Akira Kurosawa builds a complex ensemble of characters in Yojimbo’s compelling narrative of rival crime lords and Shakespearean power struggles, though it is the mysterious samurai who wanders into their midst who commands the greatest power of them all, seemingly walking straight out of Japanese mythology to save the town held hostage by a violent feud.
Through his indisputable talent as an avant-garde storyteller, Kubrick accomplishes a formal rigour and aesthetic precision in 2001: A Space Odyssey that so few artists have ever come close to, revealing a glimpse of humanity’s infinite potential through a staggering feat of filmmaking that measures up to the transcendent, cosmic scale it is representing.
Ingmar Bergman’s personal turmoil during production of The Passion of Anna infuses this chamber drama with a shaggy, improvisational quality, deconstructing its titular widow’s grief with the same imperfect honesty which he himself is guilty of, and bringing a raw vulnerability to complex characters straining against each other’s cruelty.
From the moment the first bombs start falling, Ingmar Bergman descends Shame into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, tragically twisting the souls of wartime survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves and taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.
As we trace back the steps of one mentally tortured painter through the days before his disappearance in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that no other Ingmar Bergman film has come this close to outright psychological horror, surreally warping our most intimate relationships into vulnerable weaknesses where demons come to play.
The corruption of samurai tradition in Harakiri has not merely unfolded through passive spiritual negligence, but rather arises from the flawed humanity hiding behind its facade, as Masaki Kobayashi thrillingly lays out a pessimistic Japanese fable of one man’s violent attempt to expose its total hypocrisy.
Japanese soldier, prisoner, and pacifist Kaji seems to live multiple lives across the modern odyssey of The Human Condition trilogy, waging his soul as the last battleground of moral fortitude in the final years of World War II, and becoming the compelling centrepiece of Masaki Kobayashi’s devastating study on humanity’s most vital essence.
The incredible formal synthesis forged between Ingmar Bergman’s intimate visual style and psychological deliberations in Persona may be the finest of his career, blending the identities of two women through an avant-garde surrealism, and studying the perplexing duality which splits the human mind into outward expressions and internal truths.
Men are but faceless idols cycling in and out of fashion in All These Women, hiding with infatuated fanatics behind facades of highbrow culture, and pulling at least one absolute truth from Ingmar Bergman’s sumptuously irreverent satire – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.
In place of open dialogue between characters in The Silence, Ingmar Bergman leaves an apathetic void of love and communication, formally manifesting his long-running existential fears of an unresponsive, godless universe within a stifled relationship between estranged sisters.
