The world of cinema is still new enough that we break it down by decades, much as we do television and popular music. That’s all well and good for now but eventually the cinema will be hundreds of years old and decades won’t do anymore. Not only that, I can’t imagine cinema in a hundred years will be recognizable to me now or anyone else. Go back in time and ask someone in the early one-reeler silent period, say, around 1905, what movies would be like in a little over a hundred years and no one would say, “Oh, I imagine they will invent devices known as computers that will be used to create graphics that are photo-realistic. This will enable them to create environments that cannot exist in the real world. And, of course, long before they do this, there will be sound, full natural color, multiple characters arcs and story lines, instantaneous transmission of world events viewable to anyone with a handheld device with which they can gather the information of history in an instant or communicate with anyone visually and audibly at any moment.” In other words, for all I know, the cinema of tomorrow will be something literally uploaded into your cerebral cortex and in an instant you will be inside the movie environment just as you are in your own space right now. It will be like walking around the Jurassic Park as it happens. There won’t be an audience with you and the characters won’t be aware of your existence, unless it’s an interactive movie and they’re supposed to be. What I’m saying is, The Great Train Robbery, Orphans of the Storm, The General, The Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, 8 1/2, The Godfather, The Matrix, and The Avengers will, for all intents and purposes, belong to the same rough period of filmmaking, the flat screen period. Or something like that.
I’ve argued before, in this very space, that the Sight and Sound poll, taken every twelve years, is already seriously flawed. For starters, they ask their participants to select ten films. This was mildly absurd when they began in 1952, now it’s ridiculous. Participants feel the need to protect certain titles, like Citizen Kane, at the exclusion of other more recent greats, while others would rather present a list of nothing but new titles to make a point. Don’t believe me? Just look at the individual lists and you’ll see what I mean. Most other polls, including the ones conducted by the great cinema resource Wonders in the Dark, ask participants to list from 25 to 100 movies. I remember when I took part in a Greatest to Musicals of All Time poll at the aforementioned Wonders in the Dark and was asked to submit 75 titles. At first, I thought that was too many. I quickly discovered I could have done 100 or more with ease and was having to edit out some tough choices. Still, it meant that participants wouldn’t feel the need to purposely exclude many well known musicals that they figured everyone else would rank, like Singin’ in the Rain, just so they could include some more obscure titles, which is exactly what a top ten forces you to do. With 75 I could list all the big ones that deserved to be there and the small ones too. And the final results revealed a diverse and interesting list rather than the same old, same old.
The point is, along with the seriously flawed selection system of only ten films per participant, it also forces all of film history into one poll. This severely limits inclusion on the list by one-reelers from the earliest days of cinema and, let’s face it, movies do not exist in a vacuum. They are of their time and just because The Life of an American Fireman from 1903 isn’t nearly as sophisticated in any sense or by any standard of filmmaking today does not mean it isn’t one of the most important films ever made and also one of the best. Its greatness comes from its place in film history, that is, how much it achieved within the confines of 1903 cinema. Putting it up against Sunrise, or Citizen Kane, of Vertigo, or anything from today, literally anything, is pointless. There are no comparative baselines except for that the fact that they are all, roughly speaking, of the same technological art form. Putting together lists of greats from periods makes more sense, not only to include the early periods but also the current periods. There’s a lot of great cinema being produced right now and in the last ten years that is also deserving of recognition but where do we start?
Right now we have some basic approximations of periods. There’s the early cinema, or nickelodeon period. There’s the advent of complete storytelling with movies like The Great Train Robbery that kind of blend right into an amorphous two-reeler period that doesn’t have clearly defined borders until we hit movies like Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation which catapult us into a feature length period, although feature length as we know them today did exist before those epics. Eventually, it all just becomes the silent period which ends in the late twenties at which point we come across something known as the Golden Age which almost no one can define. If you look it up you will get multiple dates. Wikipedia’s article on the studio system alone states that it is so inconclusive that some date it 1928 to 1949, others go with 1917 to 1960, while still others go with the twenties through the sixties. In other words, nobody can agree on it. Then we hit the seventies and we’re firmly into the “let’s just classify everything by decade now” period. Movies of the 80′s, 90′s, 00′s, and so on.
But in a hundred years, is this going to be sufficient? It doesn’t feel sufficient now. In fact, even TCM feels like it needs to have a TCM2 and 3, like ESPN. Perhaps TCM Silents, TCM Golden Age (which they could define as 28 t0 69), and TCM Modern, covering the classics of 1970 on. TCM in fact is already working with Criterion on a new streaming service, FilmStruck, which will curate art house films, itself a nebulous term that could include any genre from any period, but is an important step in the evolution of film curation. I think eventually we will have massive periods broken down into sub-periods which will in turn include subsets of the sub-periods. I can envision everything from the 1800′s to now being a part of one big period centered around the development of the language of film, from one-reelers to now. That would include sub-periods of silent and sound which would include subsets of decades. And, of course, all of this would also apply to genre which would be broken down into its subsets as well.
I don’t have the answers for any of this, I’m just asking the questions. While many of us call ourselves film historians, the fact is film history doesn’t have any real functional sense of timelines any more complicated than what you would get from an encyclopedia entry on the history of the movies. There is not a great deal of deep research or scholarship in the field and the overwhelming majority of film writing has been based around individual critiques and reviews. That’s fine but it’s a starting point more than anything else. This art form isn’t going away anytime soon. Oh, it won’t exist in the state it’s in now for too much longer, technology will see to that. But however advanced and holographic and neurologically uploadable it becomes, people are always going to want stories they can experience as a first hand spectator. And it’s up to us, now, in this time period, to start preserving the stories and curating them in a way that protects the earliest achievements in cinema, and keeps their fire lit, while celebrating the most recent advances as well. We owe it to the movies. We owe it to ourselves.