In The Snob and the Philistine I make a distinction between highbrow, lowbrow, unibrow and nobrow, the only art which comes from and speaks to conscious human beings. Nobrow is now all but impossible in the postmodern era, but film, the one medium in which the wank and cheese can still dissolve without forming a pomo cronenburg, still occasionally throws up a masterpiece that unites heaven and earth. 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 focus on art that fuses ambrosia with bubblegum, ermine with nylon, eternity with the next ninety minutes.
As such, this necessarily exposes the following 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 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.