A delicate arrangement of bottles and crockery to obstruct this romantic frame in L’Atalante.
Best Film: L’Atalante
L’Atalante is a fable of ruptured innocence, jealousy, and temptation, tugging at the seams of a fragile relationship between a skipper and his newlywed wife Juliette. It is a seminal early work of France’s poetic realism, showcasing the sort of cluttered mise-en-scène that Josef von Sternberg was similarly innovating in the early 1930s, as well as gorgeous location shooting around the industrial docks of Paris. Jean Vigo’s storytelling is classical, but his fondness for the avant-garde also reveals itself in the surreal, underwater visions of Juliette, romantically escaping the cinematic conventions of the era.
Lovely depth of field showing off the beauty of France’s canals and Jean’s playful personality, revelling in the innocent romance of young newlyweds.
Most Overrated – L’Atalante
L’Atalante is rightfully beloved by many cinephiles, but not quite the 20th best film of all time as the TSPDT consensus would have us believe. Its grand ambitions in mise-en-scène, editing, and characterisation can be appreciated without placing it upon such a high pedestal, still giving Jean Vigo his due as a pioneer of French cinema in the 1930s. Perhaps 300 spots lower would suit it just fine, treading the border between Must-See and Masterpiece range.
Vigo’s trademark high angles serve a practical purpose here, capturing the entire ensemble in close quarters while emphasising the ship’s claustrophobia. Frames like these reveal Vigo’s tremendous talent, yet don’t quite place L’Atalante on the same level as history’s most breathtaking works of cinema.
Most Underrated – Nothing
Zero for Conduct is also a little overrated at #219 on TSPDT, so there are no real candidates here. For a man whose filmography is so short, Jean Vigo’s reputation in the cinephile community is extraordinary – and perhaps slightly inflated.
Gem to Spotlight – Zero for Conduct
At 43 minutes, Zero for Conduct achieves far more than most feature films do in two hours. It isn’t too difficult to imagine how Jean Vigo might have flourished during the French New Wave some 30 years later, though given the impact that Zero for Conduct bears upon François Truffaut, perhaps this would also defeat the point of its influence. The young director is evidently far ahead of his time, crafting a coming-of-age tale which revels in its carefree naturalism and youthful outlook. Vigo is economical indeed with his nonchalant pacing, smoothly shifting between vignettes that progressively mount a rising disenchantment among a cohort of schoolboys plotting to overthrow their tyrannical teachers.
Zero for Conduct isn’t as visually gorgeous as L’Atalante, but still demonstrates formal rigour in Vigo’s recurring high angles –undoubtedly the mark of an auteur.
Key Collaborator – Boris Kaufman
The cinematographer who later shot towering Hollywood classics such as 12 Angry Men and On the Waterfront got his start here with Jean Vigo, filming everything from his short documentaries to his narrative features. The two were virtually inseparable, experimenting in tracking shots, crowded mise-en-scène, location shooting, and dramatic camera angles right up until Vigo’s untimely death at age 29.
Unlike Vigo, Kaufman would have a long and impressive career, eventually moving to Hollywood to become one of its most dependable cinematographers. In L’Atalante especially he showcases a mastery of shooting industrial architecture, here forging a perfect frame from steel beams.
Key Influence – Sergei Eisenstein
Jean Vigo possesses a clear affinity for Eisenstein’s socialist ideals as a filmmaker, seeking to break free of artistic constraints by similarly liberating his characters from their own metaphoric chains. This is clearest in the schoolyard revolution of Zero for Conduct, emphasising cohesive units over individuals in what Eisenstein labelled a ‘monistic ensemble’ – a sense of group identity achieved through complete visual unity. He was not quite operating at the same level as the trailblazing Soviet montagist, but when his editing turned towards the abstract, his crafty manipulations in the cutting room moulded the flow of time itself.
Eisenstein’s monistic ensemble accentuates group identity over the individual, and Vigo carries it through here in Zero for Conduct with similarly socialist sensibilities.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
The story of Jean Vigo’s career as a director is tragically brief. Two short documentaries, a featurette, and a feature film make up his entire resume, and as mentioned before, L’Atalante does the heavy lifting for his critical reputation. He was an early pioneer of poetic realism, though where his contemporaries were concerned with notions of fate and morality, his films were pervaded by a revolutionary sensibility – no great surprise for the child of a militant anarchist.
Vigo established his sympathies for the downtrodden right from the start in À propos de Nice, creatively documenting the social inequalities among the people of Nice. It wasn’t until his featurette Zero for Conduct though that he found the narrative tools to give this theme cinematic form, turning a schoolboy rebellion into a scaled-down French Revolution. There is a tension between order and chaos in his blocking, often captured in high angles that frame the ensemble’s synchronised formations, and which would soon prove to be his trademark shot.
Order and chaos in the boys’ dormitory, mirrored in these twin shots.Chaos and order in the classroom, once again using a high angle to formally contrast both states.
The revolt in Vigo’s final film L’Atalante is quieter and more psychological, with married couple of Jean and Juliette rejecting bourgeois ideals in favour of emotional authenticity and personal freedom. The boat which they turn into their home is a strong metaphor here, drifting along the canals of France without being anchored to any single port. The accomplishment of mise-en-scène is also a step up, making for crowded, claustrophobic interiors that deny these characters any chance of privacy, though at the same time Vigo possesses an almost utopian faith in the community they entail. L’Atalante is far more lyrical than it is playful, but this hymn to love’s endurance is just as impassioned as Zero for Conduct’s celebration of youth.
Michel Simon’s lively performance in L’Atalante is consumed by the assorted trinkets and souvenirs of his tiny cabin, obstructing the frame on every side.Jean and his ship in the foreground, the industrial structures of the docks in the background – Vigo shoots on location along the rivers of France to ground this fable in a recognisable reality.
Both these films are lean, yet expansive in feeling. Vigo avoids redundancy, favouring vignettes and emotionally resonant beats that accumulate meaning rather than deliver it through exposition. As children tease each other in Zero for Conduct, the film itself becomes a prank on authority, while the eccentric antics of Père Jules in L’Atalante imbues its romance with whimsical comic relief.
Form-breaking playfulness as this caricature springs to animated life, mocking the school’s authority figures.The highpoint of Vigo’s short career – the schoolboys joyously rebel in slow-motion, feathers floating through the air as they exit the dormitory in an exuberant procession.
Vigo often takes his spirited, formal experimentation a step further though, paving the path to freedom through brief moments of transcension when reality gives way to surrealism. Animated caricatures leap to life with form-shattering irreverence in Zero for Conduct, and at its most awe-inspiring, the schoolboys’ joyous mutiny revels in one of cinema’s earliest displays of slow-motion. Meanwhile, L’Atalante conjures underwater visions of love through surreal dissolves and double exposure effects, sinking us into Jean’s aching, disorientated mind as he dives beneath the Seine.
With Zero for Conduct facing censorship issues and the final edit of L’Atalante escaping his artistic control, Vigo never reaped the financial reward for his films. At age 29, he died of tuberculosis, a mere month after L’Atalante’s release. Nevertheless, his cinematic legacy was already cemented, romantically liberating cinema from convention in pursuit of emotional and political truth.
Long dissolves and double exposure effects as Jean sinks into the depths of the Seine, summoning surreal visions of his lost love.Vigo chooses to end Zero for Conduct on a low angle instead of his characteristic high angle as the boys finally subvert the school’s authority, rising to the level of heroes.
“In themselves, the pictures, the phases, the elements of the whole are innocent and indecipherable. The blow is struck only when the elements are juxtaposed into a sequential image.”
Meticulous framing through Eisenstein’s deep focus, imposing Ivan the Terrible’s distinctive profile upon the Russian people.
Best Film
Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein’s second feature stands tall among the great works of cinema, and if that isn’t enough, it is also the best-edited film of all time. It is very much a product of the Soviet Union in its earliest years, though under the purview of an artist who understands his craft on an intimate level, it also transcends mere propaganda. The five methods of montage that Eisenstein developed in the early 1920s are cleanly distilled here in their purest forms, and from this mechanical arrangement of moving images, he composes a narrative that identifies the collective masses as their own champions. No discussion of Battleship Potemkin can go without mention of the Odessa Steps sequence either, where he orchestrates a cinematic assault on the senses into a sweeping indictment of the Tsarist regime.
Innocence versus pitiless evil in Battleship Potemkin, clearly defining the heroes and villains of Russian history through masterful, tactile montage editing.
Most Overrated
October: Ten Days That Shook the World. The TSPDT list’s ranking at #452 might only be off by 100 spots or so, but this isn’t a great travesty. Although it lacks the formal rigour of Strike or Battleship Potemkin, this is a superb demonstration of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage in action, telling the story of the October Revolution through large scale set pieces and profound political symbolism.
October beautifully demonstrates the abstraction of Eisenstein’s montage theory, particularly in its comparison of juxtaposed images to create fresh, symbolic connections. This is intellectual montage at its strongest, setting Russia’s tale of Bolshevik victory against its historic, deeply emblematic statues.
Most Underrated
Strike. A ranking of #654 on TSPDT is too low for what is one of history’s most impressive directorial debuts. Rigorous formal purpose underlies every visual and editing choice that Eisenstein makes here, using a factory strike to represent a much larger class struggle at play throughout early twentieth century Russia. While cinema was still young, few people understood its immense power in shaping political thought, and even fewer mastered this skill through a virtuosic command of moving images as Eisenstein does in Strike.
Montage extends beyond the sequential arrangement of images for Eisenstein, but also blends them into the same frame here in Strike, spinning the wheel of progress over these stoic, united factory workers.
Gem to Spotlight
Alexander Nevsky. Tempered by the Soviet state, Eisenstein approached his fourth feature as a fresh start. This film may not possess the formal innovation of his silent works, yet its venture into sound cinema maps out its historic clash of medieval armies with great finesse, and builds to a grand thirty-minute climax at the Battle on the Ice. The fantastic score from Sergei Prokofiev certainly doesn’t hurt either, rumbling and sweeping across battlefields to accompany the titular Prince’s victory over the merciless Teutonic Knights.
Vasilisa’s face is foregrounded against the frontline of Russian soldiers, embodying the grit and strength of a nation that refuses to surrender quietly.
Key Collaborator
Eduard Tisse. The other option here is Grigori Aleksandrov who assisted in various capacities, whether as an actor, assistant director, or co-director. Nevertheless, it is Tisse who had the most tangible impact on Eisenstein’s as his perennial cinematographer, shooting all his films from Strike to Ivan the Terrible. It can be easy to underrate these visuals next to the sheer triumph of editing on display, but the precision that that Eisenstein applied to montages is well supported by Tisse’s tremendously striking imagery, dipping into expressionism through lighting, blocking, and camera angles.
Strong flavours of F.W. Murnau throughout Eduard Tisse’s photography, particularly in his later work. Shadows, candles, and hooded figures make for an outstanding visual and dramatic climax in Ivan the Terrible.
Key Influence
D.W. Griffith.There are few influences to draw on this early in film history, but the comparison between these directors is especially apt given their innovations in the realm of editing and establishing the foundations of film language. Despite their vastly differing political ideologies, Eisenstein admired Griffith’s ability to evoke strong emotional reactions from his audiences, often through staggeringly large set pieces with magnificently intimate close-ups interspersed throughout.
D.W. Griffith was the first master of the long shot, close-up, and parallel editing – and Eisenstein would continue to pioneer all three.A dedication to both foreground and background as soldiers march off to war, with this shot from Alexander Nevsky mirroring the above.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
Methods of Montage (1925-29)
Having studied architecture and engineering in Petrograd, fought in the Russian Civil War, and explored the world of experimental theatre, Sergei Eisenstein’s entry into cinema resulted from an amalgam of influences. It was specifically in those days of directing plays that he developed what he would call the ‘Montage of Attractions’ – the theory that by juxtaposing conflicting artistic elements, an audience could be led to specific emotional or ideological conclusions, creating a new idea that isn’t contained in any individual component. This was born from the philosophy of dialectics developed by Hegel in the early 19th century, which proposed that the evolution of human thought relied on a three-part process:
Thesis: A particular idea is posed.
Antithesis: This idea is contradicted.
Synthesis: The resolution of this conflict, leading to a new idea that incorporates elements of both thesis and antithesis.
The pinnacle of Eisenstein’s artistry arrives in Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence, often lampooned and paid homage to throughout history. Quite easily among cinema’s finest edited scenes.
Karl Marx would later develop this through a more material lens, framing the thesis as capitalism, the antithesis as class struggle, and the synthesis as a new socioeconomic order – socialism. Inspired by Marx’s writing, Eisenstein sought to similarly integrate dialectics into his own theory of montage.
Thesis: An initial image (eg. the Tsarist police massacring factory workers and their families).
Antithesis: A second image in conflict with the first (eg. a bull being slaughtered at an abattoir).
Synthesis: The reaction of the audience, who resolves the two conflicting images into a new idea (eg. the brutal dehumanisation of innocents).
Devastation reigns in Strike – Eisenstein’s parallel editing compares the massacre of the strikers to the slaughter of a bull, raging at the loss of innocence.
Just as Eisenstein was writing essays on these avant-garde ideas, the Soviet government was growing interested in cinema, recognising its potential as a method of mass propaganda. As such, he was one of several artists commissioned by the state to make films, officially commencing the movement of Soviet Montage Theory along with Lev Kuleshov (famed for devising the Kuleshov effect), Vsevolod Pudovkin (Mother), Alexander Dovzhenko (Earth) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera). There are subtle differences in the way each approached the art of montage, though it was Eisenstein who found the greatest artistic success in his five methods of montage:
Metric montage: Cutting based on a specific number of frames per shot (eg. a quickening tempo underscores the rising tension of sailors preparing to revolt in Battleship Potemkin)
Rhythmic montage: The adjustment of each shot length according to the movement unfolding onscreen (eg. watching sailors run across the frame during Battleship Potemkin’s mutiny)
Tonal montage: Editing together shots that evoke a specific mood or feeling (eg. crowds mournfully gather around the body of a fallen hero in Battleship Potemkin)
Overtonal montage: The combination of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montages to induce a more complex emotional response (eg. the devastating Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin)
Intellectual montage: The symbolic association of juxtaposed shots (eg. intercutting religious idols with the advance of the Imperial Army in October, linking the tyranny of religion to nationalism).
October’s avant-garde exercise in pure, intellectual montage – Eisenstein saw the potential to extend his craft beyond straightforward narrative convention, and creates abstract symbolism from religious and military icons.
Eisenstein’s theories were inherently opposed to the idea of seamless continuity editing and straightforward plotting, but rather suggested montage could be a dialectical form of thinking in images. Shots are meant to collide, he believed, requiring spectators to generate the resulting synthesis in their mind – a participatory act of creativity which is revolutionary in and of itself. It is certainly no coincidence that many of history’s most politically charged films feature this kind of fast-paced editing, such as D.W. Griffith’s contemptible valorising of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation or Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theories in JFK. On its purest level though, his montage theory can also be contained to a standalone shot with internal visual conflicts, such as heavy contrasts of light and dark or cutting through orderly frames with harsh, diagonal vectors.
Geometriccompositionthroughthe sharp angles of the factory, fanning out across the ceiling in this low angle as workers hang from the beams.
It is thanks to this firm theoretical grounding that Eisenstein approached his first two films with enormous confidence. Strike and Battleship Potemkin were released in 1925, making for one of the strongest cinematic debuts and immediate follow-ups in history. Both are set in the days of pre-Revolution Russia when proletariats suffered under the tyranny of the Tsars and their feudalist state, and in true socialist fashion, he identifies the collective masses as their own champions rather than glorifying any single protagonist. Where Strike ends with the catastrophic massacre of innocents though, Battleship Potemkin leaves us with a hopeful look towards the future, revealing the sheer versatility of his editorial orchestrations to span humanity’s full emotional spectrum.
Spies are given animalistic qualities through their code names in Strike, as well as the dissolves which blend them together in our mind. A prime example of Eisenstein’s editing serving character rather than plot.A creative use of a dissolve edit in Battleship Potemkin, visualising the threat of hanging sailors from the masts of the ship.
Here, Eisenstein also established a common motif that would continue to appear in his later films too – revealing the wickedness of his villains by depicting them as child killers. There is little room for moral ambiguity in these political fables, but it is upon this sheer disparity between good and evil that he builds his most invigorating montages, including perhaps the best-edited scene of all time in Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence.
The rapturous reception these early films received set Eisenstein on course to director October: Ten Days That Shook the World three years later. For the government, this was to be a grand dramatisation of the October Revolution in 1917, which saw the Bolsheviks topple the Provisional Government and officially establish the Soviet Union. Eisenstein no doubt delivers on spectacle here, and even continues his trend of opening with a quote from Vladimir Lenin, but he was evidently more interested in creating intellectual montages above all else. Although October was enthusiastically received by foreign critics, this decision to emphasise abstract visual symbolism was deeply unpopular with the Soviet government, pushing him to leave home and explore filmmaking prospects in the Western world.
Eisenstein’s knack for close-ups and framing is underrated compared to his innovations in editing, though this composition from October is a standout.The storming of the Winter Palace plays out through a series of epic imagery, flooding the vast, ornate halls with Bolsheviks at the climax of October.The Provisional Government’s leader Alexander Kerensky is set against a dour-faced Napoleon, diminishing his historical stature – Eisenstein’s intellectual montage pounds the symbolism home.
Nevertheless, these early years were Eisenstein’s most fertile artistic period, and certainly his most unrestricted. The mathematical mind that he honed as an engineering student was the same which drove him to revolutionise cinema with logical precision, seeking to understand the compositional details of art from which profound sensory experiences are born. Dissolves were not merely used to indicate the passage of time, but could be woven into montages like a legato musical phrase, while close-ups of incensed faces might alternately be played with rapid staccato. To him, this was a radical mode of creative expression for the twentieth century, uniquely attuned to his own revolutionary ideals which would symphonically swell upon waves of moving images.
A double exposure effect crushes these striking factory workers as they draw up demands in Strike.Close-ups are played like staccato montages as one man tries to turn wounded sorrow into prejudice in Battleship Potemkin, only to be faced with the anger of those seeing through his ploy.
Historical Epics (1938-46)
The ten years following the negative reception of October were turbulent for Sergei Eisenstein. After briefly dabbling in documentaries and shorts, he set off on a journey through Western Europe with his frequent collaborators Eduard Tisse and Grigori Aleksandrov, where he continued to broaden his filmmaking network. Not long after though, his attempts to break into Hollywood each ended in failure, sending him back home to the Soviet Union where he met further disappointments. His only shot at making a comeback was by appealing to Joseph Stalin, who was now exerting a more extreme censorship of the film industry than ever before.
A new era in Eisenstein’s career was beginning, shifting his focus away from experimental celebrations of modern-day Russia and towards grand historical epics. For the first time, he was also centring individual protagonists, each of whom where real-life figures whose stories were to be read as allegories for contemporary political affairs. Where his depiction of Alexander Nevsky’s medieval conquest of German invaders warned audiences of the Third Reich’s rising threat in 1938, his two-part series on Ivan the Terrible likened the Tsar to Stalin himself – much to the dictator’s initial pleasure and later disapproval.
Scenes of carnage and destruction in Alexander Nevsky, setting in a deep, sombre grief. The Teutonic Order possesses a cult-like ruthlessness with their white hoods and crosses as they torture innocent Russians.Depth of field in Ivan the Terrible, towering the Tsar’s crooked posture over a vast line of Russians stretching far into the background.
The creative limitations imposed on Eisenstein during this time may have kept his editing from reaching the avant-garde heights of his silent works, yet it is nevertheless a testament to his incredible craftsmanship that these films are still so cinematically ambitious. His renewed focus on mise-en-scene saw a slight shift towards expressionism, particularly in his production design, lighting, and blocking for Ivan the Terrible, while his exterior landscapes often featured low angles setting immaculately staged scenes against vast, grey skies.
Minimalism in Eisenstein’s framing, frequently using low angles to set actors against grey skies.Low angles again in Ivan the Terrible, painterly in their almost two-dimensional quality and beautifully textured backdrops.An incredibly recognisable profile, cast against walls in darkened shadows.
This venture into sound cinema also saw Eisenstein invite two new collaborators into his fold. Sergei Prokofiev was already a famed composer of operas, ballets, and symphonies before this partnership, but through Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible he immortalised his name in the world of cinema too. Eisenstein’s casting of Nikolay Cherkasov as the titular roles of both films similarly cemented his status as a leading actor of Soviet cinema, showcasing his range by playing extremes of rousing courage and vain cruelty.
Nikolay Cherkasov plays the titular Alexander Nevsky – the heroic Russian prince who led his people to victory against the invading Germans.Cherkasov swings far in the other direction as Ivan the Terrible, showcasing his range playing the cruel, wicked tyrant.
Eisenstein’s winning streak unfortunately came grinding to a halt after finishing Ivan the Terrible, Part II. His depiction of the historic ruler not only implied that Stalin was a ruthless tyrant, but also painted a vivid portrait of his own shifting relationship with the Soviet Union. He was no longer a filmmaker inspiring revolution through cinematic form, but rather a disillusioned artist simultaneously defying and reluctantly cooperating with an oppressive regime. Plans for Part III were immediately shelved, and Part II did not see the light of day until it was released in 1958 – ten years after Eisenstein passed away from a heart attack in 1948. Like so many artists who have worked under strict censorship laws, his output was limited, but still he carved out a legacy of montage editing that is woven into the very syntax of cinematic language.
Orson Welles would later recycle this shot in Chimes at Midnight – a forest of spears obstructing our view of the opposing forces, advancing upon Alexander Nevsky’s army at the Battle on the Ice.
Parallel blocking along these rural roads in My Little Loves, mirroring romance across children and teenagers as our young protagonist Daniel imitates his older counterparts.
Best Film
The Mother and the Whore. Jean Eustache’s epic drama lays out the Madonna-whore complex in simple terms, placing its young male protagonist in a love triangle between long-term girlfriend Marie and the promiscuous, free-spirited Veronika. As one of the great character studies of the 1970s, it captures this compartmentalisation with deadpan humour and biting cynicism, painting a stark image of manhood stifled by intellectual hypocrisy. Eustache’s mise-en-scène is grimly minimalist, and his camerawork intimate, often lingering on the three lead performances in long, static takes that dwell in the discomfort of their unusual relationship dynamics.
A fine frame of Alexandre and his ex-girlfriend Gilberte discussing marriage – Eustache’s mise-en-scène is minimalistic, but his choice to linger on shots like these during conversations is strong.
Most Overrated.
The Mother and the Whore. TSPDT’s ranking as the 105th best film of all time puts this in high masterpiece territory, which would suggest its visual or formal accomplishment rivals some of the all-time greats. As admirable as these qualities are, it is a couple of hundred spots too high.
The Mother and the Whore is a borderline masterpiece, but not entirely for its compositional beauty – as effective as this location shooting is.
Most Underrated
My Little Loves. At #849 on the TSPDT consensus list, it could easily move at least two hundred spots higher. The distant nostalgia that Jean Eustache composes here is not made up of particularly momentous occasions, yet it is in its mundane minutia that the self-discovery of a pre-adolescent boy moving far away from his childhood home unfolds, watching him grapple with the expectations of a restrictive society while seeking to understand his own nascent masculinity.
Eustache infuses the exteriors of My Little Loves with a summery warmth, lazily drifting days by as Daniel rides bikes with his older friends.
Gem to Spotlight
Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes. Before his two big features, Jean Eustache was laying the groundwork of his gendered character studies with this 47-minute study of identity and desire. Our protagonist Daniel only dons the Santa suit for a bit of extra money as Christmas approaches, but he soon discovers that it his greatest pickup tactic yet, intriguing women who are compelled by the anonymity of the costume – what handsome stranger could possibly be lurking beneath that cheap beard and hat? The moment he reveals his identity to a date amusingly undercuts his inflated ego, seeing them rapidly lose interest. It is a modest entry in Eustache’s brief canon, but nonetheless a fascinating precursor to his greater successes.
Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes foreshadows Eustache’s later interrogations of masculinity and sexuality, amusingly playing out one young man’s exploitation of his street job to hit on women who are intrigued by his anonymity.
Key Collaborator
Jean-Pierre Léaud. In a career as short as Jean Eustache’s, all it takes is a couple of films to be named in this category. Although Léaud is often far more associated with more prolific New Wave directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, The Mother and the Whore features one of his finest performances, second only to his acting in The 400 Blows. He is given almost four hours here to tease out the insecure, narcissistic character of Alexandre and his toxic Madonna-whore complex. His role in Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes continues to prove the kinship he had with Eustache, who frames Léaud as a younger version of himself in both films.
Eustache uses close-ups masterfully to forge a connection with his actors in The Mother and the Whore, giving Jean-Pierre Léaud the platform to deliver one of his best performances.
Key Influence
François Truffaut. Jean Eustache picked up The 400 Blows’ conception of coming-of-age dramas and ran with it, even casting its star Jean-Pierre Léaud as a surrogate version of his younger self. The fleeting moment where Léaud’s character stops by a poster of that exact film in Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes is amusingly self-referential, though Eustache also very much emulates the naturalism and irreverence of Truffaut’s work, similarly taking his camera to the streets of Paris and experimenting with narrative form.
Cutting away to a vignette shot in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player...…and Eustache integrates it here in My Little Loves, framing this random woman as the subject of Daniel’s dream.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
Experimenting through Shorts (1963-66)
Jean Eustache was the little brother of the French New Wave, getting his start in the Cahiers du Cinema offices after marrying a secretary there, and soon finding mentors in Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. He did not come out swinging with a culture-defining debut like Breathless or The 400 Blows, but rather spent several years honing his skills on smaller scale projects, even making a cameo appearance in Godard’s film Weekend.
There are two featurettes which stand out in this period, both interrogating the insecurity which lies beneath images of self-confidence projected by young men. The first is Robinson’s Place, following two male friends who are divided over their love for the same woman, compete for her affection, and ultimately unite in cruel revenge when she turns them both down. Their self-entitlement would carry over into Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes as well, introducing another protagonist desperately trying to disguise his total lack of integrity, though the pity that Eustache holds for these characters also points to himself as their prime inspiration. These are sad, lonely men who lack the capacity to properly express themselves, trying to project carefree attitudes that mask deep bitterness.
Eustache was a cinematic realist from the start, executing a handheld, reverse tracking shot down the streets of Paris here in Robinson’s Place.
Eustache adopted Truffaut’s distinct naturalism in these films, shooting on location throughout the streets of Paris to infuse them with an urban grit, and even using Kodak film stock donated by Godard to shoot Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes. This penchant for capturing authentic moments would extend to his work in documentaries as well, though it wasn’t until the 70s that he left his footprint on cinema history.
Eustache using the Christmas decorations and lights of Paris to set the scene here in Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, offsetting the festive joy with stark black-and-white photography.
Developing through Features (1973-74)
Having drifted around the edges of the French New Wave for around a decade, Eustache eventually fell victim to creative block, before the idea for his first feature film suddenly struck him in 1972. There was no holding back his immense ambition at this point, using the nearly four-hour runtime of The Mother and the Whore to apply an intensive focus to the lives of three young adults and their juvenile struggles in love.
Eustache did not break the trend of French auteurs directly reflecting their own lives and philosophies in their films, though he did display an unusually perfectionistic streak. One of his girlfriends described an argument they had which ended with him immediately sitting down to transcribe it verbatim for The Mother and the Whore’s screenplay, using the real names of the women he based the characters off. Even the apartment which much of the film is set in is his own, drawing an autobiographical connection between art and reality.
Eustache uses his own shabby Parisian apartment as the setting for The Mother and the Whore, drawing the autobiographical link between himself and Alexandre ever deeper.
Although Eustache was clearly far more capable of self-examination than his character Alexandre, he freely admitted to their shared passions and anxieties. Smugness goes hand-in-hand with insecurity, and it isn’t hard to see how Alexandre’s loquacious brand of intellectual pretence would later go on to shape the characters of Woody Allen and Richard Linklater films, especially considering the gaping chasm that lies between his obnoxious ego and feeble masculinity. It is much easier for him to blame women at large for his romantic struggles than to turn a critical eye inwards, as he shallowly longs for an era with old-fashioned values while remaining ignorant to the fact that he still would have been just as undesirable back then.
The visual aesthetic of The Mother and the Whore is largely a continuation of the black-and-white realism Eustache established in the 60s, though far more ambitious in virtually every aspect. A year later in 1974, My Little Loves diverged significantly with its far less talkative screenplay and astounding colour photography, soaking in the summery warmth of small-town France. Its dreamy vignettes reveal the nostalgia of a man looking back to his formative years, re-examining those tiny moments that exposed him to the joys and complications of adulthood. Here, children are observers of the world who learn through imitation, and consequently reflect the lessons they learn back into it.
Daniel’s first kiss with Françoise is the moment where he stops being a child and begins taking charge of his own life, even though he openly admits that he has no idea what he is doing.Eustache’s camera slowly revolves around Daniel and Françoise’s heads, marking this pivotal moment of maturation in his childhood.
Rather than indicting any single male character, My Little Loves composes a thoughtful consideration of the society which defines manhood for boys at an early age, and so Eustache draws from further back in his life than ever before. Like the character Daniel, he too grew up in the French village of Pessac with his grandmother, before moving to Narbonne to live with his mother. As such, it is easy to imagine how Daniel might one day become the leading protagonist of any other Eustache film.
As quickly as The Mother and the Whore lifted Eustache into the public eye, the commercial failure of My Little Loves sunk him again. The late 70s saw him return to documentaries and short films with far less ambitious scopes and visuals, even as they experimentally blurred the lines between truth and fiction. In 1981, he was partially paralysed in a road accident, and shortly after committed suicide by gunshot at the age of 42.
Similarities to Eric Rohmer in the light narrative pacing and window shots of My Little Loves, framing Daniel through his bedroom window against long, dry grass as he leaves for school.
“I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.”
The Trevi Fountain scene from La Dolce Vita may be the single most recognised image of Fellini’s career, permeating pop culture as Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg wade through its waters – but so too is it a beautifully shot sequence loaded with theological symbolism.
Best Film
8 ½. It’s a race between this surreal, self-reflexive examination of filmmaking and La Dolce Vita’s spiritual autopsy of modern-day Rome at the top. 8 ½ just gets the edge for its pure cinematic inventiveness – a complex culmination of Federico Fellini’s insecurities, ambitions, beliefs, desires, and relationships, all chaotically bleeding into each other through dreams and memories. This is also the point in his career where he moves further away from his neorealist roots than ever before, and so it is not difficult to imagine himself in the position of his protagonist Guido, trying to create a piece of art grounded in real world issues while facing a culture of excessive fame and materialism. 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.
There are few stronger opening scenes than Guido’s surreal dream from 8 1/2, expressing his insecurities, desires, and frustrations through unsettling, nightmarish imagery – a smog-filled traffic jam, a desperate escape, and an attempt to fly away thwarted by those attempting to pull us back down to Earth.
Most Overrated.
La Strada. Its #73 ranking on the TSPDT top 1000 may be about 150 places too high, but this is still an incredibly accomplished masterpiece. Federico Fellini lightly engages with commedia dell’arte archetypes to craft a fable of travelling performers in post-war Italy, and gives his wife Giulietta Masina her first starring role in one of cinema’s all-time great performances – a tragic beacon of innocence in destitute towns and barren countrysides.
La Strada is Fellini’s fable of lost innocence in post-war Europe, weaving a simple musical leitmotif into its form that resonates a nostalgic longing for brighter days.
Most Underrated
Juliet of the Spirits. TSPDT’s ranking at #888 on its all-time list a miss from the critical consensus, especially for a film that belongs closer to the top 100. This is Federico Fellini’s first venture into Technicolor filmmaking, and easily possesses some of his most astounding cinematography, holding up a feminine mirror to 8 ½ as he contemplates the other side of his unfaithful yet persevering marriage. His trademark surrealism carries over too, haunting the titular housewife Juliet with visions of sexual desire, Catholic guilt, and mystical salvation, all while she seeks an inner peace free from the expectations of others.
Fellini’s use of the colour red throughout his later career is striking, but never more so than in Juliet of the Spirits, shrouding his wife in sensual, lustful warmth.
Gem to Spotlight
I Vitelloni. Federico Fellini’s first resounding success is a good place to start for those easing into his filmography. The hangout narrative breezes by, revelling with a group of male friends in the day-to-day minutia of a coastal town, and essentially becoming the blueprint for Martin Scorsese’s own breakthrough twenty years later in Mean Streets. Even if it diverges from Roberto Rossellini’s examinations of post-war destitution, I Vitelloni is a film to make Fellini’s neorealist mentor proud, resourcefully shooting on location in small Italian villages to craft tremendous visuals from their historic stonework and his own masterful blocking.
A fine arrangement of alternating bodies in the frame and extending into the background – quite literally layabouts, which is what I Vitelloni translates to.
Key Collaborator
Giulietta Masina. Vying for this spot as well are Federico Fellini’s cinematographers Giuseppe Rotunno and Gianni di Venanzo, as well his actor Marcello Mastroianni, but his wife inevitably wins out. Even when Masina is taking minor roles in films like Variety Lights and Il Bidone, she is stealing scenes right from under everyone’s noses. Her case rests with three all-time great achievements of film acting in La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and Juliet of the Spirits, respectively exploring the division between innocence and corruption as a travelling entertainer, a prostitute, and a housewife. Her round, dark eyes are among cinema’s most expressive, conveying naivety, tragedy, and wisdom, while her diminutive stature often puts her on the back foot against an overwhelming world.
Giulietta Masina is one of history’s finest actresses married to one of history’s finest directors. She embodies tragic innocence, often spurned by men and society, yet still holding onto hope until the end.
Key Influence
Roberto Rossellini. Federico Fellini got his foot in the door of the film industry through his success as a writer on Rossellini’s films. He inherited a similar concern for the lower classes of post-war Italy and a loathing of its fascist culture, and also mastered the art of shooting on location in both urban and rural environments. He would later diverge from this style completely, exploring surrealism, spirituality, and theatrics throughout the latter half of his career, though his neorealist mentor’s influence was nevertheless crucial to his cinematic foundations.
The final shot of Rome, Open City, using the real city as a backdrop to its tragic ending. This may be Rossellini’s film, but Fellini’s writing was nominated for an Oscar, binding him closely to his neorealist roots.Echoes of Rossellini’s visual compositions in Fellini’s earliest work, blocking actors within real locations around Rome.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
Neorealist Origins (1950 – 1957)
Working his way up through the Italian film industry as an ambitious young screenwriter, Federico Fellini found great fortune in his collaborations with neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, even receiving an Oscar nomination for his work on Rome, Open City. As such, he was in an advantageous position in 1950 when made his debut co-directing Variety Lights with Alberto Lattuada. The results are fine, if not terribly impressive, though with the context of his entire career it is possible to see the start of multiple trends that would continue to resonate in his filmmaking for years to come.
Fellini was not a neorealist in the purest sense, yet his hard-hitting examinations of post-war poverty nevertheless placed him in that cinematic lineage, seeing him lead the first generation of Italian filmmakers to emerge after the movement’s peak. His dedication to shooting on location persisted through all his 1950s films, whether he was using Italy’s coastal towns in I Vitelloni, its barren countryside in La Strada, or the historical architecture of Rome to make a grander point about the city’s class inequality in Nights of Cabiria. Each set the scene for comedy-dramas, tragedies, and allegories of suffering and salvation, frequently casting his wife Giulietta Masina as tragic victims, and thematically tying together La Strada, Il Bidone, and Nights of Cabiria in his ‘Loneliness’ trilogy. Within this period though, I Vitelloni most significantly broke the neorealist mould with its loose, episodic narrative – something he would pick up again a few years down the track.
Gelsomina traverses Italy’s countryside in La Strada, its poverty and barrenness a reflection of her own misfortune.A wealth of meaning packed into the staging of bodies along the edge of a pier in I Vitelloni, staggered into the background as the men passively gaze out at the ocean – the sheer edge of the only society they have ever known.One of the greatest compositions of Fellini’s early career from Nights of Cabiria, cleanly imprinting geometric shapes against a dark, rainy street.
Perhaps even more central to Fellini’s interests as a filmmaker though was his adoration of entertainment in all its forms. The travelling performers of La Strada individually represent the clownish stock characters of commedia dell’arte, while an acting troupe takes centre stage in Variety Lights, and a soap opera photo strip entices our leading woman in The White Sheik. As we see in the joyous festivities of I Vitelloni, exhibitionist spectacle often brings communities together in celebration too, but Fellini does not shy away from studying its darker side either.
Fellini designs festivals like Josef von Sternberg before him, cluttering the mise-en-scène with extravagant, maximalist detail and streamers. Even during his realist period, spectacle is key to his visual style.
In Il Bidone, he considers con artists as nefarious cousins to actors, using their skills of deception to taking advantage of rather than entertain their audiences. Their fraudulent impersonations of Catholic clergymen specifically target those whose blind faith is already being exploited by the church, setting up a larger attack on religion in Nights of Cabiria where Christian iconography gives literal form to the Madonna-whore complex. Still, this was only the beginning of Fellini’s reflective considerations of the Catholic Church, as he entered a new period of filmmaking in the 60s.
Fellini evokes Christ’s torture and sacrifice in Augusto’s death, cherishing the purification of his soul at the tragic expense of his life – Il Bidone’s ending is loaded with symbolism of suffering and salvation.The Madonna and the whore have more in common than the people of Rome believe in Nights of Cabiria, both being paragons of goodness and innocence – a striking formal comparison.
Fellini’s Ascension (1960 – 1965)
The rising quality of Federico Fellini’s films throughout the 1950s was fairly linear, establishing him as an incredibly talented director with at least one full masterpiece under his belt. Still, his magnificent run in the early 60s belongs on another level, delivering three of the best films of all time and cementing his status as a cinematic virtuoso. La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Juliet of the Spirits are all deeply philosophical works of cinema, each following characters who search for meaning in their chaotic lives, and desperately trying to unite their competing priorities, insecurities, and desires.
On top of that, the cinematic stylisations of these films are simply sublime, with Fellini’s mise-en-scène and camerawork edging closer to maximalist extravagance. Given his focus shifting away from the plight of the poor and towards the empty lives of the wealthy, it is a fitting choice too. His control over visual and narrative chaos is never stronger than it is in this period, disorientating us with camera movements that drift through scenes of unruly mayhem, and abruptly readjusting long shots into close-ups as new faces enter the frame. Starting with Juliet of the Spirits, Technicolor photography also becomes the norm from here on, as his collaboration with cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo showcases one of the most stunningly vivid uses of colour put to film.
Fellini effortlessly transitions to a widescreen format in La Dolce Vita, using its full horizontal scope to block his actors in luxurious arrangements, and a rich depth of field to layer his opulent compositions.Fellini’s surrealism in 8 1/2 is deeply disorientating, filling this opening dream with bodies hanging out of a bus window, their faces concealed from this angle in the middle of a traffic jam.Few directors can capture chaos with the control and beauty that Fellini brings to his mise-en-scène in Juliet of the Spirits. Josef von Sternberg comes to mind as a fair comparison, but he largely shot his films in black-and-white – the patterns and colours of Fellini’s scenery are distinctive and gorgeous.
Fellini’s love of theatre hasn’t faded in this era either. If anything, the cinema screen is merely an evolution of the stage, with both artforms representing joyful celebration in the face of despair. Nino Rota’s festive music scores often capitalise on that too, composing whimsical marches and dynamic melodies that could easily underscore circus shows.
Fellini is nevertheless wary of lifestyles that are consumed solely by shallow entertainment, as the line between faith and self-gratifying exhibitionism grows ever thinner in this era, aiming a critical lens towards religious icons hypocritically stripped of their substance and reduced to false idols. Film director Guido has virtually no relationship with God in 8 ½, and yet still he seeks approval from the church to absolve the Catholic guilt was beaten into him as a child. In Juliet of the Spirits, the school pageant play that sacrifices a young, martyred Juliet upon a fake pyre additionally draws a formal likeness to flamboyant circuses that exist solely to entertain the masses.
Daunting religious imagery as we slip back into Guido’s childhood in 8 1/2, with Catholic priests asserting their dominance and setting him on a path of guilt.A pair of theatrical performances united in the red-and-white colour palette, but diametrically opposed in morality – a circus spectacle, and a religious pageant play. Even the composition of these shots echo each other, surrounding women in white with red outlines.
It is La Dolce Vita though that stands as his greatest condemnation of organised religion, following a gossip reporter through a series of parables that take him ever deeper into modern-day Rome’s moral corruption. Religion is still very much alive in the global capital of Catholicism, but only in its scantest form, whipping the masses into hysterical frenzies over apparent sightings of the Madonna while children perish in the pandemonium. Fellini is effectively subverting Christian symbolism all through this film, flying a statue of Christ over the city, dredging up a demonic sea monster from its waters, and worshipping an angelic beauty in the Trevi Fountain.
Religion mixes with mass media in La Dolce Vita, and the consequences are devastating, stripping faith of its dignity and twisting it into a violent, grotesque competition.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.Fellini’s cinematography constantly highlights the astounding geometry of Roman architecture, here gazing up at a stairway to the heavens – a wall art quality shot.
If there were any lingering traces of neorealism in La Dolce Vita, then they are completely gone by 8 ½, where Fellini fully transitions into the surrealism that would define the rest of his career. Named after the number of films he had directed up until this point, 8 ½ takes a particularly self-reflexive perspective on the creative processes of filmmaking, using its main character Guido as a surrogate for Fellini himself.
Even in his less metatextual works, characters can still be found breaking the fourth wall with silent smiles in the closing shots, continuing the trend from Nights of Cabiria into La Dolce Vita and Juliet of the Spirits. The connection that these close-ups forge with the audience are valuable, particularly given the miscommunication that encompasses his ensembles – formally rendered as voices being drowned out by voices in the opening and closing scenes of La Dolce Vita, and speaking without the movement of lips in 8 ½.
Hopeful looks towards the camera bring Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, and Juliet of the Spirits to fourth wall breaking ends.
Dreams of Rome and Beyond (1969 – 1990)
Purely in terms of visual style, the Federico Fellini who emerged from Italy’s neorealist scene looks entirely different to the man who ventured deep into vibrant, surreal expressionism in the late 1960s. Only on rare occasions here did he shoot on location, using the lively streets of Rome for Fellini’s Roma for instance. Instead, his preference for studio soundstages dominated this era, even seeing him artificially recreate his childhood town of Rimini in Amarcord. This allowed him a greater level of stylistic control, crafting idiosyncratic visions of Italy’s past and present that are populated by equally absurd caricatures. He was clearly not afraid of embracing artifice, manifesting it in imposing theatrical sets that bore no resemblance to reality, and replacing oceans with vast, billowing tarps in Fellini’s Casanova and And the Ship Sails On.
This town’s distinctive character in Amarcord comes together in scenes of communal celebration and tradition, the camera gliding breezily through the detailed mise-en-scène.Fellini’s mise-en-scène in Satyricon stands with some of his best, using his ludicrously theatrical set designs and blocking to compose off-kilter landscapes of moral debauchery and suffering. In effect, this is an ancient apocalypse – the downward slide of the once-powerful Roman Empire.Framed photos of one man’s sexual conquests adorn a long, narrow hallway in City of Women, as Fellini’s uses its angular architecture to visually impose on a wandering guest.Aggressively theatrical mise-en-scène, floating boats atop oceans of billowing tarp in both Casanova and And the Ship Sails On.
Bright red hues often violently mark his magnificently cluttered mise-en-scène with lust and aggression too, both being taken to their extremes by pleasure-seeking occupants of nihilistic hellscapes. Fellini’s Satyricon particularly captures this amoral chaos, bringing a psychotic twist to La Dolce Vita’s odyssey through a modern-day Rome void of Christian virtue. In this feverish nightmare of ancient Rome, it seems as if the pagan gods who once lived among humans have grown disillusioned with their creations, and chosen to leave them to their own unscrupulous devices.
This era is where Fellini’s trend of naming films after himself began, due to a twin production of the ancient Roman text ‘Satyricon’ taking place at the same time as his own. The title Fellini’s Satyricon was thus born to distinguish the film from that of his rivals, though it also serves to underscore Fellini’s unique interpretation of Petronius’ Menippean satire. Equally, Fellini’s Roma is his extravagant dream of the Italian capital in all its contradictions and wonders, and Fellini’s Casanova is his take on the titular 18th-century explorer’s far-flung adventures.
Satyricon signals a shift in Fellini’s surrealism, moving away from depictions of dreams and fully bombarding us with maddening, expressionistic landscapes without narrative explanation.Fellini’s location shooting soaks in the sights of the Festa de Noantri in Roma – the lights, the food, the community, everything comes together to form a lively picture of Roman celebration and joy.A dazzling composition of chandeliers hanging above Casanova at the opera – with his bigger budgets, Fellini does not half-commit to his production design.
Satyricon and Casanova in particular are films in direct conversation with Italian literature and history, thus becoming metatextual studies of storytelling itself. Fellini’s intellectual pursuits can’t be accused of keeping an emotional distance from the subject matter though, as the autobiographical lens he applies to the films of this era further builds on the self-reflective subjectivity of 8 ½. He identifies strongly with many of his lead characters, particularly when it comes to their less-than-favourable traits. Pieces of his adolescence are also directly recreated in Amarcord and Roma, with the latter even joining Intervista and I Clowns on the shortlist of Fellini films featuring the director playing himself.
By nature of these dreamlike settings, Fellini was shifting the focus away from plot more than ever before, instead structuring his films around episodic vignettes and the characters which inhabit them. This was something he was exploring as early as I Vitelloni in 1953, evoking a breezy nostalgia which he recaptures in Amarcord as he explores a year in the life of a small town. In films like Satyricon and Roma, this formal structure is a little shakier, while in decidedly weaker films like And the Ship Sails On and Intervista it is prone to falling apart at inopportune times.
One of Amarcord’s strongest compositions arrives at the Victory Monument, baring the backside of an angel who draws the lustful gaze of visitors venturing out into the rain.Fellini delivers one excellent set piece after another in Amarcord, mocking the obsessive, fascist pageantry of the 1940s with a giant papier-mâché face of Mussolini who springs to life and weds a pair of young school students.
As much as Fellini’s style shifted across four decades of active filmmaking, still he never quite escaped the love of theatre and clownish archetypes which enraptured him in the first place, drawing a common theme through his early realism and late surrealism. When he created an explicit tribute to the circus in I Clowns, he ended up with one of his few truly bad films, though this is also a testament to the power of his symbolism in much greater works.
Among Fellini’s subtler recurring motifs is the stock character of Giudzio, the town fool, first seen in I Vitelloni as a simpleton who is easily duped into accepting a stolen angel statue. He returns again in I Clowns, and then in Roma as a homeless madman, before finally appearing in Amarcord stranded atop a pyre at the village festival. There, he is taunted by fellow townsfolk who steal the ladder, jokingly threaten to burn him alive, and poke fun at his panic.
Giudzio the fool is a recurring minor character in multiple Fellini films, though each time bearing symbolic significance in relation to his surroundings.
In Italian, the name Giudzio translates to ‘judgement’, which is somewhat ironic given how little of it he deals out. Perhaps then this more accurately suggests a reckoning being cast down from God or Fellini himself upon those who mistreat him, using him as a gauge against which their souls are evaluated. The only exception here may be the instance in which he becomes a crude embodiment of judgement himself, reciting vulgar rhymes about Caesar, Mussolini, and Italy’s history of fascism in Roma.
“This fascist shit, his head is split,
Half the head they say,
Crossed the Rubicon one day,
And lost his balls along the way.”
In April 1993, Fellini received a lifetime achievement Oscar, before passing away six months later in October from a heart attack. Quite fittingly, his memorial service was held at Cinecittà Studios, where most of his films were shot. There, his life was commemorated by the playing of Nino Rota’s main theme from La Strada on trumpet, echoing the notes which once represented the whimsical, innocent character of Gelsomina long after her own death.
Intervista is Fellini’s homage to his greatest passion, cinema, still wielding a self-reflexive camera as he once did in 8 1/2 albeit more clumsily.
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
Bergman sheds a warm, orange light over the interiors of Autumn Sonata, offsetting the harshness of its complicated mother-daughter relationship with a delicate tenderness.
Best Film
Persona. This may stand as the finest formal synthesis of Ingmar Bergman’s intimate visual style of close-ups and his deeply psychological subject matter, examining the perplexing duality which simultaneously defines humans as social beings and distinct individuals. All abstract truths conceived in one’s mind must be filtered through some sensory expression to reach the outer world, and Bergman does not discount his own film from that inevitable distortion. The raw materials of cinema itself become integral to Persona’s very form, fully recognising the impossible task of creating any pure representation of reality. It is deceitful in its purposeful manipulations, but also intricately designed to evoke truths through bold, symbolic expressions. Persona features career-best work from cinematographer Sven Nykvist, editor Ulla Ryghe, and actresses Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, but it is in the way Bergman formally integrates every element of cinema at his disposal to create such an obscure, avant-garde interrogation of identity that places it right at the top.
The defining shot of Bergman’s entire career, catching both Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces looking downward in silhouette, but there is also incredible formal detail with the emphasis of Andersson’s mouth – she represents outward expressions in contrast to Ullmann’s silent introspection.
Most Overrated
Wild Strawberries. To be fair, this can only be considered overrated by comparing where it sits on my list versus the TSPDT ranking. There, the critical consensus places it as the 61st best film of all time, and Ingmar Bergman’s 2nd best film after Persona. I’ve got 8 other Bergman films ahead of it, but that has more to do with the strength of those than the weakness of Wild Strawberries, which is still a borderline masterpiece. There are very few negative criticisms that can be levelled at this beautifully surreal meditation on mortality, regret, and lost time.
One of the finest compositions and edits of Wild Strawberries arrives in this long dissolve, sending a flock of crows flying across Professor Isak Borg’s head as we slip into his dreams.
Most Underrated
All These Women. This sits far outside the TSPDT top 1000 at #9283, putting it in the very bottom tier of Ingmar Bergman’s films on the site. It has also been critically panned from some great critics, including Roger Ebert who called it Bergman’s worst film. This brightly coloured pastiche is certainly about the furthest thing one could imagine from the black-and-white meditations on faith which have defined his greatest artistic triumphs up to this point. Even his previous comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night carry a more eloquent wit than the slapstick and buffoonery he happily indulges in here, which we see one snobbish music critic awkwardly inflict on the film’s country chateau setting while visiting famed cellist Felix. Flawed it may be, but Bergman’s experimentations with colour palettes and irreverent self-reflexivity build towards a single, unified point – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.
All These Women is closer to Peter Greenaway in its visual design than any other Ingmar Bergman film. The rigorous blocking may not be new for him, but the heavily curated colour palette and self-reflexive humour is. A rapid yet brief shift of gears that pays off in this instance, despite its formal flaws.
Gem to Spotlight
Sawdust and Tinsel. This would later be topped by many other Ingmar Bergman films, but in 1953 it was his best film to date, and the strongest hint that he was capable of creating truly great cinema. Life is a circus that creates entertainment out of humiliation, he posits in its central metaphor, and in his rich staging and screenwriting he needles its existential drama with a finer, wittier point than ever before. He finds both sympathy and pity for its hapless fools doomed to eternal ridicule, yet continues to undercut their dreams of escape with constant reminders of their own inadequacy. If there is any solace to be found, at least the humiliating stories they accumulate will make for great comic fodder down the track, offering momentary distractions from their sad, squalid circumstances.
Bergman’s blocking of faces is among the best in the art form’s history, even before he came out with his first masterpiece. Much of this has to do with the lighting, the depth of field, and of course, the actors.
Key Collaborator
Sven Nykvist. There’s a good number of actors who could fill this slot too, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnar Björnstrand, but from The Virgin Spring onward Sven Nykvist is Ingmar Bergman’s most frequent and consistent collaborator. If he isn’t history’s greatest cinematographer, then he’s at least in the top 3, proving his hand at capturing both the harsh austerity of Sweden’s barren scenery and the vibrancy of rigorously curated colour palettes. Most of all though, it is his intimate close-ups which define his aesthetic with Bergman, turning faces into landscapes with the potential to be shot in an unlimited number of angles, lighting setups, and arrangements within ensembles.
Cries and Whispers is simply one of the greatest displays of mise-en-scène put to screen, drifting through these powerful colour compositions of red, black, and white with masterful blocking.Fanny and Alexander is one of Bergman’s three most beautifully shot films, competing with Persona and Cries and Whispers for the top spot.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
Early Melodramas (1946 – 1950)
Although Ingmar Bergman’s love of cinema began during his years as a literature and art student at Stockholm University College, his fascination with human relations, faith, and dreams are rooted even more deeply in his childhood. The estrangement he felt from his father, a strict Lutheran minister, would manifest in many of his films as crushing emotional and spiritual isolation, especially taking the form of melodramas in his early years.
The development of his artistic voice was slow but sure. Many of the films from this era of his career were romances and tragedies that saw young love wither into resentment, with some mix of suicide, rape, trauma, and cheating thrown in the mix. These narratives also played heavily on flashbacks contrasting the innocence of youth against the depressing burden of reality, further expressed through some sharp yet eloquent eviscerations.
“I hate you so much that I want to live just to make your life miserable. Raoul was brutal. You took away my lust for life.”
Rut (Thirst, 1949)
Easily the most consequential stylistic trait that Bergman would start developing around this time though was his blocking and framing of faces in close-ups. Port of Call is the earliest instance of this, but Thirst would push it a little further with Bergman’s first notable use of what would become one of his trademark shots – the profile of one face half-obscuring another behind it.
The first instance of this trademark shot appears in Thirst, half-obscuring one actor’s face with the profile of another.Port of Call features some solid location shooting. In choosing to shoot on authentic docks and harbours, Bergman establishes his setting as a working-class port town, imbuing his characters’ troubles with a nuanced sorrow that connects to her helpless, abject poverty.A beautiful use of dissolves in To Joy, illustrating his characters’ passions for music by visually merging them with it.
The Summer Years (1951 – 1955)
This is the most suitable title for the next stage of Ingmar Bergman’s career for two good reasons. From 1951 to 1955, he directed three films with Summer in the title – Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, and Smiles of a Summer Night. Later in his career he would tick off the three other seasons with The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, and Autumn Sonata, but for now his fascination laid in this fleeting period of daylight, growth, and abundance that precedes darker, colder days.
This is also the era when his cinematic artistry and reputation began to lift off the ground, seeing him further refine his style and hit greater heights than he did in the 1940s. Romantic tragedies and melancholy flashbacks are often still very much at the centre of his work, meditating on the fickle nature of human desire that keeps his characters from establishing trust in their relationships, but so too is he broadening his range as well. Smiles of a Summer Night is his first comedy, taking a light-hearted spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its intricate web of affairs between aristocrats, while Sawdust and Tinsel turns a circus troupe into an existential metaphor for life’s cruel farce.
“We make art. You make artifice. The lowest of us would spit on the best of you. Why? You only risk your lives. We risk our pride.”
Mr. Sjuberg (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953)
Another one of Bergman’s trademark shot, this one of horizontal faces lying parallel to each other, making its first appearance in his light comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
Gunnar Fischer’s contributions as Bergman’s regular cinematographer during this period must be noted, contributing his eye for barren landscapes and deep focus imagery. Another Bergman trademark emerges for the first time in Smiles of a Summer Night with the parallel faces lying side-by-side, while his actors’ performances flourish even more under the intimate inspection of his close-ups. Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Gunnar Björnstrand each get their time in the spotlight here, but it is Harriet Andersson who truly defines this period for Bergman as an actress, exerting a feminine sexuality and emotional depth that was far from common in the 1950s.
Harriet Andersson is one of Bergman’s first true collaborators, lighting up the screen in Summer with Monika. This is the film’s single strongest shot – the camera locks Andersson’s penetrating gaze in close-up, and tracks forward as the background lighting dims.
Philosophical Dramas (1957 – 1963)
Before 1957, no one saw a masterpiece like The Seventh Seal coming from Ingmar Bergman. To then follow that up with Wild Strawberries in the same year makes for an accomplishment rivalled by very few in film history – one must think of Josef von Sternberg dominating 1930 with both The Blue Angel and Morocco, or Francis Ford Coppola releasing both The Godfather Part II and The Conversation in 1974.
These two films also mark a new trajectory for Bergman, who was now staring down the philosophical questions that had previously only lingered beneath the surface. The silence of God would occupy his thoughts in The Seventh Seal, and would become a running theme throughout the rest of this period until The Silence in 1963, while Wild Strawberries draws us into the dreams and memories of an elderly professor looking back on a life of regrets. Those flashbacks that Bergman had been using for so long by this point manifest with nightmarish unease here, similarly setting him down a path of cinematic surrealism.
“Is it so awfully unthinkable to conceive of God with one’s senses? Why should He conceal Himself in a fog of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living within me in a painful, humiliating way, though I curse Him and want to tear Him out of my heart? Why does He remain a treacherous reality of which I cannot rid myself? Do you hear me?”
Antonius Block (The Seventh Seal, 1957)
Historical and metaphysical iconography in The Seventh Seal’s chess game with Death, becoming a symbol of fate and futility.Bergman separates Max von Sydow from the rest of the ensemble in this shot, relegating him to the background and pouring in light above his head. He is the only one here not looking straight at Death, who stands just behind the camera.
Man’s faith in God, or the lack thereof, is clearly a subject that torments Bergman in this period. It was already very clear that Bergman was an immensely talented writer of dialogue, but it wasn’t until this point that he started writing some of the greatest screenplays of all time. The Virgin Spring lays out a compelling allegory of Christ’s sacrifice, while Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence constitute his unofficial ‘Faith’ trilogy, each in conversation with each other on the matter. The resentment that his characters hold towards each other frequently spills over into poetic vitriol in these films, aimed at viciously tearing each other down, though frequently revealing more about the speaker than the target of their derision.
“I’m tired of your loving care. Your fussing. Your good advice. Your candlesticks and table runners. I’m fed up with your short-sightedness. Your clumsy hands. Your anxiousness. Your timid displays of affection. You force me to occupy myself with your physical condition. Your poor digestion. Your rashes. Your periods. Your frostbitten cheeks. Once and for all I have to escape this junkyard of idiotic trivialities. I’m sick and tired of it all, of everything to do with you.“
Pastor Tomas Ericsson (Winter Light, 1963)
Winter Light is one of Bergman’s greatest screenplays and character studies, examining the paradox of a doubting priest, but he still delivers these brilliant compositions of faces. Note the detail in placing Christ’s tortured face above Tomas’ here. He looks down at the priest, who is in turn distracted and looking at Jonas, who is similarly refusing to look at the person trying to reach him.
The parallel move away from Summer-based films as well couldn’t be harsher – frozen landscapes, rural churches, and foreign hotels completely isolate his characters in unwelcome environments, cutting them off from God and the rest of humanity. His home island of Fårö features for the first time among these settings too in Through a Glass Darkly, becoming its own metaphor of emotional and spiritual solitude.
Two of Bergman’s greatest actors join his troupe in this period around this time, with Max von Sydow making an enormous breakthrough as the disenchanted knight Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal, and Ingrid Thulin leaving a huge imprint on Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, and The Silence. So too does Sven Nykvist properly enter the picture here, taking the reigns from Gunnar Fischer and establishing a working relationship that would last for decades. He had done some very solid work before on Sawdust and Tinsel, but the severe minimalism of The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, and The Silence stands among some of Bergman’s finest visuals, delivering magnificent theological symbolism.
The Virgin Spring is one of Bergman’s most violent films, with the rape and murder of an innocent girl. These dead, slanted branches are constantly obstructing his frames here, fragmenting shots into pieces that emphasise a poignant brokenness. Bergman’s home island of Fårö features for the first time in Through a Glass Darkly as a symbol of physical, emotional, and spiritual isolation. It would later also set the scene for Persona, Shame, Hour of the Wolf, and Scenes from a Marriage among others.
Experiments in Form (1964 – 1982)
With The Silence capping the end of his thematic trilogy in 1963, Ingmar Bergman claimed he was done questioning the existence of God, and new avenues began to open that allowed him greater artistic freedom – not that his shifting focus was immediately met with widespread acclaim. All These Women is a huge swing in visuals and writing that is about as far from Bergman’s typical style as possible, comically indulging in slapstick and satire that is ridden with flaws, yet still sticks the landing. It is also his first film shot in colour, which he wouldn’t return to again until The Passion of Anna in 1969. From then on though, it became the default in his filmmaking, seeing him quickly become a master of colour in Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander – two of the most beautifully shot films in history.
No longer sticking purely to philosophical dramas, Bergman began exploring other genres as well. Hour of the Wolf sees him take command of psychological horror as an interrogation of mental illness, Shame witnesses a married couple emotionally ripped apart by war, and Scenes From a Marriage lays out an enormous marital epic that is viscerally uncomfortable in its realism. He had been examining the constraints of human relationships since his earliest days of filmmaking, but this is easily his purest distillation of these concerns, trapping us in confined rooms with a husband and wife on the verge of divorce.
“We’re emotional illiterates. We’ve been taught about anatomy and farming methods in Africa. We’ve learned mathematical formulas by heart. But we haven’t been taught a thing about our souls. We’re tremendously ignorant about what makes people tick.”
Johan (Scenes From a Marriage, 1973)
Horizontal faces lying parallel to each other – another of Bergman’s trademark shots composed with stark austerity.
It is also with his production of Scenes From a Marriage that he became the first director to effectively make the leap from film to television while maintaining his artistic integrity, recognising the potential of the miniseries format. This is something he would repeat again in Face to Face and Fanny and Alexander, even though all three would also receive theatrical cuts for international distribution. Many of his other films frequently hover around the 90-minute mark, and so for this reason it is particularly impressive that he was so successful in creating long-form cinema too.
It is Persona that stands tall as the centrepiece of this period, marking Bergman’s greatest cinematic experiment in what many have described as the Mount Everest of film analysis. It is obscure in its formal patterns and rich in its crisp visual style, studying the human face like a filter through which emotions may be either honestly expressed or deceitfully masked. The blending of identities previously explored in Wild Strawberries and The Silence also reaches a pinnacle here, and it is fascinating to see how Bergman would continue to use this device to specifically get to the root of his female characters, as we later see in Cries and Whispers. Usually if he was going to feature music in his films, it would be existing classical pieces, but it is fitting that both this and Hour of the Wolf were the two films he chose to involve avant-garde composer Lars Johan Werle, emphasising their existential terror through a pair of dissonant, experimental scores.
Bergman first used this shot in 1949, and seventeen years later he perfects it in Persona.Crisp, deep focus as Alma slides into Elisabet’s role in her relationship, patching up old wounds while Elisabet remains emotionally disconnected in the foreground.An eerie spliced close-ups of both women’s faces, emphasising their similarities and revealing both as equal halves of a whole.The more one studies this shot in Hour of the Wolf, the more disturbing it becomes, manifesting Johan’s demons as his neighbours.
There is another unofficial trilogy which forms too between Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna, considering a trio of couples with artistic inclinations lost in spiritual crises. Quite significantly, this is where Liv Ullmann started working with Bergman, acting besides Max von Sydow in all three films. Later she would also follow Bergman to Hollywood when he made The Serpent’s Egg, his second English-language film after The Touch. Neither are major artistic achievements, but still demonstrate his willingness to keep moving outside his comfort zone.
Finally, Bergman’s surrealism began to settle on a series of recognisable traits during these years. Silent sequences of characters wandering empty hotels, manors, apartments, and houses turn these spaces into dreamy limbos, located somewhere within their uneasy subconscious. The sounds of ticking clocks often accompany these scenes too, implying the imminence of death even in these apparently timeless realms. The first time we witness this device may have been in The Silence, but he continues to draw it through Cries and Whispers, Face to Face, and Fanny and Alexander too, uncovering the psychological root of his characters’ fears and desires.
Characters wander apartments, houses, manors, and hotels in eerie, surreal silence. Here in Face to Face, Bergman leads one of them into a split screen manifesting two halves of a single mind like Persona.A fantastical prologue to Fanny and Alexander that sets up Alexander, his imagination, and the huge, magnificent apartment owned by his grandmother, Helena. Drapes of green and gold hang over cased openings and windows, creating immaculate frames all through the interior space.
Television Specials
There are few filmmakers who have kept up as great a level of creative stamina across a large span of time as Ingmar Bergman, though in the last couple decades of his life even he began to grow tired, and the quality of his work declined. Despite Fanny and Alexander being intended as his last film before committing himself entirely to theatre, he did keep working on television projects. He had touched on this before in specials like From the Life of Marionettes, but from here it became his entire career. Unfortunately, most of these films have very little artistic merit, plainly revealing their limited budgets in their poor cinematography and uncharacteristically messy writing.
Two exceptions stand here. The first is After the Rehearsal, which is deeply in touch with Bergman’s love of theatre. Though he sets it entirely on a stage and thus compromises its cinematic power, his formal manipulations of time through dreams and flashbacks remain strong, slipping an ageing theatre director back through time to an old relationship.
Being set in a single location, After the Rehearsal is severely compromised in its cinematic power, but Bergman’s adoration of the theatre as an art form bleeds through in its central formal conceit.
The other exception is Saraband – the last film of Bergman’s entire career, and a fitting return to form. Though often described as a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, it is much more an observation of the imprint its aged divorcees have left on the younger generations now carrying their legacies. Bergman had contemplated the regrets of old age before, but this feels far more grounded in his firsthand experience than the surreal meditations of Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, now finding peace in the act of introspective reminiscence and his longstanding adoration of classical music.
Many of his usual trademarks are present in Saraband, including savage dialogue viscerally thrown between wounded characters, but in the very final minutes there are no such acts of spiritual desecration to be found. With two of his greatest actors by his side, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, Bergman finally appreciates the pure bond between lovers, parents, children, and friends that transcends all other worldly distractions.
Four years later, Ingmar Bergman passed away in his sleep at his home on Fårö. The date was 30 July, 2007 – the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni’s passing. His influence as one of the all-time great directors and screenwriters continues to be felt in the work of virtually every filmmaker working today, from the severe aesthetic precision of Paweł Pawlikowski’s films Ida and Cold War, to Paul Schrader’s direct evocation of Winter Light in First Reformed.
Bergman’s final film Saraband is a poetic return to form after decades of less-than-admirable filmmaking, recapturing the magic between Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson from Scenes from a Marriage.
“I should like to make films that are not lowering to the spirit. A new building can be very harrowing, I should like to give people a chance to whistle.”
Tati’s playfully artificial decor underscores his own physical humour, masterfully bouncing the two off each other.
Best Film
Playtime. This easily belongs among the greatest displays of production design committed to film, perfectly merging Jacques Tati’s visual ambition, social satire, and sharply staged slapstick. The construction of Tativille is a staggering achievement on its own, blending a monochrome palette with harsh textures and sharp angles to build an artificial city that is both familiar and entirely the product of one whimsical, ingenious imagination. To then shoot it in wide shots that turn these bizarre edifices into perfect frames and obstacles for Tati’s physical gags is another cinematic triumph altogether. And then in considering the vignette narrative structure that whisks us between parts of the city and which gives this film its distinct form, it becomes apparent that Playtime is Tati’s best.
A room of grey office cubicles, trapping its workers in claustrophobic boxes and Hulot in a confusing labyrinth.
Most Overrated
Playtime. The TSPDT list gets it right in letting it sit at #1 of 1967, but having it at #49 of all time might be overly lofty praise. I would have it sitting in the #100-150 range – no insult to the film at all, but there are slightly greater cinematic achievements out there.
Wall-length windows become glass boxes, containing Hulot inside rigid, artificial structures and making for some superb displays of set design.
Most Underrated
Mon Oncle. Its ranking at #402 of all time on the TSPDT list isn’t terrible, but it should be sitting in the masterpiece range, around the top 250. Before Playtime, this was Tati’s best film, and shows off a wonderfully outlandish display of architecture sending up impractical modern design trends. There is also the sweet narrative through line of Monsieur Hulot’s relationship with his nephew, paying off in a heart-warming conclusion.
Geometric shapes and angles at the nearly monochromatic Villa Arpel, “ultra-modern” in its stylish décor but barely practical for everyday living.
Gem to Spotlight
Trafic. This isn’t quite near the level of Tati’s top 3 films, but his resourcefulness here is truly impressive given that he was heading towards bankruptcy at this point in his career. Rather than using impressive architectural structures as the basis of his visual satire, here he hits on the ultimate paradox of an inept modern society – sitting in high-tech, metal boxes that are designed to drive us into the future, but which instead sit bumper-to-bumper in frustratingly stagnant lanes of traffic.
The perfect paradox of modern society – these machines designed to push us into the future keep us rooted to the spot. On top of everything else, Tati is a skilled satirist.
Key Collaborator
Alain Romans. This is not a particularly significant category for Tati though, who is not known for his collaborations. Still, it is worth noting Romans’ musical contributions to both Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle, developing relaxed, jazzy motifs that complement Tati’s laidback whimsy.
The first appearance of Monsieur Hulot in 1953 sets him up as one of cinema’s great comedic characters, more comfortable among children than he is with adults.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
A Spark of Inspiration
In the 1930s, long before his days as a director, Jacques Tati was performing in music halls across France, his act being described as “partly ballet and partly sport, partly satire and partly a charade.” It was also around this time that he began acting in shorts, introducing him to the world of film where he would eventually find his stride. His first effort at directing was the 1947 short, L’Ecole des facteurs, and while it was well-received, it is more notable than anything for providing the comedic foundation of his 1949 feature debut, Jour de Fête, which follows a similar line of comedic gags.
It was evident right away where Tati’s primary inspiration lies. Buster Keaton is written all across his deadpan expression and physics-defying stunts, as well as his dedication to using the entire frame set back in wide shots to play out gags. In his narrative structures of comedic vignettes and social critiques of modernity, Charlie Chaplin is very much present, though with a distinctly French twist. The invasion of American commercialism in small-town France is his primary satirical target in Jour de Fête, as he longs for simpler times where efficiency wasn’t the end goal. Like Chaplin, he is also a romantic at heart. His characters do not seek love, but every so often they come across a woman with similar innocent ideals, and the two find solace in each other while the rest of society keeps operating on its own nonsensical wavelength.
Who would have guessed how many gags you could get out one bike – Tati’s style of comedy is endlessly inventive, and makes wonderful use of the whole frame like Buster Keaton before him.
Of course, the silent cinema influence is most of all evident in the dialogue, or lack thereof. Rarely does it hold any key information we couldn’t glean from the visuals, and so instead it simply becomes part of his lush sound design, delivering character information through their vocal tones rather than their actual words. Around them, bells, squeaky chairs, and clacking shoes among an array of other everyday items fill in Tati’s intricate soundscapes, often accentuating gags with well-timed sound effects.
Tati’s work is pervaded by a childlike wonder, seen here in the final shot of Jour de Fête where this small boy gleefully chases the disassembled carousel horses down the street.
The Reign of Monsieur Hulot
In 1953, perhaps the most significant cultural icon associated with Tati arrived. Monsieur Hulot is the bumbling, pipe-puffing, good-natured figure at the centre of all his greatest films, played by Tati himself. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday solidified him as an extraordinary director, but the film is also greatly helped along by the presence of this distinctive character, whose peculiar fashion, long lurching strides, and childlike mannerisms sets him apart in any crowd. Just as you could draw a line directly from Chaplin’s Tramp to Tati’s Hulot, so too does Hulot become a direct inspiration on contemporary comedic characters – most of all Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, whose silent antics are strongly reminiscent of Hulot’s ventures through a world he can’t quite comprehend.
There is also the development of his voice as a satirist in the 1950s, pursuing similar critiques of modernity that he initiated in Jour de Fête, though additionally targeting the superficial class structures, fashions, and technologies of mid-century France. Humanity’s efforts to progress as a society and grow more efficient ultimately has the opposite effect in Tati’s films, setting characters back with designs and systems that only serve to complicate their lives. The assembly line gag in Mon Oncle particularly calls to mind a strikingly similar one in Chaplin’s Modern Times, letting his inspiration peek through quite explicitly.
Clean precision turns to controlled chaos in Tati’s factory scene, throwing back to Chaplin’s Modern Times.
On a cinematic level, Tati’s greatest accomplishment through the 1950s and 60s was his architectural constructions, at times even rivalling Michelangelo Antonioni with his ambitious urban structures filling in as characters. Instead of using these to paint out wandering tales of isolated, wealthy Italians though, his constructions are brilliant oddities, often built on sets rather than shot on location. From the ramshackle, Dr Seuss-style apartment complex in Mon Oncle to the sprawling, monochrome city he created for Playtime, there is no understating his wildly impressive visions which land him among some of cinema history’s finest, most perfectionistic production designers. Every piece is curated, arranged, and shot with intensive purpose, which always comes back to the framing of characters in environments that are wildly beyond their control, and which diminish them in turn. To trace the progression of this through his career as well, it is clear that up until the 1970s he was trying to top his previous film in sheer scale, leading to his finest achievement of all in Playtime.
Tati’s intricate dioramas reflecting their eccentric inhabitants. A huge influence on Wes Anderson, most of all in this set piece and gag that was recently paid homage to in The French Dispatch.Tati’s magnificent use of architecture as character rivals Michelangelo Antonioni – the main difference being everything in Playtime is an artificial set, uniting under a singular comedic vision.
Bankruptcy and Decline
Tati was one of the few French filmmakers working in the 1960s to neither be grouped in with the French New Wave artists innovating cinema, nor be targeted by them for perpetuating the industry’s bland, middlebrow “Tradition de qualité”. In this way, he existed in his own bubble, coasting by on a unique style that calls back to cinema’s past more than it does push it into the future. As such, there was not much of a safety net protecting him from the massive financial failure of Playtime, which is less an indicator of its quality, and more of its extraordinarily large budget which could not be recouped.
1971’s Trafic is by no means a disappointment, but almost any film following the glorious Playtime would suffer in comparison. Though the visual work and production design is a step down, it remains thoroughly impressive for its sheer resourcefulness. Rather than reflecting characters in the towering architecture around them, cars are instead rendered as extensions of their quirks and foibles, and additionally carry on Tati’s criticisms of inept modern technology.
Sadly, Trafic was also the last onscreen appearance by Tati as Monsieur Hulot. Having failed to make a profit here too, Tati was driven to make his final film in 1974, Parade – also his first failure. There is something of a mannered feel to this, which isn’t surprising given that it is essentially a variety show of magicians, acrobats, clowns, and animals. Parade is the equivalent of a Netflix comedy special for Tati, and is far from cinematic or anywhere near the heights of his best work. It doesn’t help either that it was shot on fuzzy videotape that exposes the tiny budget he had to work with. For a director who once possessed such ridiculously monumental cinematic ambitions, it is an unfortunate film to bow out on.
Cars used as extensions of people in Trafic, connecting humanity to their inefficient, idiosyncratic machines.
“If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I’ll never achieve it; in the same way that I’ll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.”
A Short Film About Killing. It is not just a highpoint of the Dekalog series, but of Kieslowski’s entire career, delivering a punishing treatise on the injustice of the death penalty through a sickly, jaundiced filter. This vision of Warsaw is a barren wasteland of corruption, and that seeps all through Kieslowski’s grotesque photography and methodical staging. The story is split in two halves, each ending with a brutal murder, and the formal mirroring is impeccable. The destruction of human life is a sacrilegious transgression of nature in his eyes, every bit as repulsive as the desolate society which either passively or righteously condones it.
Perhaps Kieslowski’s greatest accomplishment in style, filtering a pair of senseless murders through a sickly, yellow haze and crafting endlessly creative frames in A Short Film About Killing.
Most Overrated
Nothing. Everything from Kieslowski is either well-rated on the TSPDT list or underrated. Given the formal complexity of much of his work, it is naturally more likely that audiences will miss his genius rather than overestimate it.
No End is a heavy, sombre film contemplating the introduction of martial law in Poland, and paralleling that with one woman’s grief over her deceased husband. It also marks an important transition for Kieslowski from social realism into spiritual, philosophical cinema.
Most Underrated
A Short Film About Killing. This currently sits at #8 of 1988, which is a significant miss from the critical consensus. It deserves to be in the top 3 (along with Distant Voices, Still Lives and Dead Ringers), if not sitting at number 1. It was also the first theatrical cut of a Dekalog episode, so my guess is that many critics are divided over whether they should consider it as part of the series or on its own. My vote obviously goes to the latter.
Absolute bleakness in this dystopian vision of Warsaw. The stench of death hangs in the air as Kieslowski foreshadows the tragic ending in the very first shots.
Gem to Spotlight
Dekalog. The cinematic launchpad for the rest of Kieslowski’s great career can’t be overlooked. Few television series have reached this level of artistic accomplishment, as Kieslowski dedicates each of its individual episodes to one of the Ten Commandments, crafting an epic drama around a set of strangers living in a single Warsaw apartment complex. We are gifted an omniscient perspective into their stories, each one of which possesses its own distinct style while being bound together by a series of common motifs. Kieslowski’s characteristic use of iconography and cutaways also lend spiritual significance to these characters’ journeys, wrestling with complex moral dilemmas that attempt to reconcile traditional moral imperatives with modern cultural values.
One of the single greatest frames from the Dekalog, watching a man through the apartment building entrance and silhouetted against the rain. The use of glass as a lens through which we can observe the world would later become a key stylistic feature of The Double Life of Veronique.
Key Collaborator
Krzysztof Piesiewicz. It is hard to glean how much of a coincidence it is that Kieslowski’s great artistic breakthrough with the Dekalog was also when he started co-writing his screenplays with Piesiewicz. Clearly Kieslowski’s stylistic accomplishments are his own, and the narrative fascinations with fate, death, and religion began long before his arrival, but it is evident that his work was far stronger when Piesiewicz was in the picture, who worked on every Kieslowski film from 1988 to his death. These screenplays are obscure and profound in their philosophical ambitions, centring complex characters being drawn towards predetermined fates far beyond their control.
Kieslowski and Piesiewicz’s screenplays often centre divine mysteries beyond human understanding, reminding us of this silent witness’ omnipresence in almost every episode of the Dekalog.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
Targeting Polish Politics
As a film student with ambitions in the realm of political art, Kieslowski began his career making both short and feature-length documentaries, travelling Poland to research and shoot the day-to-day lives of labourers, soldiers, and city people. After recording interviews with workers protesting against food shortages, he quickly found himself being heavily censored by Polish Communist authorities, though this only incensed him further and pushed him to branch out into narrative filmmaking.
His non-documentary debut, Personnel, was broadcast on television and struck a chord at the Mannheim Film Festival, winning him first prize. It wasn’t until The Scar though that he was able to combine his intelligent political voice with artistic potency, setting him up as an important figure in the realm of social realism. Through his following films he developed a didactic and pointed cinematic style, targeting specific areas of Polish culture and politics unique to the time period such as the introduction of martial law, all the while continuing to wrestle with censors. Blind Chance was hit particularly hard with its release being delayed by authorities for six years, and not being seen by the public until 1987. Even today, there is still a single scene depicting the police beating up a citizen that has not been fully recovered.
A gorgeous composition to open The Scar, using forest trees to divide the frame into segments and split up the labourers.
Across the late 70s and mid 80s, Kieslowski continued dropping in pieces of conceptual philosophy and surrealism. There was already a hint of it in the sparse, ethereal score of The Scar, but in the parallel timelines of Blind Chance and the ghostly manifestations of No End, it became clear that he was starting to head in more metaphysical directions. Of course, this would all foreshadow the complete departure from politics in his later career, and a submission to personal, spiritual questions.
Kieslowski’s camera in Blind Chance rushes along the platform with our young protagonist at a key turning point in his life, right before the narrative splits off into three different timelines.
A Television Breakthrough
While Kieslowski was beginning work on his most ambitious project yet, the Dekalog series, he was asked by his producers to expand two of its episodes into feature-length films to make for easier international distribution, thus giving us A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love.
These films were released in 1988, a year before the Dekalog would make its television debut, and both marked a dramatic step up in artistic quality from his previous films, individually developing colour palettes that are formally tied to their narratives. This would go on to be an identifying characteristic of Kieslowski’s later work, even becoming the stylistic basis of his Three Colours trilogy in the 1990s. Here though, it was A Short Film About Killing which especially leapt out for its harsh depiction of Warsaw as a dystopian hellhole, laying vignettes over sepia images of social decay and violent murder, and making a powerful statement against the death penalty.
The arrival of the Dekalog series in 1989 only cemented the genius that took over film festivals the previous year. Inspired by a 15th century artwork that depicted the Ten Commandments in scenes from that period, Kieslowski strived to make a modern cinematic equivalent within the social and political context of late-Communist era Poland. This wasn’t just the start of his interest in God-like, omniscient perspectives that study the hidden interconnections between unassuming strangers. This was also the beginning of his commitment to long-form cinema, structuring series around cultural ideals whether they be religious imperatives or the colours of the French flag.
Red production design soaking A Short Film About Love in a passionate ardour, foreshadowing a similar (and stronger) stylistic choice a few years later in Three Colours: Red.
Questions of Faith and Philosophy
By the 1990s, Kieslowski was well and truly on a roll, delivering masterpiece after masterpiece. Despite being the only standalone film from the latter half of his career, The Double Life of Veronique stands as one of his finest cinematic accomplishments, displaying all of his most recognisable stylistic trademarks that would continue to be represented in his subsequent Three Colours trilogy. The use of glass to reflect and distort images is particularly characteristic of Kieslowski, gazing through orbs, lenses, and windows to empathetically consider alternate perspectives. It has a distancing effect as well though, as if to suggest we can never truly cross that barrier into other people’s lives.
In The Double Life of Veronique, Kieslowski frequently combines those glass shots with his cutaways, another distinguishing feature of his that stretches even further back to his earlier films. A dissolving sugar cube, a pair of grasped hands, a cracked glass of beer – these tiny, delicate representations of larger ideas offer deeper meanings to his stories and characters, stepping beyond the immediate plot to examine the ways human experiences are reflected in the micro-details of their surroundings. They also practically break up the flow of Kieslowski’s narrative, taking the time to retune our sensitivity and perspective, before letting us re-join our characters.
The Double Life of Veronique marks a great achievement in mise-en-scène for Kieslowski, weaving red decor through scenes shot with yellow and green filters, but it might also be his most formally complex work in its quiet mysticism.Powerful cutaways to tiny symbols reflecting our characters’ emotional journeys, here paired with one of Kieslowski’s greatest use of glass to refract a shot.
It is worth noting the yellow and green hues that hang in the air in The Double Life of Veronique, but the colour palettes which permeate the Three Colours trilogy go without saying. In representing the French flag as a film series, Kieslowski is able to take the time to examine philosophical applications of its national values – liberty, equality, and fraternity. Red in particular stands out as being most in line with his previous metaphysical fascinations as laid out in Blind Chance, the Dekalog, and The Double Life of Veronique, studying the passing connections between strangers and the alternate lives we could have lived were it not some twist of fate or divine intervention. Much like the ending of Blind Chance, the conclusion of Red sees Kieslowski gather a small ensemble of characters we have been following but who are unknown to our main protagonist, uniting the Three Colours trilogy within a single scene.
It was at the premiere of Red at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival that Kieslowski announced his retirement from film, claiming his belief that literature could achieve greater things than cinema. Evidently there was a change of heart at some point, as he began to work on a new trilogy with films based on the concepts of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Though he had finished writing them, he passed away in 1996 from a heart attack, and two of the three screenplays were later adapted by other filmmakers.
A gentle azure palette infused with the photography in Three Colours: Blue, diffused through the soft natural light.
“If you look at ancient Chinese culture, and depictions of it, the relationship between people and nature was very different. It almost felt as though feelings were always attached to a certain landscape.”
Jia Zhangke
Top 10 Ranking
Film
Year
1. Platform
2000
2. Still Life
2006
3. Ash is Purest White
2018
4. The World
2004
5. Xiao Wu
1997
6. A Touch of Sin
2013
7. Unknown Pleasures
2002
8. Mountains May Depart
2015
Unknown Pleasures, Jia Zhangke’s follow-up to Platform, doesn’t reach the same level as his previous films but still establishes his voice in the realm of social realism.
Best Film
Platform. Jia Zhangke’s follow-up to his promising debut, Xiao Wu, is sprawling and ambitious filmmaking. State performers searching for direction in the wake of China’s Cultural Revolution unfolds slowly and deliberately over ten years, taking an emphasis off plot and onto these wandering, disillusioned young characters. The weathered architecture imposes harsh textures and shapes on these characters, making for a defining piece of 21st century realism.
Clearly an Antonioni acolyte in his profound sense of architectural style, and a formal master in the recurring use of these wide shots throughout Platform.
Most Overrated
Still Life. This isn’t outrageous though. TSPDT has it at #4 of its year and I would only be a few spots lower. There isn’t much to criticise here in this film – it is still Jia’s second best after Platform and reveals a new direction in his formal approach to structuring narratives into three-pronged segments.
A crumbling city in Still Life standing for Chinese culture at large, erasing the old to make way for progress. The way this is painted out in the contrast of foregrounds and backgrounds is especially affecting.
Most Underrated
Ash is Purest White. Sitting at #21 of 2018 is bizarre. If it doesn’t belong in the top 10, it should at least be on the outskirts. It stands among Jia’s most structurally impressive films, as he instils its sound design, music, architecture, and colours with a soothing repetition that echoes down through all three chapters of its characters’ lives, both together and apart.
Traces of Kieslowski in the use of colour in mise-en-scène, switching up the palette in each chapter.
Gem to Spotlight
The World. Jia’s first step beyond the boundaries of strict realism, but only barely. The image of tourists and theme park workers towering over shrunken replicas of world monuments is surreal, and makes an acute statement on the cheapening effect of globalisation on human achievement.
Rigid structures and patterns all through Jia’s mise-en-scène here as characters gaze up at the passing plane and dream of flying away.
Key Collaborator
Zhao Tao. Jia’s top actress appeared in eight of his films from 2000 to 2018, finally culminating in Ash is Purest White, which marked her greatest performance to date. There, she plays the lover of a mob boss across three chapters of her life, carrying an epic character study of feminine strength and its moulding in the fiery heat of adversity. She internalises that with hardy resilience – a common trait among many of her characters in Jia’s films, even while she embodies the isolation so present in his examinations of China’s modern landscapes.
A Touch of Sin, Jia’s bloodiest film to date, studying the inevitable bursts of violence that result from constant abuse of the working class. Zhao Tao shines in her chapter, and especially with her sudden, vicious snap.
Key Influence
Michelangelo Antonioni. The ennui of modern life is bound to manmade and natural monuments for both Antonioni and Jia, using magnificent backdrops to underscore each character’s alienation. The pacing of their films is meditative, allowing us time to bask in meticulous compositions of their blocking and architecture, as well as environments that seem to exist in states of perpetual, existential change.
The final shot of Antonioni’s L’Avventura, using this mountain as a backdrop of deep isolation and melancholy.Echoing Antonioni here in the use of natural land masses to inform character – a stunning composition in Ash is Purest White.
Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations
An Underground Movement
With increased censorship policies rising in China in the 1990s, there was a growing disillusionment with those state-funded films that neglected to depict the authentic lives and struggles of people as they actually were. The Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers thus came about as an underground movement led by Jia Zhangke, committed to raw realism – handheld cameras, location shooting, non-professional actors, all calling back to the Italian neorealists of the 1940s and 50s.
Debut and Breakthrough
Jia started his career at Beijing Film Academy where he made three short films, experimenting with documentary and narrative cinema. It was also there that he began work on his feature debut, Xiao Wu, set and filmed in 1997 during the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong. The time period and political landscape is marked with loud, public announcements declaring crackdowns on petty crime, threatening the welfare of the titular pickpocket.
It was ultimately Platform though, his follow-up effort, which made Jia an internationally renowned arthouse director, as he shifted his focus back to the 1980s to observe the gradual social changes in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Jia’s frequent camera pans soak in the detail of dirtied interiors and rundown streets in both films, shooting in long takes that refuse to hurry the characters and stories along.
An impressive debut from a young auteur, hitting the streets of China with 16mm film stock to capture a biting piece of realism in conversation with contemporaneous political affairs.
Pushing the Boundaries of Realism
Politics and globalisation have always remained at least in the background of all of Jia’s films, but while his earliest films might draw comparisons to Robert Rossellini in their authentic representations of Chinese workers, criminals, and slackers going about everyday life, it was about the mid-2000s that Jia began to throw in traces of fantasy. The final minutes of The World conclude with a pair of voiceovers seemingly playing out the thoughts of two dead bodies, and Still Life digs even deeper into such surreal allusions by using its hints at an extra-terrestrial invasion as metaphors for the destruction of an ancient Chinese village.
In 24 City, displaced workers and families who were previously involved in a once-standing airplane engine manufacturing facility now find themselves wrestling with a changing infrastructural and social landscape as it is demolished to make way for a complex of luxury apartments. Again, the grounding of realism is challenged in this experimental documentary that blends authentic and scripted stories, refusing to note the difference between the two.
Beyond Antonioni, there are also traces of Yasujirō Ozu in shots like these with the hanging laundry and background architecture – but this specific building in Still Life also possesses its own surprising significance to the underlying science-fiction themes.
Experimenting With Structure
As the 2010s arrive, Jia followed up on the formally segmented structure of Still Life with an anthology film in A Touch of Sin. In Mountains May Depart and Ash is Purest White, he similarly delivers a pair of of three-pronged narratives set across three different eras of Chinese culture. Even here though, there still remains a consistency in his use of architecture and landforms to define characters, whether he is painting out a hardened spirit with a mountainous green volcano in Ash is Purest White or collapsing buildings around a man searching for stability in Still Life.
Jia is still active in the world of Chinese cinema, having recently made the short film Visit contemplating the COVID-19 pandemic, however there is no current news regarding his direction on future films.
This pagoda is a deliberate formal choice all through Mountains May Depart, recurring in the background right up until this wonderful final shot.
