What might it mean to call a film indispensable? Perhaps not much. At base level, we'd merely be asserting that other films (maybe the vast majority) are candidates for the garbage heap. Since experience so powerfully ratifies this definition, we might say, in plain words, that an indispensable film is a keeper. But what would we keep it for?

The pleasure of its parts, to begin with: a personality, a setting, a moment that is worth revisiting. Beyond that, we might mean that the film as a whole is an experience we can no longer imagine being without. It has changed us and so has become a part of us. This is a more forceful definition, though one that still covers a great many cases. I have known people who considered the masterpieces of Yasujiro Ozu to be transformative in this sense, but also George Cukor's Les Girls.

But then there's the strongest and most restrictive meaning. An indispensable film is one that we keep because we have no other choice. An urgent circumstance thrusts it upon us, as the battered shield is pressed on the hero of a quest romance. Were we to let it drop, we would fail a situation much larger than ourselves. I think the documentary Gunner Palace, by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, is indispensable in this highest sense. Every adult citizen ought to see it. So should every kid over the age of 13.

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