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Appendix: Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998, France, 266’) If this list serves as a superficial indicator, my favorite films are staged narratives (six titles), American (five) and on average 80 minutes in length. How oddly, appallingly conventional! An eviscerator of personal taste, the statistics machine brings up the question of whether canons in cinema can mean anything today with so many films existing and so much/many history(ies) to choose from. My idea was to make a list and to narrow it by applying a rationale to each film. Thus, major studios (Biograph, Shochiku, Paramount) had to be complimented by institutions that, over the second half of the 20th century, proved equally monolithic: Castro’s Cuba, Warhol’s Factory. The zenith work of New Taiwanese Cinema, a national movement that provided a model for the success and failure of world cinema culture as we came to know it in the following decade and a half, is bookended by a lyrical American silent made by a director who didn’t only provide the model, but everything that we know about… oh, who am I kidding? The only way to submit to this impossible task was to keep things strictly personal, and the reasons for including these films (and the bonus video) are, in the end, no one’s business but my own.