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210 International Harvest National Film Histories on Video To celebrate the ‘‘100th anniversary of cinema,’’ the British Film Institute has commissioned a series of documentaries about national cinemas. Some of them are still being made, but the nine I want to discuss here, all of which have been completed over the past three years, are a highly uneven batch. For starters, the series is based on the debatable premise that the best way to recount the history of movies is by starting with national cinemas, an approach that fosters insularity, mishandles many major figures who are transnational or multinational (including Akerman, Antonioni, Chaplin, Davies, Dreyer, Godard, Hitchcock, Lang, Murnau, Ruiz, Snow, Stroheim, and Welles), and often honors sociology over aesthetics and the typical over the exceptional. Of course, most film professors love this approach, because—to paraphrase critic Bill Krohn writing in another context—it allows one institution (academia) to pay homage to another (national bureaucracy) over the body of an artist. So it’s no surprise that an academic and BFI bureaucrat, Colin McCabe, is the principal architect of this package. Significantly, the late Henri Langlois—the Turkish-born founder of the French Cinémathèque who was arguably the key guru of the French New Wave—spent his life railing against state bureaucracies, and his passion fomented a cinephilia that trampled national boundaries with giddy abandon in the 60s and 70s, much as another brand of cinephilia had in the 20s and 30s. But in more conservative eras such as the present, foreign filmmakers have to be exhibited like zoo animals in their native habitats to be delivered to an international audience. This is part of the bias that underlies the BFI’s present agenda, which also often hands over the responsibilities of film history to filmmakers rather than to scholars who’ve had more opportunities to educate themselves on the subject. The casualties of this approach include the BFI production that tries to cope with its own national turf, Typically British (1994). Over the opening titles cowriter and codirector Stephen Frears proclaims, ‘‘The great French film director François Truffaut once famously said that there was a certain incompatibility between the terms ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain.’ [Pause.] Well [pause] bollocks to Truffaut .’’ To Frears’s credit, he wears his upper-class background on his sleeve in the autobiography that follows, and the sheer disdain conveyed in his pauses ex- OTHER CANONS, OTHER CANONIZERS 211 presses almost as much as his words do. But most of what follows constitutes a weary confirmation of Truffaut’s bias; Frears is so plainly bored by his subject that he can conclude 50-odd minutes later, ‘‘The only truth I have learned is that people when they go to the movies like to see American films.’’ He can’t even imagine why they shouldn’t—or why this bias may say more about the power of Yankee advertising dollars than about Hollywood aesthetics. Given such a crass sociological survey of English movies, where the bottom line generally seems like the only game in town, it’s hardly surprising to see Frears reject the whole silent era as inconsequential. He patronizes Michael Powell and Humphrey Jennings (accorded one measly clip each); fails to mention Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, or Richard Lester (presumably regarding all three as American interlopers); reduces Ken Russell and Mike Leigh to the worst single clips imaginable (and has nothing to say about the TV work of either); limits John Boorman, Bill Douglas, Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway, Isaac Julien, and Sally Potter to one fleeting movie poster apiece; and, apart from a disparaging nod to Night Mail, omits virtually the entire English documentary movement, along with the cycle of Hammer horror movies—meanwhile paying abject obeisance to the Academy Awards and every crumb they’ve offered British cinema (special points to Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, and Four Weddings and a Funeral). It’s frustrating to imagine what a real critic of English cinema like Raymond Durgnat might have done with what Frears chooses to discuss, not to mention what he leaves out. It may be unfair to saddle Frears with all the inadequacies of this breezy tour, for all its personal elements, because a cowriter (critic Charles Barr) and codirector (Mike Dibb) are also credited; apparently Frears was too busy directing Mary Reilly at the time to do much more than chew the fat with a few colleagues (Gavin Lambert, Alexander Mackendrick, Michael Apted, Alan Parker) and add...

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