Survey position: The reflective approach

• From Sight and Sound, October 2023

In my last column, I suggested that 2022 marks the first “post-historical” version of the Sight & Sound survey of the greatest films of all time, at a time when the massive accumulation of films and historical developments exposes the survey’s “inadequacy to do its job.” As a historical novel.” I soon began to reconsider this claim, as the same dilemma can be found in film history lessons. How does one correctly count 128 years of cinema?

I teach courses on the future of cinema. The curriculum focuses on contemporary moving images that reflect the prevailing forces shaping cinema: digitalization and the attention industry, economic and environmental crises, and unprecedented expressions of individual and collective identities in an era of emancipatory politics. Thinking about the history of films that the top ten of 2022 can tell us, I also wonder how the list might represent a cinematic present.

Just in time for the fall semester, here’s a ten-week meditation curriculum based on my top ten for 2022. I’ve been tempted to fall into old habits and organize it chronologically. But then I wondered what it would mean to start a course in cinema history with Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and to have an extended radical feminist film as the starting point for a long-term exploration of cinema.

Week 1: Jeanne Dielman. Situate the film within current moving image practices, focusing on the question of duration. What does it mean to spend three hours with this movie, versus three hours elsewhere (Marvel blockbuster, Netflix, games, YouTube, TikTok)? What subject matter and whose lives do we expect to encounter on screen, and on what basis?

Week Two: Vertigo (1958). He used the film to present the classic Hollywood cinematic language: continuous montage, shot/reverse shot, composition. Recognize audio-visual patterns as markers of an author’s vision and signature. He introduces Hitchcock as a trademark auteur of the mid-century, and contrasts the way auteurs are labeled today. With the help of film theorist Laura Mulvey, consider how Hitchcock’s adaptation can be used as a defense of the male gaze.

Week 3: Citizen Kane (1941). Emphasizing the importance of narrative and multiple points of view: Is the film a proto-multiverse? Consider the Hollywood studio system, its rules and laws, and Orson Welles’s appropriation of it for his maverick purposes. Learn about the craft of cinematography, screenwriting, editing and music. Consider the tension between individual vision and collective vision. Where and to whom is art attributed?

Week 4: Tokyo Story (1953). Ask the question of how film is read cross-culturally, and what is understood as “non-Western cinema”. Ozu Yasujirō is celebrated for creating an authentic Japanese cinematic language, but the film is a remake of a Hollywood blockbuster. The film reflects Japan’s post-war adoption of Western capitalism, with work seen as a disruptive force in the family unit. Ozu’s use of time and space becomes a force for reflection and resistance.

Week 5: In the Mood for Love (2001). World cinema in the era of late capitalism. Contrast Ozu’s depiction of family life in mid-century Asia with Wong’s nostalgic romanticism. How does the latter reflect twenty-first century developments regarding hyper-individualism in Asia and elsewhere? Think about the role of influence: when and how does it become an essential element rather than a secondary element in the film?

Week Six: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Science fiction before blockbusters, and special effects before them CGI. How does the film establish cinematic realism within the speculative scenario? How has digital technology led to new understandings of reality? Present Hull 9000 as an iconic depiction of artificial intelligence, and how it compares to contemporary concepts of artificial intelligence Amnesty International.

Week 7: Bo Travel (1998). Alienation as a cinematic strategy to reconsider foreign cinema, national cinema (what is a “French” film?), masculinity and queerness, the war film and the musical film. Cinema’s relationship to problematic or vanishing institutions and ideologies, and the prospects for decolonization and undoing of reimagining the future of cinema.

The eighth week. Dr. Mulholland (2001). He assumed that film was the intersection between Hollywood and art cinema. Consider its origins as television The series’ pilot and remaining television elements. Explore the film’s vision of cinema as a dream state and the significance of dream-like dissonance. Discuss Hollywood as an institution built on imagination.

Week 9: Man Carrying a Movie Camera (1929). The film was considered a documentary that challenges the definition of the genre. Presenting the legacy of Soviet montage theory as the cinematic construction of social utopia. How does the film’s celebratory, turbulent, all-encompassing outlook compare with today’s totalitarian spectacle of truths mediated by social media?

The tenth week. Singing in the Rain (1952). He focused on film as meta-cinema. How does her account of the film industry’s transition with the dawn of talking pictures reflect the state of the industry in the 1950s? How can we project the film’s gaze into the present, as Hollywood faces the turmoil of our time? Amnesty International? Also consider the excessive water use in the title scene: an outdated and unsustainable practice, or a victory in the face of climate catastrophe?

Of course, there are bound to be localized blind spots, and these films can be applied in different ways. But given this speculative approach, perhaps the true test of any film at all is that its value extends beyond its place in film history, and that it is able to reassert itself amid current challenges and circumstances. In doing so, it provides a way to see the world and cinema anew.