In my last post I made a distinction between highbrow, lowbrow, unibrow and nobrow. I made the point that nobrow, the only art which comes from and speaks to conscious human beings, is now impossible in the postmodern condition, but that’s not strictly true. Although film has its limitations, it is the one medium in which the wank and cheese can still dissolve without forming a pomo cronenburg. Thus, where the emphasis in my guide to books was on ‘outsider literature’, and the emphasis in my guide to albums was on ‘panjectivity’, here, in this scitter-scatter guide to film, I’ll be focusing on art that fuses ambrosia with bubblegum, ermine with nylon, eternity with the next half-hour.
As such, and as I made clear in The Snob and the Philistine, this necessarily exposes my list to the charge of pretension, by the shallow, and vulgarity by the narrow. I do brush against either pole here, and of course my selection is coloured by subjectivity—I have a weakness for black comedy and a nostalgic attachment to films which inspired me as a young man—but quality transcends form, which is why I touch here on every genre. I find it a little depressing when people ask of a book or a film ‘what is it about?’ hoping to confirm that it will conform to their subjectivity. This is why I appeal to readers who react against kitchen-sink drama, or romantic comedy, or sci-fi, or European arthouse, or whatever they ‘don’t like’, to reach beyond themselves to attend to any work here which touches them off.
The selection, which includes teevee shows and documentaries, is mostly ordered by the name of the screenwriter. I define a ‘director’ as ‘someone employed to get in the way of actors and take the credit of writers’. Just about all the directors worth their salt either write their own scripts, have written great scripts or give an enormous amount of credit to the writer (e.g. Gilliam and Loach). Of course cinematography and choice of music is important — one reason Kubrick the Cold and Bergman the Bore are both here — but these things are a distant second to the story and, more particularly, to the artistic truth of the great actor.