Anderson: The Master (2012)

Like There Will Be Blood, The Master is a period piece about the decline and implosion of a magnetic, visionary, larger-than-life personality. In this case, it’s Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), leader of a post-WWII cult known as “The Cause,” who forms a volatile and ambiguous friendship with Freddie Quell (Joaquim Phoenix), a drifting, dissolute veteran. Poised somewhere between Scientology and the proliferation of post-war self-help movements, The Cause revolves around an unusual kind of reincarnation, whereby Lancaster entrances his acolytes into apprehending the textural traces of the past upon their immediate surroundings. Although there’s certainly a hypnotic element at play, Lancaster prefers to describe it as dehypnosis, an awakening – for him, the residues of the past are always here in the present, it’s just a matter of allowing them to become alive to us, and allowing ourselves to become alive to them. And Anderson follows suit, crafting a period drama that doesn’t quite attempt to recreate the past so much as to mesmerise it out of the present, shrouding our nostalgic preconceptions in the same blue-green murk as Lancaster’s sessions, only to puncture them with moments of sparkling lucidity. In other words, it’s a period drama about a figure who’s prescient that he will always be present, if only through the objects he leaves behind, the tiniest traces he’s committed to the world, folded back into the shadowy string of East Coast houses where his dehypnoses and domestic archaeologies occur. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel like there are really any private or public spaces in the film – every space is cast adrift from the normal balance of present and past, too present to feel private and too past to feel public, fixing the characters in the paradoxical poses of photographic portraiture, especially Freddie, who continually clenches the left side of his face, as if suffering a sustended stroke, or bracing himself against an imminent stroke. Apparently, Anderson was inspired by the fact that post-war periods often give rise to spiritual movements, but they’re also when people try and recalibrate the present – and few films return you as strangely to the present as this one; you emerge, dehypnotised, to a world that’s familiar, yet also has  “another feel to it that is so basic…colour with unfamiliar tones, a strange touch to the air.” Coming out of a film rarely collapses you back into it as completely as it does here, part of the paradox of a period drama that addresses every period as the present, and every present as its own: “Are you here with me, now, in 1950?”

Nichols: Catch-22 (1970)

For all that it revels in visual conundra, Catch-22 is a remarkably difficult novel to adapt to the screen - it’s so driven by paradoxes, circularities and conversational dead-ends that it’s hard to see how it could ever be appropriated as dialogue. Thankfully Nichols’ adaptation doesn’t even aim for dialogue, opting instead for a series of cacaphonies intermittently drowned out by aircraft noise. Virtually the whole film feels shouted, ejaculated more than delivered; poised at a weird hysterical pitch between terror and ecstasy, it’s locked in a perpetual nosedive that makes Dr. Strangelove feel positively placid by comparison. Like the novel, all that frenzy revolves around Yossarian (Alan Arkin, in the role he was born to play), a fighter pilot stationed on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean, during the later part of WWII. Like the novel, too, Yossarian’s more or less displaced by a vast bureaucratic machinery, deflected into a host of cacaphonous voices who seem to have somehow turned reduced language to its exchange-value – in this world, it doesn’t much matter what you say, just that you say something, exchange language in some way. As with some of the Zucker comedies, then, there’s not much distinction between names and things, making for a vast bureaucratic nightmare wherein naming something totally changes its meaning, or even its existence. Perhaps that’s why the film tends to foreground Milo (Jon Voigt), the barracks businessman, who barters supplies, parachutes and, finally, the base itself to maintain a steady exchange of goods with the German economy. And it’s that sense of an exchange that defies belief or even perception – an exchange of perception -  that foreshadows Michael Bay’s take on the American military-industrial complex some twenty years later, as Nichols sketches out a new and totally disorienting kind of no-man’s-land, collapsing the extreme foreground and background into a new kind of space, buoyed by a galactic updraft that makes the whole film feel shot in the air. Veering quite vertiginously between satire and superspectacle – there are some breathtaking aerial sequences – it’s quite true, then, to the galactically dystopian scale of Heller’s vision. True, too, to its melancholy, as Yossarian spends the last part of the film wandering through  a dark, dank dreamzone, not so much a surreal descendent of neorealism as an American experiencing the tableaux that would eventually inspire neorealism. Quiet as a mess hall that’s just been annihilated, sombre as the first two acts are cacaphonous, it’s bears witness to the profound, terrifying silence that lurks just beneath the surface of Heller’s manic verbosity, completing the novel as much as complementing it.

Dwan: Slightly Scarlet (1956)

Although the twin innovations of Technicolor and widescreen more or less spelled the end of noir in the 1950s, there were a few last gasps that were more lurid, brutal and desperate than anything that had come before. Strictly Scarlet belongs to that moment – an extravagant fusion of suburban melodrama and noir, it’s fixated with the exact porosity between the inner city and the suburbs, as well as the exact immunity of the suburbs from the inner city, which it examines by way of the relationship between two sisters, played by Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming, who get caught up with a private investigator, played by John Payne, while he’s working for the upper political-criminal echelons of San Francisco. From the very beginning, Dwan sets out to visualise whatever unimaginable Valley of Ashes might connect these parallel universes of endless, darkened rooms and lavish picture windows, passing over the highways – or internalising them – to craft tableaux that blend suburban and noir cues in bewildering, spectacular ways. Of course, that’s somewhat implicit in the very premise of a Technicolor, widescreen noir – it’s quite a violent thing to see Technicolor so shrouded in darkness, just as it’s somewhat shocking to see red seep out of black-and-white tableaux, to witness film noir bleed into film rouge. But Dwan heightens it to a hallucinatory pitch, converging suburban agoraphobia and noir claustrophobia on plushly carpeted and upholstered interiors that feel too wide and too constricted all at once, cavernously stifling as a diseased lung. Where classical noir made you feel like you were trapped in a canted or occluded camera, this new disorientation is more like being trapped inside a single dolly zoom – it brims with an entirely new, synthetic distortion of space, standing in relation to the old noir much like the new anamorphic lens stood to the old spherical lens. Less a forerunner, then, of Vertigo than of Brian de Palma’s various rediscoveries of Vertigo, it’s like watching late noir glimpse neo-noir, and the American metropolis glimpse its devolution into endless urban sprawl.

Bartel: Eating Raoul (1982)

One of the great cult comedies of the 80s, this delicious, delirious comedy revolves around a couple – Paul and Mary Bland (played by writer/director Paul Bartel and Warhol regular Mary Woronov) – who come up with a quite original way for disposing of the tiresome swingers infesting their apartment complex. Moaning the degradation of America, and especially of Los Angeles, where they live, Paul and Mary frame themselves as the vanguard of the middle class – but the great joke of the film is that they’re really the rearguard, since the sexual revolution they’ve taken up arms against was really incorporated into the middle class years ago. Left behind by the middle class as much as by the sexual revolution, their very prudishness quickly feels like a perversion, making for something of a masterpiece of middlebrow aesthetics, as Bartel more or less refrains from exploitative spectacle, but only in the name of a putative tasetfulness that’s well and truly internalised it. That, in turn, makes for a quite striking, bathetic comic signature – cartoony enough to anticipate the over-articulated banalities of Family Guy some thirty years later, the only shocking thing about it is how easily shock is absorbed, how much more voracious bourgeois tastefulness is than even the most outrageous fetishes that the couple come across. It’s all enhanced by being shot in the same lush, retro-celluloid palette of so much late 70s and early 80s neo-noir – and, in a kind of weird twist on the 80s fixation with the 50s, everything might seem to have changed, but nothing has really changed, just because nothing can ever really change in the world that Paul and Mary have chosen to inhabit. For that reason, the odd combination of 50s and 80s décor probably feels just as retro-futuristic today as it did when it was released – indeed, for Bartel, it’s clear that the middle class can only exist in a kind of perpetual retro-futurity, as the film scrupulously refuses to distinguish between the avant-garde and the arriere-garde, between what’s transgressive and what’s old-fashioned. It’s a tribute to the audacity of Bartel’s comic vision, then, he not only manages to restore Paul and Mary to the cutting-edge of middle class values, the cusp of retro-futurity, but manages to make them feel even more obliviously and blithely quaint in the process, in a brilliant, scathing elegy for a revolution – and a resistance – that never really happened. 

Eastwood: Flags Of Our Fathers (2006)

Clint Eastwood’s first real war film isn’t quite about the Battle of Iwo Jima – that’s more the province of the sequel, Letters From Iwo Jima - so much as the afterlife of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of American troops raising the flag on the top of the island. Divided into two more or less parallel narratives, it contrasts the lead-up to the photograph, and the American struggle for control of the island, with the aftermath of the photograph, as the six soldiers involved find themselves compelled to endlessly tour the United States, both during the last stages of the war and beyond. As a film about the way in which a photograph was circulated, recreated and confected into a spectacle – at one point, it’s literally remade as a dessert - it often plays as an amalgam of photographic images, or a piece of photojournalism, especially during the last sequence, which is an out-and-out visual essay. At the same time, though, Eastwood somewhat deflects the difference between photography and film into the difference between film and CGI, creating an odd, alterior medium, a fusion of photography and CGI, that frequently makes film feel displaced entirely. That’s quite clear in the afterlife of the photograph, whose parched, recycled, overcirculated images make for a palette that feels bleached by all the cameras that have flashed across it, but it’s most poetic in the assault on Iwo Jima itself, where it gives the island an otherworldy strangeness, turning it into a single uncanny valley that would perhaps feel more at home in a first-person shooter than in an Eastwood joint. It’s striking, then, how elegantly it brings back the widescreen sublimity of some of Eastwood’s earliest films, his fascination with debilitating discrepancies in scale, figures set against mystic horizons. And as in so many of those films, that synthetic vastness distends and suspends time into an interminable, unbearable waiting that’s even more oppressive than conflict, if only because it outlives it – as soon the war is over, we’re back waiting for all the ceremonies, bureaucratic meet-and-greets and jingoistic platitudes to end. Taken together, then, the two halves of the film converge on something like a spectacular front, the jingoistic coal-face of the war effort – like Yankee Doodle Dandy, released in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Eastwood’s interested in all the ways in which the stars and stripes can be turned into a spectacle, as the flag becomes a kind of sounding-board where different entertainment media rub shoulders. Except that this film’s far more sceptical, far more iconoclastic – colour’s too camouflaged here for the stars and stripes to really shine through – and, finally, far more ambitious, as Eastwood attempts nothing less than to pinpoint the exact moment at which an image seeped into the national consciousness, and to reassemble history as if it hadn’t.