The Oddity of Fandom: Or, An Open Letter to Courtney Barnett

Dear Courtney,

I am a big fan of yours. I have seen you three times in the span of about two years and have managed to see you go from Toronto's small venues to one of the biggest non-stadiums. Your songs have been the soundtrack to my life for the past two years. The first time I ever heard your music, a friend introduced me to Avant Gardener. I was having some kind of panic attack that day, so it was amazing to me that here was someone singing a song about an inability to breathe just as I was going through that same thing. Meanwhile, Elevator Operator kept me going through the strike that I was involved in just about when the album was released. I loved your lyrics in general. You were a crazy poet who managed to explain everything perfectly: My motto in life became I wanna go out but I wanna stay home, "I don't want no 9 to 5 telling me that I'm alive" clashed so well with "I don't know what I was thinking I should get a job" and I found nothing more inspiring than "I used to hate myself but now I think I'm alright". When you sold out the Danforth, I was incredibly happy for you. It was like a friend of mine had accomplished something huge: I was there at the beginning and now I was here to see you reap the benefits. And yet, when I walked into that building and saw all of those people there, I felt a sense of dread, jealousy, a longing for the past, a feeling that my favourite artist was no longer mine.

I don't mean to be dehumanizing nor do I mean to be selfish, even though I know I am, but this is where fandom lies. The first time I saw you, you were at the Silver Dollar. I was standing directly in front of you, face to face. After the show, I came up to you to talk to you and shake your hand; I wanted a hug and a conversation and a friendship and a correspondence, but I settled for a quick chat and a shake. Thinking back now, I realize that that conversation was hollow: I either talked about how great you were or how I was involved in this whole connection. I have begun to realize that our connection, the connection between the fan and the admired, you, is very one-sided. I project my feelings onto you. As Kanye West would say, "I invented Courtney...I thought I was Courtney".

The second time I saw you was at Lee's Palace. I still managed to get a spot up front, but you were no longer an equal. You were above me, elevated. You sang down towards me and I watched you just out of reach. You now had the ability to reach out to a bigger room. I started to realize my folly: I had told people about you. I wanted everyone to know about you: I didn't want you to be a secret. I wanted you to be famous, but I also wanted you to be mine and mine alone. I wanted everyone to know you but no one to know you.

As I'm writing this, I have just returned from your show at the Danforth. As Kim Deal would say "I'm happy for you but I feel like crying". Courtney, you've made it! I used to think to myself that with your unusual, decidedly non-mainstream style, you would remain an oddity. I felt bad about it, but it was one part wish fulfillment and one part prayer, but you are no longer a secret. Everyone there knew you and loved you. They all knew all the lyrics, they all moved to the sound: you looked so happy to be seeing this. You called out to the crowd at one point during your show: you asked who was there at the Silver Dollar show. I raised my hand with a howl. There weren't many hands or howls in that room; maybe one percent. But I think I know what they were thinking; it was what I was thinking: we wanted to go back there, to that Silver Dollar room. We all wanted to fix our error. We all wanted to go back there and never tell anyone about you. We discovered you and if we could do that, we could keep you. It's disgusting, isn't it? I'm happy for you, but today, I felt like crying, because I couldn't be selfish; I couldn't hold onto you and I couldn't project my own ideal version of you, and by extension myself, onto you. I'm an awful person, but that's what fandom is: we will support you but we will secretly wish for something less.

I hope this letter finds you well and I hope that you won't hate me for this. But, really, how can you? You are not who I imagine you to be; you are just an extension of me presented through a stranger. At least that's who you are from where I'm standing, in the back, no longer able to look at you one-on-one, relegated to the crowd. Courtney, I hope this letter finds you well. I just want you to know that I am sincerely happy for you and your rising star and your success. I just wish that you could have been a secret for a little while longer.

Truly yours,

Your Biggest Fan

Sisyphean Cinema

            In the post-9/11 world, a new cinema has emerged that is characterized by voluntary repetition of actions, spaced out across a vast period of time, almost always concluding in failure. This is the new style of Sisyphean cinema which has slowly but forcefully made a place for itself in modern arthouse cinema. Sisyphus was a mythical Greek king who was punished by the gods and forced to push a large boulder up a hill for all eternity, knowing that, once it has reached the top, it would roll back down again. In his philosophical study of suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus used this myth as a metaphor for life. It is important to differentiate this philosophy from existentialist thought and, perhaps more importantly, from nihilistic thought: these two philosophies have been rampant in cinema since its beginnings. This is the understanding of this myth that has become the source of this new cinema. Of course, this is not to suggest that this phenomenon is wholly new: after all, it is named after a legend that is practically as old as time, and has shown up in many well-known fables, like the tale of the monkey's paw. Furthermore, it shares many similarities with other types of cinema, such as certain types of what-if cinema. However, its recent use in cinema has come to symbolize much more. Sisyphean cinema has surreptitiously become a big enough phenomenon to pervade not just the arthouse, but also cult cinema, with a view towards the mainstream; it has even spawned its own auteurs.

            The film that made me aware of this phenomenon and which inspired this essay is Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 2014 film Two Days One Night. The Dardenne brothers have been on the verge of this style since as far back as 1997, when their film Rosetta portrayed a young girl and her inability to succeed due to circumstances beyond her control. These side effects of poverty in a capitalist society followed their films all the way to their most recent film; Two Days One Night just happens to be the most blatant such example. This film sees Sandra, a character portrayed by Marion Cotillard, attempt to return to work after a depressive period left her incapable of committing to her job. She soon after realizes that her job has been terminated in favour of a pay raise to her former coworkers. This follows the traditional Dardenne style, placing an insurmountable obstacle in front of the protagonist which is naturally, mentally and socially out of her control. What is different here, however, is the structure of the film: Sandra is allowed another vote and she takes on the task of attempting to convince her coworkers to forgo their bonuses, so she may remain employed. This process, taking place across a weekend, has one setup repeated numerous times. Sandra has a prepared introduction and she questions each individual with that statement. Furthermore, each time she looks like she is making progress, by way of receiving a positive response from a co-worker, it is counteracted by a negative response from another co-worker. In other words, every time she reaches the top of the hill and finds herself in ecstasy, the boulder rolls down again and she is reminded of her inability to cause any changes in society. Of course, the film also takes the other characters into account. Rather than being mere obstacles for her goals, the other coworkers are themselves portrayed as individuals rolling boulders up hills; each person who refuses to take the bonus is shown to be on the brink of their own personal failure, as if capitalist society in and of itself is Hades. The Sisyphean myth, the Camusian conception of it, is further reinforced in this film by two scenes. First, in a painfully long, real-time take, Sandra decides that this unwinnable journey is pointless and decides to take her own life by emptying all of her depression medication into a cup and taking it all at once. After getting news that another co-worker was on her side, she admits to her act and is immediately hospitalized. This goes along with Camus' idea that, even though life may be harsh and meaningless, suicide is not a logical response; suffering is human and must be met head on. Similarly, the ending of the film, where Sandra turns down a job that would cause one of her supportive coworkers to lose his job, she again refuses to take the easy way out, instead opting to seek her own way in a world full of potential failure. The ending is portrayed happily, but it is a happiness of realization and acceptance of absurdity, not one of completion; Sandra does not reach her goals, but she does reach self-actualization.

            Two Days One Night is perhaps the most perfect realization of this Sisyphean myth, but it is not alone in cinema. What is perhaps rarer is the cult cinema/periphery of mainstream conception of this myth. It is important here to make some definitive statements about my understanding of cult and genre cinema within mainstream culture, in order to demonstrate the importance of this concept's slow acceptance in these spheres. Cult and genre filmmaking are, by definition, on the precipice of mainstream culture, but they also have the capability to break into the mainstream or even exist within the mainstream while cultivating a cultic audience (i.e. the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises). It should also be noted that Sisyphean cinema is, by its very nature, anti-mainstream, so a legitimately Sisyphean film, like Two Days One Night, could not exist in the mainstream. However, large Sisyphean elements are freely available in a lot of mainstream films. The difference is that in a mainstream film, the repeated failures occur on the path to a resolution, rather than being the entirety of the path. Sandra fails and fails well past the ending of her film, while someone like Dory from Finding Nemo only fails until she succeeds, resulting in the resolution. Horror films are much more likely to be Sisyphean in this way. For example, Teeth is one slaughtered rapist after another all the way to the end, where the protagonist of the film is sitting in a car with an old pervert, indicating that everything is about to happen again Similarly, the slasher film is a repeating example of Sisyphean horror: the failure of adults to protect their children, the failure of children to keep it in their pants, the failure of the killer to kill the final girl and the failure of the final girl to kill the slasher, resulting in another sequel full of failure; it is failure all the way down. The best example of a truly Sisyphean horror film appears in the recent strange genre film Nina Forever, where the repeated failure is not meant to represent an existential dilemma or the errors of society, but something much more tangible and universal. Holly learns about a young man named Rob who tried to commit suicide after his girlfriend Nina died in a car accident: immediately, the film begins with not just suicide, with all of its implications, but a failed suicide attempt. The two begin seeing each other and that is when they realize their Sisyphean struggle: every time they attempt to have sex, Nina's bloody corpse drags itself out of their bed (or other surface) to interrupt them. Once again, this film works almost solely in repetitions: Rob and Holly think their struggle is over, they attempt to have sex again, Nina shows up, they struggle, they avoid sex (in a way, a return to the slasher convention where an attempt at sex led to a different kind of death) until they attempt it again, restarting the pushing of the boulder from the other side of the hill. At the end of the film, nothing is resolved, which would in another case be lazy storytelling. In this case, this lack of resolution is like that in Teeth, a realization that this struggle will continue on and on well past the film's running time (the inclusion of mortality in this story could even suggest that death will not end this). And yet, this is a genre film; its themes and imagery may make it difficult to sell to a mainstream audience, but the other half of its runtime is occupied by horror conventions, a generic understanding of death and mortality and elements of mainstream cinema, which is to say that this is not an attempt at creating Sisyphean cinema nor is it a completely generic exercise; this is a hybrid which will lead to an advancement in this type of filmmaking.

            In the meantime, this style has also developed its own auteurs. While filmmakers like the Dardennes and, to some degree, Michael Haneke and Aki Kaurismaki have roots in this cinematic style, one filmmaker who must be mentioned in this conversation is screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman, a man who made a career out of writing Sisyphean screenplays before going into the concept headfirst for his directorial efforts. Kaufman's early cinematic work involved writing screenplays for music video directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. These films were unquestionably absurd (read: of the cinematic offspring of the theatre of absurd) without quite reaching Sisyphean levels of discourse, mainly due to the fact that they were handed to or co-written by more traditionalist filmmakers. Jonze is too much of a romantic and Gondry is much more concerned with the inner workings of the mind than with anything approaching absurdism. This is why Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., two films completely immersed in uncanny representations of reality (of the daily lives and existences of John Malkovich and Kaufman himself, respectively), both ended in much more traditional ways. In the first, all the characters gain closure and the villains are punished and in the latter, the most blatantly Kaufmanesque of these early screenplays, fate and reality are confirmed, with the elimination of the superfluous Kaufman twin and the realization of Kaufman's screenplay. In the two Gondry films, both of which were co-written by Gondry himself, Kaufman's work is clearly watered down resulting in the only average Kaufman written film, Human Nature, as well as the deeply romantic and life-affirming ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The latter film, which ends in a decidedly non-Sisyphean way, is shown as a heavily Gondry inspired work by the fact that his follow-up to the film was The Science of Sleep, a film which has similar themes but is much less competently written. At this point, Kaufman became free to take total creative control of his works when he directed his first feature, Synecdoche, New York.

            Synecdoche, New York finally allowed Kaufman to show his truly absurdist leanings by making a film all about the path towards death. This is, in fact, Kaufman at his most absurdist, including many interesting touches that would need to be studied on their own time. While this film is not characterized immediately by repeated failures, repetition is inherent in both its structure and its mise-en-scene. The film follows Caden Cotard, already named after self-destruction, as he works on his newest theatre piece. One thing that differentiates this film from others is that Cotard begins the film on success. Unlike the failures of Sandra to return to work and Rob to kill himself before him, Cotard begins by earning a MacArthur Fellowship. The only failure in his story is internal, a mixture of apathy and imposter syndrome. From this point on, his life begins to fall apart, but it is not this steady failure that makes this a Sisyphean work, but rather his product: a play which quickly becomes layered. Cotard's play is a dramatization of reality taking place in a warehouse. This warehouse becomes the reference point analogous to the top of the mountain. Each time Cotard's vision becomes complete, all of reality within a single building, the new representation of the warehouse becomes a new, smaller dramatization of reality. While no one would consider the play in this film a success, it would be assumed to be a far distance from a failure. However, it is a failure if only because it points out the inherent incompleteness (and proves that completion is impossible) in the artistic vision and, by extension, in life. In a sort of modern day version of Zeno's paradox, Cotard will never be able to complete a new layer of reality without falling into a new failure. So it is that, despite Cotard's "success", this film is entirely structured as a repeated failure. And, of course, right at the end where it looks like Cotard has finally figured it out, with the aid of an all-knowing figure, he dies. No fanfare, no pomp and circumstance, just a quick, uneventful death that would befall anyone, no matter how great.

            Kaufman followed up Synecdoche, New York almost a decade later with another film which proved him to be a strictly Sisyphean auteur, Anomalisa. Anomalisa is much smaller and more personal than its predecessor, but it is again characterized wholly by failure, failure which seems at first to be external but is soon after proven to be internal. Michael Stone lives in a world where everyone shares the same face and voice. This mundanity becomes a fact of life for him until he meets Lisa. This film, unlike its predecessors, reads as a conventional story with an unconventional problem: there is nothing here to suggest failure until the third act. Once Michael and Lisa fall in love, Lisa begins to change, taking on the form of everyone else and it is only here that we realize that the world is not this way, but rather that Michael, in all his narcissism, sees everyone else like this. While the failures are not all represented, Lisa's transformation serves as proof that Michael's inability to make connections with others is a result of his depersonification of everyone around him. It is this failure to make personal connections which once again places this work squarely within a Sisyphean context, demonstrating exactly where Kaufman's head is.

            And this is all only a small sampling of this new style of filmmaking. With the rise in independent filmmaking and new production methods, filmmakers have more freedom to experiment with non-traditional methods of storytelling and many of these filmmakers are turning to their deepest fears: that what they create will be a failure and no one will watch it. Of course, the majority of art fails. Very few people are remembered past their work's exhibition. As a result, artists become disillusioned and they need to find a place to which to turn. The result become this: stories of individuals striving for success, climbing that hill, reaching for the top, only to see their dreams roll back down the other side, continuing thusly for the rest of their existences.

On Birdman, the Death of Cinema and the Cowardice of Inarritu

Birdman is an interesting experiment, consistently bordering on brilliance, which somehow makes me loathe Inarritu even more. Five minutes into the film, after a series of letters spell out a quote, a meteor rushes the earth and Keaton meditates while floating, I was ready to walk out, convinced that Inarritu had done it again, but I stayed. That may be a strange way to start, so allow me to crank it up a bit more: People have been predicting the death of cinema since its inception; at first, it was a mechanical death: the idea that films were a novelty which would not survive the next attraction. Once it became obvious that cinema was here to stay, the metaphorical death notices began. Godard has said cinema is dead at least a dozen times over the last week, every critic predicts the end to be near whenever there's some sort of advancement and, more literally, Agnes Varda depicted M. Cinema laying on his death bed and dying on his 100th birthday. I guess this is my jumping off point, no pun intended: Inarritu is not saying anything that Varda didn't say twenty years ago, but Varda said it; Inarritu was too afraid to do so!

Birdman is, at its root, a film about the death of cinema, with Inarritu becoming an unwitting accomplice in the demise. Inarritu uses this film to say "fuck cinema, fuck cinematic theory, fuck cinematic criticism, fuck cinema!" To begin with, there is a certain cinematic specificity that is intentionally not adhered to: within medium specificity, this film places three different media above the cinema. The first is theatre: the content is theatrical, but so is the form. Cinema tends to follow a system wherein time is consistent at the deficit of space. A million shots may place themselves in every corner of a room, but, in a narrative, the million shots, when placed together, will simply constitute a million continuous seconds. In this film, with its single "continuous" take (more artificial than Hitchcock's in Rope), the space remains consistent with a ludicrously inconsistent temporal effect resulting from it. Moving from one corner of a room to another will introduce new characters, a quick tour through the labyrinths of the set leading from day to night. Space becomes submissive to time, like in the theatre, where a quick turn of the unmoving stage will create a new day.

Then, the beat poetry turns this play-film into an unusual musical of sorts, wherein the words are no longer cinematic. As the percussionist plays off to the side, the words change tone, they go up and down, high and low, fill silences: the words are no longer of importance, the cinematic words have, again, become submissive to the beat, to the poetry, to the sounds of the streets. After all, it is the streets which, supposedly, create the sound that infests the set and the play-film. The play-film is ultimately about seeing the best minds of one's generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Poetry has, in the past, been successfully transported to film: Jarman's films were frequently poetic, in particular War Requiem and Blue. The Song of Lunch managed to actually create a narrative screenplay out of a poem, but, again, the poem was twisted to fit the body of film, not the other way around. Another medium swallows up the cinema.

Finally, painting or sculpture invades this already vulnerable play-poem-film through the "beautiful" cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. One aspect of cinema that all theorists thought to be the most cinematic was the close-up, the ability to show the face better than anyone else can. This play-poem-film decides to disprove that by creating grotesque close-ups that resemble something between the paintings of Egon Schiele and the distorted sculptures of Evan Penny; one scene in particular made Emma Stone look like a simulacrum, existing without any indexicality! Inarritu betrays the cinematic form and medium, selling off all of its benefits to other media, resulting in Birdman, the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film that comes forth from his experimentation.

Already, Inarritu has created a film that has totally removed cinema (or at least diminished it) from the final product. He then spends the rest of the film dismantling the society around cinema. How does he do this? There are a variety of not-so-subtle moments where this dismantling is apparent. In one discussion, Roland Barthes is mentioned, but he is laid by the wayside in favour of "pig semen" and talks of Birdman. Riggan's mirror has a bit of paper attached to it which reads "a thing is a thing, not what is said about it", a clear indictment of criticism, in this case film criticism, perhaps also another stab of Barthes' "Death of the Author", claiming that a thing is only what it is at conception, at the insistence of the author, and nothing else: cinematic journalism, cinematic criticism, cinematic theory, all placed aside, unimportant to Inarritu and his refusal of cinematism.

Then, Riggan's identity comes into question. Riggan is an original who no longer has work, portrayed by Michael Keaton, the original cinematic Batman who no longer has work. The similarities between the concepts of a Batman and a Birdman do not need to be discussed, as they are plainly obvious. The film (the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film) takes place near Times Square, in order to allow Riggan to constantly run into the intellectual property of other filmmaking studios. The screen is frequently filled with the images of transformers, superheroes and other mass-produced, entirely sellable beings from popular blockbusters that have come since the last Batman/Birdman film was made (1992) and Keaton/Riggan's career ended. The television is showing Robert Downey Jr., whose career flourished after taking on a superhero role, following in the footsteps of Keaton, with Riggan no longer a well-hidden metaphor. With Batman the property of others and Birdman all anyone can talk about, Keaton/Riggan is stuck in this endless loop, one which, unless this Inarritu play-poem-painting-sculpture-film succeeds, he will never be able to leave.

So, why is any of this important? Because, in one final "insult" to cinema, Inarritu has personified cinema in Batman! Cinema is often personified as someone with dignity, someone who feeds and cares for us viewers, someone who would make a good parental figure. Inarritu portrays cinema as Batman, the same old crap before said crap was old! Cinema is portrayed as the first step in its own destruction. Inarritu made this film as yet another cry of "cinema is dead and you have killed it; long live the cinema". That is, of course, the first problem with anyone complaining about the death of cinema: the implication or insistence that it was someone else and not them. If cinema really is dead or dying, Inarritu and his tired antics are at least partially responsible; it's strange that one of the most exciting films about the cinematic condition came from someone so boring! There's also the fact that he decries modern cinema by making a superhero film, but that is too blatant and obvious to necessitate discussion here. In Varda's film, M. Cinema was laying in his death bed: Cinema was dying. Here, cinema is senile, cinema is demented, cinema is slowly but surely losing his mind. The world has abandoned him and he doesn't realize it. That is a bold stance: cinema as lunatic rather than cinema as diseased, afflicted by unnamed disorders. Of course, he (referring to cinema) does everything he can to stay relevant. He writes in superpowers for himself, he flies, he has visual effects, he writes in a hot lesbian scene and he even shoots everything in one long take (again, extremely artificial). None of this is enough, though: the world is changing and cinema is being replaced by new media, by cell phone cameras, by youtube, by giant electronic billboards and by its original enemies, television and theatre. Cinema cannot continue and he is dying!

So, the death of cinema: not a particularly novel concept, but always a brave concept to follow. What is wrong with the direction? Why loathe Inarritu? Because he is a coward! This film is about the death of cinema: either cinema lives or he dies. There is one answer: is cinema salvageable or is he laying dead in a gutter somewhere? Inarritu spends the entirety of the third act, in his magic realist mode, throwing Birdman off roofs, putting bullets in him, having him jump out windows and yet, he continues to live: certainly, this is a continuation of the artifice present in the whole film, but for once, I demanded an answer.

Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman threw himself off of a balcony in a state of delusion, clearly in the real world due to the interference of others, but then he flew, he flew across the city, ending up...getting out of a cab, back in reality. He shot himself in the head with a gun in the real world (well, on a stage in the real world) and ended up blowing off his nose and living with zero actual neural damage. Finally, he throws himself out of the window (it is pretty obvious at this point that cinema's disorder may be suicidal tendencies) and the result is left up in the air. This is, no questions about it, an act of cowardice. This is a film that takes place in the real world, Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman a product of his surroundings, driven mad by the inadequacies of life. If his daughter sees him fly (or whatever that ending was supposed to signify), the whole film results in the work of a man who went out of his way to deconstruct cinema, bring it to its knees and run away screaming as soon as the cinema began to bleed. The cowardice may have resulted in something brilliant: perhaps the daughter of cinema, whatever she may be, has come to lead us on a new direction, but this cowardice is still unforgivable! Birdman ends up becoming the story of a doom-predicting prophet who ran home at the first sound of a trumpet.

The Anti-Canon Manifesto

I. The Enemy

Whenever a new art form gains prominence within academia, a group of self-appointed scholars will inevitably rise up to dictate the correct way for one to enjoy the works of that formal medium. This dogma has come to be known as the canon. These canons have existed with each and every form and medium of art, giving importance to certain painters, writers and creators over others, thus setting the path for how each form will be studied for years to come. Canons have been seen as necessary, because they allow beginners and novices to gain an introduction to an art form. However, the issue arises once the viewer gains an understanding of the art form and, rather than moving in new directions, continues to follow the set path. Arguably, one of the most egregious offender of this canon abuse, along with popular music, is cinema, which has the misfortune of being both a young medium and an expensive one. As a result, the cinematic canon has been heavily diluted to a small, chosen few, which are then, without question, fed to another generation of academics, making sure the cycle continues, as new cinephiles watch and re-watch the same handful of films over and over again. This selection also comes from a position of power, resulting in a final product which is western above all else, with the added detriment of coming from a viewpoint that is white supremacist, male chauvinist and generally bourgeois. This is just the beginning of a series of issues which inherently pervade the canonic system, specifically the cinematic canon, which will demonstrate why the dependence on this system needs to be lessened and why this system needs to be removed from the academic circle.

II. The Canon Hinders Conversation

This is the root of all the problems with using the cinematic canon in academia; the canon makes sure that certain topics will never be discussed. The most obvious way that this occurs is by placing certain films out of the reach of criticism. The established academic canon of cinema has placed Citizen Kane at the top of the "list" for many years, which ultimately means that this film is not to be questioned; this film can be revered, whether blindly or through deliberation, and the questioning of it is to be discouraged and actively prevented. As a result, we return to the blind auteurism of early Cahiers du Cinema writing, the same kind of hero worship that led Francois Truffaut to decide that the worst film by Jean Renoir is inherently better than the best by Jean Delannoy. When the "best" films ever are forced on an audience before they have even had a chance to see them, there are really only two results: either the viewer eventually agrees or disagrees and is, therefore, discredited. These two results are also rather problematic in their own areas. The former leads to academic groupthink, with everyone liking or disliking a certain film merely for its placement within the canon, while the latter will frequently lead to simple contrarianism, with certain critics and academics attempting to make a bold stand by speaking out against a film, giving no good reason beyond "it's not that good". It was this empty iconoclasm that led many film critics to speak out against Citizen Kane's number one placement on the Sight & Sound poll, arguably the most respected dictator of the cinematic canon, which then caused it to fall to number two, being replaced by Vertigo, a film which had been consistently on the same poll, peaking at number two the previous time the poll was taken, making no difference in this matter whatsoever! In an attempt to claim that change is occurring, this drop-and-replace event happens frequently on a variety of cinematic aggregators, with zero difference being made to the general makeup of the cinematic canon. Of course, this lack of conversation is merely the root of the serious issues with the cinematic canon.

III. The Canon is Exclusionary

This can be seen as a continuation of the canon's ability to hinder conversation by excluding certain cinemas from general access. Looking at some of the most popular canon-based lists, including the Sight & Sound critic's poll and other, larger lists, one thing becomes clear: canonized films are an unusually homogenized bunch. A canonized film is most likely to be directed by a straight, white male from the United States, with the films often not "keeping up" with modern standards, proven by the continued appearance of films like Birth of a Nation on such lists. Furthermore, the majority of any canon ends up being composed of films from a few specific countries, namely the United States, France, Italy, Japan and Russia, with occasional contributions from other countries which could pass themselves off as productions from one of these countries, specifically American-favoured films from Great Britain and French-favoured films from Belgium and such surrounding areas. The 2012 Sight & Sound critic's poll proves this, as does the 2002 edition. 1992 was the last time that this poll included a film with no participation from these five countries, when Pather Panchali became the sole film from none of these nations to be included on this list. Similarly, on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They toplist, a list dedicated to aggregating all toplists into a definitive one, the highest-ranking film with no participation from any of these five countries is Persona, the Swedish film landing at number 24. In fact, the top 100 only contains twenty-two films which are not considered productions of the aforementioned five countries, but, even among this selection, a large number are co-productions, including several UK-USA co-productions (although British films in the top 100 tend to be overly Americanized films endorsed by Hollywood). Of these 22, only thirteen had no producing help from those five nations. Similarly, the top 100 of the list only contains one woman (Chantal Akerman, director of Jeanne Dielman at number 83), with the next women not showing up until positions 137 and 339!

There are, of course, approximately two hundred countries on earth, so how does the canon ultimately account for that? Through a system of tokenism. Most filmmaking nations are allowed a specific number of canonized filmmakers, depending on a variety of factors. For example, Poland has had three filmmakers "accepted" by the academic community (Kieslowski, Wajda and Polanski) at the loss of the likes of Zulawski, Holland and Krolikiewicz, while Iran has only had two filmmakers accepted, Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, at the loss of many others. Obviously, European nations are allowed more "spots", while countries considered more towards the third world are allowed less (Brazil is allowed Rocha, while Algeria is allowed the Italian Pontecorvo!) There are also other groups which fall into this tokenistic system, wherein women are allowed several spots (Akerman, Denis and Varda) at the loss of the likes of Shepitko and Duras. Discounting the middle east, all of Africa is essentially allowed one spot, taken by Ousmane Sembene, while South America is represented by the already mentioned Brazilian Rocha. There is one way to beat this tokenism and that is to remove oneself from one's nationality. It is rather telling that Polanski and Kieslowski did not become famous until they began working on productions based out of the base five countries, just as Kiarostami eventually ended up directing films in France and Japan. And it must not be forgotten that the ultimate sign of "making it" is still considered directing a film in the United States.

Why does all this matter? Because the canon dictates who gets to make more films and what films end up available to be viewed by the most people. This means that the most canon-friendly films will be released on readily available home viewing formats, while receiving more advertising within academic circles and publications. This will also lead to a higher demand for works by the canonized director, causing producers to seek them out, leading to more and more productions. This will of course lead to further canonization, causing this cycle to repeat itself again and again. While academia is supposed to be all-encompassing, this makes it clear that this could not be further from the truth. With the current trajectory of academia, the broken canon will never be fixed.

IV. The Canon is No Longer Necessary

One final issue with canons is that, in the modernized world, with the advancement of technology, canons have simply become defunct. To begin with, the canon is a concentrated effort to make the subjective objective, which, again, leads to contrarianism. This contrarianism then leads to splinters within the canon, leading to several vaguely interconnected canons. This is to say that there are now dozens, perhaps hundreds, of canons which still attempt to keep an artifice of singularity. Canons have split into lists based on genre, country, movement, etc., which begin with canonized films and then evolve into lesser-valued films, which is to say that these sub-canons serve as regular lists of recommendations, with a slight hint of authority. If that hint was removed, nothing would change. In fact, modern technology has proven this. For example, private torrenting websites have taken over the role of the canon with the removal of authority. On some of these websites, nameless and faceless individuals recommend films, which will then be placed in a spotlight and given awareness. These films end up with an audience through a system similar to personal, friendly recommendations. Add to that the proliferation of websites like the Internet Movie Database and it becomes clear that personal exploration may be the future of cinematic discovery. The majority of academics have access to the ultimate tool for unearthing cinematic treasures and yet, they continue to adhere to the old-fashioned canon. Is there any way to break one's dependence on the canon?

V. The Battle

There is a way and, just as with the proliferation of the canon, the destruction of the canon must be set forth by the academics. The rejection of the canon must first be implemented in the pedagogical system. Students can always seek out the canonical; academia should teach them how to find non-canonical material. Students should be taught how to discover what may not be otherwise discovered. Academia should teach about how to discover and how to discuss films by unknown filmmakers and, perhaps more importantly, contemporary filmmakers; filmmakers who have not managed to become canonized. When every filmmaker and film movement is equal, it becomes simpler for every film to be recognized, every filmmaker to be considered and every film movement to be legitimized. Only then can we break our dependence on the canon and manage to study film as objectively as possible. This is what we need to strive for. Film studies still follows a system wherein some concepts and objects are unquestionable. This is what is holding this field back. This must be remedied. Death to the canon!