Whose Canon is it Anyway?: Subcultural Capital, Cultural Distinction and Value in High Art and Low Culture Film Distribution

According to figures from the British Film Institute (BFI), the UK has
the second largest filmed entertainment market in the world, coming
second only to the USA,1 worth an estimated £3.8 billion (2016, p. 2).
How we choose to navigate the sheer volume of films available to us is
significantly affected by the circulation of discourse, often related to its
visibility, as well as notions of taste. Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that
we can observe a segmentation of the discourse surrounding film—where
the mainstream, the industry and academia all reinforce and promote
their own agendas (2000). Historically, early film criticism was concerned
with legitimising these texts and their study, consequently attempting to
align film analysis with that of broader historical approaches established
in the analysis of the fine arts. These early valorisations about what might
constitute the highest quality representations, and the subsequent formation
of the film studies discipline, led to the formation of the first canons.