to. But in no sense does it forestall the possibility of the rest of us coming up with our own mixtape-like Top Ten lists, which we might then blog, e-mail, tweet, or torrent to our friends and beyond.  Rather than shutting down conversations, as some once felt literary canons did, this year's Sight & Sound poll has been almost universally seen as a conversation starter.

Part of what's changed, I think, is the way we consume movies these days.  I come from the last generation whose cinematic education began before the home video revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s. When I first began to watch movies seriously, my knowledge of film was still at the mercy of (pre-cable) television and theaters.  Especially in a town like Berkeley, these could provide an excellent introduction to world cinema.  Repertory theaters like the UC and the Rialto 4, and arthouses like the Northside, provided me with a terrific cinematic education, supplemented by local television's tendency to fill time with old movies.  My strongest t.v. movie memories revolve around Creature Features, the late-night Saturday horror / monster movie show on Oakland's KTVU (Channel 2), hosted by the inimitable Bob Wilkins.  Wilkins aired an incredibly eclectic mix of films. His show introduced me to everything from Ray Harryhausen's work to the Toho studio Japanese monster movies, from the classic Hammer films of the 1950s and 1960s to Night of the Living Dead (which scared the pants off of me).  Here's Wilkins introducing a particularly obscure horror flick...though I think you'll get a sense of both his nerdish enthusiasm and the care with which he tried to pass his cinephilia on to his audience:

One could certainly get an excellent introduction to film from these sources. Indeed, the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, became steeped in the history of cinema largely via watching old films on t.v. But starting when I was in high school, home video became an ever more important method of cinematic consumption.  Over the course of the '80s, repertory film theaters remained vibrant (though they often became part of chains), but by the end of the decade they had entered into steep decline.  Of the repertory theaters of my college years in Cambridge, one--the Brattle--is still hanging on, but the Orson Welles is long gone (a fire led to its closure while I was still in college).

VHS, and later Laserdiscs and DVD, meant that one was no longer constrained by the programming choices of others. Though which films were available in these formats was--and remains--a source of some frustration.  Nevertheless, the world of cinema opened up in a way that it never had before.  Even when a film was unavailable on VHS, one could often obtain bootleg copies, often recorded off the air. Indeed, there was an outfit in L.A. that used to rent such films by mail.  Yes, the quality was often low. But certainly no lower than that of the films that the young Martin Scorsese watched on his family's small black-and-white television in the 1950s.

We're now in the midst of the latest phase of the ongoing home video revolution. For those with an internet connection, streaming video makes an enormous quantity of film instantly available through services like Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and Amazon streaming video. The Internet Archive has made a large number of films that have fallen into the public domain available via torrent. And, if one is willing to break the law, virtually any film imaginable can be found online for free.

At the time I began high school in the late 1970s, it would have been practically impossible to see Vertigo.  The #1 film on this year's Sight & Sound critics poll had been withdrawn from circulation by Hitchcock's estate in the early 1970s; it would return to movie screens with much fanfare in the 1980s.  Today, I could begin viewing it on my computer screen in a matter of minutes without leaving my desk.
 
We can now, I think, go beyond talking of a home-video revolution and instead consider what one might call the informationalization of motion pictures.  This is, to be sure, a mixed blessing. Seeing Vertigo on my computer screen is not remotely the same thing as seeing it projected in 70mm.  Indeed, even in theaters, digital formats are threatening to kill off celluloid.  But the informationalization of motion pictures fundamental alters the way we consume movies...and the way we think about our consumption of them. And it contributes powerfully to our experience of the Sight & Sound poll as a kind of mixtape--a cultural production we can both experience and re-mix ourselves--rather than as the hermetic declaration of a cultural authority.

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* "In the old joke about The Daily Worker, an editor hands a rewrite person a wire service item about a motorcyclist knocked over by a car, and says, 'Class angle this one, comrade.'"-- Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, October 16, 1989.

**  Once again I've strayed onto ground that is the professional province of two of my fellow bloggers, so I hope Andrew and L.D. will add to these thoughts about canons and canon wars.