I wrote this piece on (specifically private) film lists not long before that article was published; while I certainly had little to no intent of starting an argument at the time and framed the piece solely as a (somewhat embarrassing) personal reflection, I realise in hindsight that it serves as something of a direct riposte to Elena's piece, particularly these claims:
Suffice it to say I lean much more closely towards your view.Elena Gorfinkel wrote:Lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard.
Lists colonise the mind and impoverish the imagination.
Lists will always disappoint, even as they promise an inexhaustible world, an infinite plenum.
Lists bludgeon the dispossessed with a metric of popularity, as if it is a universal value.
Lists assert property, mastery, possession.
Lists are an anti-film politics.
Lists are metrics.
Metrics are our enemy, and the enemy of art and of political struggle. Every list is by necessity impossible, and must remain unwritten, a private reckoning. The unwritten list tarries with the inevitable vortex of unknowability into which all films will certainly fall, unless we can defend and describe them better, making space for their work as live and active forms.