The history of Film Movements (cinemawaves)

 A formidable new blog, Cinemawaves, is offering to cover the history of film movements in cinema history : 

A film movement signifies a wave of cinematic works, usually following a particular trend in cinema, shaped by and reflecting the time, people, culture, and political events of the location from which it emerged. These cinematic works frequently draw inspiration from cultural roots influenced by events of national tragedy, popular culture or social issues. Often, these film movements are instigated by filmmakers or film critics who develop concepts through discussions on how to craft films and then translate those ideas into cinematic practice.

Check out also at Screenville:

• Nuances in "Art Cinema" History
• Historical map of the aesthetics, schools, trends and genres
• Parallel Histories of World Cinema Developments

Aesthetic Matrix : Documentary

Related :

• Academic Film Styles Matrix / Cinema Aesthetic Matrix (Paintings edition) / Animation 
• Cinema Styles Range Evolution (Aesthetic Matrix)
• S&S2012 Canon : Academic Matrix / FC2012 : Academic Matrix follow up

S&S2012 Canon : Academic Matrix

Related :

• Years and Countries favoured by S&S2012 Poll / S&S 2012 Canon (2) : Numbers
• Cinema Aesthetic Matrix (Paintings edition) / Academic Film Styles Matrix

Cinema Aesthetic Matrix (Paintings edition)

Cinema Aesthetics Matrix (Painting analogy guide edition)

The history of art paintings is much older than the one of cinema, it is often more familiar and intuitive too because the affinities/contrasts/ruptures between art periods, art movements, stylistic schools are defined by rather clear visual differences, at least on an primary intuitive level. That's why it is a helpful visual aid to better grasp the more subtle, complex differences between film styles. A map of plastic styles would not look exactly as this, because the names of aesthetic styles in cinema don't quite overlap the ones in paintings, because the continuity and transition between each "step" work on particular planes : plastic representation and thematics for paintings, and for cinema we have to put into consideration not only the visuals (cinematographic style, lighting style, set style, costume style) but the visuals on the 4th dimension (editing style), the performance style, the dialogue style, the soundscape style (music score style, audio capture style) and the thematics.

The matrix historically initiate on the bottom left corner (Primitive style), but the current standard today is located in the center (Academism).

The matrix expands radially, in a centrifuge way, in all directions at the same time.

Pay attention to the ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION of the human face/body in these paintings, and how it differs from the ones right next to them, and even more from the ones further away. Some go for versimilitude, or strive to attain it at least, others never try to go near it and instead propose a very personal INTERPRETAION of the anthropomorphic representation, more personal, more simplified/stereotypical, or on the contrary a more complexified/transmuted version of a human figure. Same goes with the art of Mise en scène in cinema, and we see the same affinities and contrasts between various branches of cinema history, the realists, the verbose, the minimalists or the abstracts... (to cite only a few of them possibilities discovered by filmmakers over the years).

Related :

• Academic Film Styles Matrix / Nuances in "Art Cinema" History 
• Matrice des montages / Typologie des montages
• Ruptures esthétiques 1 - 2

Years and Countries favoured by S&S2012 Poll

That's 100 global nominees in total for an individual Top10 entry, and only 18 countries are represented (and 6 countries get everything but 18 of them 100)...

Guess which countries voted in majority at the 2012 Sight & Sound All Time Greatest Films Poll?
Or more exactly, the right question is : What is are country of origin of all films seen by the voters? (not just masterpieces, but all there film culture). It's easy to assume that most of the voters are only familiar with the select few "top cinema nations", which have a larger number of potential masterpieces (historically), no question about it. But candidates for a canon are not limited to the major cinema nations, it's a matter of artworks proposed by individuals, not by countries, and a timeless masterpiece may originate from any part of the world, even countries where the cinema industry is suppressed, censored or generally mediocre...


Related :

• S&S2012 Canon : Academic Matrix
• S&S 2012 Canon : Number 1 / Numbers / You are qualified to vote if... / Hollywood's Supremacy? / 1950s standards 

Aesthetic Hegemonies in Cinema History

N.B. only newest flags are used

Related :

• S&S2012 Canon (4) : Hollywood supremacy? 
• Nuances in "Art Cinema" History 

Nuances in "Art Cinema" History

Because there is no such thing as ONE SINGLE MONOLITHIC BLOB called the "Art Cinema Tradition"!

Some of the genres, film movements, film styles, schools in cinema history (1895-2012) :

3D Cinema (USA) 1952- [timeline]
[Norman McLaren, Alfred Hitchcock, André De Toth, Jack Arnold, Paul Morrissey, Richard Fleischer, Stephen Low, Graeme Ferguson, James Cameron, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Ben Stassen, Robert Rodriguez, Bob Peterson, Steven Spielberg]

American Independent Cinema First Wave (USA) 1968?
[Stan Brakhage, John Cassavetes, Roger Corman, Jonas Mekas, Russ Meyer, George Kuchar, George Romero, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Frederick Wiseman]

ANIMATION (World) 1905-
[Segundo de Chomon, John Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl, Lotte Reiniger, Noburo Ofuji, Robert Lapoujade, Enest & Gisèle Ansorge, Eliott Noyes, Ishu Patel, Norman McLaren, Jan Werkmajer, Ladislas Starevitch, Jean Painlevé, Jiri Trnka]

Anime (Japan) 1960-
[Osamu Tezuka, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Hayao Miyazaki, Toshiro Kawamoto,  Katsuhiro Otomo, Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, Hideaki Anno]

Australian Film Revival / Australian Film Renaissance / Australian New Wave (Australia) 1971-1989 = 18 years
[Peter Weir, George Miller, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Ken Hannam, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce, Tim Burstall, John Duigan, Brian Trenchard-Smith]

B Picture (USA) 1960-50 = 10 years
[Edgar George Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Ted Tetzlaff, Allan Dwan, Don Weis, Jack Arnold, Jacques Tourneur, Nathan Juran]

BAROQUE 1954-
[Dario Argento, Raul Ruiz, Robert Aldrich, James Cameron] critic : Jean Rousset

Berliner Schule (Germany) 2000-
[Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, Benjamin Heisenberg, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Jan Krüger, Henner Winckler, Maren Ade, Sylke Enders, Maria Speth, Nicolas Wackerbarth, Henrike Goetz, Soeren Voigt, Matthias Luthardt, Ayse Polat, Stefan Krohmer]

Blaxploitation (USA) 1971-79 = 9 years
[Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, Kyle Onstott, Jack Hill, Jack Arnold, William Girdler, William Crain, Sidney Poitier, Oscar Williams, Michael Schultz, Sam O'Steen, Larry Cohen]

BLOCKBUSTER 1972-
[Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, James Cameron]

Bollywood (India) 1970-
[Ashutosh Gowariker, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Mani Ratnam, Rakesh Mehta, Mira Nair, Chadha, A. Khan, Dutta, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Rakesh Roshan]

Brighton School (UK) 1898-1904 = 6 years
[George Albert Smith, James A. Williamson]

British Social Realism (UK)
[John Boorman, Ken Loach, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, Peter Watkins]

Budapest school / Documentarism (Hungary) 1969-1985 (1972-1984) = 16 years
[Dárday István, Szalai Györgyi, Ember Judit, Schiffer Pál, Tarr Béla, Gazdag Gyula, Elek Judit, Gyöngyössy Imre, Kabai Barna, Schiffer Pal, Darday Istvan, Vitezy Laszlo, Gyarmathy Livia, Gulyas Gyula, Gulyas Janos, Sandor Sara, Almasi Tamas, Istvan Gaal]

Burlesque 1910-29 = 19 years
[Max Linder, Fatty Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Charles Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Harold Lloyd, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy]

CARTOON (World) 1892-
[Emile Reynaud, John Stuart Blackton, Emile cohl, Winsor McCay, Walt Disney, Max&Dave Fleischer, Berthold Bartosch, Mickhail Tsekhanovski, Hector Hoppin, Anthony Gross, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, William Hannah & Joseph Barbera, Norman McLaren, Paul Grimault, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Walerian Borowczky, Wan Laiming, Ralph Bakshi, René Laloux, Youri Norstein, Jean-François Laguionie, Frédérick Back, Isho Takahata, Andrei Khrjanovski, Hayao Miyazaki, John Lasseter, Nick Park, Peter Lord, Brad Bird, Marjane Satrapi, Michel Ocelot, Sylvain Chomet]

Caligarism (Germany) 1920-27 = 17 years
[Karl Heinz Martin, Paul Wegener, Carl Boese, R. Wiene, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni, G. W. Pabst, Karl Grüne, Lupu-Pick] critic : Henri Langlois, Lotte H. Eisner

Chambara / Jidaigeki / Samurai cinema (Japan) 1920s
[Daisuke Itō, Masahiro Makino]

Chanchada (Brazil) 1949-59 = 10 years
[Oscarito, Grande Otelo, Zezé Macedo, Zé Trindade]

Chaos Cinema (USA) 1999-
[Wachowski, Tom Twyker, Tony Scott, Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan, Jaume Balagueró, Darren Aronofsky, Marc Forster, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Bay] Critic : Matthias Stork

Cinema da Boca do Lixo / Mouth of Garbage Cinema (Brazil) 1960-70s
[Carlos Reichenbach, Luiz Castelini, Alfredo Sternheim, Juan Bajon, Cláudio Cunha, Walter Hugo Khouri, Fauzi Mansur, José Mojica Marins] critic : Rogério Sganzerla

Cinema djidid / Algerian New wave (Algeria) 1967-
[Mohamed Bouamari, M. Lakhdar Hamina]

Cinema du look (France) 1981-1991 = 10 years
[Jean-Jacques Benex, Luc Besson, Leos Carax]

Cinéma du Québec libre (Québec/Canada) 1963-1980 = 17 years
[Gilles Groulx, Michel Brault, Arthur Lamothe, Pierre Perrault, Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, Denys Arcand, Francis Mankiewicz, André Forcier, Jean Beaudin]

Cinema Nôvo (Brazil) 1962-72 = 10 years
[Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Joaquim Pedro de Andrad, Linduarte Noronha, Ruy Guerra, Leon Hirszman]

Cinema of Transgression (USA) 1984-1990 = 6 years
[Nick Zedd, Kembra Pfahler, Casandra Stark, Beth B, Tommy Turner, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch]

Cinéma Pur / Absolute Film / Integral Cinema (France) 1924-29 = 5 years
[René Clair, Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Germaine Dulac,  Man Ray] critique : Henri Chomette

Cinéma-vérité (France) / Direct Cinema (UK) 1959-
[Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, Mario Ruspoli, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Chris Marker]

La Cinematografia Futurista / Italian Futurism (Italy) 1909-
[Arnaldo Ginna, Bruno Corra, Marinetti, Balla Chiti, Setimelli, Anton Bragaglia] critique : Canudo, Anton Bragaglia, Verdone, Dziga Vertov, Alberta

Cinématographe (France) 1950-1983 = 33 years
[Robert Bresson] critique: Robert Bresson

Classic Hollywood (USA)
[Frank Capra, Michael Curtiz, Victor Fleming, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Ernst Lubitsch, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Preston Sturges, Raoul Walsh, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, William Wyler]

Comédie burlesque (Mexico) 1936-58 = 22 years
[Cantinflas, Tin Tan]

Comédie de mœurs (Mexico) 1936-58 = 22 years
[Pedro Infante]

Dadaïsme (Germany, USA, France) 1916-1925 = 9 years
[René Clair, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Hans Richter] critique : Gianni Rondolino, George Sadoul

COMEDY 1913-
[Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Sacha Guitry, Alexander Medvekine, Marcel Pagnol, Frank Capra, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Frank Tashlin, Billy Wilder, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, Otar Iosselani, Woody Allen, Ettore Scola, Blake Edwards, Roberto Begnini]

dGeneration (China) 2009-
[Huang Weikai, Zhao Dayong, Du Haibing, Xu Tong, Li Ning, Xu Xin]

Digital Cinema (USA) 1999-
[Michael Mann, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, David Lynch, James Cameron, George Lucas, John Lasseter]

DOCUMENTARY (World) 1895-
[Lumière, Flaherty, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jean Rouch, Agnès Varda, Johan Van der Keuken, Raymond Depardon, Claude Lanzmann, Frederik Wiseman, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog]

Divismo (Italy) 1913-20 = 7 years
[Mario Caserini, Alberto Degli Abbati, Baldassare Negroni, Nino Oxilia, Carmine Gallone, Gustavo Serena, Giovanni Pastrone, Giuseppe DeLiguoro, Roberto Roberti, Amaleto Palmeri]

Dogme 95 (Denmark) 1995-2002 = 7 years
[Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Jean-Marc Barr]

Ecole Russe de Paris (France) 1920-37 = 17 years
[Viatcheslav Tourjansky, Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexander Volkoff, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, René clair, Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Anatole Litvak, Fedor Ozep, Victor Trivas]

Egyptian Golden Age (Egypt) 1940-52 = 12 years

Escuela de Cuzco (Peru) 1961-
[L. Figueroo, E. Nishiyama, C. Villanueva]

ESPIONNAGE (World) 1915-
[Henri Fescourt, Henri Pouctal, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, George Wilhelm Pabst, Raymond Bernard, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Anatole Litvak, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Billy Wilder, Henry Hathaway, Jacques Tourneur, William A. Wellman, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Samuel Fuller, Carol Reed, Alfred Weidenmann, Ronald Neame, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Robert Aldrich, Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Phil Karlson, Stanley Donen, Martin Ritt, John Huston, Michel Deville, Roman Polanski, Martin Campbell, Roger Spottiswoode, Paul Greengrass, Sam Mendes]

ESSAI FILM (World) 1922-
[Benjamin Christensen, Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Joris Ivens, Nicole Védrès, Pierre Braunberger, Georges Franju, Marc Allégret, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Marcel Ophuls, Orson Welles, Luc Moullet, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Louis Malle, Michael Moore, Robert Kramer, Jean-Luc Godard, Romain Goupil]

Fifth Generation (China) 1983-
[Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Junzhao, Zhang Yimou]

Film Noir (USA) 1941-51 = 10 years
[John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, Edgar G. Ulmer, Charles Vidor, Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur, Orson Welles, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, William Wyler, Robert Aldrich]

FILMED THEATRE 1907-
[Marcel Pagnol, Sacha guitry, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, Max Ophüls, Alf Sjöberg, Elia Kazan, Joseph Mankiewicz, Serguei Youtkevitch, Grigori Kozintsev, Ariane Mouchkine, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Manoel de Oliveira, Alain Resnais, Kenneth Branagh, Eugene Green]

Filmo Caligraffico (Italy) 1940-44 = 4 years
[Mario Soldati, M. Camerini, Luigi Chiarini, Renato Castellani, Fernandino M. Pogglio, Alberto Lattuda]

Films de Cangaceiro (Brazil) 1953-71 = 14 years

Found Footage Thriller (USA-Spain) 1980-
[Ruggero Deodato, Rémy Belvaux, Dean Alioto, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, Fred Vogel, Jaume Balagueró, Matt Reeves, Oren Peli]

Free Cinema (UK) 1952-1959 = 7 years
[Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson] critique : Alan Cooke, Richard Anderson, Gavin Lambert

Generation 56 (Czechozlovakia) 1956-
[V. Jasny, K. Kachyna, F. Vlacil]

German Expressionism (Germany) 1918-1926 (1920-1931) = 8 years
[Robert Wiene, Paul Wegener, Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Paul Leni, Arthur Robison] Critique : Lotte Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer

Giallo - Gore (USA-Italy) 1963-1992 = 29 years
[Mario Bava, Dario Argento, H.G. Lewis, Andy Milligan, David Graham, J.G. Patterson, Jesse Franco, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Joe D’Amato, G.A. Romero, Wes Craven]

Grierson School / Documentary Film Movement (UK) 1926-50 = 24 years
[John Grierson, Robert J. Flaherty, Basil Wright, Stuart Legg, Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, David MacDonald, Humphrey Jennings, Stewart McAllister, Pat Jackson, John Eldrige]

Le Groupe des Cinq (Switzerland) 1969-1980 = 11 years
[Alain Tanner, Claude Goretta, Jean-Louis roy, Michel Soutter, Jean-Jacques Lagrange, Yves Yersin] critique : Freddy Buache, Michel Boujut, Christian Dimitriu

Grupo Cine Liberación (Argentina) 1962-1976 = 14 years
[Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Gerardo Vallejo, grupo Realizadores de Mayo, Enrique and Nemesio Juárez, Pablo Szir]

Guerilla Film (World) 1971-?
[Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Shyam Madhavan Sarada, Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Miguel Gomes, Raya Martin, Denis Côté, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Vincent Gallo, Harmony Korine, Josh & Benny Safdie, Bruce LaBruce, Valérie Massadian, Terutarô Osanaï, Alex Ross Perry, Alessandro Comodin, Djinn Carrénard]

Hammer films (UK) 1955-74 = 19 years
[Michael Carreras, Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Tudor Gates, John Gilling, Anthony Hinds, Jimmy Sangster, Peter Sasdy, Harry Robertso]

Hays Code (USA) 1934-66 = 32 years

Hong Kong New Wave (Hong Kong) 1979-
[John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui] Jackie Chan, Ching Siu-Tung, Ringo Lam, Johnny To, Tsui Hark, Wong Kar Wai, John Woo, Corey Yuen]

Impressionisme (France) 1919-1929 = 10 years
[Gance, L'Herbier, Dulac, Delluc, Epstein, Vigo]

Indie Film 2nd Wave (USA) 1990-
[Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Joel and Ethan Coen, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Michael Moore, Alexander Payne, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Terry Zwigoff]

Internationale Situationiste (France) 1957-1962 = 5 years
[Guy-Ernest Debord, René Viénet, Gérard Cohen, Ngai Hong]

Iranian New Wave (Iran) 1968-
[Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Forough Farrokhzad, Majid Majidi, Mohsen Mahkmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, Samira Mahkmalbaf, Asghar Farhadi, Mohammad Rassoulof, Bahman Ghobadi, Rafi Pitts, Marzieh Meshkini, Reza Mir-Karimi, Hana Mahkmalbaf]

Italian neorealism (Italy) 1942-51-55 = 13 years
[Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Lattuada, Luigi Zampa, Aldo Vergano, Giuseppe De Santis, Luchino Visconti, Pietro Germi] Critiques: Cesare Zavattini, André Bazin, Freddy Buache

Italian New Wave (Italy) 1960-
[Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Francesco Rosi, Valerio Zurlini, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Ferreri, Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, Ettore Scola]

J-Horror (Japan) 1960-
[Kyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike, Masaki Kobayashi, Nobuo Nakagawa, Takashi Shimizu, Kaneto Shindo, Sion Sono, Shinya Tsukamoto]

Kammerspielfilm (Germany) 1921-1929 = 9 years
[Paul Leni, F.W. Murnau, Karl Grune, Lupu-Pick, Paul Czinner, G. W. Pabst, E. A. Dupont, Carl Boese, Bruno Rahn, J. May]

KINO (Canada-World) 1999-
[Christian Laurence]

Kino-Pravda (USSR) 1920ies
[Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, Mikhail Kaufman]

Kitchen Sink Realism (UK) 1955-69 = 14 years
[Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Ken Loach, John Schlesinger, Jack Clayton] critique : Lindsay Anderson, Nina Hibbin, Andrew Higson

Kynikós kinimatográfo (Greece) 2005-
[Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari]

Korean Hallyu (South Korea) 1997-
[Kang Je-gyu, Kwak Jae-yong, Kang Woo-suk, Kim Ji-woon, Bong Joon-Ho, Hong Sang-Soo, Kim Ki-Duk, Lee Chang-Dong, Park Chan-Wook]

Lettrisme (France) 1945-
[Isidore Isou (Jean-Isidore Goldstein), Maurice Lemaître, Guy Debord (Hurlements en faveur de Sade), Gil J. Wolman, François Dufrêne, Marc'O]

Louis & Auguste Lumière (France) 1895-1905 = 10 years

MANNERISM 1960-
[Brian De Palma, Jean-Pierre Melville, Sergio Leone]

Georges Méliès (France) 1896-1913 = 17 years

Mélodrame à tangos (Argentina) 1933-42 = 9 years
[Libertad Lamarque, Hugo Del Carnil]

Mockumentary 1933-
[Luis Buñuel, Richard Lester, Orson Welles, Rob Reiner, Woody Allen, Jim McBride, Eric Idle, Peter Jackson, Larry Charles] critique : Jane Roscoe, Craig Hight

Movida (Spain) 1980-
[Pedro Almodovar, Iván Zulueta, Fernando Trueba, Fernando Colomo]

Mumblecore (USA) 2001-
[Andrew Bujalski, Lynn Shelton, Aaron Katz, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Joe Swanberg]

MUSICAL 1929-
[Harry Beaumont, LeRoy, Grigori Alexandrov, Ernst Lubitsch, Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian, Jacques Demy, William Wyler]

Musical Carnavalesque (Brazil) 1933-37 = 4 years
[Carmen Miranda]

Narcocinema / Videohome (Mexico) 1980s
[Jorge Reynoso, José Luis Urquieta, Alfredo Gurrola, Rubén Galindo]

New Argentinian Cinema wave (Argentina) 1991-
[Fabian Bielinsky, Israel Adrián Caetano, Pablo Trapero, Carlos Sorin, Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso]

New Documentary Movement (China) 1990-
[Wu Wenguang, Wang Bing, Li Hong]

New French Extremity (France) 1998-
[François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Claire Denis, Patrice Chereau, Bertrand Bonello, Marina de Van, Leos Carax, Philippe Grandrieux, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Jacques Nolot, Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, Alexandre Aja] Critic : James Quandt, Jonathan Romney

New Hollywood / American New Wave (USA) 1967-1982 = 15 years
[Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, John Schlesinger, William Friedkin, Michael Cimino, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg]

New Queer Cinema (USA) 1991-
[Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien, Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin, Gregg Araki, Ang Lee, Bruce LaBruce, Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell] critic : B. Ruby Rich

New Sensitivity (Israel) 1971-
[Avraham Heffner. Ephraim Kishon, Moshé Mizrahi]

Nickelodeon (USA) 1905-13 = 8 years

No Wave Cinema / New Cinema (USA) 1976-1985 = 9 years
[Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, John Lurie] critic : Marc Masters

Nollywood (Nigeria) 1992-
[Chris Obi Rapu, Chico Ejiro, Kingsley Ogoro, Zeb]

Nordestern (Brazil) 1925-96
[Tancredo Seabra, Abrao Benjamin, Fouad Anderas, Carlos Coimbra, Aurelio Teixeira, Paulo Gil Soares, Glauber Rocha, Carlos Mergulhao, Oswald de Oliveira, Eduardo Coutinho, Rosenberg Cariry, Lima Barreto, Paul Caldao, Lirio Ferreiro]


Noul val românesc / Romanian New Wave (Romania) 2004-
[Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Cristian Nemescu, Cătălin Mitulescu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu]

La Nouvelle Vague (France) 1958-1963 = 5 years (1956-1965)
[Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Jean Rouch, Louis Malle, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Pierre Kast] critique : François Truffaut, JLG, Jean Douchet, Antoine de Baecque

Novo Cinema (Portugal) 1963-74 = 11 years
[Paulo Rocha, António de Macedo, Fernando Lopes, António da Cunha Telles, António Campos]

Nuevo Cine / Argentine New Wave (Argentina) 1959-
[F. Birri, L. Murua, M. Antin, D. J. Kohon, R. Magica]

Nuevo Cine Mexicano (Mexico) 1990-
[Arturo Ripstein, Alfonso Arau, Alfonso Cuarón, María Novaro, Guillermo del Toro, Jorge Fons, Antonio Serrano, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carlos Carrera]

Nuberu Bagu / Japanese New Wave (Japan) 1956-1976 =  20 years
[Susumu Hani, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Yasuzo Masumura, Masahiro Shinoda, Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura]

Oberhausen generation / German New Wave (Germany) 1961-1971 = 10 years
[Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Fleischmann, Alexandre Kluge, Ferdinant, Khittl, Herbert Vesely, Edgar Reitz, Christian Rischert, Franz Josef Spieker, Jean-Marie Straub, Theodor Kotulla, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder]

Painted Film 1935-
[Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage]

Parallel Cinema / Art Cinema / Indian New Wave (India) 1952-1976 = 24 years
[Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Chetan Anand, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shyam Benegal, Jahnu Barua, Bhabendra Nath Saikia]

Participatory cinema / Cinema 2.0 (World) 2006-
[Brett Gaylor, Matt Hanson, Nicolás Alcalá, Timo Vuorensola, Kevin Macdonald]

Peplum / Sword and Sandal (Italy) 1953-62 = 9 years
[Sergio Leone, Mario Bava]

Pinku eiga / Eroduction (Japan) 1962-82 = 20 years
Age of Competition / First Wave (Japan) 1962-71 = 9 years
[Satoru Kobayashi, Tetsuji Takechi, Seijun Suzuki, Kōji Wakamatsu, Kan Mukai, Kin'ya Ogawa, Shinya Yamamoto, Kan Mukai, Giichi Nishihara, Kōji Seki, Giichi Nishihara]
Roman Porno / Second Wave (Japan) 1971-82 = 11 years
[Teruo Ishii, Norifumi Suzuki,  Shunya Ito, Masaru Konuma, Tatsumi Kumashiro,  Noboru Tanaka, Yasuharu Hasebe]

Pluginmanifesto 2001-
[Jonathan Brann, Geert Wachtelaer] Critic : Ana Kronschnabl, Anna Notaro, mayoke, Simone Kurtzke

Poliziottesco / Italo-crime / Euro-crime / Italian crime films (Italy) 1968-1980
[Mario Bianchi, Alfonso Brescia, Enzo G. Castellari, Damiano Damiani, Alberto De Martino, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Marino Girolami, Romolo Girolami, Umberto Lenzi, Fernando Di Leo, Carlo Lizzani, Sergio Martino, Stelvio Massi, Giuliano Montaldo, Sergio Sollima, Duccio Tessari]

Polish School (Poland) 1955-1965 = 10 years
[Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has]

Poliziottesco / Italo-crime / Euro-crime / Italian crime films (Italy) 1968-1980
[Mario Bianchi, Alfonso Brescia, Enzo G. Castellari, Damiano Damiani, Alberto De Martino, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Marino Girolami, Romolo Girolami, Umberto Lenzi, Fernando Di Leo, Carlo Lizzani, Sergio Martino, Stelvio Massi, Giuliano Montaldo, Sergio Sollima, Duccio Tessari]

POSTMODERN 1990-
[Joel & Ethan Coen, Tim Burton, Oliver Stone, Jean-Jacques Beinex, Luc Besson, Quentin Tarantino]

Prague Spring / Czechoslovak New Wave (Czechoslovakia) 1963-1968 = 5 years (1962-1971)
[Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jan Svankmajer, Jiří Menzel, Frantisek Vlacil, Karel Kachyna, Jaromil Jireš, Jaroslav Papoušek, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Pavel Juracek, Jan Schmidt, Juraj Herz, Jiri Weiss, Jiri Krejcik, Zdenek Brynych, Vojtech Jasny, Hynek Bocan, Ladislav Rychman, Otakar Vavra, Zdenek Sirovy, Antonin Kachlik, Stanislas Milota]

Primitive Cinema (France-USA) 1895-1905 = 10 years
[Louis & Auguste Lumière; Thomas Edison; Georges Méliès; Edwin S. Porter; G.A. Smith; James Williamson; Feuillade]

Pure Film Movement (Japan) 1910-20s
[Eizō Tanaka, Masao Inoue, Thomas Kurihara, Kenji Mizoguchi]

Queercore (USA-UK) 1985-
[Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, Derek Jarman] Critic : G.B. Jones, Bruce LaBruce

Ranchera Comedia (Mexico) 1936-58 = 22 years
[Tito Guizan, Jorge Negote]

Ranchero Melodrama (Mexico) 1943-64 = 21 years
[Dolorès del Rio, Mario Félix, Pédro Armen Doriz]

Réalisme Poétique (France) 1922-1957 (1954) = 35 years
[Marcel Carné, Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Jean Gremillon, René Clair, Anatole Litvak, Julien Duvivier, Claude Autant-Lara, Roger Leenhardt, Yves Allégret, Marcel Pagliéro, René Wheeler, Jacques Becker, Max Ophüls, Pierre Chenal]

Réalisme Sociale (France-UK) 1955-
[André Cayatte, Paul Carpita, Maurice Pialat, Claude Miller, Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardennes, Ken Loach]

Remodernist Film (USA) 2004-
[Jesse Richards, Harris Smith, Peter Rinaldi]

Rive Gauche (France) 1950-63
[Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Henri Colpi, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville] critique :  Richard Roud

ROAD MOVIE 1969-
[Hall Bartlett, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Barba Loden, Monte Hellman, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick, Michael Cimino, Agnès Varda, David Lynch, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Walter Salles]

SCIENCE FICTION 1902-
[Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, Y. Protozanov, Robert Wise, Byron Haskin, Inishiro Honda, Don Siegel, Richard Fleischer, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Carpenter]

SCIENTIFIC FILM 1897-
[Dr Eugène Louis Doyen, Dr Jean Comandon, Jean Painlevé]

Sixth Generation (China) 1990-
[Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, Li Yang, He Yong, He Jianjun]

Socialist Realism (USSR) 1934-53 = 19 years
[S. & G. Vassiliev, Friedrich Ermler, Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, Efim Dzigan, Boris Barnet, Vladimir Legochine, Youli Raïzman, Alexandre Zarkhi, Yossif Kheïfts, Mikhaïl Romm, Mark Donskoi, Serguei Guerassimov, Alexandre Dovjenko, Lev Arnstam, Vsevolod Poudovkine, Mikhaïl Tchiaourelli, Adolf Minkin, Gerbert Rappaport, Sergeï Youtkevitch]

Soviet Montage (USSR) 1919-1930 = 11 years
[Dziga Vertov, S.M. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexandr Dovjenko, Jacob Protazanov, Boris Barnet, Abraham Room, Lev Koulechov, Grigori Kozintsev] Critiques : S.M. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Koulechov

Soviet New Wave (USSR) 1962-68 = 6 years
[Andrei Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov-Kontchalovski, Paradjanov, Iosselani, Daniela, Klimov, Muratova, Panfilov]

Soviet Second New Wave (USSR) 1974-78 = 4 years
[Andrei Tarkovsky, Panfilov, Choukchine, Cheptiko, Guerman, Mikhalkov, Sokurov, Soloviev]

Soviet Parallel Cinema  / New New Wave (USSR) 1980ies
[Soloviev, Muratova, Sokurov, Kanevski, Longuine, Omirbaev, Karakulov, Lapouchanski, Pitchoul, Amirkoulov, Dykhovitchni]

Spaghetti Western (Italy) 1958-80 = 22 years
[Sergio Leone, Jesús Franco, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima]

Superhero Franchise (USA) 1978-
[Richard Donner, George Lucas, Richard Lester, Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Alex Proyas, Joel Schumacher, Sam Raimi, M. Night Shyamalan, Ang Lee, Guillermo del Toro]

Surréalisme (France) 1930-1969 = 39 years
Breton [L'Age d'Or, Entr'Acte, Potemkin, Ombres Blanches, Buñuel, Mack Sennett, Chaplin... King Kong, Peter Ibbetson]; general [Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Germaine Dulac, Petr Karl, La Perle (Georges Hugnet, Henri d'Arche), Fleurs Meurtries (Roger Livet), Records 37 (Brunius), Jean Vigo, Prévert, Wilhelm Freddie (Spiste horisonter), Marcel Mariën (L'imitation du cinéma)]; USA underground [Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, Joseph Cornell]; Canada [Lipsett]

Taiwan New Wave (Taiwan) 1982-1990 = 8 years
[Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kunhou]

TEEN FLICK (USA) 1950-
[Elia Kazan, John Hughes, John Landis, Judd Apatow]

Tendency films / Left wing cinema (Japan) 1920-30s
[Kenji Mizoguchi, Daisuke Itō, Shigeyoshi Suzuki, Tomu Uchida]

Tercer Cine / Third Cinema (Latin America) 1960-70s
[Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Raymundo Gleyzer, Jorge Sanjinés]

Tropicalisme (Brazil) 1968-72 = 4 years
[Nelson Pereira, Joao Pedro de Andrade, Walter Lina Jr.]

True Cinema movement (India) 1980ies
[Rajan Sarma] Critic : Rajan Sarma

Underground film / New American Cinema (USA) 1957-80s
[Stan Brakhage, Harry Everett Smith, Maya Deren, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, Jack Smith, George Kuchar, Mike Kuchar, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Carmelo Bene, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Stephen Dwoskin, Paul Morrissey, Otto Muehl, Pierre Clémenti] Critic : P. Adams Sitney, Manny Farber, Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel

Unspoken Cinema / Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (World) 1971-
[Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, Fernand Deligny, Franco Piavoli, Darejan Omirbaev, Sharunas Bartas, Tarr Béla, Aleksandr Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Gus Van Sant, Fliegauf Bence, James Benning, Tacita Dean, Amat Escalante, Albert Serra, Govindan Aravindan] critique : HarryTuttle

Video Art installation (World) 1963-
[Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Fred Forest, Peter Campus, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Doris Totten Chase, Norman Cowie, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, William Wegman, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Domingo Sarrey, Juan Downey, Wolf Vostell, Slobodan Pajic, Wolf Kahlen, Peter Weibel, David Hall, Paul Wong, Lisa Steele, Colin Campbell, Miroslaw Rogala, Danny Matthys, Chantal Akerman, Akram Zaatari, Mireille Astore, Miranda July, Douglas Gordon, Martin Arnold, Matthias Müller, Lucio Fondana, Les Levine, Dennis Oppenheim, Charlotte Morman, Antoni Muntadas]

Yugoslav Black Wave / Novi Film (Yugoslavia) 1961-1972 = 11 years
[Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar "Saša" Petrović, Želimir Žilnik, Miroslav "Mika" Antić, Lordan Zafranović, Mića Popović, Marko Babac]

WESTERN 1894-
[Thomas, H. Ince, J. Cruze, John Ford, Howard Hawks]

Wuxia / 武俠 / Kung Fu (China)  1966-
[King Hu, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Chang Cheh]

Yeşilçam / Green pine (Turkey) 1950-70s
[Ömer Lütfi Akad, Osman Fahir Seden, Atıf Yılmaz, Memduh Ün,  Metin Erksan, Halit Refiğ, Duygu Sağıroğlu, Remzi Aydın Jöntürk, Nevzat Pesen]



And these are only the identifiable groups of filmmakers with a certain common affinity, it doesn't account for all the one-off films, the insular filmmakers, the oddities escaping all possible classifications...



Related :

• "Asian Minimalism" (Bordwell) / To America Everything Foreign is SLOW / Reductive Foreign Stereotypes 
• Ruptures esthétiques 1-2
• Forgotten Obsolete English word #8: Tradition 
• Film Theory Branding / Neo-Neo / Wolves are not alone (the critic who cried wolf)
• Aesthetic Hegemonies in Cinema history 

S&S 2012 Canon (5) : 1950s standards

How great were the 50ies? And are there any later films that are better?

When introducing younger generations or casual movie goers to cinema's most prestigious legacy, the natural impulse is of course to turn them to Classical cinema, to Silent films, or to Black&White films in general... because these are fading from the collective memory, from current cultural references, but also from repertoire screenings, from DVD availability and restoration. When confronted with an audience who only watches the current offer, i.e. commercial genre, action entertainment, romance, horror and teen comedies... the imperative to educate their taste and to open up their horizon is to promote and rely on the good, safe oldies. It never fails, and it source of great joys and amazing discoveries about the lost art of caring about mise en scène and content.

However, the formation of a canon is a very different operation, with a different purpose. We can't use a pseudo-canon as a publicity campaign for forgotten (outdated) masterpieces of the past. A canon is produced at a certain point in time and should reflect the standard of greatness attained by cinema. This is not the canon of our youth, or the canon of our ancestors. This must be the canon of 2012, even though we know very well, it's conservative nature will barely make up-to-date with how it should have been in 2002.

That's why, the Top10 entrants of the past must defend their title with the greater masterpieces produced since. If cinema really hasn't improved since 1959, then there is no reason why newer films should make an appearance in the Top10, not the Top250 for that matter. But no matter how high a summit cinema reached in the 50ies... Apparently some people believe that and bath themselves in blissful nostalgia.

I find it hard to believe that the level of cinema excellence, cinema's aesthetic achievements, cinema's depth, cinema's poetry hasn't at least equaled (if not surpassed) the 1959 quality, thus rightfully challenging the highest ranks of the canon with the familiar canonical title of the past. Let's compare...

What is the reason why we endlessly keep Citizen Kane and Vertigo at an unattainable level??? Is it because Tarkovsky or Ozu don't know how to use a camera? Is it because voters didn't bother to watch a single Kiarostami film? Or is it because these safe and proven tokens are convenient, lazy choices?

There are many ways for a newer masterpiece to surpass one of the past. Either straight up : meeting the old standards by their rules, on the old territory, by being superior at filming classically, abiding to the genre codes... (this would be neorealism, New Hollywood...) Another way is to challenge the old establishment, by criticizing or perverting or subverting the old rules, by commenting them... (this would be post-modernism). And probably the most impressive and celebrated, but also the most difficult to sell, is to invent new rules, a new style, a new narration, a new image, new performances, a new medium, a new technique, a new genre (this would be Surrealism, Dadaism, New American Cinema, Structuralist films...) 

1950s Standards

Hypothetical 1959 Canon (spanning the 1895-1959 history of cinema), corrected with 2012 hindsight (alphabetical order), that are still relevant to today's highest standards :

• Battleship Potemkin   STRONG CONTENDER
• Citizen Kane  STRONG CONTENDER
• Journey to Italy   ARGUABLE
• The Last Laugh   ARGUABLE
• Late Spring   ARGUABLE
• Ordet   STRONG CONTENDER
• Pather Panchali   STRONG CONTENDER
• Pickpocket   ARGUABLE
• La règle du jeu   ARGUABLE
• Sunrise   ARGUABLE
• Tokyo Story  STRONG CONTENDER
• Vertigo ARGUABLE

Keep in mind we are voting for the ALL-TIME Top10, so only 10 slots on the ballot. There are many outstanding masterpieces, but we can't keep them all. So which ones could be swapped easily, due to personal preferences of the expert. Some are clearly surpassed today, technically or dramaturgically or in term of content. So even if we save these (like the ones I cited in my second post), they don't stand a chance head-to-head against the 10th best of a 1960-2011 list. The point is to figure out which pre-1960 canon-grade masterpieces are truly considered timeless, and could easily compete today with the contemporary's best standards (given that the cinema excellence has raised the bar since the 1950ies).
"Strong contender" means they easily have a chance to get into today's canon. "Arguable" means they could make a case for their inclusion, if there isn't enough canon-worthy titles post-1960.

TODAY'S STANDARDS

Greater (canon-grade) masterpieces made since 1959 (spanning the 1960-2011 history of cinema) :

• 8 ½
• 2001 : A Space Odyssey
• A Brighter Summer Afternoon
• Aguirre : the Wrath of God 
• An Autumn Afternoon
• Andrei Rublev
• L'Année dernière à Marienbad
• Apocalypse Now
• Au hasard Balthazar
• L'Avventura
• Ceddo
• Close-Up
• Cries and Whispers
• Death in Venice
• La Dolce Vita
• L'Eclisse
• El espiritu de la Colmena
• Flowers of Shanghai
• Hara Kiri
• High and Low
• The Hole
• The Hourglass Sanatorium
• In the Mood for Love
• Jeanne Dielman
• La Jetée
• Kagemusha
• Mirror
• Mulholland Dr.
• Nostalghia
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Opening Night
• Persona
• Play Time
• Psycho
• Ran
• The Sacrifice
• Sátántangó
• Songs from the Second Floor
• Soy Cuba
• Stalker
• Taxi Driver
• Time of Gypsies
• Touki bouki
• Trois Couleurs : Rouge
• Trois vies et une seule mort
• Veronika Voss
• Werckmeister Harmonies
• The Wind Will Carry Us
• Woman in the Dunes
• Yeelen

And if we respect the unspoken rule of waiting at least 10 years before proposing a recent film to the canon, these canon-worthy titles should wait till the next poll to be nominated : A Separation; Once Upon A Time In Anatolia; Uncle Boonmee; Caché; Melancholia; Woman on the Beach, The Turin Horse...

Look at this post-1960 list! These films aren't inferior to whatever the height of Classical Cinema was back in 1959. They are easily as great (objectively), if not (arguably) greater for some of them. Obviously the older canon will suffer from the comparison to the latest standard. This is inevitable...
How could anyone think for one second that Some Like it Hot, Intolerance, The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, Black Narcissus, the silent King Kong (1933), His Girl Friday, Le Voyage dans la Lune, The Big Sleep, Duck Soup, Gone with the Wind...  could take any one of the limited spots reserved in a Top10 for later masterpieces??? It doesn't mean they are not great films, but not Top10-worthy any longer. These lesser films still get votes by the dozen from people who don't realize what voting for an up-to-date canon means! You can't keep voting for the same titles just because they've made the Top10 once, or because of their historical importance alone.
All we need is to handpick the 10 best of these post-1960 masterpieces to keep out ANY pre-1960 masterpieces! And there is enough of a taste spectrum there to choose from, and still compose an individual ballot reflecting your preferences, while selecting from a list of objective canon-worthy titles.
But there is always room for a few pre-1960 masterpieces in an up-to-date canon. The masterpieces from the silent and classical era that still defy contemporary achievements on equal footing, those with a chance to win any canonical title (arguably). But this number is a lot smaller than what it was before the boom of the 60ies (which produces a lot of canon-worthy masterpieces) as well as all the following decades (which opened the canon access to a lot more marginal countries).
I only listed 50 films there, the consensus among experts should be restricted to this range of choice, and argue together over which ones of these deserve better the Top10 privilege (even though they are all more or less on equal quality level, all part of the top tier masterpieces. This is my list of 50, but it could be another one if you really think I'm way off-base... I readily admit such pre-selection must not be made by a single individual. A canon must be built around the expertise of many, which should cancel out odd preferences and solidify the safest standards (among expert standards, not the safest among random mainstream beliefs). The point is to build a credible consensus around few potential candidates, not let people randomly pick 2000+ films, which cannot possibly be all Top10-worthy. A top10 is only 10, not 2000! We can allow some room for subjectivity and expert disagreements by extending the pool to 50 instead of 10 and narrow it down by popular vote. But if you START the selection by a popular vote from 2000 nominees narrowing it down to 10 by a "majority" of less than 22%, you'll never get a credible consensus, an expert statement, an historical establishment.

Related :

• S&S 2012 Canon : Number 1 / Numbers / You're qualified to vote if... / Hollywood Supremacy? 
• Forgotten Obsolete English Word #7 : Canon 
• Subjective Ice Cream Canon (ironic)

S&S2012 Canon (4) : Hollywood Supremacy?

Without data on USA attendance prior to 1946, we'll just focus on post-1939 canon titles. The mid-forties were the all-time peak in theatre attendance for both the USA and the UK. The drop (mainly due to the TV competition) is quite dramatic ever after. And you can notice that the post-1939 titles in the S&S Top50 are very dense in the 50ies and more generally earlier than the mid-60ies. The canon is a lot more picky for the next 50 years!!!

• More audience in the theatres = More masterpieces in the collective unconscious = More critics recall this period as "important" = Larger consensus around certain masterpieces
• Less audience in the theatres = Less buzz around cinema greatness in the public opinion = Less critics noticing the greatness of films = No clear consensus around any masterpiece

Does it mean the canon is right, thus cinema was actually greater in the 1950ies and 60ies? Or is the canon really conservative, nostalgic and slow to adapt, thus ignoring newer masterpieces for more than 20 years after their releases?

What about the myth of Hollywood's supremacy?

The heydays of Classical Hollywood, or Golden Age, was THE greatest period of cinema history back in the  50ies, because sound cinema had reached true mastery of the medium in the Hollywood Studios, and they also greatly benefited from the emigration of many great European masters (notably the jewish filmmakers refugees before and during the Second World War, persecuted in the German territories; see Hollywood émigrés). There was a perfect convergence of talent, technique, equipment, infrastructure and budgets like nowhere else in the world. Until 1960, Classical Hollywood (in red) was THE referential standard worldwide (especially thanks to the re-appraisal by French criticism, which American critics rather forget), therefore had a rightful shot at stealing and monopolizing most places on a canon Top10 back then, if they disputed the privilege to the masters of the late Silent era (who equally deserved the crowning title, if not more for some of them). And this was possible because some of the non-English films (Ozu or Satyajit Ray for example) you see in this period on the above graph (in grey), were not acknowledged (or even released at all) in the UK-USA at that time.
The difference of conservative degrees for an English-centric canon is that Hollywood or British films are canonised immediately or within 10 years (the close influences by importation like Germany, France or Italy also get this advantage to some extent), but for Japan, India they have to wait decades. A stricter conservative bias for non-Euro-American cinema.

So in hindsight, we can see today, that the Hollywood-made masterpieces (in red on the graph) aren't as dominant as the American patriots would like us to believe... Even in the 50ies, when they should reign supreme, the red is matched by the grey, if not outnumbered! The last "studio-movie" in the canon (not just from the Golden Age limited period) is Psycho in 1960, the last American-made movie is Apocalypse Now in 1979 (and not even a studio movie, more like an independent film from the New Hollywood secession! like The Godfather 1 & 2 and Taxi Driver). So the last genre-movie coming from the USA in the Top50 is The Godfather 2, which came out nearly 40 years ago! And it's a canon voted by American and British critics!!! How great is recent Hollywood genre again? That's what a canon is for (when done properly), to hold current production up to the highest standards in history, and adjust your own over-praise accordingly.

So where is that supremacy of Classical Hollywood, or American indies, or Hollywood genre??? Even when the Commonwealth votes, the non-English masterpieces (mostly artfilms) dominate, either from Europe or Asia. So now that the (conservative) canon has came to term with this 1950ies mascarade, it's about time that critics start to absorb this fact too, in their weekly writings, and stop deluding themselves in thinking that Hollywood has any exclusive stronghold on canonical laurels or auteurism credits. Citizen Kane is the tree hiding the forest, or the lack thereof... The number 1 title is the only thing remembered by the public opinion, and the commonplace issued from there is that Hollywood is king of the world. But you can't reduce a canon to its (English-biased) first spot.

Hollywood didn't produce any canonical film (Top50) since the 1970ies !!! (No, Mulholland Dr. isn't American, ABC ditched it and France produced it!)

---

2012 Sight & Sound Poll (Critics votes), Directors ranking (cumulated votes by director's country)

1. USA (Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Coppola, Murnau, Chaplin, Scorsese, Lynch, Keaton, Donen, Wilder) 1542 votes !!!?
2. France (Godard, Renoir, Bresson, Buñuel, Vigo, Lanzman, Truffaut, Tati, Marker) 773 votes
3. Japan (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi) 401 votes 
4. Italy (Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica, Pontecorvo) 389 votes 
5. USSR (Takovsky, Eisenstein, Vertov) 309 votes 
6. UK (Kubrick, Powell & Pressburger) 241 votes
7. Germany (Murnau, Lang) 225 votes 
8. Denmark (Dreyer) 158 votes 
9. Sweden (Bergman) 143 votes 
10. China (Wong Kar-wai) 42 votes
11. India (S. Ray) 31 votes
12. Iran (Kiarostami) 31 votes

Are you serious? Talk about an American-centric bias in the poll due to an overwhelming majority of British and American voters. France is also heavily favoured in the number of auteurs, but not as much in terms of votes... So that's the mathematics of this flawed poll, of these biased voters. But does it reflect the actual situation of world cinema history accurately? Not quite!


The mainstream mindset

So, was cinema greater in the 50-60ies or is there a nostalgic bias at work? When you see the density of canonical masterpieces before 1970, you wonder if cinema has declined ever since... As if Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhang-ke, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima, Naruse, Kobayashi, Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, Tarr Béla, Aleksandr Sokurov, Theos Angelopoulos, Alain Resnais, Michael Haneke, Ousmane Sembene... never made masterpieces as great as anything made before the 60ies! This is ludicrous. I know the canon's inertia is full of nostalgia and conservatism... but this is forgivable for 10 or 20 years (2 polls time to adjust), not for 50 years! There are limits to the test of time, if a film critic needs 50 years to assess objectively whether a masterpiece is over-inflated by timely buzz/trend/zeitgeist... why the fuck are they even bothering writing on a weekly basis??? this is pure incompetence, this is bullshit!
We need a referential canon made by people who are more diligent to judge newer masterpieces (10 or 15 years at the maximum is acceptable) and revise the higher standards attained by recent cinema, instead of relying on outdated standards from the Classical era, when storytelling was much simpler, codified, censored and content more superficial. It's about time to give it's due distinction to the superior cinema of Modernity (which should be the center of gravity of cinema standards to date) for one, and to the very contemporary world cinema, from outside Western Europe and the USA. Because the greatest cinema is now made in Asia, Eastern Europe or South America... that's just a fact. And they deserve the recognition, the attention, the support from the critical institution, and from spectators.


From the directors cited in the Top50 Canon (+ the omitted masters; "?" not highest canonical level) :

	American canonical masters	Rest of the World canonical masters
Pre-1960	Hitchcock (UK) Welles Murnau (DE) Ford Keaton Chaplin (UK) Lang (DE) Donen (?) Wilder (?)	Ozu Eisenstein Kurosawa Bresson Mizoguchi + Murnau (German period) Vertov Renoir (French period) Rosselini De Sica Dreyer Lang (German period) Fellini Vigo (?) + Buñuel
Post-1960	Kubrick (UK) Lynch Coppola (?) Scorsese (?) + Cassavetes + Altman + Malick	Tarkovsky Bergman Bresson S. Ray Antonioni Tarr Béla Wong Kar-wai Kiarostami + Hou Hsiao-Hsien + Jia Zhang-ke Akerman (?) Tati Truffaut (?) Godard Marker (?) Lanzmann (?) Pontecorvo (?) Powell & Pressburger (?) Edward Yang + Oshima + Angelopoulos + Sokurov + Kurosawa  + Ozu  + Resnais + Ousmane Sembene + Buñuel  + Lee Chang-dong + Hong Sang-soo + Kobayashi + Roy Andersson + Kieslowski + Fassbinder + Victor Erice + Werner Herzog

Related :

• S&S 2012 Canon : Number 1 / Numbers / You're qualified to vote if... 
• Attendance History - World Cinema Stats (23) 
• Hollywood System Auteurs? 
• Poll dance (Tom Paulus; Photogenie; 9 Aug 2012) 
• Aesthetic Hegemonies in Cinema History 

S&S2012 Canon (3) : You are qualified to vote if...

The listmaking game for critics who have seen ALL films ever made (or almost)

Voting for a canon is no casual or trivial endeavour. People may make a number of random lists, and polls and ranking, without meeting any qualification issues. A canon is not a random list like every others. It's a very special election, and you need to know the entirety of cinema history to be able to weigh in, the evaluate the waning aura of old masterpieces and the surge to the summit of the most recent masterpieces, all this in comparison to the established standards over the years and in particular being able to appreciate and contextualize the level of today's standards.
If the umpire shows up one hour late into a tennis match, and counts the score only from this point on, he could come up with a very different winner at the end, without knowing the full picture, the full match.
We can catch up with cinema history and watch the films made before our time, but most people do not, and still want to be part of the vote for the fun, not because they feel capable to judge such a wide scope and depth of history. A film canon is not a venture for just any movie lover, it's for erudit veteran cinéphiles with a considerable cinema culture, curiosity and discernment. If you respect the purpose and importance of a canon, you should have the humility, deference, curtsy to let qualified people take that poll, and pass until you feel properly qualified.

You are qualified to vote in the establishment of an all time canon if...

1. you've seen more than 10,000 films and are able to recall/judge/compare them
2. you're familiar with ALL the Top100 titles from the previous poll, especially the long ones and hard-to-find ones (because these are the one suffering from unfavorable lack of votes). Do I need to specify seen ON THE BIG SCREEN?
3. you know inside out every period of cinema history, all the major aesthetic movements, at least, and more
4. you're not a self-confessed partisan for a narrow genre/era/country, or are using this for a publicity stunt to rescue a minority (silent films, female films...)
5. you know what the establishment of a canon consists of
6. you understand you're not doing it for your own satisfaction, but to participate in a collective enterprise where your individuality will be averaged out
7. you know a canon is not a random viewing recommendation, a beginner's road map, a dream package to carry with you on a desert island, the list of most re-watchable entertainment, or your idiosyncratic guilty pleasures.
8. you're not trying to catch everyone off-guard with crazy picks that have no chance to get into a consensual Top100
9. your ballot (which is supposed to stand until the next decennial poll!) doesn't change every day (a canon is for voters with a stable and sure taste)
10. you're not going to use quotas and other arbitrary rules to screw the deserving titles
11. you consider a nominee for its overall achievements, not just for the subject or the story or one performance or one scene or one punchline

All this would otherwise invalidate your participation, and mess up the result at worst (for other titles than those you promote) or do nothing at best (by being statistically insignificant).

These simple rules should bring down the number of canon makers to a more reasonable (and credible) elite of qualified voters, even if the downside is that the age average of these veterans will always tend to be too high for the past-conservatism to go away. But again, it's one of the defining characteristics of a canon to enshrine newer work with a certain delay, after a considerable test of time.

A useful canon is a canon which ballots are compatible for consensus and are tabulated constructively, not by antagonism and friction. 

A constructive consensus is not one that let rise to the top the lowest common denominator because the stronger candidates are diluted in a multitude of disparate selections, but is one that converges towards a limited number of the strongest titles.

There are enough "suitable" masterpieces around today to let every voter free of a personalised choice that will show their preferences and their strong stance (within the academic establishment). Your Top10 should be at least at the level of everyone else's Top100, and the ranking in the final collective Top10 will be determined by popularity among qualified voters.

The Long Tail curve is typical of an exclusive hegemony

846 voters replied before deadline, from a contingent of 1000 invitations extended out to 73 countries throughout the world. They think that expanding the voter base is an improvement, and they advertise the diversity of nationality... However if we omit the doubles due to typos (or the country of "Africa"???), the British/American critics who file in under another vacation-location in addition to UK/USA, and when we look at the proportion of English-speaking territories (56%), the "diversity" is more into the marketing talking points than giving foreigners a real shot at influencing the Euro-American establishment.

• ENGLISH =56% (233 UK; 173 USA; 26 Australia; 19 Canada; 13 Ireland; 6 South Africa; 4 New Zealand)
• EUROPE =63% (233 : UK; 50: Spain; 34 : Germany; 32 : France; 24 : Italy; 14 : Russia, Sweden; 13 : Ireland; 12 : Hungary, Netherlands, Switzerland; 10 : Poland; 8 : Slovenia; 7 : Austria, Czech Rep., Romania; 6 : Estonia, Portugal; 5 : Norway, Serbia; 3 : Belgium, Greece; 2 : Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia; 1 : Belarus, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine) 
• AMERICA =28% (173 : USA; 19 Canada; 17 Argentina; 8 Brazil; 7 Mexico; 4 Cuba; 3 Peru; 2 : Chile, Colombia; 1 : Guyana, Uruguay)
• ASIA + OCEANIA =10% (26 Australia; 12 Japan; 11 India; 13 China; 7 South Korea; 4 Thailand, New Zealand; 3 Taiwan; 2 Pakistan; 1 Philippines)
• AFRICA + GREATER MIDDLE EAST =5% (7 Israel, Turkey; 6 South Africa; 5 Lebanon; 3 Egypt; 2 Kazakhstan; 1 Abu Dhabi, Algeria, Armenia, Burkina Faso, Dubai, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tunisa, UAE, Uzbaekistan)

Keep in mind there are redundant counting because some critics are listed under several locations.

Are you surprised now that Europe and the USA hold up over 90% of the Top100 titles?

Sight and Sound is a British magazine, so it's normal and expected they primarily cater to their local readership, their local critics and cinema professionals. No question about it. Maybe also to the English-speaking countries because the language of publication is English. Nonetheless, there is a genuine effort to expand the roster to the world.
Although it might look like a desperate attempt at positive discrimination without any real leverage...
As you can see on the graph above, the English advantage is not merely the largest number, slightly above everyone else, it singlehandedly dominates a large majority by itself. And if English-speaking voters can't even agree on a number 1 (only 22.6% of the votes), what kind of consensus has any chance to rise to the top10 for isolated voters whose indigenous taste will vanish in a multitude of residual orphan picks?

I'm glad that countries like Spain (50 voters), Hungary (12), Netherlands (12), Switzerland (12), Poland (10), Slovenia (8), Estonia (6)... get a powerful lobby at the Sight and Sound redaction for a fat quota in the roster... but other larger countries get ripped off : China (13), India (11), Japan (12), Brasil (8), Mexico (7), Russia (14)!

And when you look at which films the outsider voters pick, they favour American and European masterpieces instead of weighing in for their own culture (which is something they could and should do better than anyone else), or in general for a non-USA-Europe-biased World Cinema!

In a perfect world, even Europe-based critics would be open-minded and not partial toward their own national culture... thus vote impartially for the objectively BEST FILMS IN THE WORLD, not the Best European or Hollywood films... But obviously we can observe that decades after decades, the cultural imperialists declare sacred their local masters, write cinema history accordingly, and impose to everyone else this self-marketing propaganda. Sadly, many people buy into it, and believe there isn't anything else outside of Hollywood and Western Europe (limited to France, UK, Germany, Italy, USSR and Sweden).

A greater balance with a reasonable representation by nationality, YES, although an absolute parity is impossible, nor strictly desirable/practical anyway. But this shouldn't mean to expand and dilute the number of voters to people who have no business dealing with the totality of cinema history. Maybe they are afraid to tell some voters "sorry we won't be needing you anymore", so they just add a new layer on top of an ill-conceived foundation.

The election of the all-time greatest films shouldn't be EVERYBODY's business. When you only organise a poll every 10 years, it should be taken a little more seriously than "here is my favourite memories from the top of my head, as of today". No. If there is only one vote every 10 years, every voter should make use of these 10 years to pounder over their idea of a pantheon, to revise, to rewatch, to cover your blind spots, to watch other voters's nominees, to re-rank your top100, to reconsider new configurations, to re-evaluate the past classics, to re-appraise the new masterpieces. Then maybe we'd be looking at a canon worth taking seriously! A canon which wouldn't insult its name of "canon" by disguising as a populist survey.

Related :

• S&S 2012 Canon : Number 1 / Numbers / Hollywood's Supremacy? 
• Nuances in "Art Cinema" History

S&S 2012 Canon (2) : Numbers

Giving all titles on each ballot the same weight gives a more balanced canon. But the top spots are still way above everyone else, out of reach... This is not a healthy competition, nor a credible one. Even if Vertigo and Citizen Kane are THE best films there ever were (which is at least debatable), they shouldn't be superior to the runner ups by a factor of 2 or 5! Because voters gave 10 titles, not just one on their ballot. The head-start is suspicious, most likely due to the myth surrounding the canon status quo : i.e. These films are always cited as the best films, so I must put them on my ballot or else I'll look like a fool. This kind of mentality allows a given film to raise above the rest by sheer popularity alone. Is Vertigo TWICE as great as Tokyo Story or La règle du jeu, which would justify why it gets nominated twice as many times by voters? Hell no! This is B.S. Maybe in 1930, there were a couple masterpieces that were that much superior to all the rest... But not today, not these titles.

All this becomes mitigated by the fact that Vertigo was only mentioned by 191 voters of a total of 846 participants!!!! That's barely 22.6 % of the voters! That's the GREATEST FILM OF ALL TIME for you... only backed up by less than 1 voter out of 4!!! How great and famous it is then? Not even the FIRST one on the poll is cited by EVERYONE? WTF? And the last on the top50 is "consensual" for 1 voter out of 29.

Let's emphasize this : more than 3 out of 4 alleged "experts" disagree that Vertigo belongs to a top50, and 28 out of 29 "experts" think that La Jetée doesn't belong on a top50, but both films (and all the others between them) end up being enshrined on magazine paper for posterity anyway!

What happens is that there are 50 or 100 people amongst voters who play the rules and vote for the established titles that should most likely top this canon, a convergent goal, a common target, and all the others are just shooting astray for the joke, because they don't take their task seriously enough.

That's what you get when you let people take it easy on a canon contribution, they just push their personal favourites with no regard for the actual titles that MOST EVERYONE should recognize as the CONSENSUAL GREATNESS in film culture. See : Critical Fallacy # 13 : Inconsistent Standards 

* * *

Let's forget about the particular titles cited for a moment, and break down this pseudo-consensus into statistical facts.
With an average of about 3000 films produced in the world every year, the centennial history of cinema tallies, at least, approximately 300,000 films (how many of these have you seen?). 
A Top1000 roughly corresponds to 0.3% of the total of all films that ever existed!!! A Top100 roughly corresponds to 0.03% of the total. A sample of 10 titles roughly corresponds to 0.003% of the total. So we're talking about the absolute ELITE of cinema. These films are not merely supposed to be awesome to you, today, they must be the absolute best according to all possible objective consensual criteria, across over a century of history. And if you've seen 10000 (distinct) films in your lifetime (which isn't the case of the vast majority of voters I safely assume), a ballot of 10 titles corresponds to 0.1% of your movie consumption (put that in regard to all the films you haven't seen!). It's much easier for you to select 10 films out of a 10000 seen, than it is for a canon to elect a Top10 out of  300,000 titles in cinema history.
Think about it : every film on this Top100 canon is there not because voters deemed it worthy of placing in a their Top100, but they promoted them as TOP10 MATERIAL!!! 

TOP 10

AUTEURS : 100% Male
No double citation for a single filmmaker (which happened for Chaplin in 1952, Eisenstein in 62, Bergman in 72, Welles in 72 and 82).  But for such a small sample, it's pointless to draw any conclusions on who's missing from the very top of the pyramid (by genre, decades or language)...

GEOGRAPHY : However it's important to note that the films are predominantly from the Western world. Only 4 films from the East made it in a top10 since 1952 (Ugetsu Monogatari in 62, 72; Seven Samourai in 82; Pather Panchali in 92; Tokyo Story in 92, 02, 12; all with decades-long overdue acknowledgements)... the rest are ALL either from Europe or the USA! If this British-made canon proved to be open to the non-English world (France, Italy, USSR, Denmark, Sweden) it never looked very hard outside of their immediate zone of influence (Asia, South America, Middle East), despite a wide spread presence of the Common Wealth British empire throughout the world...

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TOP 50

AUTEURS : 98% Male / 2% Female

• 4 Godard
• 3 Coppola, Dreyer, Tarkovsky
• 2 Hitchcock, Ozu, Kurosawa
• 1 Bresson, Renoir, Murnau, Lang, Kubrick, Ford, Eisenstein, Fellini, Vigo, Donen, Antonioni, WKW, Lynch, Lanzmann, Scorsese, De Sica, Keaton, Akerman, Tarr, Truffaut, Rosselini, Wilder, S. Ray, Tati, Pontecorvo, Chaplin, Mizoguchi, Marker, Kiarostami

GEOGRAPHY : 50 North / 0 South - 42 West / 8 East

• 25 Europe / 14 North America / 7 Asia / 1 Middle East / 0 South America / 0 Africa
• 14 USA; 13 France; 6 Italy; 5 USSR, Japan; 2 Denmark, Sweden; 1 Hungary, Iran, India, Germany, China, Belgium

GENRE : 32 Classical / 15 Artfilm / 8 Experimental / 3 Documentary / 2 Musical / 0 Animation / 6 Silent

DECADES : 1920s : 6 / 1930s : 3 / 1940s : 3 / 1950s : 12 / 1960s : 15 / 1970s : 7 / 1980s : 1 / 1990s : 3 / 2000s : 2

LANGUAGE : 14 English / 14 French / 6 Italian / 5 Russian / 5 Japanese...

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TOP100

AUTEURS :  98% Male / 2% Female

GEOGRAPHY : 99% North / 1% South - 89% West / 11% East

• 63 Europe / 31 North America / 10 Asia / 1 Middle East / 0 South America / 1 Africa
• 31 USA; 22 France; 9 Italy; 7 UK; 6 Japan; 5 USSR, Sweden; 4 Germany; 2 Denmark, Taiwan; 1 India, Iran, Hungary, Belgium, China, Spain, Georgia, Senegal

GENRE : 63 Classical / 29 Artfilm / 11 Experimental / 4 Documentary / 2 Musical / 0 Animation / 11 Silent

DECADES : 1920s (or before) : 10 / 1930s : 7 / 1940s : 9 / 1950s : 25 / 1960s : 21 / 1970s : 14 / 1980s : 6 / 1990s : 5 / 2000s : 3

LANGUAGE : 38 English / 24 French / 9 Italian / 6 Japanese / 5 Russian / 5 Swedish / 4 German...

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A canon should not be built on representational diversity (in order to make everyone happy, and show a politically correct panel), but we may nonetheless take a look at the quota-free poll results, and detect what are the predilections of the voters (not individually, but as a collegiate mind, as a timely mentality). This lack of diversity does not reflect a meaningless canon, on the contrary (if we can trust the voting standards) this shows the hierarchies of the establishment, and possibly the state of cinema in the world.
*IF* the ballots are educated, the first culprit is the world : other countries outside of Europe and the USA just don't make as many masterpieces as well. Which is partly true, sadly, in all objectivity. There are great films made in the world, but when it comes to elect the 100 best films of all time, the competition level is very high (as evidenced by the quality of the films present).

However, we cannot discount the absence of curiosity of the voting panel (which I suspect mainly  consists of English-speaking reviewers or European, even though the electorate increased from 150 to 846 this year). And there are obvious blind spots, overlooked masterpieces that are never included within the "usual suspects". 

There aren't too many candidates which absolutely do not deserve a spot in a top100... it's always debatable to an extent. Personally I would strike out less than 20. Meanwhile, there are more than 20 that I would add to the roster for being superior to the ones locked in... but these choices are arguable (because they only reflect MY opinion). Even though, the ones overlooked would probably improve the ultimate diversity of the canon. Half of the Hollywood-made films, and even some European ones get a free ride, out of deference for an established reputation, out of habit or familiarity, rather than because they persist to earn their spot against newer films. 

The Silent films were all the rage in the 40ies and 50ies, because cinema was half as old than today, there were less existing films, and the sound era was too inexperienced. Gradually, although very slowly, the silent masterpieces met their match and yielded their spot to newer films. Silent masterpieces are still excellent by all means, but 80 years since the peak of the silent era, cinema history lines up A LOT MORE titles, and the number of great films exploded, while the limited space in a top100 doesn't budge. We must judge past history in comparison to today's greatest achievements. Even if most academics and critics are fond for their impressionable youth, truth is we can make films today as great as in the silent era, or the Hollywood classical golden age for that matter.
I'm glad that the canon-making made adjustments in recent decades, not only by stoping this blind worshipping of Citizen Kane this year, but also by letting go of overrated darlings such as Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, Intolerance, The Wizard of Oz, Jaws, Birth of a Nation, Black Narcissus, The Maltese Falcon, E.T., The Red Shoes, Bonnie and Clyde, Broken Blossom ... which belong to a canon of a bygone era; they just look "dull" alongside the greater masterpieces on a list of only 100 bests. And this is not the arguable part of the canon, they lost their edge a long time ago! 

Did you hear anybody complain about the scandalous lack of women in the canon, like it happens every year for the line up of Cannes??? No. Because these clueless pundits don't give a shit about gender equality... they just have an anti-Cannes axe to grind.

Overall (Top50), Godard gets the most citations (4 titles) but fails to place one film in the top10 (161 votes for all his entries). Meanwhile Welles hugged number one for such a long time, but barely place a second film in the top100 (157 votes in total)... Hitchcock is the winner with the most votes (225) from only 2 films.
However Godard is hardly the greatest filmmaker ever! Hitchcock has a defensible shot at the title, but has been surpassed by the apparition of an Eisenstein, a Ozu, a Bresson, a Kurosawa, a Kubrick, a Tarkovsky, a Lynch, a Kiarostami... They are at least as masterful and perfectionist (and Godard doesn't reach this level of perfection). Why would the "establishment" only want to remember one and kind of underplay/overlook the others? We should see at least some fair competition between them, neck and neck, not such a wide gap of notoriety. Welles and Hitchcock already monopolized the laurels for half a century, it's about time to accept to let go of these safe, convenient idols. It's about time to realise the possibility of cinema to improve the quality level (however paramount in its own time) of the Classical age.

Largely overlooked : South America (Mexico, Argentina most notably), China (and Hong Kong), India (obviously), Iran, Taiwan or South Korea. And in Europe we could cite as well Greece, Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Romania... Or Canada in North America.

If we take a look at the language spoken in the world (or at least in the world of cinema-producing countries), Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic should dominate film culture... However, only English (mainly thanks to Hollywood) really stands out. India or Japan make the most films in quantity, but unfortunately they don't make the best films in term of quality... there should be more canon-worthy masterpieces in the lot.
If China (Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhang-ke, Zhang Yimou, Fei Mu, Sun Yu) is a mid-range player in the masterpieces field (except maybe Taiwan with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang who are Top-range), Japan is one of the world's top players (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Oshima, Naruse, Kobayashi) and is clearly underrepresented in the canon.

I have to say that given the relatively limited spread of French language in the world, France is making a remarkable show in this Top100 with nearly a 1/4 of the films (and tied with English in the Top50!) for such a small country. And there are still "cinéphiles" who think that Hollywood is THE most important contributor to film culture, auteurism and film literature... But let's be honest, if France objectively deserves one of the top spots in cinema history for all its auteurs, films, critics... a quarter of the Top100 for a single country is way too generous, and denotes an obvious bias in the accounts of the cinema legends.

We can also note that Europe gets almost twice as many spots in the Top100 as the USA does. And this is an English-centric canon made by Sight and Sound (so the bias towards Hollywood and British cinema is overinflated to begin with). Where is the cultural hegemony of Hollywood in the highest spheres of film culture? Everybody keeps talking about it, but I don't see it. Must be a self-affirmative mantra that American reviewers and historians love to tell themselves. MY canon would be more fair toward World Cinema and even less partial for Hollywood.

English and French language films take up 62% of the Top100... which leaves a little more than 1/3rd for all other languages in the world! Is it a fair representation of cinema greatness in the world? Or is it slightly inflated by the exclusivity of self-centric English and French film literature? Objectively we can only recognize this consistent quality in research and development of new film forms... the USA and France do stand out as some kind of leaders in the world of cinema; but maybe not to such extent, and such lopsided fashion, which explains why less obvious countries get shut out of the canon. Marginal countries need more supporters among the "expert-voter" (who would qualify to vote if they were).

Related :

• S&S 2012 Canon (1) : Number 1 
• Presumptuous Best Film in the World 
• The 2012 Sight & Sound Poll [Part 1]: Don’t Call it a Consensus
(Andrea Comiskey & Jonah Horwitz; Antenna; 6 Aug 2012)