Overshadowed it may be compared to Yasujirō Ozu’s other family dramas, but Late Autumn’s examination of marriage and remarriage in mid-century Japan still finds fresh emotional textures in its colour cinematography, intertwining love, duty, and generational bonds.
The struggle to survive in the Siberian wilderness of Letter Never Sent is as psychological as it is physical, swallowing four diamond-hunting adventurers up in its primordial chaos, and forcing us through Mikhail Kalatozov’s daunting camerawork to bow down before its ravaging elemental forces.
There seems to be a sinister influence taking hold of the children that governess Miss Giddens is tasked with caring for in The Innocents, though as Jack Clayton sinks us into her tortured, repressed mind, so too are the lines blurred between unholy evil and those who obsessively seek to conquer it.
Only by blackmailing, intimidating, and investigating from the shadows can one vengeful son expose the corporate corruption of mid-century Japan in The Bad Sleep Well, as Akira Kurosawa adapts Hamlet with a severe, noirish cynicism, examining the foundations of bloodshed which the upper-class bureaucracy shrouds in obscure conspiracies.
Through Federico Fellini’s cynical subversion of theological iconography and episodic parables, La Dolce Vita traces a tortured soul’s weary descent to the depths of an amoral, existentialist hell, examining modern-day Rome’s spiritual corruption to ultimately become one of cinema’s great religious epics.
Christian and pagan symbolism may be nothing new for Ingmar Bergman, but their manifestation in The Virgin Spring through such visceral violence is punishing even by his standards, thoughtfully considering in this parable of murder and revenge how virtue might survive our most guilty, godless instincts.
François Truffaut’s graceful camerawork and inspired editing delightfully engage in the jaunty lightness that flows from one mysterious bar pianist’s lithe fingers, though for all his lively formal experimentation, Shoot the Piano Player also seeks to understand the wistful tragedies and romances of a reclusive man hiding behind cheerful musical expressions.
For the Italian bourgeoisie who sit untouched above the rest of society in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, there is such a thin line between existence and non-existence that the disappearance of a friend barely registers. The only tangible truths out there are those huge, material constructions which tower over the city, like odes to the superfluity of human progress.
