The List is Black

When browsing the list of the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, the usual follies persist. Only one film from outside of the Western world is in the top ten. Only two films directed by women are in the top ten, and one of them, Maya Deren, is assigned a male co-director (a credit that is not actually settled law). Eight of the top ten are either French or United States productions. The top twenty includes two more women and one film from the Global South. Of course, no Black director appears until in the vicinity of position #30.

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. More people have heard of Chris Marker, more people have seen the work of Chris Marker, because Marker’s work has circulated more, because of the structure of power in the world, because of the rules of capital, and therefore, the “greatest short film ever made” is Marker’s La Jetée. Not to overanalyse the situation, and certainly not to charge it with being a lightweight psyop, but an image of La Jetée was included in the email invitation to participate in the polling for this particular list. This is the nature of things. Certainly, La Jetée is a great film, but do we need to assign it a numerical value based on a weighted voting process? I suppose this is a rhetorical question. We live in an era where there must be a quantifiable winner, and the winner must take all.

Art has long been haunted by the nightmare of quantifiability, but film art suffers from this acutely. Because it is a young art? Because it is a mass medium? Can you imagine a list of the greatest paintings of all time? Or the greatest architectural works of all time? Even the greatest photographs of all time. Now that we are far enough into its second century, we might soon arrive at the point where it sounds just as silly to propose ranking the greatest films ever made, if only because of the sheer number of films made. And this is just one of my reservations about the task of list-making.

I have seen all of the films in the top ten on this list. In the next ten on the list, there are at least five films I have not seen or do not know very well. In the following ten, there are another five films I have not seen or even heard of. This might signify nothing other than that I am a slow cinephile. It could also be read benevolently as an invitation by respected colleagues to familiarise myself with important pre-canonical works—and I would be inclined to accept that invitation. However, I am more concerned with the assumption underlying this entire prospect.

How could I presume to submit a list of “ten greatest short films ever made” when I have not seen even half of the short films ever made? Such a prospective list would be flawed from the outset by my limited worldview. That worldview is tainted by the hegemonic powers in the film world. Let us not forget that colonial powers prevented their subjects from making films. For their viewing pleasure, these subjects were given the ‘canon’ with few alternatives. When the possibility to make films was eventually afforded to these former colonial subjects, distribution avenues became limited, as did the opportunities for translation. The playing field was always uneven, and we might argue that it still is today, even though we are flooded with the illusion of infinite choices online. Culture is wielded like hard power, and film is no exception. Film is actually incredibly effective as a form of power. This is inclusive of the very list that you are contemplating as you read this antagonistic position.

To be fair, there are things I like about the list. I love the implicit assumption that short film is experimental film. Documentary, narrative, and animation are underrepresented at the top end of the list, and I wonder if there is a general feeling that films that fit cleanly into these generic boundaries belong elsewhere. That said, all films were short films prior to the introduction of the feature-length format—but then, there was no such thing as a ‘short’ film. So it is a bit odd that Buster Keaton makes two appearances near the top of the list in representation of the 1920s, and no one else prior to that, save for the proto-cinematic exceptions of the Lumieres and Melies at the turn of the twentieth century. In this context, we can call Keaton an outlier, though the greatest outlier near the top of the list is Forugh Farrokhzad.

Farrokhzad is the only woman with a solo directing credit in the top ten and the only director from outside of Europe and North America in the top twenty. Her film The House is Black (1963) is a masterpiece, a brutally subversive and confrontational film with a humanist slant and a poetic soul. Such a beautifully destructive work should be welcome in any canon. It is certainly wonderful that the film was recently restored and has been shown widely in pristine form. That achievement required both cultural and financial capital, which took decades to accrue. It is very likely that ten years ago this film would not have breached the top ten, or maybe even the top fifty—which is simply to say, you don’t know what you don’t know. Every list resulting from such a poll should be a de facto declaration of how much we do not know, and how much we comfort ourselves by reasserting what we already know. Needless to say, there are many other Farrokhzads in need of wider visibility so that their brilliance can shine forth, but unfortunately, they must also wait out their decades in the immense shadows of the Resnaises and the Bunuels and the Snows of film history.

They say that men lie, women lie, numbers do not lie. But numbers do not tell a complete story either. The history of an art form cannot be reduced to numbers, and people cannot be reduced to numbers. Another devastating and brutal film follows The House is Black in the top ten: Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Night and Fog (1955) at #4. Let us note the cruel irony of assigning a number to a film about people who were assigned numbers and then exterminated. These are the stakes of the games we play. Not to say that value-driven list-making is a fascist endeavour, but it does seem low-key authoritarian. The canon will never not persist. We can imagine the end of the world before we can imagine the end of the canon. This is why I choose not to participate in reifying it in the form of a ranked list. Because we don’t know what we don’t know. But also because of what Dziga Vertov once wrote: “What’s good is not what’s really good, just that which is profitable to be considered as such.”