Against the political turmoil of mid-century Greece in The Travelling Players, Theo Angelopoulos’ theatrical microcosm captures a fragmented nation caught between competing powers, dissolving time through long takes that conjure a swirling, ceaseless nightmare.
Through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s formal severity and exacting aesthetic, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom stares unflinchingly into the repellent darkness of humanity’s soul, tracing the systematic torture of young captives subjected to the relentlessly sadistic games orchestrated by four fascist overlords.
Perhaps the only thing longer than the title Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the film itself, as Chantal Akerman forces us to feel every passing minute of one homemaker’s fastidious routine, along with its gradual, psychological decay into exasperating chaos.
Coming of age is quite literally a horror show in Carrie, and one that Brian de Palma conducts with spectacular tension, brewing a lethal combination of hormones, trauma, and telekinetic powers within a lonely, abused teenager.
The anonymous affair which widower Paul and young actress Jeanne conduct makes for a warped power dynamic in Last Tango in Paris, and Bernardo Bertolucci is unafraid to plunge the crude depths of their precarious arrangement, prodding at raw, psychological wounds that explode with love, grief, and violent anger.
Stealing a dead man’s identity seems like the perfect opportunity for television journalist David Locke to escape his unfulfilling life in The Passenger, though as Michelangelo Antonioni drifts him through a perplexing labyrinth of his own making, we are implicated in his confrontation with life’s empty, senseless banality.
By casting himself as the omniscient narrator of Two English Girls, François Truffaut imbues the love triangle between one aspiring Parisian writer and the two sisters he deeply loves with a tender, literary quality, playfully savouring every romantic and sexual encounter over nine years of their young lives.
The coming-of-age vignettes that make up My Little Loves do not depict particularly momentous occasions, yet it is in the mundane minutia of Daniel’s year away from home that his self-discovery unfolds, as Jean Eustache tenderly captures the whiplash of a lonely, confusing, yet stimulating adolescence.
The infamous Madonna-whore complex is baked right into the title of Jean Eustache’s bleak treatise on juvenile masculinity, as The Mother and the Whore applies an intensive focus to a young narcissist’s thorny relationships with his long-term girlfriend, his secret lover, and the intellectual hypocrisy that underlies his infidelity.
The Devils may be set during the witch trials of 17th century France, and yet Ken Russell’s cynical condemnation of religious tyranny escapes a narrow relegation to the distant past, infusing his cautionary tale with a bitter, anachronistic timelessness.
