Bahr, Coppola & Hickenlooper: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)

Such is the sublimity of Apocalypse Now that it’s almost unbelievable it was ever made. Like Kurtz, it’s a grand idea of a film, a concept that would seem to defy any execution. It’s a tribute to Hearts of Darkness, then, that it makes Coppola's labour of love seem even more unbelievable, improbable and singular. Edited from footage and interviews that Eleanor Coppola gathered during the filming process – sometimes without Francis’ knowledge – it takes you through one unfathomable complication, crisis after another, as well as a series of out-takes that rival anything that the film has to offer (including the French Plantation sequence which, at this point in time, had never been edited into a theatrical release). Part of what makes it so engaging is that Eleanor started shooting from the earliest casting sessions – it’s clear that everyone was prescient that this was going to be a massive project, and that Francis himself wanted some record in case it never reached completion. At the same time, that also allows you to witness how often the scale of the project exceeded everyone’s expectations, quickly ballooning to a point where Francis could quite comfortably describe it as “the first film that would win a Nobel prize.” In Eleanor’s eyes, at least, it’s clear that Francis simply became Kurtz,  immersing himself in the agon of his artistry in a completely unprecedented way, at least for a director. Interestingly, the film opens with an excerpt from Orson Welles’ radio play of Heart of Darkness, which recurs at key points throughout the film, reminding us that Conrad’s novel was originally going to be Welles’ first film, before he settled for making Citizen Kane instead. The implication is clear - too ambitious even for Welles, Apocalypse Now is the film Kane wanted to be. That might sound hyperbolic, but the film gathers you up into its momentum, not least because of how passionately both Coppolas believe in film as a visionary medium, meaning it's also a film about American Zoetrope, the Coppolas’ production company. By the end, you feel as if the convocation of “artists, musicians, filmmakers and directors” that they dreamed of has really come to pass, if only on this one occasion – and that makes Hearts Of Darkness as exhilarating and intoxicating a companion piece to Apocalypse Now as The Godfather Part II was to The Godfather, suffused with “a kind of powerful exhilaration in the face of losing everything…like the experience of war.”

Morris: Vernon, Florida (1981)

Vernon, Florida started life as Nub City, a documentary about a collection of Vernon residents who amputated themselves to collect insurance money throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, after reputedly receiving death threats from some of the subjects, Errol Morris opted for a more general portrait of the town, making for one of the most restrained, refined films of his career. For the most part, it consists of long, lyrical tone poems to Vernon and its environs, interpersed with quiet, contemplative monologues that perhaps feel more cryptic than they really are, just because the film presumes so little about how we should approach them, scruplously refraining from what one local preacher describes as “therefore experiences.” Even at this early stage in his career, it’s clear that Morris is able to utterly relax his subjects, engaging them in the most casual, candid way, until it’s feels like they’re talking to themselves, or thinking aloud, rather than addressing him or the camera. That allows them to retreat into their most mystical and apocalyptic mindsets, until it feels as if everyone in the town is preaching, testifying  or bearing witness to an interminable waiting that soaks into the pores and pauses of Morris’ montage sequences, making the film feel much longer than it actually is. Everything visionary about the American vernacular is distilled here, spoken in tongues touched with a strange grace, voices that are not their own. Morris may have gone to Vernon in search of eccentricity, but Vernon, Florida is too esoteric to be eccentric – it exceeds it, touching the very tip of what a documentary can do.

Herzog: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

Based loosely on the Mark Yavorsky case, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done stars Michael Shannon as Brad McCallum, a sensitive, introspective actor who barricades himself in his San Diego house after murdering his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with an antique saber. Most of the film takes place in flashback, as Detective Hank Havenhurst (Willem Defoe) questions Brad’s girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) and acting teacher (Udo Kier) on the street outside. However, the flashbacks just make things more complicated, since it’s clear right away that they constitute something like Herzog’s tribute to David Lynch, who produced the film. Not only are they suffused with Lynchian iconography, but they take the sinuous dream-sequences of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive and stretch them at either end, until they’re more loftily visionary and freakishly kitsch than even Lynch tends to craft them. As they distend, they open up great glissandoes of space, until it feels as if all movement is relative, and all objects are provisional, placeholders for something that exceeds them, most spectacularly in a sequence that takes place in the Westin San Diego, casting us adrift amongst an utterly frictionless world of fountains, elevators, exercise bikes and open-plan restaurants. With nothing truly stationary, nothing feels resistant either – everything proceeds with the indefinite momentum you find in a vacuum - until it’s only by killing his mother that Brad can hope to find a still point, a fleeting moment of resistance. But it’s vanished before the film has even begun, before the crime is even committed, sending him back  to the same sombient resignation that opens and presides over every flashback, the strange apathy you feel when you know that you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up. And, like a dream, the film anonymises you, just as the San Diego sprawl adds a touch of dreamlike anonymity to every encounter, gradually divesting every object of everything except its closeness to other objects, smothering every scene in a sea of liquid surfaces. 

McDonagh: Calvary (2014)

Calvary is the second collaboration between John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, following The Guard. This time around, Gleeson plays a priest, Father James Lavelle, who’s told in confession that he has seven days to live. The film plays out over that week, as we’re introduced to a succession of characters in Lavelle’s remote Irish parish, all of whom feel like they could be the confessor. Like The Guard, there’s an odd, unsettling fusion of comedy and high drama, but it’s slightly more refined here – for the most part, it feels as if a certain terse, bluff levity is part and parcel of this community’s idiolect, a resilience mechanism that the film simply happens to capture and document without ever becoming a comedy in itself. More than that, it protects the film from its own incipient nihilism, since, with the exception of his daughter, who comes to stay for the week, most of the characters Lavelle encounters are bruised, battered or corrupted beyond all redemption or recognition – especially those played by comic actors, with Chris O’Dowd and Dylan Moran putting in especially chilling performances. It’s no surprise, then, that Lavelle holds forgiveness as the greatest virtue, but what is perhaps surprising is how magnificently the film’s terseness forgives its characters, painting them in broad, Catholic brushstrokes that balloon them out into promontories buffeted by broad Celtic beaches, bathed in the same clean light as the earliest British missionaries, only to contract them again into dim, sheltered echo chambers that make every conversation feel like a confession, even or especially when they’re not aware that they’re making it. Perhaps that’s why Lavelle often feels more like a missionary than a priest, an envoy from the Catholic Church back into its most sinful, shrouded recesses - in his hands, the film distills into a sustained act of penitence, an expiatory edifice illuminated from within, with all the gestural economy and luminosity of a passion play. It ends, as it must, with devastating humility, but that also makes it feel as if it doesn’t really end, or as if the ending is no more important than the process of watching it. Like the conclusion to The Guard, it casts you back upon the main body of the film, asking you to relive it, even imitate it, in something close to a cinematic devotional manual, designed to render Calvary lyrically and languorusly available to a lay audience.

De Palma: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

One of the strangest films of Brian De Palma’s career, Phantom of the Paradise is a loose adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, transplanting the rise of Glam Rock for the rise of Grand Opera. In this case, the Phantom starts out as Winslow Leach (William Finley), a struggling songwriter who sells a song cycle to Swan (Paul Williams), the mysterious owner of the Paradise, a baroque nightclub. After Swan reworks it as a Glam Rock musical and has Finley disfigured, the songwriter starts to haunt the cast and crew of his desecrated masterpiece as they prepare for opening night. As that might suggest, most of the film takes place in and around the Paradise, which is as much of a character as the Paris Opera was in the original story. Yet Leroux’s catacombs feel positively lucid in comparison with De Palma’s Paradise, which presents an extraordinary, shifting array of textures and surfaces. More an optical illusion than a sustained space, it’s ostensibly a series of nested microcosms that start with the traditional baroque corridors and foyers, and progress to the high-tech recording studios that form the nerve centre of the building. Yet De Palma’s camera is so hyperactive and vortical that this hierarchy of spaces never quite comes together, never quite feels linear. The closer we get to the centre of the building, the more cluttered with cameras and other electronic platforms it becomes, until it's more like participating in a happening than watching a film from a comfortable or critical distance. That sense of media saturation is perfectly suited to the polymorphous perspectives of Swan’s Glam phantasmagoria, which is nothing if not an accumulation of surfaces upon surfaces, a multi-platform, cannibalistic concatenation of pleasures that depend, for their effect, on never quite feeling commensurable with each other. And, by the end, Glam has become voracious enough to simply incorporate all the Phantom’s efforts to thwart it, until it’s a bit like an alternative version of Carrie in which the final bloodbath merely intensifies everyone’s prom-night high. A rock musical for the cusp of a synthesized age, and a last gasp of Gothic on the eve of Goth, it puts everything out there and never once looks back, hurtling Glamwards with apocalyptic abandon.