THE SHIP IS LISTING - by awful stack
I’ve already forgotten about the list. It snowed overnight, and my cat — who is small and round — walks around in the snow with the snow reaching up to her belly.
— There are ships that list — they lean into the water, bending as if lazy; to starboard, to port. The Costa Concordia — laying upon the rocks as if in sleep. Foucault reads Borges, taming “the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between same and other”. List articulates sameness and difference (such and such thing is like [of the same order] but qualitatively different from such and such thing, Etc). The famously-cited Chinese encyclopaedia in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification”, Etc. What does a list do except propose a resolvable same-same-difference? What if your list is not merely an accumulation (the archive), but a hierarchy? There’s more than a whiff of old physik to this, humours and their ilk — why you love your little astrological system, and where we (you, I) belong within it. Any list necessarily gestures beyond itself,— to what is — by definition — excluded from the list. A list always talks about everything that exists; totally. By the by, the list is already obsolete.
— Lists spawn lists (in this, they are generative) — because the list is subjective, and draws a (some think; many think) unfair circle with the wagons of the culture. The proprietors of the list must be stupid and/or foolish, and those who contributed to the list are “misinformed, actually”. One contributor reveals a little embarrassment that (some of) their proposed additions to the list were actually incorporated into the list, just as others make various apologies for their selections (“with my selections, I was–”). To list is — necessarily — to imprint, and to project. This is your state of the art, even while the mandarins who compiled it are ever fretful about their task (either: its immensity, [or] its fragility). Did we do a good job?
— The list is wearing noise-cancelling headphones and is rolling a snowball.
— If these are the best one hundred films ever made, then everybody — at least — is in agreement that the task itself is riddled with the rot (of omissions, dud inclusions). Luminaries (but not Lumieres) cling on, the elder statesmen who — adjusting their robes, reeking of noblesse oblige — make room on the benches for those brash new arrivals who are drawing eyes from across the room (and beyond: the windows, where we — paupers and grocers — peek in, faces pressed to the glass). They try to get comfy. I can’t believe he’s wearing that, it is the last days of Rome, etc. Is the list a lottery? Yes, and no. The list leans over in the water, and all manner of cutlery and crockery slides about. The ship of life has crashed upon the rocks of — Mayakovsky, declarative; mad-eyed.
— Listing is listing, leaning over — subject to sinking. I am talking without specificity. Jeanne Dilman rises to the froth of the broth; suspended on a matrix of collapsed collagen and chicken bone. The real work comes later, when we — us — begin to do auguries over these melted bones, intuiting the intentions of the list-makers. If you were to vote for Ozu, would you choose his agreed-upon masterpiece (Tokyo Story), or some cherished b-side (Equinox Flower). So-and-so must have voted with this intention, and you are like sulky fans of football guess-timating the grand strategy of the coach (narrow-nosed, blinking; arms folded against the green lees of the pitch). “It is good to see Tarr here, to see Weerasthethakul here, to see Deren here, to see Denis here”, as if you are idling by the wedding buffet and nodding as each half-acquaintance makes their appearance beneath the shade of the marquee; [fanning themselves, hoo boy]. But. But. Whose absence reflects a controversy, a glaring omission. “Where’s Reygadas — was his invite lost in the mail?”. There is no invite, not really. There is no room for plus ones. Who is embalmed and who tame? Hawks, a suckling pig; Dreyer, a stray dog.
— The list is a function of enlightenment reason. There are lists of drunkards (1834), and lists of instances of premature interment (1816), and lists of stages from courtship to marriage (held in the Boston Public Library — no date). The list — claimed Umberto Eco — is the “origin of culture”. Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum of 1684 contains — from its 195 page — a list of many divers items contained within an imagined collection, including “rare and generally unknown books”, “an ancient British herbal”, an illustration – a “moon piece” — “describing that notable battel between Axalla, general of Tamerlane, and Camares of Perian, fought by the light of the moon”, “a Draught of famous Dwarfs”, some “ancient ivory and copper”, in addition to a “large ostrich’s egg” engraved “neatly and fully” with a scene depicting the “famous battle of Alcazar”, that never (actually) took place. Here, “three Kings loft their lives”. Lists can be fun, too.
— The list is kneeling by the lake, trying to catch its reflection in the murk.
— The list is not merely a monument, but a function. The list is a to-do list, a to-watch list, whose check-marks shore us up against the ruins of the culture. Franklin “drew up a list of virtues”. The films contained, are they virtuous? By watching them, we gain a little self-righteous light. To be cast adrift in the list, confronted with the lode-stone of your unwatching, is to be humbled before those same ruins. Would you admit you hadn’t seen Mirror, had never taken the time to watch L'Atalante? Likely not. You might also use the list to beat others. The list — after all — is, in the Middle English (c. 1600) a kind of “stripe” or thin strip of border, a piece of cloth or garment, which — in an earlier iteration (lyst) had been understood as a poetic appeal: hear, harken. A narrow strip that must be paid attention to. You might be beaten or whipped with it, just as it might describe a ship teetering too closely to the waterline. Narrowness is unavoidable, where lists/lysts are concerned. Danger draws close, as do the rocks (the ruins). Is that an alarm I can hear, wailing?
— The list might reflect the widened aperture of the voting body. It might have been cooked up by the audacious lobbying of distributors and their PR directors, shimmying. Is there something foul in the list — is it filled with all sorts of Brownian concoctions (a ring found in the belly of a fish — the mummified body of one Father Crispin of Toulouse). Let’s ask Foucault (one of a list of people who might appear on a reading syllabus).
“When we establish a considered classification, when we say that a cat and a dog resemble each other less than two greyhounds do, even if both are tame or embalmed, even if both are frenzied, even if both have just broken the water pitcher, what is the ground on which we are able to establish the validity of this classification with complete certainty?”
Well, ahm — we cannot. In isolating, we analyse. The work has only just begun. A film about two bicycle thieves (1948) and an investigation into an attack (1950) — Italy, Japan — were produced under the same conditions of swallowed light (film — the machinery of exposure). We recognize all of these things as films, and we agree (mostly) on this. A man reads a newspaper with sunglasses on, cigarette drooping from his lips, just as a woman sits on a fence — waiting for her husband to come home. Have you seen, have you seen? The list cannot be a list of perfection (its suitability to be within the bounds of the List), but an articulation on the condition of its own possibility (Foucault). Best is not best, worst is not worst (or wurst, were we to be talking about sausages – which are eminently not films, though they are held in the shape of a sausage by a film [of flesh]). Really, are we not — with out poll-list — making a statement really about the horizon of critical consensus on which we’re currently perched, and about the kind of viewer that we are — in the round? The b-sides and underdogs (stray, brazen, having just broken a pitcher, embalmed, Etc) might properly reflect our night-time tastes (what we watch when nobody else is watching). The list effaces specificity, and renders a kind of pinhole epistemology on what films we watch (and like). Where’s Stan Brakhage! Where’s Parajanov! Where’s Yamatoya! We whine and caterwaul. The list wants us to pierce it and pull it apart, subject it to the microscope (and to the torture chamber). It’s just a list — the list doesn’t matter. The list matters most of all.
— The list exactingly prepares its outfit for work tomorrow, but spills coffee over itself eighteen minutes into an hour’s commute.
— It has snowed heavily and the list still lists, and it will exist tomorrow just as it did not exist on July 17th 2022. The list reflects a kind of royal jelly of opinion which is — precisely — nobodies’ opinion; because [I predict] no set of ten votes from any individual contributor will be reflected in the top ten of the ‘best 100 list’, because that list is a xerox copy reflected upside down in a broken mirror, and really — really — that impossible list is a lot like Thomas Browne’s imagined compendium; a list that is absolutely, indefatigably a list, while also being entirely fictive. Its truthiness is its listyness, and not the function of the items contained therein. The list is a generalisation — a truthful fabrication. It looks like a list, it barks like a list, it is embalmed like a list! “Language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, [an] indispensable link between representation and things”. The list affirms only that films are films. It is a list whose central chamber is thronged (at its fringes) with the flickering eyes of 173,394,045 others — films celebrated and burned, forgotten and loved. Pornos and instructional videos, adverts for toothpaste and in-flight safety briefings. These are also films. These are not films, but videos. The circled wagons of the List are studded with arrows — a pair of lifeless boots poke out. John Ford gallops away. Claude Lanzman stamps about in the tall grass, smoking. Tati wobbles an arrow’s shaft with a silly twanging sound. They mill about just as the horses beyond — yelling and dancing – draw their bow-strings back and prepare to fire. Is— is that Jonas Mekas? Is that Andrea Holland? Their hooves are very loud indeed.
— The list might spawn certain reverberations in the culture. Dielman will play to a crowd of seven in Shropshire! Akerman might finally get that big blu-ray boxset. There are winners and there are dribbling lords who — let’s be frank — have always been here, whose presence at the feast (which is also a circle of wagons) was predetermined, and who — by their nobility — grant the frisson of same-same-difference upon these new arrivals (Deren and Hammid can be seen, kicking the tyres and debating the lunch order). Somebody will have to look after the water supply, and somebody else will have to do the sweeping. If these are our luminaries and demi-gods, might we expect them to throw some manna onto the films that wait beyond the wings, twanging their bows?
— The list is making ‘your mum’ jokes in the Tesco carpark. It is doing press-ups in the shiny new PureGym. It is ordering a pizza with anchovies and pineapple.
— But let’s be real. There are other lists. There is your list and my list, and there is a list of new releases and a list of the films that are showing at the cinemas of Dresden next Tuesday afternoon. There are lists which are really shelves and there are lists of ‘hmm someday’, which have never — will never — be written down. I have never seen Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day. This is a list, too. It has just knocked a pitcher over.
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