De Palma: Passion (2012)

Over the past decade, Brian de Palma has been moving steadily away from films designed to be watched in theatres, a tendency that culminates with Passion, his most recent effort. In many ways, it’s a film designed to be viewed on a SmartPhone, rather than viewed at a cinema, not least because it’s about a pair of marketing executives, played by Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, who spend most of the film ruthlessly competing on a campaign for the latest version of the SmartPhone, known as the OmniPhone. As with so many of de Palma’s earlier films, it’s alive with Hitchcock references and tropes, but it also feels like a bit of a break from his earlier homages – rather than a self-conscious exercise in style, it often plays more like a realist depiction of a world that just happens to have become Hitchcockian in every way. In particular, Hitchcock’s tendency to splinter relationships into complex geometrical configurations of bodies and gazes works quite naturally with the networking that underpins McAdams and Rapace’s competition – there’s no real character development in the film, just a kind of continual mirroring and replication, while every connection or disconnection between the two feels equally inauspicious, part of a healthy network. Insofar as de Palma pioneered neonoir by rediscovering Hitchcock as a noir director, it also feels as if some definite break has been made with his noir lineage - it’s a study in OmniNoir rather than neonoir, often feeling like a mere advertisement for a Noir App that automatically changes every scene into a mise-en-scene. And there’s something automated about the film generally – there’s no sense that de Palma’s camera is distinct from any of the recording devices that it depicts, no sense that it is privileged in any way. Given that most of his directorial signatures – especially tracking-shots and split screens – depended precisely on that distinction, that makes for quite a self-effacing film, culminating with a film-within-the-film that’s more like a film-that-replaces-the-film, since it’s not merely screened but shot within the film, in a kind of test run for the OmniPhone. Still, perhaps that’s what it takes to make a film designed to be shown on a recording device, a film that’s less a matter of production or consumption than produsage, reconstituted each time it is viewed.

Steiner & Van Dyke: The City (1939)

Exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair as part of “Tomorrow’s City,” The City is a suburban symphony film – a blueprint and manifesto for a new decentred form of urban living. Scored by Aaron Copland, it plays as four more or less discrete films, or movements – a nostalgic vision of small-town American life, a depiction of the industrial slums of Pittsburgh, an evocation of the modern American city and, finally, a proposal for a new kind of Garden City. All four sections are spectacular – the first is a classic slice of bucolic Americana, the second is a study of industrial smoke and steam that draws on Steiner’s textural mastery in H20, while the third is an extraordinarily vivid evocation of the gestural tics and nuances of the urban crowd, surely one of the greatest depictions of the rhythmic metropolis ever committed to film. However, the fourth section is perhaps the most astonishing, just because of how it positions suburbia as the end-point of the American technological sublime – after a montage sequence featuring skyscrapers, military jets and the Hoover Dam, we’re presented with a suburban polis “as moulded to our human wants as planes are shaped for speed.” As the “motor parkways that weave together city and countryside,” the highways play a key role in this vision – they’re portals to a new plane of existence, more or less interchangeable with all the greenbelts and green spaces that they leave in their wake. In fact, at the peak of its highway pastoral, it feels as if the film is a paean to the possibilities and poetry of greenbelts without highways, suburbs without cities – it is actually shot in the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland – or as if the highways were rivers of rejuvenation, rendering all labor in their vicinity agricultural, agrarian, almost feudal. Cosmic in its scope, and breathless with technological speculation, it's a spectacular advertisement for suburbia as a launching-pad to the universe, and a clear forerunner to the sci-fi suburbs of the 1950s. 

Frankenheimer: Ronin (1998)

Ronin was John Frankenheimer’s last great car chase vehicle and it’s one of his most spectacular. Set across a brittle, metallic Europe that’s still dominated by the palette if not the politics of the Cold War, it uses a cursory heist narrative as the pretext for a series of spectacular chases and set pieces, some of which take place on the French Riviera, and some of which take place in Paris. By this point in his career, Frankenheimer had perfected the car chase as a kind of city symphony, especially in claustrophobic or cramped streets – beyond a certain speed, his films let you glimpse an entire city, with a mindful, almost meditative awareness of how small moments and minutiae formed part of the big picture. All Frankenheimer needed to do as an auteur was to maintain that speed, stay at that informational horizon, supersede each new evolution in surveillance - and, in Ronin, it’s clear that that involves outwitting emergent mobile phone technology. Not only are there phones in every scene, but Frankenheimer’s camera continually aspires to the perspective of a roaming mobile signal – moving ethereally over town and mountain, the subliminal undulations of his Steadicam triangulate and incorporeate a bewildering number of points of view into every take. That makes every space feel as labyrinthine as a nascent car chase, especially in the spectacular showdown, set against the Paris of La Defense – an endless devolution of highways and tunnels, with the Seine shot as just another industrial corridor. Admittedly, it’s a vision that frosts over charisma, character, regional difference – as Frankenheimer’s camera glides across his frozen surfaces, you almost forget that this cast includes Robert de Niro, Jean Reno, Natasha McElhone and Stellan Skarsgard, among others. Almost, but not quite, since these characters are more like spies cast adrift from the end of the Cold War, rather than, say, the neoliberal mercenaries of Heat, whom the film occasionally recalls – they burn with a soulful displacement that has to believe that order, structure and security still exist out there somewhere, even if they’re entirely evacuated from Frankenheimer’s meticulous mise-en-scenes.

Anderson: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Ever since The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s films have progressed architecturally as much as cinematically – there haven’t been any great changes or developments in his directorial style, just micro-refinements and micro-adjustments, in response to each new space or structure that he encounters. That has made for a peculiarly timeless filmography, full of spaces that seem to hold time in abeyance, or at least keep it poised, precariously, at their cusps and thresholds. On the one hand, The Grand Budapest Hotel takes that to its logical conclusion – endowed with no less than four narrators, all the burden of storytelling is lifted from Anderson’s tableaux, which are now devoted entirely to spatial elaboration and fixation. None of his previous films feel so collapsed into their sets, or demand as much awe for their sets as sets – even the actual locations feel crafted, monuments to the film’s auteurist ambition. At the same time, though, something new starts to break through – it is as if an elastic band had been stretched to its extremity, and was just starting to feel the first, distant signs of relaxation, as Anderson’s most minute, obsessive mise-en-scenes to date are somehow combined with moments of real obscenity and atrocity, too anarchic to be contained by the architecture that seems to coax them into existence. Narratively, that makes for the first Anderson film in which space starts to feel genuinely threatened by time, by history – set in Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II, it’s about a concierge, played by Ralph Fiennes, who tries to keep his Indian pageboy, played by Tony Revolori, out of a Nazi prison. And if space without time is Anderson’s particular formula for white privilege, then that makes it feel a bit like he’s deracinating himself, or trying to escape his own style – it’s a prison escape film in every sense - perhaps explaining why his tracking-shots are so prominent and propulsive, or why his stilted, porcelain dialogue trembles with such vernacular restlessness. At those moments, it seems to promise a return to the Anderson of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore – that or a movement away from film altogether, perhaps towards architecture, cake decoration or dollhouse design, since it’s impossible to think of a more exquisitely plastic or confected cinema than what’s perfected here.

Jarmusch: Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

No contemporary director is quite so alive to the language of hip as Jim Jarmusch – he always seems to catch the right pose, the right inflection, at its most fleeting and effervescent. In recent years that has tended to make his films play as a catalogue of postures, a canon of cool, more interested in perfecting and refining a certain stylised ennui than in traditional narrative or character development. In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive culminates that trend – it is about a pair of aesthetes, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, who have read everything, seen everything and experienced everything that the Western Canon has to offer. The twist is that they are also vampires, meaning that Jarmusch can heighten their aesthetic exhaustion to a supernatural pitch – for them, being undead is mainly a matter of having nothing left to read, watch or experience; their aesthetic life has become purely gestural. In that sense, the film feels a bit like an anatomy of hipsterism, especially hipsterism’s hostility to novelty, its perpetual reminder that anything that seems new is already old, if only by a couple of moments. It also pinpoints the recent return to ambience in popular music as a kind of reflexive impotence in the face of that hostility – Hiddleston’s character has perfected a very particular anonymous drone rock that drifts in and out of the film, percolating its conversational loops and rhythms while overlaying everything with soft sombient feedback. And while there are certainly narrative interludes – most notably Hiddleston and Swinton’s anarchic niece, played by Mia Wasikowska, coming to stay – it is very much a study in conversational drone, with Jarmusch’s compositions reined in as never before, and his colour stock more or less reduced to the monochromatic palette of his earlier works, since it’s rare among recent vampire films in being exclusively shot at night. Even at its lushest moments, a black-and-white world undercuts everything – commuting between Detroit and Tangiers, the vampires prey on Jarmusch’s mise-en-scenes, absorbing or discarding everything that doesn’t conform to their pallid whiteness, until it’s like watching a film shot from the perspective of the Canon itself: a circulation, or conversation, in which there is no real permutation, just endless predation.