CLUB HAVANA'S SECRET HISTORY OF CINEMA
by
Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah
Information about what used to be called "the cinema" increases exponentially. All around us, in every conceivable medium, from glossy, scented magazines to slow-loading CD-ROMs, mountains of trivia and rolling hills of lists overwhelm our ability to think clearly about movies.
Trade paperbacks and Web sites that purport to identify the 517 best or 50 worst movies of all time, the most erotic films, the best movies shot in New York, the greatest movies about baseball or boxing, movies that contain the best scenes of mud-bathing or people finding flies in their cocktails. . . there's no end in sight.
People like movies, but they really really like making lists of movies. We at Club Havana like making lists too. We like making lists so much we decided to make what, on the basis of comprehensive study, we hope and fully expect will be the list to end all lists: the ten best movies of every year since 1928.
Why is one movie better than another, and what constitutes "better," anyway? It's these questions that the ever-increasing number of lists never answer, or even ask, as they present more and more facts and figures about fewer and fewer films, compiling an official history that threatens to obscure the real glories of moviemaking.
Most choices of "best movies" reflect, above all, the merchandising campaigns of large entertainment corporations; secondarily, the listers' conscious agendas and often-unconscious cultural prejudices. These latter, in turn, reflect one or more of the currently dominant ways of watching and discussing movies. There's the mass audience, a mythical giant beast with a ravenous appetite for aliens, out-of-control buses, and Tom Cruise, and terrified of any movie with subtitles or made before the early 80s, when it was born. There's the more "clued-in" audience that favors $15 million "independent" films, and there's the cappuccino crowd that supports the occasional U.S. theatrical release from a foreign country.
There's academia, determined to fit everything ever exposed on celluloid into its predictable conceptions of "popular culture" or esoteric psychoanalytical frameworks. Then there are fringe groups like nostalgia buffs; fetishists of particular stars, genres, or periods; and connoisseurs of horror and exploitation films from Italy and Hong Kong.
Thus, corporate histories of Hollywood that emphasize commercial success, nostalgic reminiscences of movies seen in childhood, dreary academic theorizing, and smirking dismissals of both "art" and "trash" have come to dominate writing about film—an area where real investigation was once not only possible, but encouraged.
Meanwhile, entire continents of cinema drift out of inaccessible. Works of great interest by minor directors elicit no interest at all. Recognized classics manage to retain their audience only by being transformed into junk sold at shopping-mall studio stores.
We seek to turn the tables on these trends. We'll go deep into film history and examine as much of world cinema as we can. Nothing cinematic is alien to us. (Except feature-length cartoons. We refuse to discuss, or indeed to watch, any cartoon more than 10 minutes long.)
Our credo is that it doesn't matter if a film is black-and-white or color, in English or Hungarian, whether it was made in Hollywood or in somebody's basement, whether it's Hiroshima mon amour or Kiss Me, Monster. We demand that a film engage with the medium. That it entertain without insulting our intelligence. And for a film to end up on our ten-best list, it must be the work of a creative artist—the director. It must be motivated and informed by a personal way of seeing and thinking; it must be true to itself, even though it may be marred in some cases because of conditions not under the filmmaker's control. The singular visions of the films we like will overshadow the stuffed-and-mounted "classics" of a movie culture that refuses to admit there's a world out there waiting to be discovered.
Even though our results have been double-checked by the ancients, we're sure there are great films out there of which we're totally ignorant. We live in the US, after all, a country where video stores put El Mariachi in the foreign-film section and alphabetize it under "E." If you know of a masterpiece from Argentina or Turkey (for example) that may have escaped us, please write and tell us about it.
