"20 classic films that every child should see" - UK educational charity campaign

From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

  A UK charity that organises after-school film screenings for children
has compiled a list of the twenty, by value judgment implication "best",
films for this purpose. The press release has been picked up by most of
the mainstream media here and regurgitated uncritically. This story -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078782/The-20-classic-films-child-watch-understand-history-cinema.html
- is typical of the coverage.

While any initiative intended to give
children and young adults the opportunity to develop into critical
viewers is to be welcomed, I can't help but wonder if this is yet
another, largely unhelpful entrenching of the canonisation tendency. If
so, the justification for it demonstrates staggering ignorance on the
part of the charity's chief exec. She claims that: "...the majority of
these [the BFI's top 100 films list] are films which young people today
might never hear about, let alone have the chance to see." Really? Clips
from almost all of them are available for free online, most can be
purchased on DVD for £5 or less and many are broadcast repeatedly on the
4-5 terrestrial digital channels that programme mainly or exclusively
archive material. When I was a teenager in the late 80s/early 90s, the
only way to see most of them was either to wait until the one TV channel
that regularly showed foreign language and older titles to broadcast it,
go to a repertory theatre to see it (virtually impossible if you didn't
live in London), or, if it was one of the very few titles available on
retail VHS, buy it at £30-40 in today's prices (adjusted for
inflation).

The other thing that strikes me is that her list reveals an
approach to canonisation that emerged with the intellectual film culture
of the 1920s (The Film Society, Close-Up, the Documentary Movement,
Roger Manvell, the "quality" imperative in 1940s film criticism etc.)
and has persistsed, largely unchallenged to the present day. That list
consists overwhelmingly of British and European titles, many of which
(e.g. the Ealing titles) were indeed canonised and their reputations
established by that intellectual film culture. A couple of years ago I
was asked to review a truly dreadful book, uninsipringly entitled "Fifty
Key British Films", which reproduced, uncritically, just about every
assumption, ideological prejudice and critical cliche (e.g.
Hollywood=bad, Europe=good, studio aesthetic=bad, gritty realism=good,
etc. etc.) that has informed the critical establishment here since the
inter-war period. There was a big overlap between this list of "key"
(you know when someone uses that word as an adjective that you're
dealing with the intellectually challenged!) films, the BFI's list, and
the one that is now being flogged to Britain's schoolkids.

Am I
overreacting, and is there maybe a stronger case for this kind of
curatorial initiative in film education? I have to confess to an
instinctive loathing of canonisation, probably because I very much enjoy
looking at films that either no-one else has heard of, or which the
consensus of critical opinion has written off, and then making a case
for their significance. I also find it very rewarding to introduce such
films to students: because they can't simply go to the library (or,
let's face it, Wikipedia) and find a load of people in print telling
them how wonderful it is, they've got to do the thinking needed to form
a viewpoint themselves.

My overwhelming fear in this canonisation
tendency is that instead of actually engendering critical and thoughtful
viewing, what this initiative will actually do is to encourage these
schoolchildren to read their films as one would read the Koran in a
madrassah. In other words, we are told that these must be "good" films,
and so we will accept being told how to think. Take the two Ealing
examples on the list. "Kind Hearts and Coronets" is often celebrated as
an example of British filmmaking at its timeless best (Google if you
don't believe me). Whenever I have expressed the view that the film
consists of a verbally witty but prejudiced and ideologically
problematic script (it's a thinly veiled and empirically misleading,
metaphor-based attack on the 1945-51 government's meritocracy agenda),
wooden, caricature-ridden acting, a barely competent, booze-addled
director who seemed to be unaware that it was possible to move a camera
during a shot and that it might be an idea to tell the actors to look at
each other as they're delivering lines to each other, and average though
unremarkable production values, I have elicited horrified reactions
along the lines as if I'd just suggested hiring Gary Glitter as the
headmaster of a primary school. In other words, canonisation closes down
debate and indepedent thinking, and my fear is that initiatives such as
this one will only serve to entrench an atrophied and prejudiced
approach to cinema history among those who will form a future generation
of media historians.

Thoughts?

Leo

-- 
Leo Enticknap
Institute of
Communications Studies
2.35, Clothworkers' Building North
University of
Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
My personal website [1]
My page on the
University of Leeds's website [2]
My page on academia.edu [3]


Links:
------
[1] http://www.enticknap.net
[2]
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/leo
[3]
http://leeds.academia.edu/enticknap