Sweating in Gilmorehill as a Film and TV student at the University of Glasgow is a common occurrence. The cinema’s thermostat is set at a temperature feared by anti-perspirant manufacturers, and each underground seminar room really does make you feel closer to the equator. But nothing quite matches the hidrosis that I and I hope others experienced in response to the ice-breaker question we asked one another at the introductory lecture in first year: what’s your favourite film?
A first-world problem for an already sufficiently highly strung seventeen-year-old boy, yes, I wonder today what my answer was. Eager to impress my fellow future permanently unemployed cohort, was I self-aggrandising enough to say the closest thing I’d seen to a silent, Bulgarian, 3-hour-long psychosexual drama? Or did I list some of my actual nearest and dearest and risk their judgment?
Neither exclusive to film students nor socially awkward teenagers, many interested in film stutter when this loaded question is fired at them. Your answer can disclose your pretension or authenticity, but you might be more preoccupied with how many ‘uhms’ and ‘ahs’ you can get away with before the other person loses interest.
All this to say, there is a dichotomy equally paralysing as it is absurd between saying the best film you’ve seen or your favourite when asked the question. As a film student, I’m taught to disentangle subjectivity from objectivity when talking about cinema in a way that doesn’t translate outside the seminar room. Think about the terminology everyone uses in a good-faith debate over a film’s quality: ‘appreciate’, ‘for me’ and ‘just didn’t do it’. The fact that this evasive, personalised language doesn’t apply to every film demonstrates a phenomenon perhaps uniquely cinematic, or at least the exclusionary, subconscious distinctions made between high- and low-art.
This may only be unmasked when we reflect on the company in which we employ these guarded phrases. Some gangster films unsatisfyingly develop characters, frustrating your viewing experience and inviting critique over the film’s narrative negligence. I suspect, however, their reputational significance requires you to moderate this reprehensible, outlandish thought. A chick flick’s fanbase, on the other hand, tends to be more concerned with beating the Bechdel test than they are with you being stick.
Whisking the baggage of aesthetic discussion and cinematic spectatorship away to a distant island, and banishing all traces of ostentation, both in this new fantasy world and with three years to improve my diction since that fateful day in first year, I can now comfortably elaborate on the best/favourite paradigm. A glance at my Letterboxd top four reveals Aftersun, Whiplash, Phantom Thread, and Paddington 2 – a respectable, if maybe too contemporary, mix of devastation, heart palpitations, opulence, and bear.
Fundamentally, though, these are not the best films I have seen. They more so demonstrate the movies I respond to emotionally and intellectually; available for closer dissection but not conditional on it to enjoy.
Perhaps you, reader, expected a film student to deliver something more akin to Barry Lyndon, Jeanne Dielman, The 400 Blows, and In the Mood for Love. Excellent cinema, to be clear, and the former and the latter certainly occupy a sweet space in the Goldilocks zone of
favourites and masterpieces, but the previous four do too, and I’m tired of pretending they don’t.
Aftersun and Paddington 2, for instance, are among the best British films in the last ten years, and are recognised as such. I remember the first time I watched both moments, and we, the cinemagoers and I, cried with and at them, and revisiting them later to realise they are just as capable of illuminating aspects of the human condition as the cornerstones of cinema that are the subject of long-standing critical acclaim.
Had my top four included films uninterested in inducing waterworks and respiratory conditions – less stomp-all-over-your-heart and more piss-all-over-your-sofa-in-hysterics – you wouldn’t then be able to accuse me of selectivity. Of course, Aftersun and Paddington 2, films respectively and partly about parenthood and xenophobia, might be better placed to touch on what it means to be alive than, say, The Room. But they provoke in me an intense, affective reaction coupled with that capacity for textual scrutiny that combine to constitute my preferred cinema.
If The Room or Face/Off or Sharknado or whatever member of the so bad it’s good catalogue can’t be someone’s favourite film, then cinema will have lost its special essence. If your favourite film makes you stare at a wall for hours after each time, great. If it’s your family’s go-to, also great. Communal or alone, dumb or intelligent, to validate only one reason for enjoying an art form, always viewed and engaged with differently, would be cinematic treason of the highest order. Just don’t say American Psycho without expecting me to take a few steps back.
Laurie Campanile (he/him, @Lauriecamp04)
qmunicatemagazine.co.uk 