Stanley Kubrick’s astonishing display of picturesque beauty and grace haunts every frame of Barry Lyndon, and through this he sets an impossibly rigid standard of perfection that his messy, flawed characters cannot live up to, even as they strive for self-aggrandising legacies and traditions that only reveal their feeble hubris.
In the small city of Rochefort seven hours outside of Paris, the entwining paths of young and old lovers alike wind these dreamy idealists up in some remarkable force of fated romance, joyously orchestrated through artistic expressions of dance, music, and outrageously beautiful colours by French auteur and musical devotee Jacques Demy.
Through the violent demolition of an ancient Chinese village in Still Life, Jia Zhangke brings about an apocalyptic vision of modernity and globalisation, pushing the boundaries of neorealism with an eerie edge of science-fiction imagery.
Once Upon a Time in the West’s epic narrative is more a legendary tale than anything else, as Sergio Leone stages remarkably orchestrated, suspenseful face-offs in dry, open deserts, turning outlaws, lawmen, and pioneers into mythical figures of American history.
As absurd obstructions and diversions continue to stack up in one man’s simple goal of returning home after work, Martin Scorsese drags us through his oppressive, Kafkaesque narrative, aiming his subtextual critique right at the soul-sapping forces of corporate America.
In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn combines two roles she would commonly be associated with in her career – the fresh-faced innocent and the stylish fashion icon – and through her gorgeous transformation challenges clearly defined class boundaries, giving rise to a web of intricate relationships that Billy Wilder relishes in his luscious deep focus cinematography.
Blue Bayou features a heavy, gut-wrenching narrative that pulls a Korean-American adoptee down a bureaucratic path of loopholes towards unjust deportation, and yet the flashes of beauty which emerge in moments of serenity lend a quiet joy to his family ties that cannot be broken by time, distance, or institutional forces beyond his control.
Dario Argento constructs one of the most audacious displays of stylistic horror to emerge from the genre since its cinematic inception in Suspiria, breaking from the tradition of dark, dreary aesthetics by reinterpreting its expressionist roots through an entirely different filter altogether – one that tunes into the striking contrasts of opposing neon colours to draw out a violent and vivid fairytale of witches and ballerinas.
The sharp angles and lines of Bernardo Bertolucci’s immaculate, austere tableaux of wartime Europe are as equally unyielding as the dogmatic socio-political landscape they make up, lending this incisive attack on unthinking fascist ideologies an extra edge of bitter resentment.
It is through Edgar Wright’s disorientating atmosphere of intensely expressive neon washes and fluid transitions that we feel the physical worlds of aspiring fashioner designer Ellie break down in Last Night in Soho, as her nightmarish trips to the Swinging Sixties lead us into a frightening convergence of the past and present.
