Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon," argues that what makes a work canonical is the quality of "strangeness." By this, he means a work that is unassimilable by previous categories of interpretation, i.e. a work that exceeds and overflows any of the conceptual boxes that one might try to put it in.
I recently finished teaching a class on film history. I tried to show my students films that I thought were important in the history of cinema, films that I thought would best illustrate certain ideas I was trying to get across, and films that I thought they might actually like. All of the films I showed were films that I, personally, love. They were:
The Gold Rush, Freaks, Cat People, The Bicycle Thief, Tokyo Story, The 400 Blows, Breathless, The Passion of Anna, Family Life, Badlands, L'Argent, Stranger Than Paradise, Kids, Gummo, and Elephant.
I hadn't seen many of the films in a long time, and some I had only seen once before. Some I loved more than ever, and others I loved less. But the ones that struck me as the most unassimilably strange were:
The Gold Rush, The Bicycle Thief, Tokyo Story, Breathless, L'Argent, and Family Life.
Two of these films, "The Gold Rush" and "The Bicycle Thief," were widely popular when they came out, and have become so familiar as to seem "not strange" anymore. But I would argue that they are both utterly unassimilable, and that something about them exceeds or overflows any of the categories or conceptual boxes we might try to put them in. I have the same reaction to "Tokyo Story," "Breathless, "L'Argent," and "Family Life."
I can imagine having a different set of reactions to the above films in the future, but for now, these are the films that struck me as the most unassimilably strange and therefore as the most promising contenders for inclusion in the cinematic canon that is to come.
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:44 PM
