Canon Fodder
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Canon Fodder" is an article by Paul Schrader Film Comment (September/October 2006) in which he chooses twenty movies that he regards as canonical (with forty runner-ups). (The contrast of Rosenbaum's thousand and Schrader's twenty shows that even the number of films in a film canon is entirely arbitrary.) “As the sun finally sets on the century of cinema”, the article’s subtitle asks, “by what criteria do we determine its masterworks?” Schrader proposes seven criteria for formulating a film canon: beauty, strangeness (an “unpredictable burst of originality”), unity of form and subject matter, tradition (“The greatness of a film or filmmaker must be judged not only on its own terms but by its place in the evolution of film”), repeatability, viewer engagement (a great film “frees the viewer from” the passivity of the typical film-watching experience “and engages him or her in a creative process of viewing”), and morality (“no work that fails to strike moral chords can be canonical”). He rejects the idea of auteur canon, stating that “The film canon . . . consists of films, not people”, arguing that the moving picture medium is too collaborative to focus merely on the director. Schrader's personal canon excludes documentaries and non-narrative films, and he also eschews multiple films by the same director.
Schrader's top twenty films
Schrader's top twenty films are: 1. The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir); 2. Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu); 3. City Lights (1931, Charles Chaplin); 4. Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson); 5. Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang); 6. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles); 7. Orphée (1950, Jean Cocteau); 8. Masculin, féminin (1966, Jean-Luc Godard); 9. Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman); 10. Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock); 11. Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau); 12. The Searchers (1956, John Ford); 13. The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges); 14. The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci); 15. 8½ (1963, Federico Fellini); 16. The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola); 17. In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai); 18. The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed); 19. Performance (1970, Donald Cammell/Nicholas Roeg); 20. La Notte (1961, Michelangelo Antonioni).
