Wednesday Investigations 2.0 [004]: Horror, comedy, experimentalism, and canonicity

On the 2022 Sight and Sound list

Since the last installment of this newsletter, the results of the Sight and Sound “Greatest Films of All Time” poll were released. This is always an exciting event for movie buffs: it comes out only once a decade (the first was in 1952), and it has always formed a strong argument for what constitutes our culture’s collective cinematic canon. (If you’ve ever heard that Citizen Kane is “the greatest movie of all time,” it is at least in part because it topped this particular list for sixty years.) The claim that the Sight and Sound list meaningfully reflects a broad critical consensus has been enhanced, I think, by the fact that they continue to widen the pool of critics they consult: they are at 1,639 this year, doubling 2012’s number (846 critics) and representing a tenfold broadening over 2002 (145 critics).

Attempts at making a canon are always fun because it presents us with an opportunity to quibble not only about the relative positioning of what’s been included, but we can also get incensed about films that have been left off. Heck, we can argue that entire genres are underrepresented here: as a fan of horror films I find myself looking for all sorts of spooky stuff that isn’t there. Absent are silent classics like Nosferatu (1922); important films from the Universal Studios monster cycle, like Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931); exquisitely grubby midcentury independents like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), or Halloween (1978); crossover fare like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986); and 21st century art horror like Antichrist (2009) or Hereditary (2018). (Horror films that did make the list: Psycho (1960), The Shining (1980), arguably Mulholland Dr. (2001), and Get Out (2017).)

shot from this year’s winner, which could be said to occasionally have a horror vibe // screenshot 3/10 from this Tumblr post

OK, fine, horror is (arguably) a niche genre: how about something everybody likes, like comedy? We have two Keatons (Sherlock Jr. (1924) and The General (1926)) and two Chaplins (City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)), but most of the great screwball comedies are missing (It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940) and His Girl Friday (1940) are all absent). And after the 30s, comedy as a genre may as well not even exist: we have Playtime (1967) and… no other postwar film that could be decisively called a comedy? Whole postwar comic subgenres are passed over: missing are parody films like Airplane! (1979)), mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap (1984), and contemporary romcoms like When Harry Met Sally… (1989). There is nothing resembling a teen comedy for any generation of teens; there is no 21st-century entrant from the Apatow factory. No Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975); no Life of Brian (1979). No Big Lebowski (1998)—heck, pick your favorite Coen Brothers film (arguably all comedies to some degree): none of them are here.

And yet, by and large, I appreciate and value this list. It raised some eyebrows this time around, when it catapulted a Chantal Akerman film to the top of the list, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). (Citizen Kane (1941) is now number three; and Vertigo (1958), which topped the list in 2012, is now number two.)

Jeanne Dielman represents the first time a film directed by a woman has ever reached the top ten in this poll, to say nothing of the number one slot. Others have written on the film as an important piece of feminist filmmaking, a critical tradition worth digging into but which I can’t begin to summarize in the short space of this newsletter. Laura Mulvey, who some of you likely know from her coining of the term “the male gaze,” wrote a whole new essay on the topic.

the back of Dephine Seyrig’s head // screenshot 3/10 from this Tumblr post

There is much one could say about Mulvey’s essay, but since I came in complaining about omitted genres, I thought it worth picking up from there and noting that she spends a bit of time, at the start, situating Jeanne Dielman in the genre tradition of the experimental film:

“[T]he ultimate surprise goes even further: the film that collected the most votes in 2022 is made with a cinematic style and strategy closer to avantgarde than mainstream traditions and, furthermore, at just under three and a half hours, demands dedicated viewing. Although confrontational, idiosyncratic and extraordinary films have consistently appeared lower in the lists, the experimental tradition, to which Jeanne Dielman belongs, is—apart perhaps from the recent appearance of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)—absent.”

Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman // screenshot 7/10 in this Tumblr post

Mulvey’s categorization of Dielman is apt, though I’d quibble with her assertion that the experimental tradition is otherwise absent here. Two other female-directed films on the list, Vêra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), could readily be included on any syllabus of “experimental films,” for one thing, and Sátántangó (1994) and Shoah (1985) are both longer, if you’re counting length as a prerequisite for avant-gardeish “dedicated viewing.” There are four separate Godard films on this list, each experimental for its time and radical even today, and even Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., another film in the top ten, owes its debts to experimental film, especially in its final third. This is a good thing, though; the more the merrier. As a fan of experimental work in all media, I must say that it is nice to see “experimental cinema” making a strong showing, as a genre, on a list that will guide the viewing choices of many movie fans in the years to come, even if it means some other genres might need to take a back seat.

Lest this get lost in the shuffle—and in case the voice of 1600 other critics hasn’t convinced you—let me add here that Dielman is, indeed, a masterpiece! Back when I first saw it, I took a lot of screenshots and posted them at Tumblr. It was an especially fruitful film for my old project, Cinema Without People: just looking at these three posts side-by-side tell you something instructive about the grammar and structure of the film.

screenshot 7/10 from this Tumblr post

I’ve seen a few other Akerman films, too, News from Home (1977), and the absolutely gutting No Home Movie (2015); both are worth your time and attention. (For what it’s worth, Citizen Kane remains excellent, and it has its own Cinema Without People post.)

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Before I looked over Sight and Sound’s published list, I tried my hand at writing my own ten-film ballot, just for fun. It’s harder than you’d think, and if I tried it a second time I’d probably end up with a different ten. But for posterity’s sake, here’s what I wrote down, organized chronologically.

Man With A Movie Camera (1929)
M (1931)
His Girl Friday (1940)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
2001 (1969)
Eraserhead (1977)
The Fly (1986)
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Magnolia (2000)
Decasia (2002)
Cameraperson (2016)

Most of these are pretty famous: five of them are on the Sight and Sound list, with two in the top ten. (Eraserhead, for what it’s worth, isn’t on Sight and Sound list, but it emerges as #53 on the Sight and Sound Director’s Poll, arguably a more interesting list.)

My most contemporary choices, Decasia and Cameraperson, are both experimental documentaries, and each could be seen as a kind of response to 1929’s Man With A Movie Camera. Man With A Movie Camera represents a titanic cinematic achievement—testifying to how through carefully assembling and inventively editing masses of footage you can successfully evoke something as complex as a day in the life of four separate cities (Kiev, Moscow, Odessa and Kharkov).

We could argue that there’s no longer an appetite for that kind of monumental totalizing film; watching it, you feel the same sort of “we don’t make things like this anymore” sensation you might feel when wandering through a magnificent Beaux-Arts post office or train station. Cameraperson (directed by Kirsten Johnson) and Decasia (directed by Bill Morrison) each speak to the exhaustion of that kind of constructivist impulse, while simultaneously arguing that revelation can still be found in the remnants, excess, and waste of our collective century-long cinematic project. Johnson is interested in the offcuts and scraps that have piled up during after her long career as a cinematographer; Morrison is interested in the forgotten films slowly rotting away in archives. Each of their films are remarkable—indeed, I would say they are each perfect—but I’ll get out of the way here and let the trailers speak for themselves:

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And finally, here’s one for the comic book fans: a new, surprisingly moving, trailer for the forthcoming Across the Spider-Verse. Dropped yesterday!

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The New York Times’ best films of 2022, which dispiritingly became a flash point in this year’s culture war (thanks Elon) is of course worth reading, though I found this critic’s roundtable at Vulture a little more interesting, in part because it also talks about interesting failures.

—JPB, writing from Dedham, MA and Minneapolis, MN, in the week ending Wednesday, December 14