It is virtually impossible to separate Sergio Leone’s majestic cinematic style, mythic storytelling, and morally ambiguous characters in For a Few Dollars More, as each tightly intertwine the paths of two gunslingers competing for a bounty, yet choosing to wield their own darkness against far more rotten evils.
One upper-class housewife’s discovery of her husband’s affair in Juliet of the Spirits may incite a surreal reckoning with religion, sexuality, and womanhood, though the insecurities that these kaleidoscopic dreams surface have evidently haunted her since childhood, as Federico Fellini holds up a feminine mirror to 8 ½ that seeks to understand the other side of his ailing marriage.
At the core of Repulsion’s surreal, psychological horror, Roman Polanski centres a woman with an inexplicable revulsion towards men, eerily surrounding her repressed trauma with psychosexual symbols while she desperately tries to contain the resulting damage to her mind, home, and whoever dares to cross the threshold into either.
As he is written in Shakespeare’s works, the drunk, buffoonish Sir John Falstaff is a minor character, and yet in rearranging his scenes from multiple plays into Chimes at Midnight’s compelling tragicomedy, Orson Welles compellingly peels back the layers of his carefree hedonism, resourcefully reinventing the Bard’s classical narrative structures and archetypes as he goes.
Futuristic visual designs do not always mesh so well with low-budget location shooting, but for a postmodern master of cinematic form like Jean-Luc Godard, such delightful incongruity only strengthens his deconstruction of film noir and science-fiction genres in Alphaville, which both examines and becomes an act of rebellion against artistic censorship in its very construction.
In setting up a formal clash between his brazen stylistic experiments and the stagnant setting of a traditional Ukrainian village, Sergei Parajanov pushes the focus of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors past this narrow-minded society and towards the haunting mysticism which lies both beyond its boundaries and within its own characters.
