1970s

There is something of Lenny Bruce’s rebellious, unorthodox style in Bob Fosse’s 1974 biopic of the comedian’s life which mirrors his own unruly manner, cutting between moments from all across his life and death to confront the difficult legacies left behind in the fight for free speech.

Around the hair-raising cat-and-mouse chase between detective Popeye Doyle and French mobster Charnier, William Friedkin constructs a gritty vision of New York City flooded with stagnant puddles and coated in at least a few layers of grime, melding narrative and setting to deliver a biting, authentically cynical crime thriller in The French Connection.

Woody Allen takes aim at 19th century Russian literature in his off-beat period piece Love and Death, smashing through those quaint conventions of cultural and cinematic history to fashion an entirely new kind of artistic statement out of the fragments left behind.

The layers of subtext and symbolism that flow through Don’t Look Now may take multiple viewings to fully appreciate, but in Nicolas Roeg’s fluid editing which swirls between cryptic images of blood, churches, water, and grotesque representations of death, its feverish atmosphere takes hold, haunting us with the ghosts of events that have already taken place, and some that are still yet to happen.

It is from Stanley Kubrick’s uncomfortable philosophical questions regarding free will and sin that his inspired, repulsive aesthetic of nude sculptures and phallic symbols explodes outwards, marking the dystopian British society of A Clockwork Orange as one which has fallen prey to its pleasure-seeking impulses.

Stanley Kubrick’s astonishing display of picturesque beauty and grace haunts every frame of Barry Lyndon, and through this he sets an impossibly rigid standard of perfection that his messy, flawed characters cannot live up to, even as they strive for self-aggrandising legacies and traditions that only reveal their feeble hubris.