FURTHER FODDER: Readers respond to Paul Schrader's Film Canon
Top 20 Directors Omitted from the Canon (Readers were invited to nominate their own top 10 directors missing from the list of 60 canonical films in our Sep/Oct issue. We compiled the results according to a descending point system in which the number one director received 10 points.)
1. Howard Hawks
2. Jacques Rivette
3. Sergei Eisenstein
4. Roberto Rossellini
5. Krzysztof Kieslowski
6. Abbas Kiarostami
7. Robert Altman
8. Jean Vigo
9. John Cassavetes
10. D.W. Griffith
11. Terrence Malick
12. Ernst Lubitsch
13. Nicholas Ray
14. Satyajit Ray
15. Chantal Akerman
16. Vittorio De Sica
17. Werner Herzog
18. Pier Paolo Pasolini
19. Hou Hsiao-hsien
20. Ousmane Sembene
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Paul Schrader’s selection of Canon-worthy films stinks of retrograde Eurocentrism. It speaks to the single biggest problem in contemporary Western film criticism: the blinkered, reactionary notion that most of the great filmmakers are or were Western men, and that the era of great cinema has ended with their aging or death.
Mike Archibald
Vancouver, Canada
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Paul Schrader is correct in observing that Pauline Kael’s great intuitive response to movies never cohered into a true aesthetic. She came close to acknowledging this in the preface to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which closes by quoting the title of my undergraduate philosophy paper, “Art as Transformed Subversion: The Elusive Aesthetics of Pauline Kael.”
But Mr. Schrader should fret less about the impossibility of setting a canon that will remain canonical. Canons always change to reflect evolving tastes. Vermeer was neglected for centuries and moved into the art historical canon less than a hundred years ago. Winckelmann’s epitome of the classical aesthetic was the Apollo Belvedere, now viewed as a Hellenistic pastiche for Roman patrons. And Roman architecture, once viewed as an undifferentiated extension of Greek architecture, came to be admired for its raw expression of structure in the early 20th century, when modern architects were pursuing similar goals, while today we acknowledge that the plaster and painted decorations conveniently ignored for so long really made these buildings more like Beaux Arts painted ladies than anyone previously cared to admit.
So, Paul, relax about the canon, and just keep up the good work.
Jim Hoekema
Newburgh, NY
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So his list is as much a canon of directors as it is of films, and should be taken to task for two gaping holes:
1. Howard Hawks
2. Ernst Lubitsch
As traditional as Schrader’s canon appears at first glance, the absence of Hawks and Lubitsch in favor of A Place in the Sun is a giant revisionist red mark.
Jerry Johnson
Austin, TX
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I’m delighted to see A Place in the Sun on the list. Surely Stevens is the most underrated of all American filmmakers.
When I registered that there was no Rossellini on the list, I actually exclaimed out loud "Oh my god!" The father of film modernism not canonical?? Inconceivable.
Michael Annand
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I do appreciate the fact that he omitted several of the names that are often included in lists like these. Capra, Lean, and Spielberg are only a few examples of directors revered by listmakers like the AFI that I just can’t stomach.
Although Schrader in his article also takes a jab at the AFI, his list suffers from the same flaw as that organization's list of the “100 greatest American movies”: the absence of John Cassavetes, (arguably) the most important figure in American independent film.
Wesley Elmore
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“Canon Fodder” was the most enjoyable article I have read in Film Comment in my brief time as a subscriber. Thanks!!
Chet Mellema
Cedar Falls, IA
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For me, the idea of a film canon was initiated in 1968 by the italicized titles in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema. (I excavated his 1963 Film Culture draft and the Sight and Sound lists only later.) The book’s very structure and sentence rhythms continue to resonate like Old Testament chapter and verse, a quality faintly echoed in Paul Schrader’s more rigorous Bloom-inflected essay.
Schrader never mentions Sarris explicitly but his book arrived at the cusp of key creative and critical events—American cinema’s strongest embrace of European modernism, the Postart declarations of Cahiers and Screen and Kael’s “Trash, Art and the Movies”—that are touchstones of Schrader’s argument. Perhaps the era of Postart troubles the prospect of an update to the Sarris project just as it inhibited Schrader from following through on Walter Donahue’s book proposal.
The list that follows (chronological order by film selection) edges back into the Sarris pantheon, ventures into past and contemporary Europe, and touches down on India and Iran. I will not quarrel with Schrader’s worthy choices of Lewis and Mann in the bronze category except to say that the fierce economy of their movies is equally present in Aldrich, Fuller, and Siegel and is made poetic in the work of Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and Penn.
Howard Curle
Winnipeg, Canada
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Paul Schrader’s attempt at defining a canon of films, and then ranking them, does a disservice to both his argument and his readers. Suppose, for example, that we were to make a canon of, say, Western music. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that we choose Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” as Number One. Okay, now we’ll look for a piece almost but not quite as great as that, for Number Two. Maybe Bach’s Goldberg Variations? Sure, why not? Now for Number Three: maybe Beethoven’s Eroica? Almost but not quite as great as Goldberg, right? Well, maybe, but now we’ve disposed of three great composers and can never go back to them for another work.
There are two reasons why Schrader’s bizarre list (I’ll leave his philosophical justification, along with his dislike of his own art form, to another correspondent) can’t work. First, it allows only one film per filmmaker. Has no one made more than one great film? It’s okay to love The Rules of the Game, but what about Grand Illusion? Oharu is fine, but didn’t poor Mizoguchi also make Sansho the Bailiff? Too bad, Kenji—you’re only allowed one.
Second, ranking films in order falls into the same trap as the AFI’s notorious list of “100 Greatest American Movies”: Is Number One really so much “greater” than Number One Hundred? Who decides, and by how much is it greater? Schrader conflates every genre—dramas, comedies, mysteries, westerns—and even tosses in one musical, and then ranks them. Did he find commonalities between Number 9, Persona, and Number 28, The Wild Bunch? If so, what were his criteria? If they all possess his list of seven essential qualities, did Number 53, Claire’s Knee, have less than Number 6, Citizen Kane? You can see where this goes, and frankly it isn’t pretty.
