Within Eraserhead’s nightmares of mutant babies and urban isolation, it is the psychological impression of its surreal imagery which carries far more impact than any attempts to derive its literal meaning, as David Lynch mystifyingly manifests the dark subconscious of one young father existentially terrified of parenthood.
For all of Akira Kurosawa’s jaw-dropping historical battles staged with colourful splendour and imposing characters that fill out Ran’s immense narrative, at its core is a seething bitterness towards humanity’s existential isolation, propelling the dramatic power struggles between three jealous brothers in feudal Japan.
Ingmar Bergman’s personal turmoil during production of The Passion of Anna infuses this chamber drama with a shaggy, improvisational quality, deconstructing its titular widow’s grief with the same imperfect honesty which he himself is guilty of, and bringing a raw vulnerability to complex characters straining against each other’s cruelty.
David Cronenberg’s blending of intellectual musings on modern mass media with grotesque body horror makes Videodrome’s dire warnings all the more visceral, robbing brainwashed individuals of their humanity by fusing them with the technology they have become reliant on, and marking a triumphant success in transgressive genre filmmaking for the young auteur.
Fritz Lang distils the fearful mistrust of authority in Weimar Germany down to a single criminal mastermind in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, painting out an expressionistic world under his hypnotic control with dark, jagged strokes, and setting the proto-noir standard of elaborately plotted crime narratives.
Like a man ready to tear the world down with him on his way to hell, there is no real direction to Johnny’s intellectual bullying through London’s nocturnal streets in Naked, yet around him Mike Leigh constructs a character study of such immense nihilism that even he can’t escape the miserable darkness he emits.
From the moment the first bombs start falling, Ingmar Bergman descends Shame into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, tragically twisting the souls of wartime survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves and taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.
As we trace back the steps of one mentally tortured painter through the days before his disappearance in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that no other Ingmar Bergman film has come this close to outright psychological horror, surreally warping our most intimate relationships into vulnerable weaknesses where demons come to play.
That wistful memories last far longer than the events they are born from is a painful paradox in A Day in the Country, but with a visual style and narrative pacing as elegant as Jean Renoir’s, it is fully possible to recognise the beauty of these moments as they pass us by, manifesting as scintillating portraits of an idyllic, rural France.
The corruption of samurai tradition in Harakiri has not merely unfolded through passive spiritual negligence, but rather arises from the flawed humanity hiding behind its facade, as Masaki Kobayashi thrillingly lays out a pessimistic Japanese fable of one man’s violent attempt to expose its total hypocrisy.
