Via Greencine comes this introductory chapter, of an abandoned book by Paul Schrader on the notion of a film canon:
The notion of a canon, any canon—literary, musical, painting—is 20th-century heresy. A film canon is particularly problematic because the demise of the literary canon coincides, not coincidentally, with the advent and rise of moving pictures. There is much debate about the canons but no agreement. Not only is there no agreement about what a canon should include, there’s no agreement about whether there should be canons at all. Or, if there is agreement, it is this: canons are bad—elitist, sexist, racist, outmoded, and politically incorrect.
Yet de facto film canons exist—in abundance. They exist in college curriculums, they exist in yearly 10-best lists, they exist in best-of-all-time lists of every sort. Canon formation has become the equivalent of 19th-century anti-sodomy laws: repudiated in principle, performed in practice. Canons exist because they serve a function; they are needed. And the need increases with each new wave of films. What I propose is to go back in order to go forward. To examine the history of canon formation, cherry-pick the criteria that best apply to film, and select a list of films that meet the highest criteria.
The model, of course, is Harold Bloom’s 1994 bestseller, The Western Canon. Mustering a mountain of hubris and a lifetime of close reading, Bloom proposed a canon of Western literature: books and authors who meet the highest “artistic criteria.” The Western Canon is also a screed against “the cultural politics, both of the Left and the Right, that are destroying criticism and consequently may destroy literature itself.” These cultural politicians, whom Bloom dubs “The School of Resentment,” count among their number Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, New Historicists, Lacanians, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians (Bloom doesn’t flinch from making enemies). —Filmlinc
An online listing of Schrader’s 60 films can be read on Jeffrey M. Anderson’s website Cinematical.
More on Schrader’s canon by Donato Totaro here.
after repeated scans of the list I became less shocked at what was missing and began to appreciate what was there. Like the often overlooked Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg film Performance. I began to smile and take perverse pleasure at the quirks and oddities of Schrader’s canon. For example, while excluding Eisenstein because his films tell us nothing about “what it means to be human or, to put it in grand terms, ennoble the soul,” he excludes such luminous humanists as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and all of neo-realism, while including such Italian films as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the most cynical and nihilistic westerns ever made (but which I thought was one of Schrader’s most inspired selections), The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci’s bleak, terrifying account of Italian Fascism, and La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni’s paean to emotional fragility and human alienation amid Italian modernity (and by far the most pessimistic of Antonioni’s alienation tetralogy). I wondered how he could insist that the bar be raised as high as possible (“The higher the better”), and then include The Big Lebowski at number 40! While disappointed that there was not one horror film in the canon, from someone who has directed two (The Cat People, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist), I was surprised to find out that there are five westerns in his canon. With the inherent possibility of such contradiction and inconsistency, it became evident that canon formation is not for the feint of heart. Schrader should be applauded for providing a reference point for further generations to contest. After all, what type of a canon would it be if it did not? –Donato Totaro
