![]() ![]() Is this baptism of absolute quality perhaps a little premature? It is easy to see why The Piano made such a splash on its release. Jane Campion's The Piano(1993) has marched into the Hall of Classics faster than just about any other film of recent times. It has to be some kind of goddamn masterpiece! ![]() Not just interesting, and more than simply (in whatever sense) notable or significant. ![]() Heated debate gets restricted to questions of cultural politics: is the film sexist, racist, colonialist, class-ist? But even the most violent polemics in this realm assume, tacitly, that the film must be, at some level, great – great enough, at any rate, to be worthy of all this attention. ![]() Scholars look into each aspect of the film, its sources, its mix of genres, the traditions and contexts into which it might usefully be fitted. The analytical discussion of a designated classic can go on forever. That much, it seems, has already been decided. As in literary studies, fine-grain discussion of a cinematic classic moves beyond whether this particular text "works", whether its parts cohere successfully, whether it succeeds in whatever it sets out to do. How do you know that a film has become a canonised classic – even (in the breathless language of the marketplace) a modern classic? Quite simply, when it has passed beyond evaluation. ![]()
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