Every few months somebody publishes a list of films everyone should see, and every few months the same argument breaks out underneath it. The list is too old. The list is too obvious. The list has no horror, no animation, no comedy, nothing after a certain decade, nothing from outside a handful of countries. Somebody points out that a film on the list is boring. Somebody else points out that boring is not an argument. Nobody’s mind changes and the whole thing runs again the next time.
The argument is stale because the premise is wrong. Almost everyone treats these lists as verdicts, as if the point were to declare the winners. Read that way they are indefensible, because no honest person believes that a hundred films can be ranked against each other in any final sense. But that was never the job. A canon list is not a scoreboard. It is a syllabus.
A syllabus, not a scoreboard
Think about what a syllabus does. It does not claim that the assigned reading is the best writing ever produced. It claims something narrower and far more useful: that if you work through these particular things in roughly this order, you will come out able to do something you could not do before. The texts are chosen for what they teach, how they connect to each other, and how much they open up once you have them.
A film canon works the same way. The films on it are load-bearing. They are the ones that other films are in conversation with, the ones whose techniques got absorbed into the grammar everyone now uses, the ones that changed what a certain kind of movie was allowed to be. Watching them is not an act of homage. It is the acquisition of a vocabulary.
This is why the standard complaint that a canonical film is boring misses the target so completely. It might well be boring to you, right now, on a Tuesday. Boredom is a real experience and there is no point lying about it. But the question a syllabus asks is not did you enjoy this. It is can you now see something you could not see before. A film can bore you and still permanently change how you watch everything after it.
The two things people mean by “should”
Part of the mess comes from the word “should,” which is doing two incompatible jobs at once.
The first meaning is obligation: you owe it to the art form, to your own seriousness, to have seen these. This is the version people rightly resent. It turns film into homework and viewers into people who are behind on their assignments, and it always carries a faint sneer.
The second meaning is closer to a recommendation with a reason attached: if you like film enough to be reading a list about it, these are the ones that will pay you back the most for the time. That is not an obligation. That is somebody handing you a map of where the good stuff is buried.
Almost every fight about canon lists is really a fight about which “should” is being used. Write the second kind and the temperature drops immediately.
Canons are arguments, and that is the point
The other durable objection is that these lists are political: they encode whose films got funded, whose got preserved, whose got written about by the people who happened to control the writing. That objection is correct. Any canon is a record of who had access to cameras, money and archives, and of what a particular group of critics found legible at a particular moment.
The wrong conclusion is that canons should therefore be abandoned. The right conclusion is that a canon is an argument, and arguments can be answered. The useful response to a narrow list is a better list, with reasons. This is exactly how canons have always changed: films that were dismissed on release get re-examined, whole national cinemas get rediscovered when their prints finally circulate, genres that were treated as beneath criticism get taken seriously by a new generation of writers who grew up loving them.
A canon that never changes is dead. One that changes for no reason is worthless. The thing to defend is the practice of arguing about it in public with your reasoning shown.
How to build one that works
If you are going to make a list like this, a few principles keep it honest.
- Say what the list is for. A list for someone who has seen thirty films and a list for someone who has seen three thousand are different objects. Most bad lists are bad because they are pretending to serve both.
- Give each entry a reason. Not a plot summary. A sentence explaining what this film does that the others do not, and what it unlocks. If you cannot write that sentence, the film is on the list out of habit.
- Include the difficult ones, and say they are difficult. Warning someone that a film is slow, or cruel, or structurally strange, does not scare them off. It prepares them, which is the difference between bouncing off a film and getting through to it.
- Leave the seams visible. Say what you have not seen. Say where your taste runs. A list with an honest bias is more useful than one pretending to be a view from nowhere.
- Do not confuse importance with quality. Some films matter because they were first, not because they are good, and it is worth saying so out loud rather than quietly inflating them.
What it is actually for
The best thing a canon list does has nothing to do with settling anything. It gives a person who has just started caring about film a place to stand. That is not a small gift. The volume of available cinema is genuinely paralysing, and “watch whatever you like” is useless advice to someone who does not yet know what they like.
A good list says: start here, because these connect to everything else. Then, once you have a footing, the list should become disposable. You outgrow it. You start disagreeing with it in specific rather than general terms, which is to say you start having taste of your own. The list has done its job at the exact moment you no longer need it.
So the next time one appears and the comments fill up with people explaining that it is wrong, remember that being wrong in an interesting way is most of the value. A canon list is an invitation to argue, and the argument is where anyone learns anything. It is a syllabus for a class nobody grades, and the only failing outcome is watching nothing at all.
