Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

the significant works of directors previously canonized,
rating Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955) higher than Citizen
Kane and Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
(1927) above The Last Laugh, while also embracing
Mizoguchi’s Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu,
1952) and Tales of Ugetsu for their long-shot, long-take
aesthetic.
In the United States, Andrew Sarris (b. 1928) railed
against native critics who favored foreign, experimental,
and documentary films over commercial Hollywood productions.
In The American Cinema (1968), he offered a
reassessment of American film history based on auteurist
principles, analyzing the work of over a hundred directors
and sorting them into hierarchical categories ranging
from ‘‘The Pantheon’’ to ‘‘Less Than Meets the Eye’’ to
‘‘Subjects for Further Research’’; the result was a personal
canon that served as both a model for critical assessment
and a lightning rod for debate. The values underlying
auteurism revolutionized the way critics conceived of
artistic significance, opening the door for more lowbudget,
transgressive, and idiosyncratic directors to be
endorsed by the critical mainstream.
CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO THE CANON
By the end of the 1960s, some theorists and academics
began questioning the tendency of auteur critics to consider
the aesthetic value of films outside of any economic,
historical, or ideological context. The adoption within
film scholarship of theories drawn from structuralism,
semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis made problematic
notions of authorship and conventional critical
assessments. The rise of a modernist European art cinema
and a vibrant American avant-garde encouraged some
scholars and critics to embrace alternative filmmaking
practices. At the same time in academia, feminism, race
and ethnic studies, and queer studies led to a re-evaluation
of orthodox canons in literature, art, and film.
In cinema studies, scholars critiqued the canon from
a number of angles. They noted that organizing film
history around ‘‘great men’’ who produce masterpieces
ignores other important aspects of the field, including
film style, technology, genre, industry, national film
schools, and spectatorship. Some highlighted the exclusionary
nature of the orthodox canon, including the
paucity of female, non-western, and non-white directors,
and the neglect of documentaries, avant-garde, and animated
films. Others argued that not all viewers value the
same films, and those films that are valued can be significant
to viewers for different reasons; thus, the personal
canons of critics, filmmakers, and audience
members will likely differ, as will those of individuals in
different countries and age groups. A new approach to
canon formation appeared necessary.
Canon and Canonicity
Janet Staiger summarizes four common
approaches adopted in the 1970s and 1980s to address
perceived problems in canon formation. First, some
scholars analyzed acknowledged film classics against
the grain, seeking to reveal new meanings and significance
through alternative readings. Others revised the
criteria that determined the nature of film art in an
effort to include previously marginalized work within
the established canon. Many called for the creation of
new canons of oppositional work that challenged dominant
modes of representation. Finally, still others
argued for the abolition of the canon itself, as the
process of canon formation inevitably elevates selected
films at the expense of others. Rather than a complete
abandonment of the canon, the primary result of
several decades of debate within film studies discourse
has been a greater awareness of the varied criteria used
to form canons and their implications for film culture
and history.
As academia grappled with the relative merits of
canon formation, the evaluative impulse of auteurism
became enshrined within mainstream film culture, leading
to an embrace of the masterpiece tradition and an
ever-growing number of ‘‘best of’’ lists. Individual critics
at daily newspapers, magazines, and specialized film publications
as well as critics’ groups around the world now
annually rate each year’s releases, while the Library of
Congress has its National Treasures list, and on the
Internet thousands of personal web sites offer their own
idiosyncratic canons. The urge to define cinema’s masterpieces
reached its apex with the wave of national cinema
centenaries celebrated during the late 1990s and early
2000s, as organizations in country after country conducted
polls to select their top one hundred film productions.
Meanwhile, growing popular interest in box-office
grosses and ancillary sales has led to the promotion of a
different kind of canon, one formed by consumer taste
rather than critical opinion. In the United States, Gone
with the Wind (1939) has achieved canonical status as the
all-time highest box-office performer, reflecting not its
critical clout but its firm hold on the popular
imagination.
While some academics and critics continue to favor
a core canon dominated by art cinema and select
Hollywood auteurs, the boundaries of the canon are
continually expanding. Early tastemakers were able to
see movies only via theatrical release, a few major film
festivals, and specialized exhibition, yet modern scholars
and critics enjoy dramatically increased access to titles
through a diverse array of additional media: cable,
video, VCD/DVD, and the Internet. Institutions such
as the American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film
Institute (BFI) mount programs of film screenings and
publications that aid in redefining the canon. At the
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 219