The canon of Western cinema

Don’t know what a canon is? No, me neither until I read about it in the latest issue of Little White Lies. It turns out that a canon is a generally accepted rule, standard, or principle by which something is judged. And so it’s on this basis that Lillian Crawford’s article entitled ‘Too Much Johnson’ outlines a timeline tracing the evolution of the Western cinematic canon.

The timeline is a carefully curated insight into the history of film, including the earliest studies of silent cinema, outlining key milestones in Western filmaking and referencing films that have defined and moulded cinematic canonology in the past century. But canons can not be an ever-fixed mark, changing with the film landscape and tastes and so Crawford ends her article asking the reader to question modern canonology and how it might or should be adapted in the future.

Issue 87 of Little White Lies is avaiable to purchase from MyMagShop.