1960s – Page 2 – Scene by Green

8 1/2 (1963)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 18min

Common wisdom says that 8 ½ is titled after the number of films Federico Fellini had directed at this point in his career, the total consisting of six previous features, two shorts, one co-directing effort, and this, his most autobiographical, self-reflexive piece of cinema yet. It would have been represented as an entirely different numeral had none of those fallen into place, but instead we get this incomplete fraction, stuck between integers as if waiting to be filled in.

The same could be said of the two Italian directors connected to this film, with both the fictional Guido and real-life Fellini reflecting on the pressures of fame, religion, art, and relationships tugging them in multiple directions without any unifying principle. Thanks to their professional careers, they are familiar with the unique suffering that comes with overactive imaginations trying to sort through fragmented lives of excess, but ironically this vocation is one of the few that seeks to deliver a catharsis for the issues it has created. Finding relief is not so simple as projecting one’s crippling insecurities up on large, flickering canvases, but rather arrives through humbling self-examination, opening one’s mind up to a world that may either praise the genius it sees or eviscerate it for a lack of inspiration.

One of the greatest opening scenes of cinema history, with Fellini dipping us right into the film’s remarkable surrealism. A suffocating traffic jam, a liberating flight, and a rope pulling us back to the ground, all without revealing Guido’s face.

For Guido, there are few nightmares worse than this claustrophobic social anxiety. Caught in the middle of a traffic jam, he bangs on the windows of his car as if suffocating from the stagnation, while the silent witnesses of neighbouring vehicles passively watch his struggle with cold, bored expressions. Among them, bus passengers hang their arms outside windows, while an older man in a car seems more preoccupied with his glamorous female companion. Quite eerily, there are no engines to be heard on this busy stretch of road, and neither do we see any close-ups of Guido’s panicked face which might have otherwise oriented us in the scene. Even his escape and liberating ascent into the sky are eventually spoiled by a man looping a rope around his ankle, tethering him to the earth like a kite that can only soar so far before crashing back down. When he awakes, the surrealism dissipates, and yet Fellini still holds back from revealing the face of his surrogate as doctors and colleagues bring their consultations to his hotel room. It is not until he is able to get some time to himself in a bathroom that he is revealed in full, and that Marcello Mastroianni’s perturbed, restless performance finally starts to lift off.

*Guido is revealed in full when he finds a moment of peace alone, momentarily freed from the pressures and pigeonholes of the outside world.*

Even at the spa retreat where Guido hopes to compose himself before embarking on the production of his next film, there is little hope that he will find the peace that he desires. How ironic that even within this sanctuary of rejuvenation, he still finds no escape from journalists, casting directors, crew members, sycophants, agents, and fans turning up with questions ranging from the trivial to the overly invasive, none of which are particularly helpful in curing his director’s block. It is not an issue of funding or resourcing, but he is simply not mentally prepared to offer up anything of value to his audiences.

In Fellini’s own career, La Dolce Vita and 8 ½ mark the point where he begins to veer further away from his roots in neorealism, and so it is not difficult to imagine himself in Guido’s position facing a culture of excessive fame and materialism, trying to create something grounded in real world issues. The result is a psychological dive into his own self-critical mind, picking apart this exact struggle in lavishly designed sets that don’t even bother trying to conceal his own abundant wealth and privilege.

*Far from his neorealist roots, Fellini indulges in his ravishing Italian architecture and decor, building Guido up as a man of great wealth and privilege.*

Out on the resort’s blanched white terrace, patrons gather beneath umbrellas and in lines for mineral water, though Fellini rarely hangs on wide shots long enough for us to adjust to the blinding environment. Apparently, reality is just as disorientating as Guido’s dreams. While strangers and associates gaze right down the lens in point-of-view shots, Fellini’s constantly panning camera couldn’t get away from them sooner, disengaging and drifting through the surroundings so that their lines of dialogue essentially become voiceovers. Every so often though, a new character’s face unexpectedly moves into the frame, manifesting like a phantom and suddenly readjusting long shots into close-ups. To throw us off even further, Fellini often has his actors direct their eyeline behind the camera as they speak to Guido, only to pull back and reveal him standing elsewhere in the scene.

*Fellini’s highly-exposed photography in the spa terrace set is almost blinding, pulling us abruptly into this daunting social setting.*

*Fellini’s camera pans across scenes without gaining a firm sense of geography, instead crowding his foreground with extras looking right down the lens.*

*Sharp distinctions between foreground and background, as faces suddenly move into the frame.*

It certainly doesn’t help either that among his closest associates are embodiments of his deepest self-doubts, such as industry veteran Conocchia whose ideas are a little too stale for Guido’s taste, reminding him of his own encroaching irrelevance. Old friend Mario is also present at this retreat with his young fiancée Gloria, and their effortlessly cool dance scene here is one for the ages as they joyfully twist to the sound of modern jazz, unknowingly inspiring Pulp Fiction’s equally iconic dance some thirty years later. From the sidelines though, Guido can’t help but cast judgement upon what he perceives as a middle-aged man’s embarrassing grasp at youth – a fate which he realises similarly awaits him.

*One of 8 1/2’s most iconic scenes, seeping into pop culture influencing everyone from Godard to Tarantino.*

With pressure mounting on Guido from every side at this spa resort, Fellini keeps up a persistent anxiety in his jarring visual whiplash and frenetic classical musical cues drawn directly from the works of Wagner and other classical composers. As he snaps us between characters, priorities, and dreams that can’t quite congeal into anything productive, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ imposes an overwhelming intensity upon Guido’s social obligations, while his subsequent humming of this tune suggests that this grandeur exists solely in his own head. Later when he is confronted by the reprovals of a film critic, it is Rossini’s ‘Overture’ from The Barber of Seville that heightens his anxiety, underscoring his greatest creative insecurities as they are brought to light.

“On first reading, it’s evident that the film lacks a central conflict, a philosophical premise if you will… making the film a series of gratuitous episodes, perhaps even amusing due to their ambiguous realism. One wonders what the author’s point is. To make us think? To scare us? From the start, the action reveals an impoverished poetic inspiration. Forgive me, but this might be the most pathetic demonstration ever that cinema is irremediably behind all other arts by fifty years. The subject matter doesn’t even have the merits of an avant-garde film, while possessed of all its shortcomings.”

*The critic’s rebuke of Guido’s film might as well be a negative review of 8 1/2 itself, putting all Fellini’s artistic insecurities on display.*

The hints of this criticism being directed towards 8 ½ itself isn’t easily missed. If art reflects one’s mind, then this director’s block necessarily calls Guido’s value as a filmmaker into question. Disappearing into his own fantasies might at times feel like the single most effective way he can run from these feelings, as demonstrated in one dream where a harem of women falls at his feet and offer him a power over those in his life he feels threatened by. Still, an unfiltered, self-critical imagination can be an unwieldy thing. Just as it is an endless source of creativity, so too can it spiral off in egotistic directions or turn against the dreamer themselves, as these women do when they catch onto Guido’s misogynistic hypocrisy.

Another layer of Guido’s psyche offers portals into his past, though rarely are they so straightforward as to be direct representations, clouded by discontinuity in Fellini’s editing and constantly shifting camera perspectives. When a magician reads his mind at the resort, the apparently meaningless words “Asa nisi masa” seemingly come from nowhere, yet are shortly revealed through flashback to be a mystical phrase taught to him by his peers at a Catholic boarding school. These formative years are at the core of his being today in many ways, especially seeing how his pampering by school staff is mirrored in his present-day harem fantasy, fetishising a worshipful, almost maternal treatment from female lovers.

*“Asa nisi masa” are the magic words linking Guido’s past to his present, deftly leading into a flashback at his Catholic boarding school.*

*Freudian sexuality connects Guido’s childhood memories to his modern-day harem fantasy, fetishising a worshipful, almost maternal treatment from female lovers.*

This Freudian angst is complicated even further in 8 ½ with Guido’s frequent hallucinations of his deceased parents. In his mind they are slippery, malleable figures, with dreams of his mother transforming into his wife Luisa with a sly cut, and weeping over his sexual vices after he makes love to his paramour. His shame seems to be tied to his sexual development as an adolescent too, when he and his schoolmates paid La Saraghina, a prostitute who lived in a shack down at the local beach, to dance for them. The Catholic guilt beaten into him by the school priests after being caught out for this is instrumental in shaping his constant search for religious approval, as in the modern day he is still trying to appease a Monsignor imposing a strict Christian morality upon his film. Despite his aspirations to prove his spiritual wholeness though, visions of La Saraghina frequently intrude at the most unexpected times, denying him any escape from his mortifying past.

*La Saraghina represents Guido’s shameful sexual desires rearing their head at the most inconvenient moments, continuing to appear unexpectedly in the present day.*

*A severely blocked composition as Guido faces up to his crying mother, punished for his indecent cavorting with La Saraghina.*

*Daunting religious imagery as we slip back into Guido’s childhood, with these Catholic priests asserting their dominance and setting him on a path of guilt.*

*The spa sauna becomes a confessional for Guido, with this white sheet hung up like the divider between the priest and penitent. Fellini’s creativity with his symbolism is endlessly impressive.*

Even above Guido’s desire to create art is his need to be loved and affirmed, not just by a select few, but by everyone – the religious, the secular, the fans looking for entertainment, the critics looking for intellectualism, his many love interests, and even his deceased parents, who continue withholding their affection in death. Hope seems lost after Luisa witnesses his bitter, cinematic representation of their marriage and leaves him, and the arrival of a beautiful actress who he believes is perfect for a role impossibly described as “young and ancient, a child yet already a woman” does little to assuage his insecurities. Even while he venerates her as an idealised, abstract concept, she cuts him down, recognising the character he has based on himself as being incapable of love.

*Guido’s luck finding his ‘ideal woman’ for the impossible role he has created is remarkable, yet even she calls him out as a phoney incapable of love.*

Pleasing just a single person seems to be an impossible task, let alone the hundreds of people begging for answers, and therein lies the source of Guido’s creative block. “Everything happens in my film. I’m going to put everything in,” he proclaims, but in catering to the desires of so many others, there is nothing truly authentic or honest about his artistic expression. In his impossible endeavour, he has become a walking paradox: a director with no direction, the observer becoming the observed.

“I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film to help bury forever all the dead things we carry around inside. Instead, it’s me who lacks the courage to bury anything at all. Now I’m utterly confused, with this tower on my hands. I wonder how things turned out this way. Where did I lose my way? I really have nothing to say… but I want to say it anyway.”

Finally, the day of shooting arrives for Guido, and he has to practically be dragged on set against his will. Once again, the crowds of journalists, critics, and crew are present, blasting him with questions of political, tabloid, and spiritual natures. “Can you admit you have nothing to say?” one man cruelly jabs, as Fellini’s frenetic editing and score keeps trying to build to a climax. “Just say anything,” he is advised, but still, there is nothing that comes from his mouth. Within the crowd, Luisa is present in her wedding dress, taunting him with memories of happier days as he too wonders where they went. And of course, casting a shadow over the chaotic press conference is his giant launchpad set – a hulking steel monument to his own meaningless ambition and grounded imagination, offering empty promises of space-bound adventures with the clear absence of a rocket

*A giant set piece promising great narrative catharsis for both 8 1/2 and Guido’s own film.*

*Fellini deliberately dismantles the continuity in his editing, breaking eye lines and the 180-degree camera rule to completely disorientate us.*

Beneath its menacing shadow, the only feasible solution to all Guido’s troubles seems to be a clean, sharp gunshot to the head, though not before a guilt-inducing vision of his mother asks where he is running to. At first this suicide seems to be nothing but another dramatic diversion from reality, adding one more drop to the sea of memory and dreams that Fellini traverses with such elusive grace, and which keeps obscuring the boundaries between Guido’s inner and outer lives. Symbolically though, it is a perfect merging of the two. What Fellini purposefully avoids depicting here is the explicit reveal that he has aborted production on the film, and only showing the aftermath of this decision when we return to reality. In killing his failed project, he has successfully killed the part of himself that simultaneously strives to live to impossible expectations and scorns the people setting those standards.

It is perfectly fitting to 8 ½’s cinematic form that Guido’s monologue announcing his fresh perspective is not the focus of these final minutes, but instead simply underscores a grand, visual sequence that could only ever be rendered through this artistic medium. Not even the critic’s disparaging words can kill the rising joy he feels in this moment, as Fellini cuts through a montage of all those people who make up Guido’s identity smiling right at the camera, and congregating for the first time in a single location. “How right it is to accept you, to love you. And how simple,” he ponders, as men in tuxedos shout to crew members standing up on lighting rigs, who aim their beams towards the rocket launchpad.

“Life is a party, let’s live it together. I can’t say anything else, to you or others. Take me as I am, if you can. It’s the only way we can try to find each other.”

*Dreams and reality blend in conversations like these, with Guido’s dialogue playing out in voiceover to what may be an imaginary Luisa.*

Though Guido’s lips are not moving with his voiceover here, Luisa can hear him perfectly. Between the two estranged spouses, finally there seems to be some sincere attempt at understanding. Only in shaking off his constant need for approval is he able to connect with others in any meaningful way, receiving them as they are, and in turn presenting his most honest self to the world without shame.

Not far away from the site of this epiphany, a small, ragtag marching band of carnival performers parade towards the set’s scaffolding, and a set of makeshift white curtains are suddenly pulled back. Behind them, every single character we have met throughout 8 ½ comes pouring down the steps of this magnificent launch pad as if attending some grand parade conducted by Guido, who directs them into a single, unifying fantasy. Far removed from the frivolous, empty spectacles of La Dolce Vita, the circus of 8 ½ becomes a celebration of communal delight, piecing together the fragments of the director’s life in a giant circle and spinning them hand-in-hand around the set. For any artist seeking a practical execution of their avant-garde ambitions, creativity and creation are not always perfectly synchronised. In painstakingly lining these up through Fellini’s wildly surreal stylings though, 8 ½ stands as history’s most brilliantly compelling piece of self-reflexive cinema, seeking to examine the arduous processes of its own construction.

*Fragments of Guido’s life finally piecing together in this magnificent crescendo of carnival music, with him finally taking the role of director.*

*Guido’s past, present, faith, secularity, artistry, ambition, insecurities, and relationships finally reconciled in a single joyful display of unity.*

8 1/2 is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes and YouTube.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Federico Fellini | 2hr 54min

Beneath the open, outstretched arms of the giant Christ statue that flies over Rome in the opening minutes of La Dolce Vita, every sin he preached against two thousand years ago is being committed by its self-indulgent citizens. Aristocrats shamelessly fornicate in drunken orgies, greedy journalists overstep boundaries to fill their own pockets, and children’s lives are chillingly taken by those most trusted to protect them. Still, at least these people are willing to pause for a moment to wave at the sacred spectacle blessing the crowds with his abundant grace – or is it judgement he is casting down, condemning them to the miserable hellscape that they have built at the global capital of Catholicism?

Just because gossip reporter Marcello Rubini laments this underworld of fetishised religion and vacuous principles doesn’t mean he is absolved from indulging in the hedonistic lifestyle that feeds it. Though he follows the movements of the flying statue in his news helicopter, apparently not even that is impressive enough to keep his eyes from drifting to the rooftop of sunbathing woman calling out to him. “What’s going on with that statue? Where are you taking it?” they yell, only to be drowned out by the whirring blades. With Marcello quickly abandoning any hope of chatting them up beneath the noise, it would seem the disconnection is mutual, as he flies away to his destination and on with his life.

*A bastardised icon of Christ flies over modern-day Rome, blessing its citizens – or is he casting judgement down on the sinners below?*

This is the plague of loneliness which has infected Federico Fellini’s depiction of Rome in La Dolce Vita, distilled into pure allegory. The most basic communication between lovers, friends, and strangers is hopelessly lost in the noise of superficial distractions, stifling the few genuine attempts to find some deeper sense of purpose within an empty life. Like parasites sapping the lifeblood of humans, Rome’s media and celebrity culture are partially responsible for this spiritual epidemic, with Marcello’s photographer friend Paparazzo even being named after the Italian slang for mosquito, and in turn giving birth to the term ‘paparazzi.’

Up to now, Fellini had explored similar moral tragedies within the fables of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, though for the first time the poverty-stricken woes of the working class are not where his focus lies. Instead, he aims both disdain and conditional sympathy towards the upper end of society where there is a complete vacuum of personal responsibility, while only occasionally noting their impact on the suffering of those below. In true Christian style as well, seven is the all-important number which guides Fellini’s episodic structure, breaking this landscape of false idols into a series of parables that take Marcello ever deeper into Rome’s moral corruption – not unlike Dante’s physical descent into the circles of Hell.

The other key characteristic carried over from Fellini’s previous films as well is his location shooting within Rome itself, building on neorealist tradition while departing wildly from his mentors’ sensitive examinations of post-war poverty. For the first time he is shooting in widescreen CinemaScope, which itself is a fitting choice for this film of eclectic environments and bustling crowds, though his lush depth of field and meticulous blocking across the full horizontal length of the frame lifts La Dolce Vita to even greater stylistic heights that not even Fellini had touched before. At the many decadent parties Marcello attends, the camera frequently sits close to the ground as it observes inebriated guests mill around the bright, modern interiors, while one such gathering inside a Baroque castle treats its imposing history as little more than a consumable luxury. At the same time though, La Dolce Vita isn’t some conservative, high-minded condemnation of modern festivities. Like Fellini, Marcello is both lured in and repelled by its seductive glamour, the paradox of which incites a Catholic guilt that lingers from his childhood.

*Fellini effortlessly transitions to a widescreen format, using its full horizontal scope to block his actors in luxurious arrangements, and a rich depth of field to layer his opulent compositions.*

Beyond the ornate walls of Marcello’s parties, Fellini guides us through busy streets and neighbourhoods crowded with glossy black convertibles, reflecting the lights of Rome’s raucous nightlife. Only the wealthy can afford to live here, right by the majestic historical monuments that become little more than status signifiers, while the poor are kept out of sight on the city’s rundown outskirts. Though not all settings here were filmed in the real locations, such as the studio sets recreating the interior of St Peter’s Basilica and the Via Veneto, the artifice isn’t readily available from the sheer detail of the mise-en-scène.

*Glossy black cars drive through busy streets, reflecting the lights of Rome’s raucous nightlife.*

*Fellini is dedicated to designing the frame through Rome’s magnificent architecture, using this walkway to funnel through his shot and connect foreground, midground, and background.*

When it comes to La Dolce Vita’s most memorable and iconic scene though, Fellini wisely chooses to use the real Trevi Fountain as the basis of Marcello’s fleeting romance with lively Swedish movie star, Sylvia Rank. Played by up-and-coming actress Anita Ekberg, Sylvia makes a sizeable impact in her relatively short time onscreen, becoming celebrity incarnate with her ditzy public persona, buxom beauty, and moody sensitivity. She may not live outside the superficial glamour of the entertainment industry, but her radiant passion is unlike anything Marcello has encountered before, and so over the course of one night the subject of his gossip column evolves into an icon of angelic veneration.

*Anita Ekberg’s appearance is brief but impactful – a woman to be revered, but never touched by a man as tainted with sin as Marcello.*

After wandering away from the party, he and Sylvia approach the Trevi Fountain. She is the first to dance in its waters before inviting him in, where he reaches his hands out to touch her face. Once there though, he simply can’t bring himself to cross that threshold of intimacy. Like the Roman gods carved from stone that stand above them, Sylvia has frozen, as if taking her place among their divine company. She may be revered and even desired, but never must something so sacred be grasped by mortals as spiritually corrupt as Marcello.

*The Trevi fountain scene is recognised even by those who have not watched La Dolce Vita, as Marcello and Sylvia cross the barrier into a realm where cleansing water flows from divine gods.*

Perhaps then wealthy socialite Maddalena might be a more attainable prospect for the cynical journalist, seeing as how her discontent with modern-day Rome mirrors his own. For a time, he tries to cover that up with shallow praises of it as “a jungle where one can hide well,” though her desire to set up a simpler life elsewhere slowly wears away at his false positivity. When they run into each other again at a party hosted in an aristocrat’s castle, he once again wanders off with a woman who has drawn his eye, yet one who this time curiously leaves him in an empty room.

From a nearby chamber, Maddalena speaks into a well, revealing a trick of acoustics that hauntingly carries her voice to where he is seated. It is through this ghostly separation that Fellini plays out what seems to be the most sincerely romantic dialogue of La Dolce Vita, as she confesses her love and proposes marriage. Marcello tentatively dances around his answer for a time before finally returning the sentiment with a heartfelt monologue, and yet it isn’t until he is met with total silence that he realises Maddalena has been quietly seduced away by a fellow partygoer. The tangible vision of potential romance that faded into a disembodied echo has now disappeared entirely, and thus Fellini breaks Marcello’s heart again with another reason to despair.

*The most intimate conversation in La Dolce Vita unfolds in separate rooms, connecting Marcello and Maddalena through distant echoes before she is swept away into another affair.*

How can Marcello blame Maddalena though when he too has fallen so many times to the same temptations, even as he has complained of wanting to excise them from his life? His moral offences are not victimless, as throughout the course of La Dolce Vita he continues to cheat on, neglect, and physically abuse his mentally troubled fiancée, Emma. He has a “hard, empty heart,” she claims, while he accuses her of smothering him with a sickening, maternal love. Even at their lowest though, just as it seems they have cut ties for good, there he is picking her back up from where he dumped her on the road. In a more conventional Hollywood film this act might be framed as persevering love, and yet Fellini pierces the glib idealism to expose their reunion as little more than a desperation for companionship, and a passive willingness to let its toxicity eat away at their self-respect.

Trapped in a cycle of fights and silent make-ups with no real resolution, Marcello and Emma’s relationship slowly suffocates. Fellini takes up many issues with the state of modern relationships, and key among them is a lack of self-respect perpetuating a passive toxicity.

Delving deeper into Marcello’s inability to maintain healthy relationships, Fellini introduces his womanising father. It is through his sins after all that we gain some insight into the self-destructive hedonism that he passed onto his child, and on an even larger scale, from older generations down to all of Rome. The discomfort that crosses actor Marcello Mastroianni’s face here exposes a new kind of insecurity we haven’t seen before, reluctant to expose a formative piece of his childhood which lacked a stable, loving paternal figure.

At the nightclub where Marcello meets his father, Fellini chaotically fills the frame with the glitzy spectacle of giant balloons tumbling from the ceiling, and draws their lustful eye towards burlesque dancers. It is during one clown’s sad trumpet solo though, incidentally reminiscent of Gelsomina’s from La Strada, that Marcello’s father grows disinterested and strikes up a chat with the woman next to him – his son’s ex-girlfriend, Fanny. His eagerness to cross that line and pursue his own impulsive desire not only speaks to his selfish, weak-willed character, but also offers some explanation for the vices ingrained in Marcello, who at the very least recognises them as such.

*Fellini drops balloons from the ceiling in the nightclub where Marcello goes with his womanising father, finding entertainment in the form of burlesque dancers and one sad, lonely trumpeter.*

Between the seven parables of La Dolce Vita, Fellini continues to trace the path that leads from small transgressions to a larger culture of cruel exploitation, most acutely capturing that evolution in the media frenzy that congregates around a fake sighting of the Madonna. Just outside the city, two children from a poor family lay claim to witnessing this miracle, while their parents spur them on. Marcello is among the more sceptical visitors – “Miracles are born out of silence, not in this confusion” – and yet he follows through on his report anyway, feeding the blind faith of believers to keep the news cycle moving along.

A small lie blows out into a media frenzy, and Fellini relishes his opportunity to crowd each frame with people, lights, scaffolding, vehicles – absolute excess in the name of finding spiritual enlightenment.

At the tree where the Madonna was sighted, sick people and their families pray for healing into the night, as if desperately trying to reclaim the Christian spirituality that Rome has lost. Fellini positions his camera at high angles above the crowd as rain begins to fall, short circuiting the flood lights and saturating spectators, yet still they all remain. Their devotion might almost be considered inspiring were it not for the mindless fanaticism that escalates when the children claim to witness the Madonna’s return. As they run from one spot to another, Fellini fills his frame with the crowd’s confused, disorderly movements, growing more frenzied until they begin violently tearing branches off the tree that she apparently touched.

Any objective observer can see the blatant irony of their desecration, breaking an apparently holy icon into lifeless parts so they might selfishly take a little bit of it home for themselves, though the scene’s final stinger doesn’t arrive until the following morning when the dust has settled. In the heat of the moment, a small, sick boy has been trampled to death, literally killed by Rome’s religious herd mentality and its corresponding media circus.

*Religion mixes with mass media, and the consequences are devastating, stripping faith of its dignity and twisting it into a violent, grotesque competition.*

*When the dust settles, the casualties are revealed – innocence literally killed by Rome’s religious herd mentality.*

After such a reprehensible display of abhorrent human behaviour, there is only one person who Marcello can turn to for some restoration of hope, and whose own storyline is split up into three smaller parts across La Dolce Vita. Affluent intellectual Steiner is the man that Marcello wishes he could be with his balanced lifestyle, loving family, and sophisticated hobbies, and Fellini even sets him up as a spiritual guide of sorts who plays jazz and Bach on a church organ. His party of artists and philosophers is relatively subdued to the others featured in La Dolce Vita, inviting Marcello to thoughtfully ponder his two great passions of journalism and literature, and how he might follow in his host’s footsteps to find peace within himself. In rebuttal though, Steiner is quick to divulge his own discontent.

“A more miserable life is better, believe me, than an existence protected by a perfectly organised society.”

*Steiner has achieved the dream of wealth, love, and success that Marcello deeply envies, with his splendid house party framed to pristine perfection.*

Only when Steiner’s story is wrapped up in its third act do the terrible depths of his anguish come to light with a gut-wrenching twist. Outside his house, journalists gather to get the scoop on the man who allegedly killed his children before committing suicide, and swarm his unaware wife whose confusion turns to horrified realisation of what has happened. “Maybe he was afraid of himself, of us all,” Marcello tries to reason, grasping for answers that don’t entirely make sense in the wake of such immense tragedy. If a smart, self-assured man like Steiner couldn’t hold onto some thin thread of moral order in this universe though, then what hope is there for Marcello?

*Fellini’s cinematography constantly highlights the astounding geometry of Roman architecture, here gazing up at a stairway to the heavens.*

*News spreads out on the street of Steiner’s murder-suicide, delivering the final blow to Marcello’s hope in some cosmic moral order.*

It isn’t quite clear how much time has passed between this scene and Fellini’s final episode, but the shift in Marcello’s disposition is notable, having abandoned both his passions of journalism and literature to sink deeper into the entertainment industry as a publicist. After he and some new friends break into one of their ex-husband’s beach house, the night quickly devolves into a bacchanalian orgy which sees Marcello cover a female companion in cushion feathers and ride her around the room, degrading her to the level of a beast. No longer do we see any inhibition or hesitation in his debauchery, but rather a listless resignation to his moral depravity that thoroughly blends in with the licentious crowd.

*Marcello’s life devolves into a dehumanising orgy, void of dignity or belief in some greater purpose. These are the deepest pits of hell where humans become little more than animals.*

In these closing moments, Fellini formally unites the end of Marcello’s spiritual journey in La Dolce Vita with its start and midpoint, and draws on two crucial symbols from both. As the sun rises the next morning after the party, Marcello and company loiter down to the beach where fishermen have hauled a bloated Leviathan from the water. “It insists on looking,” Marcello reflects as he stares into its dead, godless eyes, feeling them pierce his conscience. Where La Dolce Vita began with Christ flying over Rome, it now ends with Satan being dredged up from its depths, as Marcello finally reaches the innermost circle of Hell and faces the hideous disfiguration of his soul.

*A bloated Leviathan dredged up from the ocean, piercing Marcello’s soul with the cold, dead eyes of Satan.*

And yet even here at Marcello’s lowest point, still there is a divine presence by his side – a young girl he had previously encountered at a seaside restaurant, whose soft features he noted resemble those of an angel from an Umbrian church. In a key piece of foreshadowing, the cha-cha song ‘Patricia’ she innocently hummed along to while waitressing is perversely revisited in the closing moments as the soundtrack to Marcello’s orgy, hinting at her return and final attempt to reach him. From across a channel on the beach where he now stands with his friends and the dead sea monster, she waves and shouts at him, eventually getting his attention.

Ultimately though, Fellini chooses to end La Dolce Vita the same way he started it – with Marcello’s complete failure to connect with others, even as his Umbrian Angel tries to reach him over the noise of the waves. With a defeatist shrug, he returns to his decadent life, and consequently leaves behind the purest icon of divine grace that he has encountered yet. Through Fellini’s cynical subversion of theological iconography, the greatest religious epic put to film does not trace the paths of great men like Judah Ben-Hur or Moses, but a tortured soul’s weary descent to the depths of an amoral, existentialist hell.

The return of Marcello’s Umbrian Angel is a last grasp at salvation, but the distance is too great. Lips move, but the sound doesn’t quite reach across the channel, leaving this tortured soul to fade back into his existential hell.

La Dolce Vita is currently available to buy from Amazon.

Knife in the Water (1962)

Roman Polanski | 1hr 41min

The moment that the mysterious, unnamed hitchhiker of Knife in the Water boards the yacht of upper-class couple Andrzej and Krystyna, Roman Polanski’s camera attaches to the switchblade he carries in his pocket. It proves its utility as a practical tool, cutting ropes when the boat ends up marooned in shallow water, and slicing up food during meals. The dangerous game the hitchhiker plays of Five Finger Fillet is surely an impressive feat of dexterity too, and although Andrzej puts an end to it with apparent concerns of ruining the deck, his competitive side soon emerges when they take turns throwing it at the wall. Going by the lingering close-ups that Polanski uses to suspensefully track the knife’s movement, it would be safe to assume that this is his Chekhov’s gun, and it indeed serves an integral role at the climax. Ultimately though, the symbolic weight that is placed in this phallic icon of masculinity far outweighs its physical danger, chillingly sinking a rocky marriage before it gets the chance to take a life.

*Polanski’s phallic symbol of masculinity is wielded as a toy, a tool, and a subject of competition between the two men.*

Although the hitchhiker is spontaneously invited along as a plaything for the wealthy couple, the insecurity he sparks in Andrzej transcends class boundaries, both being men vying for the attention of Krystyna. Adding to the tension as well is the suggestion that Krystyna herself may not necessarily belong in this upper stratosphere of society, having married into money rather than being born into it. The egotism of her rich husband is as plainly evident to her as the hitchhiker’s jealous desire to become him, constantly drawing them into contest over that all-important knife.

The only evidence that might hint at Knife in the Water being Polanski’s directorial debut is the clearly limited budget that confines much of his narrative to the yacht, though there are few single-location films as visually inventive and resourceful as this. No doubt this is in part due to his keen study of cinema’s greats, with his manipulation of suspense through tracking shots and editing bearing the mark of Alfred Hitchcock, and the incredible depth of field across extreme camera angles pointing to Orson Welles. Even the shrewd framing of multiple faces in close-ups delivers a hypothetical answer to the question of what a psychological thriller might look like if it were directed by Ingmar Bergman, and was grounded in social critique rather than existential horror. Quite remarkably though, Polanski’s visuals do not merely dwell in the shadow of his influences, but are given a new, distinctive shape that sits alongside some of their finest works.

Few directors have recognised the true potential of framing the human face in endless arrangements – Ingmar Bergman is among them and is clearly an influence on Polanski, though he is clearly carving out his own path too.

The yacht itself is a fascinatingly geometric set piece bound by ropes, poles, and sails, and yet Polanski prefers using his actors’ bodies as obstructions and frames in the mise-en-scène. Legs, heads, and arms are often isolated in the foreground, reflecting their fluctuating power dynamics as they take turns dominating the scenery, and disconnecting the characters from each other. Polanski intimately presses us against their bare skin from low camera positions, while high angles alternately lay their vulnerable, half-dressed bodies out on the deck, like sacrifices prepared on an altar. Being surrounded by open water, they are obviously not trapped in any physical confines, and yet within Polanski’s claustrophobic blocking they are all victims of a parasitic social environment that they have created for themselves.

*In the absence of varied set pieces, Polanski’s mise-en-scène relies primarily on the bodies of his actors, segmenting them into limbs that frequently obstruct the frame.*

*Bodies laid out on the yacht like a sacrifice, bare and vulnerable.*

After all, each passenger has something to selfishly gain from the others in this allegory of class and gender, letting us carefully scrutinise the complex web of desire and contempt that lies between them. When Andrzej first notices the hitchhiker on the road, he decides to teach him a lesson by swerving dangerously close to where he is standing, and when he invites the young man onboard, he wields his position of boat captain with smarmy authority. It is all a game to him, until he notices his dominance being undermined by the hitchhiker’s mocking jabs, minor rebellions, and flirty pursuit of Krystyna, who alternates in the middle between amusement and apprehension.

*A composition loaded with tension, blocking the hitchhiker in the background between Andrzej and Krystyna as the division in their relationship.*

*Extreme high and low angles are woven into the power play, as both men vie for the position of captain.*

*Every so often, Polanski drops in these ethereal, greyscale wide shots that astound with their beauty.*

Along with his nerve-wracking knife motif, Polanski skilfully uses these interactions to formally lay the groundwork of their eventual reckoning. The hitchhiker’s inability to swim is ominously underscored as a key plot point, while the fact that Andrzej has named his boat after his wife subtly marks them equally as his property, turning any competition for one into a contest for both. Andrzej fully realises the masculine power that resides in the hitchhiker’s switchblade when he steals it for himself, making a potentially deadly struggle all but inevitable when tensions eventually boil over and send his guest overboard. With no sign of him resurfacing, Andrzej immediately assumes the worst, briefly considering covering the tracks of his apparent murder before resolving to swim to shore and fetch police. As a result, a window of opportunity finally opens to the surviving hitchhiker who has secretly clung to a nearby buoy. With Andrzej out of the picture, he reboards the yacht, sleeps with Krystyna, and thus takes the rich man’s wife and boat as his own.

*The hitchhiker’s revenge, subverting the artificial hierarchy through wits and sex.*

Even after the boat is returned to shore and Krystyna is reunited with her husband, Polanski’s social critique doesn’t lose its savage edge. With Andrzej’s image of masculine and financial power complete damaged in his wife’s eyes, his insecurity as a weak, jealous man has also been exposed, desperately reducing women and lower-class citizens to toys so that he may wield a flimsy control over them. There is nothing left for him to say as they drive back home, nor any way he can mend the brittle foundations of this relationship. At a road intersection, he brings the car to a complete standstill, as reluctant to continue forward as he is scared to move back. Murder would be far too clean a resolution to Knife in the Water’s thrilling acute interrogation of class and marital breakdown. By the time Polanski has stripped away all pretensions of dignity in his ensemble, so too have they lost their ability to confront complex situations with decisive action, and revealed the critical emptiness of their moral character.

*A bleak final frame, lingering on the car as it sits at a total standstill – there is no way forwards or backwards for this couple.*

Knife in the Water is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the Blu-ray is available to purchase on Amazon.

Repulsion (1965)

Roman Polanski | 1hr 45min

By the time Roman Polanski reached his second feature film Repulsion, he had already proved that shooting largely in a single location was no imposition on his creativity. In place of the sailing yacht where class tensions unravelled in Knife in the Water, here it is a London apartment which he distorts into disturbing hallucinations, revealing the chaotic psychological state of reclusive Belgian immigrant Carol Ledoux. The latter two instalments of his Apartment trilogy Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant would famously enter supernatural territory, but the deterioration of Carol’s mind in Repulsion needs no such influence from cults or demons. The visceral revulsion she feels towards even the vaguest notion of sex is instead enough to cripple her for days, confronting her with intimate violations of mind and body that seek to undermine her sense of personhood, and disintegrate her grip on reality.

Coming off her grand success leading Jacques Demy’s Technicolor musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Catherine Deneuve becomes the vessel through which Polanski examines an unstable, assaulted femininity in Repulsion, immediately proving her considerable range in the shocking contrast between both roles. Carol’s aloofness towards aspiring suitors in public hides the disgust that comes out more openly at home, specifically towards the boyfriend of her older sister, Helen. Even his habit of leaving his toothbrush in the same cup as hers invokes uneasy frustration, its placement taking on psychosexual significance as a figurative penetration, and the smell of his dirty clothes is enough to make her throw up. When she is left home alone for weeks without the company of another woman though, her obsessive paranoia expands uncontrollably in manic directions.

*The first in Polanski’s Apartment trilogy is towering achievement of claustrophobic mise-en-scène, isolating Carol within a space that progressively reflects the breakdown of her mind.*

*Expressionist light and shadows cast across the ceiling in a low angle, dividing the shot into segments.*

Deneuve’s performance is certainly helped as well by Polanski’s natural penchant for close-ups, isolating her disturbed reactions to the sound of Helen having sex in another room, and fragmenting her face with obstructions and shadows. This skilful framing of actors’ expressions is of course drawn directly from Ingmar Bergman’s playbook, though Polanski clearly favours it as a device to craft suspense and terror over subdued drama. Wide-angle lenses uncomfortably press us up against Deneuve’s face, invading her personal space within claustrophobic rooms, while the reflective surfaces of elevator mirrors and kettles create distorted, unsettling doubles in the mise-en-scene. Save for the epilogue which takes a step back into reality, Polanski hangs his subjective camera entirely on Deneuve and her erratic perspective, arousing an eerie discomfort from her vacant, wide-eyed gaze.

*Wide-angle lenses applied to close-ups intimately invade Carol’s personal space.*

*There is a hint of Ingmar Bergman to Polanski’s lighting and framing of faces, here casting a shadow across half of Deneuve’s wide-eyed expression to keep her at a distance.*

*Polanski never seems to run out of creative shot choices, eerily warping Deneuve’s face in reflections against household objects.*

Quite crucially, the array of symbolic motifs that Polanski formally organises around this tortured woman gives sinister shape to her breakdown, keeping Repulsion from falling into meaningless chaos. If Carol’s apartment is an embodiment of the afflicted mind she is trapped inside, growing more shambolic with overflowing bathwater and rotting carcasses, then the fracturing walls that she hallucinates suggest a similar splintering of her psyche’s very foundations. The cracked pavement that inexplicably captures her attention long before this is one of many seemingly insignificant visual cues here that plants a seed in her mind early on and later flourishes as a monstrous expression of primal horror, though the most horrific instance of this doesn’t arrive until the landlord’s fatal visit.

*Repulsion is relatively plotless, yet Polanski weaves through strong formal motifs, including these cracks which seem to follow Carol wherever she goes.*

Leading up to this point, Carol has been tormented by dreams of men breaking into her bedroom and viciously raping her, viscerally captured by Polanski’s handheld camera and set to nothing but the muted sound of a ticking clock. The first murder she commits out of extreme paranoia toward her unwanted suitor Colin seems to come as a direct result of those hallucinations, but when the landlord visits to collect rent money, attempts to take advantage of her, and brings her nightmare to life, we are given good reason to sympathise with her violent reaction. It is important to note that the razor she wields against him is in fact Michael’s, and thus she adopts its masculine power as she turns the tables on her attacker and slices him to death.

*Another motif comes in Carol’s nightmares of being raped, chaotically captured with a handheld camera wildly swinging through the scenes.*

*The peephole shot would become a trademark of Polanski’s, adopting Hitchcock’s brand of cinematic voyeurism as his own.*

Not that this surge of retributive justice brings Carol any relief, or even an end to her rape dreams. If anything, her descent into madness only escalates from here, as she delusionally irons her clothes without power and lets the apartment sink into filthy disrepair. Where Polanski initially composes his oppressive shots in Repulsion with an Antonioni-like framing of interior architecture, his visuals evolve here into a surreal bombardment of avant-garde stylings, leading Carol down a corridor of protruding hands that forcefully grope at her body.

*A touch of Antonioni in Polanski’s use of internal architecture, dividing his frame up through walls, corridors, and doorways to insulate his characters.*

*There is no holding back Polanski’s grotesque surrealism by the end, erupting in full force with hands protruding from walls and groping Carol as she walks past.*

If we are to single out a visual motif that unlocks the key to Carol’s deepest trauma though, then we must look to the very final shot of Repulsion once Helen and Michael have returned from vacation, discovered the gruesome remnants of Carol’s murderous breakdown, and found her in a catatonic state. While panicked family and neighbours scramble to help, Polanski’s camera tracks in on the family photograph that our gaze has been drawn to multiple times throughout the film, and yet which only now reveals an insidious secret. Partially obscured by the surrounding mess, only two faces are now visible – that of an older male family member with a wide grin, and of a young girl staring at him with profound loathing. At the core of Polanski’s surreal, psychological horror, there is simply a wounded woman forced into a depraved repression, miserably trying to contain its resulting damage to her mind, home, and whatever men dare to cross the threshold into either.

*Carol’s family photo is visited one last time in Repulsion’s final shot, this time in a new light – both literally and figuratively.*

Repulsion is available to purchase on Amazon.

Red Desert (1964)

Michelangelo Antonioni | 1hr 57min

Ever since young mother Giuliana was caught in a car collision that left her with lingering trauma, the world hasn’t seemed quite right. The industrial Italian town where she lives with her husband Ugo and son is an inhuman landscape of bizarre, alien structures, twisting steel beams and pipes around engines that never seem to stop churning, and chimneys that spit out blasts of fire. There is nothing vaguely hospitable about the harsh angles they impose on their environment, and neither is there any warmth to be found in strange beeps and clangs that constantly echo through polluted open spaces.

Still, under Michelangelo Antonioni’s dreamy direction we are left to question – how much of Red Desert is simply the perception of an unstable psyche, and how much is the real degradation of modern society? It is often difficult to discern where the cold, metallic sound design ends and where the synthesised score begins, ringing electronic wavelengths through the atmosphere to maddening effect. Few others who live here seem as disturbed by the ravaging of nature as Giuliana, who wanders its greasy factories and contaminated estuaries in a state of lonely discontent. She desperately desires the company of others, but even more than that she yearns for them to protect her from the sickness of the world, blocking it out like a barrier of empathy rather than steel or cement.

“I don’t know myself. I never get enough. Why must I always need other people? I must be an idiot. That’s why I can’t seem to manage. You know what I’d like? I’d like everyone who’s ever cared about me… here around me now, like a wall.”

*A marvel of location shooting following in neorealist tradition, as Antonioni sets his psychological drama around the petrochemical plants and rustic docks of rural Italy.*

*Steel pipes and machines hem Giuliana into tight spaces – harsh, unwelcoming, and austere mise-en-scène.*

*Formal rigour in the repeated patterns of industrial structures, dominating Giuliana with sheer mass and multitude.*

For now though, all that surrounds Giuliana is the industrial “architecture of anxiety” as critic Andrew Sarris labels it, physically dominating her slight frame at every angle. Red Desert is visually distinct from Antonioni’s previous works as his first film shot in colour, but it is also very much a thematic continuation of his ‘Alienation’ trilogy, using the shapes and patterns of modern infrastructure to lose his characters in confusing, inhospitable environments. Rather than islands or cities though, Red Desert is primarily shot on location around the petrochemical plants and rustic docks of rural Italy, uncovering an awe-inspiring beauty in those manufactured structures that were not designed with aesthetics in mind. Instead, it is the purely functionality of these formations that Antonioni relishes, framing their spatial symmetries, parallel lines, and geometric configurations with rigorous precision in his astounding long shots, and carefully blocking his tiny human subjects among them.

Not content with limiting himself to the landscape’s natural colours though, Antonioni pushes his visuals even further with tints of vibrant artifice that break through the monotonous, desaturated greys. Proclaiming his desire to “paint the film as one paints the canvas,” the Italian filmmaker took to his mise-en-scène with literal cans of paint, subtly accentuating the scenery’s neutral tones while aggressively splashing lively reds across the frame.

*A thorough dedication to every detail in his mise-en-scène, painting the fruit, cart, wagon, and wall slight variations of a dull, grey palette.*

*Antonioni aggressively interrupts the noxious grey scenery with jarring flashes of red.*

*Excellent formal consistency in Red Desert’s aesthetic, delivering an array of astounding compositions throughout minimalist interiors and industrial exteriors.*

The strongest use of this palette comes in the radio telescope set piece, stretching an enormous length of crimson scaffolding far into the distance while workers climb its triangular trusses. Given its alien appearance, the structure’s purpose is not immediately obvious, though the explanation that it allows humans to “listen to the stars” makes sense. This is a culture with its eyes turned upwards rather than inwards, paying far more attention to the undiscovered ceiling of human progress than the quality of day-to-day living. While impressive leaps are made in astronomy and energy technologies, the Earth and its inhabitants waste away in silence, struck by physical and psychological illnesses that all originate from the same place.

The radio telescope set piece is an extraordinary highlight, stretching an enormous length of crimson scaffolding far into the distance while workers climb its triangular trusses. This is a culture with its eyes turned upwards rather than inwards, paying far more attention to the undiscovered ceiling of human progress than the quality of day-to-day living.

As a result, the settings that Antonioni captures in Red Desert often border on apocalyptic. Piles of corroded debris obstruct shots of Giuliana’s aimless roaming in junkyards, and a brief retreat into a riverside shack with friends offers only temporary respite from the dense fog gathering outside. Antonioni’s blocking of bodies remains impressive even in medium shots here, tangling them around each other in lounging positions that look none too comfortable, and continuing to weave in his red palette through the tarnished wooden walls.

*Frame obstructions in the vein of Josef von Sternberg, crowding out the foreground while those in the background are visually subjugated.*

*Bodies twist around each other in uncomfortable positions – there is intimacy to be found in this dying landscape, but it is forced and unpleasant.*

The moment a ship carrying diseased passengers drifts into shot through a window though, the brief comfort that Giuliana that found here immediately dissipates, and she reverts to the hysterical state that her nightmares have often brought on. Not only did she attempt suicide shortly after her car accident, but her following experience being hospitalised left her with a harrowing fear of “Streets, factories, colours, people,” and of course any illness that might once again render her helpless. The silhouetted figures of her friends staggered through the mist outside are more ominous than they are comforting under these circumstances, agitating her to the point that she tries to escape in a panic and nearly drives off the end of the wharf. The visual metaphor that Antonioni composes here of Giuliana’s car ready to tip over the edge of the world is devastatingly bleak, with the tall, unlit beacon tower diminishing her presence and the grey negative space eerily beckoning her into the void.

*Physical and psychological sickness docks outside the cabin, dissipating Giuliana’s brief comfort as she reverts to her hysterical state brought on by nightmares.*

*An ominous staggering of bodies throughout the frame in the heavy, suffocating fog, using three different depths of field.*

*Antonioni’s visual metaphor is devastatingly bleak, with the tall, unlit beacon tower diminishing Giuliana’s presence and the grey negative space eerily beckoning her into the void.*

When Antonioni isn’t trapping Giuliana within wide open expanses and behind architectural obstructions, it is his shallow focus which softly detaches her from these surroundings, envisioning her subconscious defence mechanism. It is an unusual device for a filmmaker so attached to his crisp depth of field, and yet its formal introduction in the out-of-focus opening credits and emphasis on Monica Vitti’s subtly expressive face in close-ups is wielded with exceptional care, isolating her marvellous performance against red, liquefied backdrops. She is filled with an aching hunger to simply connect with another being, and yet the more she reaches out, the more lost she becomes. When she finally makes love to a man, Antonioni’s disjointed editing keeps their passion at a cold distance, and her attempt to communicate with a German sailor by the dockyard is painfully hindered by the language barrier between them.

*The shallow focus of the opening credits is often brought back through close-ups on Giuliana, placing us in her detached head space.*

Unfortunately, the emotion that Vitti pours into this role is not always reciprocated by Richard Harris as Corrado, her husband’s business associate and the one man she connects with on a personal level. Neither does the magical realist bedtime story interlude that whisks us away to a distant island paradise formally integrate so well with the rest of Red Desert’s grim naturalism. Still, Antonioni’s stark cinematic ambition cannot ultimately be overshadowed by these flaws as he works his obsession with rich pigments into Vitti’s capricious character.

Though she erratically claims to be scared of colour, she also dreams of filling her unopened ceramics shop with it, opting for light blues and greens in a subconscious reaction against the angry red steel of her outside environment. Whether it is the pink walls of her bedroom of the green décor of Corrado’s tidy living room, Antonioni often uses the soft palettes of his interiors to offset the vibrancy of his landscapes, though visually these amount to little against the sheer mass of the world’s barren greyness.

*Various interiors briefly diverge from Antonioni’s monotonous palette, offering fleeting respite from the world’s barren greyness.*

If our humanity is to break through at all, it is not in acts of individual expression, but the giant displays of human industry mounted on arid plains, spewing yellow smoke into the dirty air. Passing birds know not to fly there, Giuliana poignantly explains to her son, though it is a sad state of affairs to begin with that such innocent creatures must be taught to navigate manmade danger in a world that no longer has a place for them. At this point, there are no easy solutions to reverse society’s reckless pursuit of progress and profit, Antonioni realises. To live is to merely survive, and yet in though slow deterioration of Red Desert’s earth, air, and water, even that is dangerously at risk.

*Yellow fumes spew from industrial chimneys, filling the air with poison that keeps the birds away.*

Red Desert is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD or Blu-ray are available to purchase on Amazon.

Tom Jones (1963)

Tony Richardson | 2hr 1min

When Henry Fielding wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in 1749, he carved a powerful archetype out of its adolescent hero, leading him through worldly adventures that taught him lessons of moral integrity, courage, and independence. The transition from youth to maturity had been explored in the mythology of many ancient cultures before, but this was a coming-of-age story for a modern world, daring to treat its protagonist’s journey with a good dose of wit, irony, and moral complexity.

What Tony Richardson accomplished in his 1963 adaptation Tom Jones is more than just an update, though his version of the titular character is certainly far more an icon of the Swinging Sixties than the 18^th century, complete with the floppy hair and roguish charm of The Beatles. Richardson’s reinvention is imbued with the rebellious spirit of Tom Jones himself, throwing out the playbook of artistic convention to challenge the same conservative notions of young adulthood that Fielding had satirised over two hundred years prior.

*Albert Finney gives the performance of his career as Tom Jones – he is a modern man of the 1960s living in the 18th century, roguishly charming and gleefully adventurous.*

As a landmark of the British New Wave, Tom Jones naturally carries the influence of its parallel French movement, and specifically the light formal experimentations of François Truffaut whose literary adaptations were similarly adventurous. Freeze frames, jump cuts, and fourth wall breaks constantly disrupt the narrative’s natural flow with comical disregard, and almost every scene transition is marked by an iris closing in on a face, a dissolve, or a wipe taking any number of shapes. Given the number of amateurs who have adopted these techniques in cheap editing programs, it is hard to argue that this has had a particularly positive influence overall, and as a result many have labelled Richardson’s editing as clumsy. Within the context of his caustic, irreverent satire though, these creative choices brilliantly undercut the pretentiousness of Tom Jones’ snobbish aristocratic society with amusing derision, reducing their self-important lives to colourful entertainment for the masses.

*Richardson freezes the frame at pivotal moments, playing with our expectations and the continuity of the piece itself.*

*Richardson approaches his edit with a rebellious French New Wave attitude about him, breaking up the edit with a freeze frame montage of character poses.*

In fact, it isn’t hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick taking much of Richardson’s work here as his inspiration for Barry Lyndon twelve years later, subverting traditional notions of literary and historical study by underscoring the absolute absurdity of his characters. As if spoken by tedious college professors, the voiceovers of both films narrate their respective stories with haughty arrogance, weaving long-winded turns of phrase into their speech that make them targets of the viewer’s contempt. Especially in Tom Jones, our narrator humorously takes it on himself to decide which parts of the tale should be concealed from public view, as the camera gently drifts away from the beginning of a sex scene between Tom and Molly, a local peasant girl.

“It shall be our custom to leave such scenes where taste, decorum, and the censor dictate.”

*Scene transitions creatively unfold in irises…*

*…and screen wipes taking any number of shapes, exaggerating the film style in a way that supports its formal experimentations.*

Humans are inherently crude, messy creatures, so Richardson holds much criticism for those who try to apply a false filter of sophistication to modern understandings of their own species. This applies just as much to storytellers as it does to those characters arrogantly trying to write their own artificial legacies, many of whom happen to belong to society’s upper class. Tom is at least honest with his imperfections, while the noblemen who surround him ludicrously frame their vicious hunts for wild game and their vain gloating over dead carcasses as honourable sport. Richardson’s cinematography doesn’t touch the profound beauty of Barry Lyndon, but his active camera is fully engaged with the action as it races alongside their horses during the chase, unashamedly submitting to the thrill of their bloodthirsty conquest and carrying the energy of its vigorous editing. In calmer scenes, he mounts his period production design and blocking in handsome wide shots too, maintaining the same sophisticated, stuffy affect as his ensemble of pompous Englishmen.

*There are no long takes to be found, but the camera is frequently dynamic and moving with characters.*

*Tom Jones is not an overly beautiful film, but it has superb visual moments like these, setting a wall of white flowers as a scene backdrop.*

*Scenic backgrounds and period costuming when Tom sets out on his journey through the countrysides of 18th century England.*

*It’s not quite Barry Lyndon, but Richardson does make the time for painterly moments of blocking and lighting.*

Of all these characters, it is Mr. Blifil who is clearly the most contemptuous, asserting his noble heritage over his baseborn cousin Tom who was adopted by the kind-hearted Squire Allworthy. This villain represents everything distasteful about England’s aristocracy, pursuing Tom’s love interest Sophie with an air of vain entitlement, and later having him banished from the estate out of pure envy. This exile consequently becomes the catalyst for our hero’s journey of self-discovery, revealing his chivalry when he saves a woman being assaulted, and his recklessness when he is drawn too easily into physical confrontations. The fact that Richardson also dwells on the awkwardness of his romantic encounters between these major encounters is integral to this character study as well, watching him lustily biting into chicken to clumsily entice a woman who he later discovers may or may not be his birth mother, while she in turn seductively slurps up an oyster.

*Comic brilliance in the culinary seduction scene between Tom and Mrs Waters who dig into their meals with exaggerated sensuality.*

The question of Tom’s true parentage may hang heavy over the narrative, but in moments like these it is treated with as much irreverent humour as anything else. The possibility that he has committed incest makes for a shockingly amusing subplot, and the opening scene which sees him abandoned as a baby in Squire Allworthy’s quarters is especially whimsical, playing out in the farcically exaggerated fashion of a silent film. The traditionally baroque harpsichord is appropriated into an upbeat screwball score here while confusion hysterically runs riot through the squire’s estate, upending formal convention several years before Monty Python would do the same in their historical comedies. When the identity of Tom’s parents is finally revealed in Tom Jones’ final act, Richardson doesn’t waste time contemplating the laborious details of the tell-all letter either, but rather rushes through the exposition with a rapid-fire, fourth wall-breaking monologue that economically cuts straight to the point.

*A silent film opening whimsically sets up the mystery of Tom’s birth in a throwback to cinema’s past.*

*Fourth wall breaks speed through necessary but cumbersome exposition with enormous energy, cutting straight to the point.*

To Richardson, continuity is little more than a hindrance to his fusion of highbrow social satire and lowbrow slapstick. It is a tool for snobs, feebly demanding respect while inviting the playful mockery of others. The abundance of irony in Tom Jones is not to say that it lacks sincerity, as behind Albert Finney’s toothy grin and comic talents we still find a young man resolutely making his way through the world, though it is consistently his light-hearted nature which guides his moral character. Tom is no relic of the 18^th century or even the 1960s in Richardson’s hands, but an emblem of perennial youth, finding comfort in the frivolous joys and contrivances of an exceedingly absurd world.

Tom Jones is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to buy on Amazon.

Teorema (1968)

Pier Paolo Pasolini | 1hr 38min

Though Pier Paolo Pasolini imbues Teorema’s structure with the same rigidity as the bourgeoisie’s arbitrary social conventions, his fleeting cutaways to Mt Etna’s chaotic, elemental landscapes are never far away. The volcano is a natural catalyst of transformation and destruction, with its fissures blowing sulphurous steam across slopes of black dust and threatening to erase any semblance of social order within its reach. It wreaks turmoil and madness, both predating and outlasting the entire span of time that humans have lived on Earth. When a mortal being truly grasps a force as primordially unfathomable as this, the effects are wildly unpredictable, though the entropic family portrait that Pasolini paints here captures the complexity of such a world-shifting spiritual experience with mystifying acuity.

*The barren, steamy landscapes of Mt Etna make for inspired formal cutaways, punctuating this rigorously structured film with visions of wild chaos.*

*Sunlight accompanies the Visitor in divine lens flares, framing him like a Renaissance sculpture.*

In the case of Teorema’s lonely aristocrats, it is not the secrets of God’s earthly creation which they must grapple with, but rather a mysterious figure who seems to come from another realm altogether. The Visitor’s eyes are a bright blue that seems to pierce the defences of whoever gazes into them, and at times he is even accompanied by a blinding sunlight forming a halo behind his head. The ease with which he falls into the family’s life is surprisingly intimate, but also offers them a strange emotional healing from their private insecurities.

When Emilia the maid attempts suicide with a gas hose, the Visitor rescues and consoles her. As Pietro the son lies in bed at night, his new roommate soothes his fears. Outside on the grass, he approaches the sexually frustrated mother Lucia sunbathing in the nude and wraps her in his arms. The immature young daughter Odetta invites him into her virginal white room, opening herself up to new experiences. And finally, the ailing father Paolo finds a comforting peace in his guest’s presence, as both walk along a misty river and talk among wild, overgrown bushes.

*Terrence Stamp’s Visitor is often found sitting with his legs open – is he a Christ figure, or is he just sexy? The bourgeoisie could easily mistake one for the other.*

*Picturesque long shots of the Italian countryside, misty and cold.*

These are not merely innocent encounters, but Pasolini connects these characters’ spiritual awakenings to physical self-discoveries through explicit sexual seductions. As a result, each family member is individually bound to parallel journeys, methodically unfolding in the same, formulaic sequence established in the first act, and referenced in the film’s title Teorema – or ‘theorem’ in English.

Following the announcement of the Visitor’s imminent departure, it is according to this order that Pasolini subsequently moves through their confessions in their respective locations. They have all faced the transmutation of their own souls, and now all they can do is contemplate the irrelevance of their old lives, and the uncertainty of their futures. “I no longer even recognise myself,” Pietro reflects in his bedroom. “I was like everyone else, with many faults, perhaps, mine and those of the world around me. You made me different by taking me out of the natural order of things.”

Out on the lawn, Lucia reveals the “real and total interest” the Visitor filled her life with during his stay, and inside Odetta expresses thanks for helping her grow up and explore her sexuality. As for Paolo, who has always believed “in order, in the future, and above all in ownership,” this guest has destroyed everything he understands about himself and the world. The only way he can imagine rebuilding his identity would be through “a scandal tantamount to social suicide,” separating himself from the materialism and ego of the modern world to seek a deeper truth in his existence.

*A green lawn, green furniture, green gates – Pasolini is committed to the colour in his mise-en-scène that slightly lifts this world out of reality.*

As for Pasolini’s stance on the sanity of it all, he approaches the matter with both delicate consideration and savage criticism. This wealthy family have been living a superficial lie for many years, consumed by worldly distractions and capitalist privilege, and so cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini infuses these scenes at their Milanese estate with a pristine fragility. Characters are blocked in rigorous arrangements worthy of paintings as they lounge on the lawn and seat themselves symmetrically around the dinner table, though these meticulous visuals carry a strange tension with Pasolini’s naturalistic, handheld camerawork. The stylistic contrast is unsettling, subtly detaching the family from the reality of the working class witnessed in the opening scene’s documentary footage, while containing them within a dream of sepia filters and ethereal green hues weaved through the mansion’s gates, lawn, cars, and décor.

*Rigid symmetry in the house of the bourgeoisie, holding together a pristine, fragile facade of order.*

*And in contrast to the curated blocking is the documentary footage of the opening, associating the working classes with a more naturalistic aesthetic of handheld camerawork.*

*The sepia filter Pasolini occasionally applies is otherworldly and alien, setting up this bourgeoisie family as people we cannot relate to.*

Not that the extremity of their spiritual conversion is any less insane than the absurdity of their bloated privilege. Pasolini heavily implies that these nobles are so emotionally repressed they may simply be confusing the ecstasy of intercourse for divine revelation, further suggesting that the only two forces capable of tearing down oppressive class structures are sex and God – or at least, the unadulterated belief in them. Theological art and texts thus become ornamental in Teorema’s satire, displacing Ennio Morricone’s gloomy jazz score with Mozart’s haunting Requiem, and pondering Bible verses in contemplative voiceovers. Even here though, Pasolini is quoting the Book of Jeremiah to consider religion’s erasure of identity through sexual metaphors.

“You have seduced me, O Lord, and I have let myself be seduced. You have taken me by force, and you have prevailed. I have become an object of daily derision, and all mock me.”

*Christian icons torment Lucia following the Visitor’s departure, stranding her in spiritual emptiness.*

On one level, Pasolini is adopting the transcendent awe of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films, gazing at impossible miracles of fasting, healing, and levitation performed by Emilia when she returns to her hometown. As the only main character here who belongs to the working class, she alone has the capacity to truly perceive and absorb the sacred, being unattached to the bourgeoisie’s material lifestyle. Her eventual sacrifice through live burial and self-immolation is even shot with an astounding beauty against the orange Italian sunset, capturing a glimpse of the sacred as she humbly resigns her body to the Earth.

*Only the maid’s transformation truly intersects with the divine, performing astonishing miracles that cannot be explained.*

*Emilia’s hair also turns green, tying her into the ethereal colour palette.*

*Pasolini uses magic hour exquisitely in Emilia’s self-burial and immolation, resigning her body to the Earth.*

Pasolini’s rigorous blocking of the family around Odetta’s catatonic state also visually alludes to the tragic funeral of a devoted believer in Dreyer’s Ordet, but there is no profound resurrection to be found here. The rest of this newly inspired family is as lost as ever, seeing Lucia aimlessly search for fulfilment through affairs with younger men, and Pietro express his lustrous longing for the absent Visitor through abstract painting. Art may be elevated in the eyes of upper-class society, but the son’s internal self-worth is thoroughly degraded as he recognises the lowliness and misery of any honest creator.

“Nobody must realise that the artist is a poor, trembling idiot, a second-rate hack who lives by taking chances and risks, like a disgraced child, his life reduced to the absurd melancholy of one who lives debased by the feeling of something lost forever.”

Odetta’s physical decline evokes the visual solemnity of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet. Rather than a divine resurrection though, Pasolini cynically displays a spiritual death in this superbly blocked composition.

*Lucia goes searching for the physical intimacy that the Visitor once provided, only to find emptiness in carnal pleasures.*

Pietro is driven to abstract artistic expression in the absence of the Visitor, trying and failing to capture the essence of the sublime. Each family member’s reaction to realising the desolation of their own souls is diverse and indicting.

This extends further to the other members of this family who now spend their lives searching for an irrecoverable connection to a higher purpose, though perhaps Paolo understands the insanity of it more than anyone. Driven mad by his own empty existence, he enters a train station and strips himself completely nude, before handing the entire factory over to his workers. A victory is secured for Pasolini’s Marxist politics, returning the means of production to the industrial proletariat, while the black, desolate dunes of Mt Etna which have appeared intermittently throughout Teorema beckon a demented Paolo away from civilisation.

Unfortunately, whatever secrets the ancient volcano holds are inaccessible to this former capitalist, whose renunciation of all material possessions has only exposed his own hollowness. He runs through these landscapes in agony, as if trying to find some justification for his total sacrifice, but there is no power great enough to heal those souls eroded by pride and entitlement. Finally seeing themselves for what they are, all the bourgeoisie of Teorema can do is scream into a void that even God dare not touch, devolving into a state of repulsive, primal desperation that Pasolini knows can never be fulfilled.

*Paolo’s reaction to losing the Visitor is the most insane of the lot, shamefully bearing his naked to the public and exiling himself to the wilderness.*

*A brilliantly mystifying formal pay-off to the Mt Etna cutaways as Paolo screams into the void, unable to find the answers he seeks.*

Teorema is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD and Blu-ray is available to purchase on Amazon.

Weekend (1967)

Jean-Luc Godard | 1hr 45min

When we initially land in the bizarre modern landscape of Weekend, it appears as if civilisation is standing on a precipice, tentatively waiting to tip over into absurdist anarchy. When cheating lovers Corinne and Roland eventually hit the road, it quickly becomes clear though that this is not the case – as far as Jean-Luc Godard is concerned, society is already there, consumed by its own avarice and hubris. Together, both spouses intend to claim their inheritance from Corinne’s parents, though privately they also plant to murder each other afterwards and greedily take more than what is rightfully theirs. By every economic, political, and social metric, they are the most standard definition of twentieth century bourgeoisie, self-absorbed in their materialistic mindsets while naively unaffected by the disaster unfolding around them. It is only a matter of time before they too are brought down to the grotesque level of squalor that those below them have been suffering through for their entire lives.

Coming out at the tail-end of Godard’s magnificent run of postmodern films in the 1960s, Weekend also signals a more politically-inclined direction for the French auteur that would last several more decades, yet would never reach anywhere near the heights of his early career. For now though, his Marxist-Leninist ideals that had previously only touched the surface in films like La Chinoise emerge fully formed here, coalescing almost flawlessly with his radical formal artistry.

*Godard’s satire is more political than ever, eviscerating the clueless bourgeoisie who journey through modern hellscapes without acknowledging the downfall of civilisation.*

As it is, Weekend marks the last true masterpiece of the French New Wave, subversively making as much a target out of the socioeconomic conventions of 1960s France as the medium of film itself. The two cannot be separated in Godard’s post-ironic deconstructions, purposefully muddling his love of cinema with his impulse to pull us from its emotional grip, rip it apart, and expose it as little more than a two-dimensional illusion of light flickering on a screen. The sporadic intertitles that interrupt its narrative and rhythmic flow are an integral part of this, romantically describing this work of cinema early on as “A film adrift in the cosmos”,before almost immediately eviscerating itself with a far more self-deprecating reproach – “A film found on a dump.” When civilisation comes crashing down as it has in Weekend, art holds very little significance, and yet even within these contradictions Godard still can’t help cherishing the creative expression it grants him.

*A classic self-reflexive device from Godard – interrupting intertitles commenting on the film itself, sardonically undercutting whatever significance we place in it as a piece of art.*

He is evidently not the only one trivially obsessed with pop culture in the midst of an apocalypse either, with a faction of rebels taking the titles of classic films as their code names – “Battleship Potemkin calling The Searchers” – while writer Emily Brontë and French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just surreally wander through anachronistic vignettes. Like all of Godard’s greatest films, Weekend is an eclectic pastiche of both recognisable and obscure icons, embracing the inevitability of artistic theft while demonstrating the possibility of still creating something valuable and original. Incredible artistic feats such as this are all too scarce in an era of dull cliches, refusing to see the potential of pre-existing material to build anything other than soulless nostalgia, and it is this stubborn passiveness on a more universal scale which damns the French society of Weekend to its dystopian grave. These citizens who seem to be driving nowhere in particular would much rather tear each other down with violent, petty road rage than continue towards their destination.

*Figures of English and French history make appearances at the end of human civilisation, building something new out of familiar references to European culture.*

When motorists aren’t furiously wielding tennis racquets and rifles over their crashed cars, it is more than likely that we will instead find them stuck in endless traffic jams, thus forming another visual metaphor that Godard saturates with Kafkaesque insanity. In one of the defining shots of his career, the camera tracks from left to right along a string of cars on an open country road while Corinne and Roland roll comfortably down an empty lane, skipping the inconveniences that lower classes must suffer through. A cacophony of perpetual beeps screams through the air, doing little to ease the congestion which grows progressively stranger the further along we travel.

A man and a boy throwing a ball between cars, a vehicle turned completely upside down, a truck of monkeys making an escape, a horse and wagon standing atop a pile of faeces, an elderly couple playing chess on the road – for eight minutes, Godard drags us through tableaux of trivial nonsense, revealing the time-wasting frivolity that grows from a lack of forward movement. In case we become too comfortable in the offbeat rhythms of this long take, he cuts in a couple of timestamps indicating the minutes that pass from 1.40pm to 2.10pm, and he also irrationally loops back on the same cars a couple of times as well. We shouldn’t be surprised to find what is causing the holdup at the end of the traffic, but it is shocking nonetheless. A bloody, violent collision has streaked the road with blood, and left the corpses of adults and children lying on the roadside.

*Weekend’s brilliant cinematic high arrives in the tracking shot following the absurdly long line of traffic, growing steadily more ridiculous bit by bit.*

*At the end of the tracking shot, a spattering of blood and violence – dead bodies from the car collision are little more than time-consuming inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.*

These cars may have once been proud emblems of modern industry and progress, and yet in Weekend they prove to be nothing more than pathetically inept status symbols, superficially signifying one’s wealth before perishing and potentially destroying their owners along with them. What starts as a biting gag in the film’s opening minutes gradually evolves into a dark formal motif, as well as a colourfully derelict part of Godard’s daunting wastelands bizarrely littered with burning vehicles. When his characters aren’t stealing clothes from dead bodies, they rarely give these a second look.

*Godard’s mise-en-scène is littered with cars, forming a creative dystopian landscape out of these icons of technological progress.*

*Godard’s violence is always drenched in artifice, sending up the action of Hollywood movies.*

The only time we even see a collision in action rather than just the aftermath is when Corinne and Roland eventually lose their car in one, and yet even here Godard does not seek to capitalise on salacious thrills, instead wishing to remind his audience of the hollow artifice in such gratuitous spectacle. As our central couple lose control of their car, the film reel and projector appear to malfunction as well, chaotically slipping the image offscreen before stabilising on the image of the subsequent fiery wreck. At first, we might think that the bloodcurdling scream coming from the debris might finally offer us sincere, personal stakes, until we hear the shrieking woman cry out the source of her horror.

“My Hermès handbag!”

*The first time we almost see an actual collision unfold, Godard runs the film off its tracks and the projector malfunctions, rendering the salacious thrills offscreen.*

Even when the world is crashing and burning, the bourgeoisie will only begin to panic when those material luxuries that dull the existential pain are lost. When they’re the ones hitchhiking on an open road and begging for help, they also find out very quickly how hypocritical their own kind are. “Are you in a film or in reality?” one woman stops to ask. “In a film,” Roland responds, clearly giving the incorrect answer as the would-be good Samaritan drives off. Two more drivers also pull over to check the superficial political alliances of this stranded couple. “Would you rather be screwed by Mao or Johnson?” one of them inquires, before decisively making up their prejudiced mind when Roland chooses Johnson.

“Drive on, Jean. He’s a fascist.”

These petty political divisions may be even more insidious than those instances of road rage we witness elsewhere, elevating a shallow commitment to political ideals above moral goodness and survival. For as long as Godard is delivering commentary such as this with his usual creativity and wit, Weekend continues to move along to its own unpredictable rhythmic dissonance, and yet the point at which he stops the film in its tracks to linger on a political speech is far too plain to be considered inspired on any cinematic level. The highlight reel of previous scenes that he intermittently cuts in over the top does little to offset the dryness as well, marking a serious blemish on what is otherwise a masterpiece of post-classical filmmaking.

*A bizarre jump cut deliberately breaking the immersion of the scene, as a field of ruined cars humorously turns into a field of sheep.*

On one hand, it is tough to imagine a slightly younger Godard from the early 1960s carelessly falling back on a scene like this, though by nature of his dynamic, ever-changing style, such variation also comes with the territory of artistic innovation. After all, the long takes that appear throughout Weekend are not something we had seen from him before either, and yet they are constantly used to much more brilliant effect here as we wander environments in tracking shots and 360-degree pans. They are superbly controlled in their execution, pushing in and out on Corinne and Roland’s silhouettes early on as she erotically describes an affair, and elsewhere holding an air of constant surprise as Godard slowly reveals a mishmash of incongruent vignettes – a man playing drums off to the side in a forest, for instance, or the bored spectators watching a farmer play Mozart. Like the director himself, he too is holding onto his own irrelevant form of artistic expression while an indifferent society collapses around him.

*A long take pushing in and out of these silhouettes early on, freezing the couple in darkness as they discuss their erotic affairs.*

The long takes and movements of Weekend are unusual for Godard who has always relied far more on his editing, and yet their use here still feels true to his Brechtian irony as the camera wanders off in the middle of scenes.

On an even broader level, it is also thanks to these long camera movements that Godard’s apocalyptic world feels so expansive, not so much aiming to establish any rigorous internal logic within it than to create the impression of a giant, meaningless odyssey. After all, was this catastrophic journey really worth the money at the end? Our two spoiled adventurers might think so at first, even going so far as to kill Corinne’s mother when she refuses to hand it over, though their success is cut short when this anarchic wasteland rears its ugly head one last time, landing them in the hands of violently radical hippies. Roland is gruesomely disembowelled – “The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror,” they explain – and Corinne doesn’t think twice to join in cannibalising her husband when she gets hungry. It is an amusingly out-of-left-field move from Godard to end this absurdist critique of consumer society by watching it ultimately devour itself, but if there is any consistency to be found at all within the sprawling chaos of Weekend, then we can at least reliably expect these vain, pampered materialists to be the source of their own inexorable ruin.

*‘Eating the rich’ depicted with gruesome irony – a capitalist’s dystopia is an anarchist’s paradise.*

Weekend is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be purchased on Amazon.

The Haunting (1963)

Robert Wise | 1hr 52min

There is little sense to be made from the perplexing layout of the 90-year-old Massachusetts manor, Hill House. Doors that are built slightly off-centre slam shut seemingly of their own accord, and there is not a single square corner to be found in the entire building, making navigation of its distorted corridors and cluttered rooms particularly difficult. The Gothic décor of dark floral fabrics and ornate wooden furniture looks as if they have been preserved in time for many decades too, reeking a deathly odour that has not quite let go of old grudges and traumas. Robert Wise forces us into a heavily subjective and wildly disorientating perspective here, twisting, turning, and tilting his camera at all angles like an angry spirit, though even his static wide shots appear to warp the dimensions of the space in his widescreen aspect ratio.

*Wise’s camera is terrifyingly subjective, exposing us to harsh angles and images that deliberately disorientate our perspective.*

*Bulging and distorting the shot with unusual lenses and reflective surfaces.*

If there is anything that consistently lets us recalibrate our senses, it is Wise’s recurring cutaways to the imposing exterior of Hill House, rising from the estate in low angles that shrink us beneath its pointed turrets and stony columns. The infrared film stock use for these establishing shots has its own eerie effect as well, darkening the daylit sky to suggest a sinister presence permanently hanging over the cursed establishment. In terms of pure visual representation, there is very little that explicitly confirms the presence of ghosts in The Haunting, and yet Wise’s cinematic manipulations settle a terrifying ambiguity across the mansion that paranormal expert Dr. John Markway believes may contain “a key to another world.”

These repeated establishing shots of Hill House are eerily weaved into the film’s formal structure, hanging a supernatural evil over its Gothic facade with the infrared film stock that makes daylit skies appear dark.

The small group of assistants he invites to help study the reported supernatural activity of Hill House are an odd group of misfits. Theodora is a psychic whose belief in the occult strikes a harsh contrast against the cocky scepticism of Luke, the young heir of the estate. Eleanor sits somewhere between the two – she is shaken by uncertainty, and yet she also experiences a strange, psychological attraction towards the manor. It is almost as if it understands her on a personal level, penetrating the veil of secrecy that surrounds the recent death of her mother to draw out her repressed trauma, guilt, and grief.

Given the parallels between Eleanor and Hill House’s backstories, it is not too hard to see why she finds such a twisted sense of belonging there. Dr. Markway sets the scene in a prologue that covers decades of the mansion’s history, narrating the “scandal, murder, insanity, suicide” that began the moment the wife of the original owner, Hugh Crain, arrived on the property, passing away as her carriage violently crashed into a tree. The second Mrs Crain would also perish here, falling down a rickety spiral staircase in the library – the same location a nurse would hang herself many years later after failing to respond to the calls of an elderly Abigail Crain, Hugh’s daughter, who died in the nursery she grew up in.

*Hill House’s past is rife with mysterious deaths and religious zealotry, laying out a formal pattern that will see history repeat itself in the present.*

A brilliant formal conceit is thus set in what essentially becomes a supernatural prophecy, promising us that the deaths of all four women will continue to echo forwards through time. As we come to discover, the fate of Abigail Crain bears a horrifying resemblance to the demise of Eleanor’s mother, whose knocking on the wall for help went ignored by her daughter. Now as Eleanor takes up accommodation in Hill House, Wise’s camera carefully traces the sound of pounding as it moves around the edges of her bedroom, exposing her heavy conscience and thus making her more susceptible to the house’s evil influence. Subtly binding her even closer to the deceased denizens of this mansion too is the reverberant voiceover that effectively disembodies her inner thoughts, foreshadowing a ghostly destiny alongside those women who fell to its dark charm.

“I’m disappearing inch by inch into this house.”

*An incredible use of deep focus in compositions like these, simultaneously framing a close-up and a wide shot that conveys total paranoia.*

*Bit by bit, the house is consuming Eleanor in its Gothic architecture and shadows, framed in high and low angles that diminish her physical presence.*

Given the expressionistic shadows which spring to life around her through Wise’s masterful lighting and blocking, this notion of Hill House gradually consuming her mind and soul manifests visually as well as symbolically. His astounding depth of field calls all the way back to his days working with Orson Welles, approaching his blocking, camera angles, and Victorian architecture with an absolute precision that subjugates us to the mansion’s imposing design. “The house watches every move we make,” these visitors whisper, and indeed Wise makes them truly vulnerable in our sights, trapping them in its claustrophobic clutter and spying on them from above in dizzying overhead shots.

*Wise makes remarkable use of his widescreen, crafting strange geometric shapes out of his rooms and blocking with wide angle lenses that watch his characters’ every move from every angle.*

The Haunting’s magnificent mise-en-scène may be Wellesian, and yet its controlled camera movements and suspenseful editing are almost directly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, pulling us into Eleanor’s uneasy state of mind. Even here though, there is a huge contrast between those slow tracking shots floating above the sleeping visitors and the crane shots rapidly dropping from the ceiling to the floor, throwing us off with a disorientating visual whiplash. Wise’s stylistic repertoire is vast, and when paired with his anxiety-inducing set pieces the effect is often chilling. Palms sweat as the camera follows characters up the spiral staircase that creaks and sways, and when Wise’s eerie practical effects make a wooden door bulge inward, he restlessly cuts between every canted, high, and low angle that he possibly can, each one more extreme than the last.

*The library’s spiral staircase may be the most purely expressionistic set piece, often shot at canted angles that threaten to send us tumbling over its edge.*

It is all too easy to fall under the influence of a cinematic technician as inventive as Wise, placing us right next to Eleanor as her trauma begins to take physical form and tampers with her perception of reality. Whether it is the manor’s ghosts or merely Eleanor’s self-fulfilling belief in them which possesses her frantic mind, her connection to the estate offers a meaningful purpose she has never felt before. Hill House accepts her as she is, and so finally the fear and neurosis that has eaten away at her mind long before arriving on its estate can be expressed outwardly. “Something at last is really, really, really happening to me,” she rejoices as she careens her car towards the same tree that the first Mrs Crain crashed into ninety years ago, unknowingly connecting the manor’s final death back to its very first. The living suffer terribly in The Haunting, but for those who have endured the deepest psychological pains of all, the only sanctuary left in the world willing to embrace them is this giant crypt of infinite despair.

The Haunting is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, and YouTube. You can also buy The Haunting on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.

Yojimbo (1961)

Akira Kurosawa | 1hr 50min

Whenever Toshiro Mifune’s rōnin strides through the streets of the small Japanese town in Yojimbo, he always seems to be accompanied by dust swirling in whirlwinds around his feet, underscoring his subtle yet formidable command over the atmosphere itself. He moves in straight lines, unwavering in his confrontation of whatever danger lies ahead of him, and supremely confidently that it too will bend to his mere presence.

He isn’t wrong in his self-assurance either. Akira Kurosawa builds a complex ensemble of characters in this gripping narrative, dividing many of them between two rival crime rings who have taken control of the town’s local trades, and each bidding for the service of this mysterious yet powerful newcomer who has wandered into their midst. When they barter for his protection, he does not even need words to push them up to the price he knows he is worth, instead simply meeting them with a cold, stoic silence. He is factionless, unswayed by their political ambitions and promises, and yet still recognising the necessity of at least some temporary alliances to achieve his ulterior motives – eliminating both warring gangs once and for all, and restoring peace to the village.

*Kurosawa’s widescreen aspect ratio is crucial to his long shots, setting the scene of Sanjuro’s wandering into town with traditional Japanese architecture lining a wide, open street.*

Even the identity of this wandering samurai seems concocted on a whim, taking inspiration from a nearby shrub when he is asked his name – Kuwabatake Sanjuro, or ‘thirty-year-old mulberry bush.’ He does not associate himself with any great clan of Japan’s Edo period, nor does he need to when his skill with a sword speaks entirely for itself. He is simultaneously every hero ever spoken about in Japanese folklore, and nobody at all.

The precedent that Mifune sets for Clint Eastwood’s own Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy is clear, with both being framed as lone figures that have walked straight out of legend and into the real world, though this shouldn’t be a surprise though given that Yojimbo was remade in the first film of that trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars. For all the rich aesthetic and cultural details unique to Japanese history here, pitting sake brewers against silk merchants in beautifully rustic sets, its structure speaks to far broader narrative conventions built into Eastern and Western mythology.

Kurosawa’s narrative in Yojimbo sits among his most compelling, exerting an influence over many westerns in the years to come, but it is also his cinematography that astounds in his meticulous arrangement of actors in the frame.

*An incredible blocking of faces here in Kurosawa’s deep focus imagery, placing the emphasis on the actors’ scheming expressions.*

Kurosawa’s love of Shakespeare is evident in the intricate power struggles between the rival crime lords, with Ushitora having previously served as Seibei’s lieutenant before striking out on his own, and both now playing out their feud through kidnapping and trading hostages. It takes Sanjuro’s wit and manipulation to trick both gangs into their first public confrontation, seeing them nervously inching towards each other from either end of the main street while he sits on the sidelines, gleefully cackling at their exposed cowardice and hoping for mutually assured destruction.

*Mifune sits between both sides of the gang war as a factionless unknown, and Kurosawa’s blocking in low angles during their battle sharply reflects this characterisation.*

The sudden arrival of a government official is all the excuse they need to prematurely halt the battle before any major loss, though tensions have been irreversibly inflamed. When Ushitora’s sadistic brother Unosuke enters the picture, Kurosawa kicks the stakes up another notch, painting him as a ferocious adversary as he stands with a manic grin in front of the warehouse he has set alight. After Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai gives the next best performance here as Sanjuro’s villainous foil, possessing a similarly cunning mind yet lacking any sort of moral code. It is thanks to him after all that the feud continues to violently escalate, seeing the other gang match Unosuke’s destructive spectacle by stabbing holes in all their enemy’s sake barrels, and erupting fountains of alcohol across the brewery.

*Tatsuya Nakadai may be second to Mifune in this cast, but he makes every second he is onscreen count, portraying a remorseless villain with a wicked grin.*

*Dynamic imagery in the sake pouring out of barrels, escalating the gang war to all-out sabotage and property destruction.*

True to Kurosawa’s penchant for such dynamic imagery, Yojimbo is brimming with visual majesty, using its widescreen aspect ratio and deep focus as a rich canvas for his epic showdowns. In his long shots of the town’s main road, he effectively turns it into a battle arena lined with taverns and homes that host nervous spectators. There is little privacy to be founded in these establishments, many of which are only separated by wooden beams that intrusively obstruct Kurosawa’s shots, while dramatic high and low angles bring a daunting gravity to the action unfolding just outside. The percussive, jazz-adjacent score that Masaru Sato injects into these scenes is not at all conventional fit for a film so rooted in the samurai genre, and yet the fusion here of jaunty, brassy melodies and traditional Japanese instruments rings out with a discordant confidence that matches Mifune’s own defiant, swaggering presence, similarly bucking cultural conventions.

*The main road in town becomes a battle arena of sorts in Yojimbo, making for some gorgeous imagery loaded with symbolic weight.*

*The divisions between establishments deny inhabitants any privacy, but also obstruct shots such as these to divide the foreground from the background.*

It isn’t until the film’s extraordinary climax though that Kurosawa unites all these formal and stylistic elements together into its greatest scene, building a steady rhythm in the editing between Sanjuro’s restrained stride up one end of the road, and Unosuke leading his yakuza down the other. The dust which once blew in small flurries around Mifune’s feet is now whipped into the air through enormous gusts of wind, lashing his robes and hair while he persistently moves forward at the same measured pace, and in total command of his environment. With each cut between him and Nakadai, Kurosawa’s camera moves incrementally closer to both, studying their furious expressions until their shared acknowledgment registers – both men know this final fight will be the end for one of them.

Yojimbo’s greatest scene comes in the dusty showdown between Sanjuro and Unosuke’s men, as Kurosawa cuts between both sides and moves his camera in closer each time. Clearly an enormous influence on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

Even when up armed with a gun, Unosuke is no match for Sanjuro’s blades, finding himself incapacitated almost right away when a dagger is thrown into his arm. Our hero makes short work of the rest of his men, cutting each of them down with his sword and only granting mercy to one young man he realises still holds onto a shred of innocence and regret. Like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers though, or Alan Ladd in the final scene of Shane, Sanjuro cannot continue living in the peaceful new paradise he has established, free from danger and crime. Kurosawa’s mythologising has rarely been so potent as it is here in Yojimbo’s circular arc, leading this lonely samurai back into the realm of wilderness and legend where he came from, ready to emerge whenever Japan’s commonfolk are most in need.

Yojimbo is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel. You can also buy Yojimbo on DVD from Amazon.

May I ask, why you think Barry did not take the chance to kill Bullingdon? Do you believe it comes…

May I ask why you think Barry did not take the chance to kill Bullingdon? Do you believe it comes…

[…] 13. Bringing Up Baby […]

Where would you place it on the list?

I have to say, Really shocked to see Hero not make the cut