Just One More Thing - The Limits of Cinema

As the year is winding down, I'm sorting out a few final blog posts of the year.  There'll be a look at some good films of this year, my top ten, and a look ahead to stuff I'm looking forward to in the new year. I might also do a favourite films of the decade list, but I might leave that a little while, as I have some catching up to do for a few major titles.  I'm also planning out what I'm seeing in the new year, what previews and such I can get to as "Canary Duty" material; for example, I'm currently on to see a preview of next series of Inside No. 9 in early January, that should be done by the second weekend of 2020. 

Another long term project I'm doing is a list of my 1000 favourite films.  Yes, really!  A few years ago, Edgar Wright did his own list, and a fine selection it is too.  So, given the number of things I go through on a yearly basis (I have multiple spreadsheets to help with my cinema and DVD viewing!), I decided to try it for myself.  It's been fun going back over several old titles, rekindling my love for some things I hadn't seen in years, and checking out a few things I'd been meaning to for a while.  My ETA for the full list is about this time next year hopefully, though I will need some time to work out the best way to present the whole thing.  But whilst I've been going through these, an interesting little question has arisen quite a few times in relation to my choices; what exactly counts as a "film"?  Should I limit this to feature films, or can I have shorts on here too?  What about TV movies, or straight-to-video features?  The Looney Tunes, Disney, and other classic cinema cartoons, can I have them?

Well, in actual fact, my definition for what counts as a "film" for this list I decided from the word go to play it fairly loose, to give myself a nice big range of things to work with.  However, recently this debate has been reignited by one of the big names in the world of film.  Cahiers du Cinema is one of the world's most illustrious and important film magazines; to get an idea of how influential, it's the publication where cinematic "auteur" theory was coined.  Just this month, they published their top films of the decade list, and a rather controversial choice was made for number one... Twin Peaks: The Return!  Yes, the TV series.  Now this got quite a few "huhs?" when it made the top ten of the year from both CdC and Sight and Sound magazines in 2017.  David Lynch himself has said that the series was basically made as an eighteen hour movie split into episodes.  Having binge watched it myself, I can say that's a fair description of it, although it certainly has some stand-alone episodes, number eight in particular... dear Gods what happens in episode eight!  It's a far from conventional series, much as the original run was, so it managing to completely jump media in it's critical response does feel like an exceptionally Lynchian thing to happen.

Now of course we recently had the whole debate sparked by Martin Scorsese about whether the Marvel Films, or any of the big blockbusters were "real cinema".  I think with this move, Cahiers du Cinema has effectively shut down that debate forever; if a TV mini-series can now count as a work of cinema, it's safe to say almost all moving picture productions do, the floodgates are open!  So whilst I was fairly comfortable in being extra broad with my definitions of "films", I feel extra encouraged now to just go nuts with it.  Big screen or small screen, high-brow or low-brow, I can have it all!  I'm not going too far, so I'm not having separate TV episodes for example (especially since that can be a great list for another occasion), but right now I feel very good about the project.  If one of the best thinky-person film magazines can say that a mini-series featuring a magic-super-strength-garden-glove and David Bowie reincarnated as a boiler can count, I can have the old 40s Superman cartoons! So all going well, should have my ridiculous watch-list ready for you all about this time next year.

Before I go, back to Cahiers du Cinema's top tens for a moment; it's worth going back through their previous years' lists, as there are some fascinating entries in there, potentially showing off the different tastes in Europe.  For example, from 1994's films, Pulp Fiction is now where to be found, but John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness did!  It's not the only 90s horror flop to make it; John Landis' Innocent Blood made the 1993 list!  Mission to Mars is on 2000's list, they really do seem to like Brian De Palma.  The Steven Spielberg War of the Worlds is in the films of that Decade!  Man, with lists this eclectic, I feel really good about my choices now.