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 one Italian filmmaker’s struggle with creative block, contemptuous shame, and overwhelming pressures, Federico Fellini crafts a surrogate representation of himself, elusively traversing a surreal sea of memory and dreams in a film that seeks to intuitively examine the arduous processes of its own self-reflexive construction.
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.
Although the hitchhiker in Knife in the Water is spontaneously invited along as a plaything on a wealthy couple’s yacht, the insecurity he sparks transcends class boundaries, as Roman Polanski acutely stages a series of power plays that slowly strips away pretensions of dignity and moral character.
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.
The industrial Italian town that the psychologically troubled Giuliana wanders in Red Desert is an alien landscape of steel beams and suffocating smog, and yet Michelangelo Antonioni’s punctuations of vibrant colour among desaturated greys offer a complex humanity to these daunting structures, painting out a world striving for growth through its own sickness.
Tony Richardson’s adaptation of classic novel Tom Jones is imbued with the rebellious spirit of the young maverick himself, throwing out the playbook of cinematic convention to skilfully blend highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick in its coming-of-age narrative, while finding comfort in the frivolities of an absurdly unpredictable world.
The ease with which one mysterious Visitor falls into the life of a bourgeoisie family in Teorema is surprisingly intimate, but his spiritual and sexual influence is also a catalyst for seismic shifts in their superficial lives, as Pier Paolo Pasolini strips away the material distractions of class, capitalism, and religion to expose the emptiness within each.
Cars may have once been proud emblems of modern industry and progress a hundred years ago, and yet Jean-Luc Godard proves them to be nothing more than pathetically inept status symbols in the absurd odyssey of Weekend, whisking us through bizarre, dystopian landscapes that take down France’s materialistic bourgeoisie with deconstructive post-irony.
The only place willing to embrace those who have endured life’s deepest psychological pains in The Haunting is the cursed estate of Hill House, consuming its vulnerable visitors in Robert Wise’s expressionistic set pieces and writing out their chilling destinies in ghostly prophecies.
