Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and the Cinematic Canon
Every ten years since 1962, the British Film Institute, an august body of film scholars and critics, has conducted a survey of its members to gauge what they consider to be the best film ever made, ranking that film with 49 also-rans.
In 1962, the greatest film was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, then only 21 years old. In 1972, it was Citizen Kane. In 1982, 1992, and 2002, it was—yes, Citizen Kane. But in 2012? In an upset that roused indignation in some quarters and it’s-about-time sentiments in others, it was Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, a comparative newcomer, released only in 1958.
Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941). Credit: Courtesy of RKO Radio Pictures, a division of RKO General; photograph from the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York
Citizen Kane, starring Welles himself, is famously a film-à-clef charting the life of newspaper mogul and influence-peddler William Randolph Hearst, who tried very hard to have the film killed in the cradle. Vertigo owes its origins not to history but to a French police procedural domesticated by the all-American, ever-likable actor James Stewart, with the requisite élan provided by the stunning Kim Novak. Both films are exemplary, their plots tight enough to twang when plucked at, their cinematography the stuff of a hundred dissertations, their acting the best the players can offer—and the direction, of course, superb, so much so that Welles and Hitchcock both remain household names.
James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Credit: KPA/Heritage-Images/Imagestate
But is the one film really better than the other? And how can we judge?
Those are questions that separate reviewing from criticism (on which see, most recently, Dwight Garner’s nicely rounded essay from the New York Times), and that raise philosophical issues as well as somewhat more practical ones: What, as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so searchingly asks, is quality? What makes one person’s opinion better than another’s? What sort of training does a critic require in order to have an opinion that carries more weight than an ordinary consumer’s?
For all the pretenses to science that the humanities might care to offer, the answers turn on the eye of the beholder. And yes, one eye can be better than another: no offense meant to anyone, but the film piece in your weekly shopper is not likely to have quite the same heft as a consideration by, say, Andrew Sarris or Judith Crist, both of whom recently departed the theater. A reviewer’s task is often to ask merely whether a film is worth two hours of a viewer’s time and ten or twelve dollars of his or her money, while a critic has weightier matters to attend to: How does an individual film fit into the film tradition generally? Is it respectful of that tradition, or subversive? Is it intended as a work of art, or is it a mere product? Is it noxious?
Nowhere in the usual list of considerations does an important question figure—namely: Is the film in question fun? Or, put more philosophically: Does this help lighten the burden of existence? Does it explain the world in ways that nothing else quite gets to? Does it make a difference?
For what it’s worth, 846 film critics cast their votes in the BFI survey, and Vertigo won by a majority of just 34. In 2002, the spread was narrower still: Citizen Kane carried the day by only five ballots.
My vote was not among those 846, else, in light of all the questions above, I might have agitated for a few substitutions on the BFI list: Does David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive really deserve a place, while Joel and Ethan Coen’s immortal The Big Lebowksi remains in the shadows? Where is Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, one of the best literary adaptations ever committed to film? Why does Andrei Tarkovsky merit two spots on the list, while one of the greatest films about 20th century Russia—I mean David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago—goes ignored? Sure, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris is brilliant, but then so is another seaside fable of the same era, William Asher’s delightful Beach Blanket Bingo.
It is also worth noting that most of the top ten films, though inarguably masterful, are rarely seen outside the context of festivals and classrooms: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939). Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story (1953) turns up from time to time on Turner Classic Movies in the United States, while only Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) are given many airings in places where nonspecialist audiences can get at them.
Quibbling about the canon: that, too, is in the nature of criticism. It yields an inescapable conclusion: we may live on the same planet, but we all inhabit different worlds, where tastes may or may not coincide. I revere both Citizen Kane and Vertigo, and while I’m not at all convinced that it’s possible to declare one as being definitively better than the other, I can certainly appreciate both the aesthetic pleasures and brain-stretching attendant in taking sides in the argument. The important thing about a canon is not necessarily that everyone like the same thing, the endorsement that lies at the heart of the BFI’s listmaking. What matters instead is that everyone has seen or read the same thing, which gives us the basis for a conversation that, in a fragmentary and fragmented world, we might not otherwise have the chance to hold.
In that light, then, the thing to do is to see everything on the BFI’s list, and then give The Big Lebowski and Beach Blanket Bingo an airing, too. Once done, we can ask ourselves how our favorite movies measure up to them—and why, and why not.
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