The Revenge of the Herd

The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

One of the not so novel ideas underpinning Ken Kesey's novel - and Miloš Formans movie - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that we put the wrong people in our insane asylums. The real loonies are the ones in charge. How could anyone have a glance at Sight and Sound's brand new list of the Greatest Films of All Time without coming to the same conclusion about the contemporary film world? 

I once believed that the whole point of doing this sort of thing once a decade was to establish a canon for fledgling film goers to use as a serious guide through the entirely unserious carnival world of movies. For the last 40 years, however, its seriousness has been challenged by a generation of critics that is growing in numbers and influence who seem much more like fans than critics. 

A canon is something like a baton or a torch that is passed from one generation to the next that celebrates the best work of the past - whether the past is many centuries old, in the case of poetry and music or, in the case of film, only a single century plus 27 years. Standards, especially standards of excellence, are always evolving, but the last three Sight and Sound polls have named a different film as the Greatest of All Time. The latest, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, was made 47 years ago. Clearly, it hasn't taken critics that long to decide that it's a great film. 

In the Autumn 1952 issue of Sight and Sound, the editors published an introduction that was really a sort of disclaimer. The editors voiced some of the reservations that the "nearly 100" critics (of whom 69 responded to the poll) had made, the most crucial of which was

our request was for personal references – “the films that have impressed you most personally” – and many critics were quick and right to answer that the films one thought best (in the history of the cinema, etc.), were not necessarily the films one liked best.

This has become the real sticking point in any kind of criticism: learning to distinguish between what one likes and what one believes is good. They can sometimes agree, but they are not at all interchangeable and every competent critic must always keep one from interfering with the other. 

But something else has come to light in the few days since the latest Poll was published. In an effort to be more inclusive of works that were made by people outside the mainstream - the mainstream being white males - and, in some cases, bending over backwards in the process - the pollsters reportedly hired a consultant whose mission was to deliberately toss all the usual criteria for compiling the list - like the films that appeared consistently higher on voters' lists - and push another agenda that accommodates the viewpoints of people who are clearly unacquainted with film history. They have succeeded, but not only in foisting a heretofore film outlier to the top of the heap; they accomplished the feat of standing on their own necks.  

A few months ago I listened to an episode from the podcast Against the Rules in which Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Fifth Risk, examined the importance of referees, expert mediators in all fields, and how their function can be subverted when the stakes are conspicuously high. He used the discovery of a hitherto unknown painting that some authenticators, hand picked by the owners of the painting, declared was "the last Leonardo" - painted at least partially by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting had been heavily restored in secret and was eventually auctioned at Christie's for a record $450M to an unidentified Saudi prince. The painting has since disappeared, the Paris Louvre refused to attribute it to Leonardo, and it has been widely repudiated as a fake. So now, thanks to the tampering with vetted authentication, some Saudi prince is in possession of a worthless fake that will go down in history as an enormous hoax. 

In an article about Lewis's podcast, Tim Schneider wrote something that has bearing on the current Sight and Sound fuore:

art authenticators…are heavily incentivized to declare competent if not necessarily spectacular works to be masterpieces by canonical talents, even in the face of legitimate doubt.

The incentives motivating many of the 1600 people who were polled by BFI, nearly twice as many as in 2012, are clearly in conflict with people who have seen every film in the canon, and tens of thousands besides, and who have an understanding of cinematic greatness - an understanding that has been tempered by decades of re-viewing and reappraisal. 

I haven't liked the results of these polls before now. These lists are probably the result of the stupefying effects of capitalism on culture, reducing everything to a monetary value (like a Leonardo) giving comfort to people who read best-sellers and who will like something only when they are assured of its popularity. Ranking films or books or songs represents a deeply philistine misunderstanding of quality, despite Richard Brody's claims to the contrary:

Lists are no substitute for criticism, but those who take them as inimical to criticism are pharisaical. Lists are solo acts of personal passion; voting acknowledges that one is part of a community. While there’s no allegiance or deference invoked by the results of a poll (as there is in an election), the poll’s outcomes are a satisfying reminder that it isn’t only family and friends who share one’s strongest enthusiasms. If a critic feels confident going out on a limb, it’s because of the implicit understanding that there’s a tree.

But the tree is rotten and needs to be pulled down. How do I know this? Think about it for a moment. Jeanne Dielman is a great film that deserves more attention. I can't complain that it's at #1 because at least it knocked Hitchcock's silly Vertigo into the #2 spot. I can understand Richard Brody being tickled by its miraculous appearance at #1. His incentive in voting for it was doubtless to maintain his street creds, such as they are, and his strenuous effort to avoid the charge of being "pharisaical" (a pharisaical word if ever there was one - and isn't it the very height of pharisaism to call a 3 ½ hour film that scrupulously avoids anything close to entertainment value the GOAT?). 

Ordinarily, I would spend a long time deconstructing the new poll, as I have done with past polls. I'm not going to this time. Besides, I'd rather any day be a pharisee than a philistine.

[Postscript December 11: the photo of an old Sight and Sound cover I chose to illustrate this piece shows the front door of the British Film Institute, bombed out during the Blitz. The coincidence was inadvertent, but nonetheless pertinent.]