Dario Argento constructs one of the most audacious displays of stylistic horror to emerge from the genre since its cinematic inception in Suspiria, breaking from the tradition of dark, dreary aesthetics by reinterpreting its expressionist roots through an entirely different filter altogether – one that tunes into the striking contrasts of opposing neon colours to draw out a violent and vivid fairytale of witches and ballerinas.
The sharp angles and lines of Bernardo Bertolucci’s immaculate, austere tableaux of wartime Europe are as equally unyielding as the dogmatic socio-political landscape they make up, lending this incisive attack on unthinking fascist ideologies an extra edge of bitter resentment.
It is through Edgar Wright’s disorientating atmosphere of intensely expressive neon washes and fluid transitions that we feel the physical worlds of aspiring fashioner designer Ellie break down in Last Night in Soho, as her nightmarish trips to the Swinging Sixties lead us into a frightening convergence of the past and present.
As a man driven to murder reminisces on the sequence of events that has led to this moment, Marcel Carne constructs a bitterly nostalgic narrative through masterful tracking shots and expressionist lighting, turning Le Jour se Leve into an indelibly moving portrait of France’s lost innocence as it heads into World War II.
While Billy Wilder’s snappy screenplay for Sunset Boulevard bounces from scene to scene in crisp, elegiac prose, he also efficiently constructs one of the most tragic cinematic characters in Norma Desmond, played by a magnificently theatrical Gloria Swanson whose every line and action resounds with pride and misery of grandiose proportions.
Though the baby mix-up premise of Parallel Mothers is in itself absurdly comical, humour is only one tool in Pedro Almodovar’s arsenal to draw out the melodramatic expressiveness of his characters’ rich, colourful lives, as he delivers a personal ode to all those wide-ranging, meaningful, and unpredictable experiences of motherhood.
There is a beautiful, architectural surrealism to the miniature replicas of world-famous monuments that feature in The World, as the theme park where Jia Zhangke sets his film shrinks these landmarks down to a size that makes both tourists and staff look like giants, and simultaneously criticises a globalised Chinese culture that allows for such a cheapening of art and culture.
In straddling a line between pulpy violence and sophisticated visual artistry, Point Blank astonishingly transcends all genre trappings, as John Boorman’s confounding, non-linear narrative extracts a dizzying fever dream from the vengeful quest of a wronged man across formidable urban landscapes.
Michael Mann’s fascination with the bleary lights and architecture of sprawling urban spaces is expressed with a fully-developed cinematic voice in his remarkable debut film, Thief, but for all of the mobs and crowds that plague these dark, neon spaces, an overwhelming isolation continues to prevail and trap its inhabitants in neo-noir nightmares.
Martin Scorsese feels surprisingly right at home in the vibrant, passionate yearning of The Age of Innocence, as he deftly tracks his camera through opulent mansions and flows from shot to shot in delicate long dissolves, presenting to us an invitation to interpret this era through a lens of subjective, impressionistic memory.
