Magazine

What are we looking to replicate or reflect when we construct a list of the “greatest films of all time”? The canon is encoded in many of our educations and structures many of our discussions about film—whether we are anti-canon or not. So with exercises such as this newest effort, we are telling ourselves what we already know.

As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

Loveboard speaks to an era in which relationships are increasingly preserved through digital archives and the large amount of digital detritus this generates. Our personal troves of images have grown significantly in recent decades. The availability and cost of film stock constrained people to choose what to archive, and therefore, to also curate the image of their past. In this sense, digital media is counterintuitive, even antithetical to curatorship: it has the ability to seemingly conserve everything, including moments that seem utterly inconsequential, even banal, that are valued only in retrospect (if at all).

Foreignness always operates in varying degrees and can easily be internalised as self-exoticisation or through voluntary and involuntary alienation. Nevertheless, watching a film about your home country through a foreign gaze is always a startling experience. The images appear uncannily alien, akin to a non-native speaking in your mother tongue: no matter how impeccable their linguistic knowledge and proficiency, their intonations inevitably inhabit an absence, turning familiar words into strange, peculiar objects.