Against lists

The essay was first published in English under the title “ Against Lists ” in Another Gaze on November 29, 2019.

The author is Elena Gorfinkel, a London-based film scholar and writer specializing in independent, marginalized and women's cinema; Associate Professor of Film Studies at King's College London.

Feminist film criticism journal Another Gaze was founded in January 2016 with the goal of developing nuanced criticism focused on women and queer filmmakers, subjects, and audiences.

Translation by Dmitry Frolov.

Movie lists won't save you.

Movie lists won't save movies.

Movie lists won't change the way movies gain and lose value.

The lists will not preserve all those thousands and thousands of films decaying in alleys, basements and closets: films lost, unseen and unpreserved.

Lists of films will not write new histories of cinema.

Lists are not neutral, not innocent, not purely subjective.

Lists don't nurture your blessed taste, they only dilute it.

Lists are a living space for exhausted, exhausted, click-hungry attention.

The lists bring together what is already known and consolidate power.

Lists are counted, counted, and continually weighed and measured against "genius" and "greatness" as if they were empirical entities.

Lists translate numerical phenomena into the imaginary empiricism of a stunning public.

But who receives these applause on a long-term scale*?

The lists will not create new canons—especially ones that include forgotten women, queer, trans, black, Latinx, decolonial and anti-colonial filmmakers or directors from the global South**.

Who would ask Barbara Hammer, Kathleen Collins, Kira Muratova and Sarah Gomez to make their lists?

The lists purport to make statements about the present and the past, but they are ahistorical, obsessed only with their own moment, the narrow horizon and the tyranny of modernity. They strengthen and reaffirm the ossified tastes of those already heard.

Lists colonize the mind and drain the imagination.

Lists will always disappoint, even though they promise an inexhaustible world, an endless completeness.

Lists target the voiceless with a measure of popularity, as if it were a universal value.

Lists assert ownership, dominance, possession.

Lists are the politics of anti-cinema.

Lists are a metric.

Metrics are our enemy, the enemy of art and political struggle. Every list is inevitably impossible and must remain unwritten, an unspoken count. The unwritten list stalls before the inevitable abyss of unknowability into which all films will sink unless we can protect and better describe them, creating space for them to function as living and moving forms.

Burn the list to break free.

The urge to make lists is closely related to collecting, the desire to record, archive, remember, preserve the experience and aesthetic sense of films that are later not remembered. In themselves, these are serious, important and historically enshrined activities. But in today's hyper-mediated moment, the self-contained forced form of the list—like the list of necessary goods or the grocery receipt of your viewing experience—has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, algorithmic capture, phallic naked narcissism. Take a closer look. Who exactly is producing this flurry of lists?

How many lists must we read to know that their creators have captured the deeper essence of these works in a comprehensible web? By tirelessly writing, reading and consuming this dirty ocean of lists, we enter into the rotting commercialism of the cinephile soul. There may be more harmful practices that harm film culture, but even so, the lists are as banal and symptomatic as anything in this corrupt melting world.

Set your list on fire. If you must count, write the same number of words about any movie not on your list.

Read as many words about women directors or directors from the Global South.

Or translate these words and signs into units of time by watching a movie that will never make it onto your list.

List potlatch: redistribution of resources redirected from collective list-making energy.

The claim to aesthetic superiority begins with a list. I wish there were other ways to create value systems, or to abolish superficial value criteria altogether, and with them the capricious and seedy arbitration of what can be considered film art - art worth watching and fighting for. The list comes together as something self-evident, asserting itself in everything that was not included in it, in everything that its compiler could not assimilate, see, know.

Lists are for laundry, not movies.

If we wash our ears, eyes and brains and wait for the suds to subside, we will find that what clings to us are shoots of another movie world; other images, spaces, voices, places, texts, struggles and time: time reclaimed after its theft by the narcissistic union of cinephilia and capital.

Notes

* The concept of “long duration” (French longue durée) was developed by the French historian Fernand Braudel under the influence of structuralism and described long-term and slow-moving historical processes, contrasted with rapidly changing events.

** The concept of the "Global South" is used as a modern alternative to the concept of the "Third World" to describe the collection of low- and middle-income countries located in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.