Vampyres

Thoughts on the film by José Ramón Larraz

Putting together a short comment for MUBI, I wrote the following: "With its atmospheric locations, painterly shot compositions and use of natural lighting, Vampyres is a grindhouse film that succeeds in dipping a toe or two into the esoteric world of the arthouse movie. Despite its minimal plotting, the story sustains interest and has a few surprising developments, but it can't compete with certain similar films by the great Jean Rollin, who could have injected this particular brand of exploitation with something more dreamlike, hypnotic and surreal."

I drafted the above almost automatically. At the time it seemed a good enough means of expressing (within the minimum character limit available) the film's strengths and weaknesses. I was content to leave it there and move on to something else when I started to question the film's deeper merits. I was thinking about how, from a surface perspective, the "vampiric" characters of Vampyres (1974) seemed to lack a political or sociological component. What was the subtext? Was the film simply a work of empty exploitation designed to shock and titillate the undiscerning viewer, or was it an opportunity - like with many other horror films before and since - to explore more interesting themes?

In many gothic horror films, the presentation of the "monster" - be it werewolf, vampire or something else - is often a figurative stand-in for something more theoretical, or subtextual. For instance, in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) by F. W. Murnau, the vampire sweeps across the landscape like a literal plague. It becomes in the process a kind of harbinger of sickness; a physical black death. In the later remake by Werner Hezog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), this "plague" becomes a possible invocation of the encroaching darkness that would infect the German psyche in the early to middle parts of the Twentieth Century. For Herzog, the vampire is almost a portent of the Weimar Republic; that period of decadence and ruin that led directly (or indirectly) to the rise of National Socialism, and later fascism and war.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror [F. W. Murnau, 1922]:

Nosferatu the Vampyre [Werner Herzog, 1979]:

In these films the vampire is symbolic; a personification of something greater than its single form. Later vampire films, such as The Hunger (1983), Interview With the Vampire (1994) and The Addiction (1995), would use vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, homosexuality and drug addiction respectively, while a more recent vampire film, Byzantium (2012), found parallels between its vampiric protagonists and the experience of asylum seekers forced to flee their native homes and live nomadically in foreign countries.

Thinking more about this particular film by José Ramón Larraz, I started to wonder if I'd sold the movie short. While I think it's easy to be blindsided by the sleazier aspects of the film - its low-budget nature, wooden performances, perfunctory dialogue, etc - there is something about Vampyres that seems to connect, albeit in retrospect, to a more interesting interpretation. It's a reading of the film that seems analogous to that of the aforementioned Interview With the Vampire (both the film version by Neil Jordan and the original 1976 novel by Anne Rice) in which the relationship between the two vampire characters could be seen as a metaphor for a homosexual relationship in the times before same-sex partnerships were more widely accepted.

Interview with the Vampire [Neil Jordan, 1994]:

In Vampyres, the lesbian lovers at the centre of the film are forced to remain hidden; living a nocturnal existence away from the conventional society. In the opening scene of the film, the couple, during an act of love, are punished and destroyed for their natural, consensual desires, by the literal shadow of puritanical virtue. In the decades, if not centuries that follow, they are forced to feed off various men in a mockery of heterosexual sex.

Vampyres [José Ramón Larraz, 1974]:

Like Interview with the Vampire, the subtext of the conventional vampiric existence is as such one of longing and repression; about two characters bound-together in partnership, sharing time and space, but not legally recognised as part of a "Holy" union. Further to this, the subplot involving the young couple who arrive at the film's manor house location with their caravan in tow (and with it an image of conventional domesticity in miniature) becomes endemic of the threat of the "straight", the conservative conformity of the "normal", or the everyday. In this context, it adds an element of colour to the interpretation, exaggerating the tedium of the heterosexual couple with the transgressions of the central characters. As does the ending, and the necessity of the two supernatural figures to once more take flight into the uncaring wilderness, lost within the margins of society.

In Vampyres, the scenes of heterosexual sex are fittingly grotesque. This grotesquery may have been coincidental - a result of having bad actors floundering into awkward love scenes without the guidance of an intimacy coordinator and literally fumbling their way through - but I think it's intentional. The wild pawing of flesh, the slobbering lips and tongues penetrating open-mouthed encounters, are the antitheses of eroticism. It fits in with the idea of characters forced to engage with a kind of sexuality that isn't felt, but instead becomes a cruel necessity for survival.

Vampyres is the first of two films I've seen by Larraz. While it's interesting enough to spend some time with, I found his subsequent work, The Coming of Sin (1978), to be on the whole a lot more interesting and much more successful in its combination of exploitation elements and art-house mind-games. Nonetheless, Vampyres makes an interesting companion-piece to that later film, with another story about female courtship and female desire under threat from the almost supernatural harbingers of conservative masculinity, guilt and emotional repression.

A Year in Film (Part Four)

A Viewing List for Twenty-Fifteen

The Visit [M. Night Shyamalan, 2015]:

1. A scatological lampoon of dysfunctional domesticity; the gross-out depiction of a rural Americana as seen through the demented eyes of Nana and Pop-Pop recalling the uncomfortable suburban nightmares of Todd Solondz and (occasionally) David Lynch. 2. A mock-documentary fairy story that deconstructs its own conventions through the interaction between characters, further draped in the guise of a Joe Dante style children's survival drama, where serious things are stated without the need to become serious. 3. A semi-autobiographical 'film about filmmaking', in which the director splits his auteurist "id" between his two adolescent characters; the quiet and sensitive Becca, who sees poetry in the landscape and aims to make a film that will heal parental wounds, and the brash and narcissistic Tyler, who only hopes to see his name trending through social media. 5. A film about forgiveness of the "self" and Shyamalan's first masterpiece in (nearly) a decade.

Far from the Madding Crowd [John Schlesinger, 1967]:

Much of what makes the film astounding is not its translation of Hardy's text into cinematic narrative, but the depiction of a rural lifestyle that throbs with a pastoral, primal beauty. Scenes on the farm and the interactions between characters - either eating, drinking or enjoying the simple pleasures of life, the daily grind - anticipates something along the lines of Pasolini and his bucolic trilogy of life; more specifically, his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales (1972). Far greater than any conventional literary melodrama adapted from a similar source, Schlesinger's film becomes a hymn to the splendour of nature, colour and the drama of the changing light.

The Steel Helmet [Samuel Fuller, 1951]:

Few films on the subject of war are so brazen in their condemnation of the futility of conflict and all of its inherent prejudices, while still managing to pay tribute to the heroism of those that take part. Fuller's film might not compete with the spectacle of more recent efforts, like Saving Private Ryan (1998), nor the subversive satirical bite of a masterpiece like the Vietnam-eta Full Metal Jacket (1987), but the depth of its ideas and the sensitivity of its intentions are well beyond the level of contemporary example.

Cover Girl [Charles Vidor, 1944]:

A film about objectification, desire, ambition, regret, jealousy, the thrill of performance; about doing something for the love of it and not just for the fame. On-stage drama spills out behind the scenes; a sense of joie de vivre envelopes both audience and protagonists, finding hope in the hopelessness, beauty in tragedy; traces of Cocteau (as Kelly breaks the mirrored illusion of the surrogate screen to free himself of the "id") and pure romanticism lead to a visual spectacle far greater than anything in today's computer generated blockbusters. If nothing else, Cover Girl illustrates the lost art of "performance" as its own special effect.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story [Peter Greenaway, 2003]:

Every sound and image is presented as a series of layered reflections; depicting the surface (the conventional narrative, which is enthralling throughout) but also the subtext, and a deconstruction of the form. Actual history is interwoven with fact and fiction, fantasy and autobiography, as well as Greenaway's continual obsession with the various ephemera of lists and numerical miscellanea, all adding up to a vast but never alienating compendium of sights, sounds and cinematic textures all working in service of a funny and fascinating tale. The film, even without the benefit of its concluding chapters, Vaux to the Sea (2004) and From Sark to the Finish (2004), is nothing less than a total reinvention of the language of cinema.

Hard to Be a God [Aleksey German, 2013]:

Falling somewhere between the immersive, mystical meditations of filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Tarr and the surreal, allegorical weirdness of Boorman's similarly satirical Zardoz (1974), German's long in production passion project is a film effectively about the nature of existence. More specifically, about the propensity of the species to find new and ever more cruel ways of decimating itself throughout the course history, only to then reassemble itself and repeat the same mistakes. Unsurprisingly, this is a unique, one of a kind film. At once frustrating, disorienting, profound, silly, revolting, even sublime! As director, German denies the audience everything one might find necessary to understanding his drama or identifying with his central characters; forgoing even the most basic of exposition and even allowing important narrative developments occur off-screen. Conventional ratings seem irrelevant here; love it or hate it, this is a truly immersive and original work; once seen, never forgotten.

Walker [Alex Cox, 1987]:

Anchored by a powerful performance from Ed Harris in the title role, director Cox's anarchic and imaginative political commentary on U.S. imperialism in Nicaragua has lost none of its satirical significance or relevance in the era directly following the Iraq war. Much of the film's blending of slow-mo Peckinpah inspired carnage and in-depth social discourse could be seen as precursor to a film like Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), where post-modern lifts from cult genre cinema are used to create a self-reflexive parallel between the past and the present/fiction and reality/etc, but all delivered with a far greater level of intelligence, integrity and scope.

Grizzly Man [Werner Herzog, 2005]:

In the tragic tale of Timothy Treadwell, Herzog finds his archetypical "hero"; a man like Aguirre, Woyzeck or Kaspar Hauser driven mad by the modern world; losing himself a fabled landscape that seems as if disconnected from time; his insanity propelling him on a fated journey towards self-destruction. Herzog's innate respect for Treadwell and his refusal to condemn the man's actions or the course of events ensure that the film works more as a found-footage variant on the filmmaker's usual themes of man's place in the wilderness, survival and the nature of the "outsider" within society (as illustrated in the titles above) and less as conventional documentary intended to educate, critique or surmise. A fascinating and frequently heart-breaking look into the fragility of the human psyche and the mysteries of the natural world.

Pistol Opera [Seijun Suzuki, 2001]:

Suzuki is one of the cinema's preeminent formalists; a filmmaker capable of elevating even the most hackneyed of B-movie narratives to a level of audio-visual art. Here he turns in a psychedelic Rorschach test that could have been described as "modern Godard remaking '60s Godard" (to establish a prevailing if limiting cinematic shorthand), if only for the fact that the film itself is pure Suzuki; in short, a loose remake of the filmmaker's own new wave masterpiece Branded to Kill (1967). However, like late-period Godard, Pistol Opera is a work of genuine modern art; a movie where light, colour, sound, editing, design and composition are as essential to the expression as its baffling and labyrinthine plot.

Unforgiven [Clint Eastwood, 1992]:

The final statement of Eastwood as orator of the American west. His character here is like a cross-section of all his past protagonists, creating a sense of the concluding chapter of a career-long journey, from innocence into the abyss. From Rowdy Yates to "the man with no name", from Josey Wales to the Pale Rider, this is a man who has committed the worst violence and atrocity and found himself transformed by it; a man striving to find peace but gradually being pulled back into the brutality and the blood-shed. At its core, the film is a meditation on violence and revenge; the morality of murder as a cold-blooded act committed by cold-blooded people, regardless of how valiantly one might attempt to justify it as an act of vengeance. The morality of trying to maintain a semblance of "life" in the face of a death, and violence that leaves scars, both physical and mental. A monumental film.

Top Ten: 1992

Ranking the Decades

A Year in Film List + Image Gallery 

Céline [Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1992]:

Chasing Butterflies [Otar Iosseliani, 1992]:

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [David Lynch, 1992]:

Antigone [Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1992]:

Lessons of Darkness [Werner Herzog, 1992]:

Light Sleeper [Paul Schrader, 1992]:

A Sense of History [Mike Leigh, 1992]:

Dream of Light (aka The Quince Tree Sun) [Víctor Erice, 1992]:

Candyman [Bernard Rose, 1992]:

The Crying Game [Neil Jordan, 1992]:

Above, arranged in order of preference, my personal top-ten best films of the year (from what I've seen), accurate at the time of writing.

Key Films #23

Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute [Shôhei Imamura, 1975]:

 

The voice of the director establishes context.  The film we're about to see is a documentary.  The subject matter, the story of Japanese women forced into prostitution during the first half of the twentieth century, is told by the women themselves.  Imamura's camera records the still life of the Malaysian waterfront as the voice of a woman - our guide to this eventual narrative of recollection - introduces herself, and in the process, sets the scene.  The age and deterioration of the voice is mirrored by the dereliction of the boats and houses that we pass by on our voyage.  People stop and wave to the camera, acknowledging the presence of Imamura and his crew, as well as the actuality of the film itself; the authenticity of it.  These images, in contrast with the interviews that follow, are intended to establish the world of the film (as it existed in 1975) against the nostalgic recollections of the women, and how the physical appearance of these places bring back the memory of certain events.  With Imamura as mediator, walking in step with this woman - microphone in hand - the film becomes a journey into the past; into places that are both real and significant to the story of this woman, and to all these women, kidnapped and forced into prostitution, and told that they were "serving" their country, only to be shunned by it following the end of the First World War.

 

Again, Imamura is using his film - his cinema - to give a voice to these people; to intervene on behalf of those on the margins of a society and as such denied the opportunity to make clear their own chain of events.  Like the director's earlier film, the anecdotal History of Post-War Japan As Told by a Bar Hostess (1971), the presentation of this world gives perspective to the recollections of its subject.  It creates personification.  These places - which hold so many kept secrets - are in a sense a reflection of this woman; an extension of her own story (as historical document), as tangible and 'concrete' as the buildings themselves.  In allowing these women to tell their stories, Imamura is shining a light on one facet of Japanese history.  Documenting, through the experiences of the women, the exploitation that the modern Japan - the now thriving, industrious nation that we know today - was built upon.  However, he's also suggesting the importance of these women, as a celebration.  Acknowledging that their ability to deal with the cruel reality of the circumstances they'd been forced to endure may have actually benefited the economy back home; making possible the great success of Japan in that period between the first and the second world wars.  As ever, the compassion and the sensitivity that Imamura shows to these characters in committing their stories to film (without judgement or denigration), is entirely overwhelming.

 

 

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) [Tom Six, 2011]:

 

The film we are watching is already at an end.  A survivor - bound, ass to mouth and mouth to ass, between the bodies of her fellow victims - pleads, wet-eyed and muted, for the sympathy of a viewing audience.  A pool of blood seeps out onto the carpet, like a shadow; a Rorschach test that mocks the need to make sense; to presume the "why?" when some things are beyond reasonable explanation.  Better to rationalise; to put into context.  It's only a movie... and it is.  The closing shot begins.  We're outside the house, looking in at this macabre scene through the shattered glass of the bedroom window.  Already we're being placed, literally, on the outside of the drama, as viewer, or voyeur.  Again, we think of Hitchcock.  The camera begins its slow craning motion, moving upwards, over the slate roof of the house with its innocuous skylight, into the reality of the everyday.  The treetops of the black forest against the grey of the morning sky seems more like an image from a Lav Diaz movie than the kinetic torture of a film like Hostel (2005) or Saw (2004).  We've experienced the real horror - the experiment and it's sickening consequences - but in this small movement of the camera between heaven and earth, we find... transcendence?  A moment, quiet and contemplative.  Then the credits roll.

 

The film we are seeing is The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009).  It unfolds, first as flashback - as a self-contained dramatisation - before switching perspectives.  As the director's credit appears, we move from the scene itself to a recording; the same image as a transmission on a flat screen monitor.  If this original film could be accused of being provocative for the sake of provocation - its grotesque scenario used as a contentious talking point and little else - then what follows is truly remarkable.  Rather than simply rehashing the plot of the first film (as sequels generally do), director Six uses this character - the 'voyeur' - to investigate the impact of his original film, while also making a far more interesting, even intelligent point, on the use of the cinema as a projection of our own fears, anxieties and concerns.  The central character - this strange little man who watches the everyday life of people unfold on security monitors as part of his daily work - has suffered a lifetime of sexual abuse.  His existence is as such without colour and without hope.  He finds in the violence of The Human Centipede not only an outlet for his own pain and frustration, but ultimately a way to feel connected; to be closer to people; to be a part of something even greater than himself.  The final twist makes this connection explicit.  It is after all "just a movie", but Six makes us question the necessity of these movies (and movies in general) and how the idea of voyeurism and projection on the part of the audience (of our own fears 'satiating' the subject matter, bringing it to life) gives the film its "influence."

 

Martin's fantasy - to purge himself of the violence that he's been a victim of since birth - is also his only way of connecting to those around him.  His experiment - his hope of continuing where the fictional madman Dr. Heiter left off - is really an effort to insert himself (literally, if not figuratively) into this living chain of human suffering, and to dominate it.  In doing so, his psychological pain will be matched by the physical pain of his tortured victims; allowing him to become 'one' with it.  Many of these sequences are beyond 'poor taste', as the film refuses to shy away from presenting the most gratuitous and sensationalistic violence.  However, the depth of the character and the intelligence of the way the director uses the influences of meta-fiction to deconstruct the 'need' for these films, is really quite astounding.  For all of its gore and degradation, it's the psychological aspect of the drama that cuts the deepest.  For instance, the use of the baby to suggest the destruction of Martin's innocence - with the cries of the baby heard during scenes of murder to make clear the effect that Martin's abuse has had on his own potential to exist - and how so much of this fantasy seems centred on the idea of destroying the society (or institutions) that made possible such abuse, hints at a deeper, less salacious relevance that works perfectly alongside the film's visual references to works like Repulsion (1965), Eraserhead (1977) and A Snake of June (2002).

 

 

From One Second to the Next [Werner Herzog, 2013]:

 

I'm not sure how much I have to say about this one.  The outline is fairly straightforward.  Herzog and his crew interview several people whose lives have been changed irrevocably as a result of road accidents.  Their accounts are moving and absorbing and often misdirect the viewer; manipulating our emotions, but only to make a point.  These recollections are structured episodically.  In the first story, a mother and her daughter recall fond memories of their respective son and brother, Xavier; the "X-Man."  They talk about him in the past tense - things he liked to do, things he was going to do, etc - which makes the viewer automatically assume that the child is dead.  However, he isn't.  The car that collided with him left the child severely disabled and as such no longer able to do the things that he'd dreamed about or enjoyed.  Herzog has the sister revisit the place where the accident occurred and she stands, completely motionless, as if spellbound - like the stunned characters in the director's earlier Heart of Glass (1976) - as she talks about the terrifying sensation of feeling the hand of her brother slip from her own grasp as the young child crossed the street.  The car came out of nowhere, and in an instant... he was gone.  Through the power of this memory as re-enactment, the audience is experiencing the accident through the emotional recollections of the daughter, making it possible for the viewer to identify and to relate.

 

In the second interview, a young man talks about his accident in vague terms, as if the memory itself has become fragmented and distant, like a terrifying dream.  We assume he's another survivor, recalling a series of specific 'haunting' details from his own accident; his ordeal.  Then it hits us.  His reckless driving killed a family of four.  The structure of the film continues like this, with Herzog developing the details of these stories naturalistically; revealing statistics through conversation and always keeping the emphasis on the stories themselves; these people and their shattered lives.  While it would be easy to demonise those who caused such accidents - turning them into villains or monsters to be hated by the viewer for their recklessness, or lack of attention - Herzog presents their experiences with the same sensitivity and distance as those on the other side of the wheel.  Recognising that these people have also been damaged by their accidents, psychologically if not physically, Herzog seems to be making the broader point that any one of us could kill or be killed; not through malice or spite, but through irresponsibility or a lack of alertness.  The movie plays to the director's strengths as a filmmaker interested in people and in their stories of survival; a theme consistent with films like Echoes from a Sombre Empire (1990), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and Wings of Hope (2000).

One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Five

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Heart of Glass
Directed by Werner Herzog - 1976

Like a dream, the image more powerful than the meaning. This is not to say that Herzog's film is without meaning, just that any potential meaning gleaned from the experience is beyond my elucidation. This is... a reverie? A film where hypnotised figures sleepwalk through a series of ancient landscapes; part of a story (in the sense that there is a narrative at work), but also removed from it, like shadows without form. Heart of Glass is a film - like many by Herzog - where the atmosphere of the place, the faces of people and the feelings evoked by a particular situation, creates the greatest impression. Scenes, moments, images - these are the things that capture the imagination; the things that inspire and provoke.

As a narrative, Heart of Glass is like a fable or a fairy story, though this suggests an innocence not always apparent in Herzog's work. As ethereal and dreamlike as the atmosphere of the setting might be this is still a film that deals primarily with the nature of insanity. Impossible dreams leading, as always, to a state of mass hysteria. This is true of all Herzog's work, where men on the fringes of a society are driven mad by an unfeasible pursuit that makes little sense to a viewing audience until we see it, expressed, on-screen. It is a theme that has dominated Herzog's work for almost half a century, but it finds its most beautiful realisation in this strange and inscrutable film, where the story - a means for allegory or supposition - enchants, enthrals and disturbs.

Hélas pour moi
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard - 1993

The existential conundrum. A lonely artist looks out from across the rocks and decides to paint a picture of a boat on the sea. Once finished, the artist steps back from his work and asks himself, meditatively: "What is missing?" After a short pause the artist realises: "I am missing!" So the artist creates a new picture; one of an artist creating a picture of a boat on the sea. Again, the artist steps back from the canvas, studies it and exclaims: "What is missing?" The artist now takes a new canvas and this time creates a picture of an artist, creating a picture of an artist, creating a picture of a boat on the sea. Stepping back from the finished work the artist looks at it and sighs: "What is missing?"

Godard's film - one of his most beautiful, if not the most beautiful - is on one level a dramatisation of the Greek myth of Alcmene's seduction by Zeus in the form of her lover Amphitryon, which is used, much like The Odyssey in Le mépeis (1963), to form the basis of a film about the disparity that exists between men and women, and the great difficulty faced in maintaining an equal relationship in light of their innate dissimilarities. However, it is also a film about the nature of legend; about the artistic pursuit of "truth"; about the relationship between fiction and reality. These themes and others are explored by Godard through a clever framing device that turns a straightforward narrative about a marriage in crisis into a multilayered detective story, full of a conspiracies, interrogations and loose-ends.

With the character of Abraham Klimt - the writer sent to investigate this story of a woman who claims to have been visited by God in the form of her husband - Godard places himself inside the narrative, as an observer, as someone capable of sorting through the truths or half-truths of the situation to find the reality within. However, the function of this character is also an acknowledgement of the audience and our own role as a collective witness to these proceedings, as we attempt to navigate the director's endless abyss of poetic quotations, references, allusions and associations, where every image, sound, quote or scene offers a new way of interpreting the presentation of events.

Like most of Godard's work, there is a lingering sadness that exists at the heart of the film. A sadness that informs the relationship between characters - this husband and wife, no longer able to make sense of one another; falling out of love but still struggling to find something worth clinging to in the chaos of existence - and which finds its expression in the current English translation of the title, Oh Woe is Me. One could argue that a more fitting translation might've been the idiom It's All Greek to Me, suggesting the film's foundation in classical Greek myth, but also its often confusing and elliptical structure; where the conflict between different forms - myth and reality, man and woman, sound and image - is used to abstract a more conventional story of human frailty and belief.

Humanité
Directed by Bruno Dumont - 1999

The two concurrent images that introduce Dumont's film present different but equally disarming challenges for the viewer. The first image, a close-up shot of a murdered child - the violent rend of the wound registering on-screen for just a moment before we eventually realise what it is that we're being forced to see - creates a natural sense of revulsion. The second image, a long-shot panorama of the verdant countryside - where the small silhouette of a character dots a frantic line across the screen - contrasts this revulsion with a more conventional appeal to suspense.

In its construction, this opening sequence seems designed to illicit a feeling of great conflict in the viewer's emotional and intellectual response to the work. On the one hand, the nature of the shots provoke the audience to look away, to avoid the horror being presented. At the same time, we're being invited to lean in, to study the frame and to take a more active role in understanding the intentions of the director and the machinations of his plot. This strange and unsettling narrative, where - on the surface - a village idiot assumes the role of a reincarnated Christ in an effort to carry the burden of humanity's suffering, but where - beneath the surface - there is something more academic at work.

Similar contrasts are apparent in every facet of Dumont's direction of the film, where the disparity between the content and the form creates a necessary feeling of divergence. In his approach, Dumont takes what is conventionally a very accessible and exhilarating genre (the police procedural) and observes it from a distance; avoiding the usual clichés that we've come to expect from films like The French Connection (1971), Vengeance is Mine (1979) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and instead, turns the investigation into a contemplative study, not of the crime itself, but of the reactions to it, the things that surround it.

The Hunters
Directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos - 1977

In one of the film's most haunting sequences, a procession of small boats drift slowly across the waters of a still, winter lake. These vessels - like apparitions conjured, literally from the past - are vestiges of a long-forgotten world; a world of promises and idealism, amendments and revolution. As the boats pass, the red of the sails suggests the political, but also the violence that these characters - spectators to the scene - have profiteered from. A mute reminder that each of them, no matter how successful or seemingly comfortable "in their place", has blood on their hands.

The characters belong to the film's present but are nonetheless needed to bear witness to this spectacle that is pulled from the memory, like so many scenes from the film. As ever with Angelopoulos, the characters coast through these memories as a rolling tableau, where the interaction between past and present is triggered by the great metaphor that rests at the heart of the film; the literal image of the once-buried past, unearthed and revaluated, here to speak out against the injustices of time in a metaphorical court, one that in some respects brings to mind the absurd and subversive satires of Godard or Buñuel.

The 'living theatre' approach that Angelopoulos perfected in his previous film The Travelling Players (1975) - where the camera records complicated sequences in single, fluid motions that block and reveal information as the scene unfolds - finds its most startling expression in this claustrophobic lampoon, where the filmmaker examines the implicit guilt of his own generation and the state of his country in a broadly allegorical sense. The style throughout is hypnotic; the slow movement of the camera as it follows, circles and tracks each character, seems to ensnare them, physically and metaphorically, in a web of their own deceit.

If....
Directed by Lindsay Anderson - 1968

A class war. A conflict between the continual divide - the "haves" and the "have-nots" - but also in the sense of the classroom as a battleground; a place for revolution. The school, as a symbol, is an obvious microcosm of late 1960s Britain or a metaphor for the social structure of a country at a time when the once recognisable divisions between "upper", "middle" and "lower" were slowly beginning to erode. It represents all the false notions of order, privilege, entitlement, stoicism and respectability that had supposedly defined the country - "the empire" - for the past hundred years, which becomes, in the eyes of the central characters (and to the filmmakers themselves), an institution that ultimately destroys the capacity for free-thinking and free-expression.

The school with its supercilious teachers, its prefects and its bullies creates order out of forced consensus and intimidation. The central characters are an extension of a persecuted underclass of young people, whose only real act of rebellion is in striving to live life and to experience what it is to be young; to make mistakes and to learn. There is no worth in having the experience of life dictated by those too afraid to embrace it. These schools - the system, the conformity factories of the status quo - attempt to quash this spirit of youth, and in doing so, quash the idealism, the innocence and the passion, which leads men and women to embrace new ideas and new ways of living.

Anderson's later masterpiece O' Lucky Man! (1973) may have labelled revolution as "the opium of the intellectuals" but If.... is no less a film about revolution, about the need for change. In its construction, the film embodies a revolutionary spirit that is conveyed through the dazzling filmmaking approach. The allusions to Jean Vigo and his masterful short Zero for Conduct (1933) infuse the film with an air of poetic-realism; where the recognisable "kitchen-sink realism" that was popular in British cinema throughout the 1960s is continually contrasted against moments of broad surrealism; like the cuts, from black and white to colour, the old replaced by the new. The images, as ever, intoxicating; disarming, possessing a life and vitality that is revolutionary in its own presentation, in the expression of its ideas and ideals.

The Illusionist
Directed by Sylvain Chomet - 2010

The card at the end says "magicians don't exist." But what is cinema if not a magic act; an attempt to conjure great spectacle and with it genuine emotion? Chomet's film - an effort to bring to life through animation an unrealised script by the immortal Jacques Tati - is a poignant work about the passing of time - from childhood to old age, from innocence to cynicism - and a reminder that every artist, no matter how passionate or committed to the craft, will one day suffer a defeat at the hands of an indifferent culture, which crushes the spirit no matter how pure the original intention might have been.

Though Chomet will never admit it, the scenes of furtive bonding between his central characters - this lanky avatar for Tati and the young travelling companion who follows him on a journey through the cabarets and nightclubs of a dying world - gestures towards an on-screen representation of the longed-for relationship between the real Jacques Tati and his eldest daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who the filmmaker had abandoned at birth.

The tragedy of this relationship haunts the film, giving it a genuine sorrow that cuts through the slapstick and the caricature that we might expect from the author of The Triplets of Belleville (2003), turning that final declaration into a bittersweet lament for the role of the illusionist, this showman, in a world of harsh reality, obligation and responsibility. Although often amusing, the subtle sadness that exists at the edges of the film is entirely overwhelming. By the end of it, I felt crushed, my heart broken. With no alternative, I went outside into the garden, and cried a solitary tear.

I'm the Angel of Death: Pusher III
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn - 2005

The influence of Alan Clarke is palpable. The handheld camera that follows closely behind these characters - placing the audience shoulder to shoulder, as part of the action - recalls the stylistic approach of Clarke's greatest films, Made in Britain (1982), Christine (1987), The Road (1987) and the still highly influential short-feature, Elephant (1988). This method, which on one level could be described as "documentary-like" - where the closeness of the camera and the objectivity of it turns the scene into a matter-of-fact observation, sans (obvious) stylisation - is at the same time a means a placing the audience within the same subjective mindset of its central character.

In each of the three films of Refn's trilogy there is a descent into hell. Although each film is to some extent open-ended - closing on a suspended sense of its protagonist destroyed, morally, emotionally and physically, by a life of criminality - there is still a feeling of the inevitable; of characters cut-off from society, hunted and despised, alone to face the threat of a violent retribution that their actions have brought upon them. In this sense, the three films could be seen as loosely representative of the legend of Faust; where a deal with the devil is suggested by the promise of a great reward. What makes Pusher III the most remarkable translation of this theme is in its focus on the character of Milo, the Serbian drug lord who cast a sinister shadow over the first two instalments, now reduced to a stumbling victim as he suffers his fall from grace over the course of a punishing 24 hours.

After the post-Tarantino high jinks of the original Pusher (1996) and the 'Loachian' character study of the almost equally great With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II (2004), it makes sense that the final instalment should descend into a full-on horror movie; again, reinforcing that idea of a literal plunge into hell. The themes carried throughout the trilogy are perfectly brought together in the closing scene, with Milo staring at the empty swimming pool, his gesture encapsulating the sense of futility that the lifestyle represents. The power of these films is therefore in their ability to trap the audience in the experiences of their main protagonist; placing us - as the spectator - on the inside of the narrative, sharing the sense of fear, sadness and paranoia.

In a Lonely Place
Directed by Nicholas Ray - 1950

Implications of the title - my favourite of any film ever made - suggests the general tenor of the thing; the feeling of it. It's the kind of title that reads like an expression; something the characters might say, like an admission of defeat, or resignation. A title that describes in poetic terms the mood of the central character - this writer, boozing and brawling his way across a late night Hollywood chimera that dazzles and disgusts in equal measure - but also suggests a darkness that exists at the very core of the film, or at the root of each character.

Bogart's protagonist finds himself 'in a lonely place' - emotionally and psychologically - but no lonelier than the poor murdered girl whose death throws these characters together, and eventually tears them apart. Her lonely place is a physical one; her body dumped at the bottom of a ravine. The murder, like the title, colours the way we perceive the film - its conflicts and interactions - exaggerating the phantom-like feeling of characters in love but incapable of expressing such love; their jealousies and dark desires getting in the way of it, distorting it, transforming it, making ugly something that could have been pure.

The character later laments, "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." The expression, beautiful as it is, describes the feeling of intense longing that permeates every scene of the film. An emptiness - psychological more than physical; a familiar feeling that seems to circle the characters of these shadowy Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s and 50s - which turns every interaction into something near-fatal, or perhaps fraught with the anticipation of darkness and betrayal.

Irma Vep
Directed by Olivier Assayas - 1996

It's impossible for me not to view the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud as a loose facsimile of the eternal Jean-Luc Godard. The similarities are few but significant. A once famous filmmaker - relic of the French 'new wave' - now seen as worthless, washed-up; "a mad man." The supporting characters all think he's finished, critically and commercially; that his ideas no longer make sense; that his approach is obsessive and unprofessional. But when these characters finally see the rushes of his latest film - a vague remake of Louis Feuillade's famous silent serial Les Vampires (1915-1916) - its experiments with sound and image, the passion of it and also the fury, are far beyond the reach of mere mortals. His is a cinema, not defined by the business or the culture - or any of the external forces that we've previously witnessed in the background of the film - but as a direct expression; as a personal art.

Of course Godard is just a convenient projection (it could just as easily be Garrel), but Assayas' film is nonetheless about the process of filmmaking at a time when one "wave" was slowly receding, when the recognisable structure of French cinema was changing, and when the stereotypical image of what a "French film" actually looked like was gradually being replaced. The markedly more mainstream sensibilities of directors like Luc Besson, Mathieu Kassovitz, Pierre Salvadori and Jean-Pierre Jeunet was becoming a substitute for the 'auteur cinema' of the previous generations. The culture - looking to Hollywood, to narrative, to box-office - was rejecting the films that came before in favour of a new kind of slick, accessible, commercial product; the type of which still dominates the multiplexes today.

It is a film about filmmaking. That much is evident. But Assayas' film goes beyond the usual 'director in crisis' farce or backdrop to significant character study approach that we've seen a million times before in films like 8½ (1963) or La Nuit Américaine (1973) to deal with the entire process of filmmaking; from celebrity, to ego, to the interpersonal "communal" aspect of the production, to the way films are eventually received, critically and commercially. However, what makes Irma Vep significant to me is in the way Assayas uses the template of Feuillade's famous work and the symbol of its enigmatic anti-heroine (as portrayed by Musidora) to riff on the heritage of his national cinema, but also to comment on the way cinema, in its development, is effectively about theft.

The film is titled Irma Vep, like the great thief, presented here as Maggie Cheung playing Maggie Cheung playing Irma Vep; stalking the hotel in her rubber outfit, walking the rooftops in the rain; a phantom lady over Paris. Cinema is, in a way, like the character; sleek, beautiful, enigmatic. The theft is elaborately choreographed (needlessly) to the point that we, as viewers, become so distracted by the spectacle of it that we're oblivious to any theft taking place. In this sense, the film acknowledges that all films are indebted to the history of cinema, to the influence and the lineage of everything that came before, but that originality can be still be achieved by filtering these influences through the personal interests, passions and obsessions of a director and their crew.

I Was Born, But...
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu - 1932

I Was Born, But... but what? The English-language title reads like an anecdotal aside, and in many ways that's exactly what the film is; a great yarn, a tale told with the same exuberance and wit that is explicit in the interactions of the central characters; these kids, struggling to make sense of how the adult world, with its responsibilities and its expectations, actually works. I've already referred to it (in passing) as one of the great coming-of-age stories, but as with all the Ozu directed films that I've seen so far, I Was Born, But... is not simply a film about these children, but about the entire social and domestic milieu; a film where the sense of place, the location - the present, now past - is tangible throughout.

Often with Ozu we get the sense of poetry, the pathos, some humour to diffuse the lingering traces of sentimentality; but we also get a sense of life being lived. There is a compassion for these characters, which makes what could've been a fairly innocent narrative dilemma resonate with the same physical and emotional urgency as something perched on the precipice between life and death. Ozu's film is as funny and as charming as we might expect from the period, but is also, at its best, an observational study on life and the way we choose to live it.