While The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’s indictments of Thatcherism’s anti-intellectualism operate as a sharp political allegory in the vein of George Orwell, Peter Greenaway’s opulent Baroque aesthetic lifts it to another transcendent level altogether, transforming a restaurant into a gallery of vivid tableaux illustrating the horrific abuses of one gangster’s despicably gluttonous conquest.
The spirit of silent comedy is kept alive in Jacque Tati’s eccentric satires, sending up the inefficient distractions of modern civilisation through bizarrely constructed architectural monuments and gags, many of which stand among cinema’s most brilliantly odd set pieces.
On every level of its stylistic construction, Mr. Turner inhabits the watercolours of its titular historical painter with ethereal elegance, and though this exquisite aesthetic initially seems at odds with the coarse, prickly figure at its centre, Mike Leigh’s exceptional orchestration of such beautiful contradictions affectingly reveals the complex creative processes shared by both artists.
As a leading figure in cinematic, philosophical storytelling, Krzysztof Kieslowski probes metaphysical questions of fate, morality, and spirituality, using sensual colour palettes and symbolic cutaways to better understand the lives that lie just beyond our immediate perspectives.
In Fitzcarraldo’s absurd dream of building an opera house in the Amazon jungle and his even stranger endeavour of hauling a giant steamship up a mountain, Werner Herzog centres him as a tragic figure in an epic fable of extraordinary ambition, fully consuming his mind with a megalomania that threatens the foundations of his own conceited, fragile mortality.
With a commitment to raw realism and segmented narrative structures, Jia Zhangke crafts scathing indictments of iron-fisted authority, modernity, and globalisation, setting himself up as a significant leading figure among the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers.
The inverted journeys of self-control and surrender that lonely drifter Freddie Quell and cult leader Lancaster Dodd travel along go beyond excellent screenwriting, but also affirm The Master’s extraordinary formal achievement, as Paul Thomas Anderson layers every single interaction with patterns that elusively float these soulmates through a post-war America lost in its identity.
There is a jarring contrast between Terrence Malick’s violent imagery and his affecting spiritual expressions in The Thin Red Line, but it is exactly this disparity upon which he hinges his condemnation of war as an ugly stain on the natural world, playing out the human struggle between dominance and grace through stirring, lyrical rhythms.
The oscillation between isolation and intimacy is just as much a part of life’s cycles as the births, marriages, and deaths that the three generations of the Jian family experience through different lenses, but while these occasions lay the foundation of Yi Yi’s grand formal structure, Edward Yang spends much of the film chasing the vivid, lonely stories that lie between them.
In wrapping up four parallel fables of prejudice stretching from ancient Babylon to the twentieth century, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance masterfully orchestrates cycles of human redemption and transgression with joy and sorrow, layering plot threads and symbolic counterpoints like intricate harmonies through this epic, cinematic experiment of narrative structure.
