Kosinski: Oblivion (2013)

Oblivion revolves around the last two people left on Earth – Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a pilot, and Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough), a communications analyst – in the wake of mass migration to one of Jupiter’s moons. For most of the film, they are the only characters, as Joseph Kosinski leads us through a series of serene, crystalline, ambient sequences, in which Jack patrols the surface of the planet, and reports back to Victoria, stationed in a console pod above the clouds. While advertisements suggested the apocalyptic monumentalism of Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay, Kosinski's vision is more of a steady-state universe, folding the decimation of the Earth’s surface back into a more cosmic equilibrium. Although Jack spends most of his time in the air, there’s really no difference between flying and any other type of movement: the planet is as isomorphic as a wheatfield, dovetailing the liquid clarity of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the invisible grids and contourless lines of Tron: Legacy. Based on Kosinski’s pitch for a graphic novel of the same name, it often feels like the pitch itself – a series of radiant, weightless images, or concepts of images that haven’t quite yet emerged. And part of what makes it so powerful is that Jack and Victoria have had mandatory brain wipes before commencing their work on Earth, meaning that this is also a world in which memory has not yet emerged, and thought itself is still emergent. Perhaps that’s why the senses don’t feel quite differentiated either – Victoria never visits the Earth’s surface, monitoring everything from her bank of touchscreens – making for a film that yearns to be experienced kinaesthetically, as well as visually. On the one hand, that means a film that yearns to be touched as well as seen, as Kosiniski once again amps up the electronic score – this time it’s by M83 – to send a continual pulse across the screen, the incipient ripple of a touchscreen. But it also means a film that yearns for a tactile intermediary, a console between viewer and screen – after all, we only really experience Jack through Victoria’s consoles for most of the film, as he turns into an avatar who has broken away from his gamer. It all builds to a quite extraordinary conclusion, as Kosinski presents something like a console as a nemesis, in one of the most disarming sci-fi spectres since HAL. Of course, it's not 2001 - nothing could be - but, in style and spirit, it's probably the closest we're likely to get to the object-oriented, console-driven dramas of 3001: The Final Odyssey, which, Kosinski suggests, could never be made into a film, but only a film on the verge of becoming something else.

Ayoade: Submarine (2010)

Submarine, Richard Ayoade's debut directorial feature, is based on Joe Dunthorne's novel of the same name, a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Swansea. It's a highly self-conscious film that's very much indebted to Dunthorne's prose style: there's far more interior monologue than dialogue, as solipsistic misfit Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) reflects upon the breakdown of his parents' marriage, as well as his infatuation with Jordana (Yasmin Paige). Part of what makes Oliver sympathetic is that Jordana's not an especially likeable character, at least not at first - and her mild contempt, which never completely vanishes, imbues their romance with something of the drab, verbose melancholy of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series, and Adrian's fixation with Pandora in particular. Still, Ayoade's most striking influence comes from across the Atlantic, since this very much plays as Wes Anderson drawn from an 80s British palette, rather than a 60s American palette – specifically, like how Anderson might look if he’d started as an 80s graphic designer, or typographer, rather than a 90s director, since there’s an extraordinary fixation with recovering the visual pleasures of the printed word. There’s text in nearly every frame, flamboyantly analog in its typography and often pointedly cinematic – text that preceded the familiarity with fonting and formatting ushered in by the PC revolution - suffusing Ayoade’s mise-en-scenes with the romance of film posters and title sequences, the random notations at the beginning and end of home movie reels. That makes it quite a compositionally ingenious and ideogrammatic film – printed as much as  directed, it wouldn’t feel that different as a series of single images, or a coffee table book of stills.  And it's the irrevocability of print that finally offsets the film's indie quirkiness, channelling it into the utter fatalism and despair that Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor bring to their performances as Oliver's parents – for all Oliver’s solipsism, it’s their story that’s finally told.

Mankiewicz: A Letter To Three Wives (1949)

This melodramatic classic was adapted from John Klempner’s 1946 Cosmopolitan novel, A Letter to Five Wives, which revolves around a circle of friends  – here  whittled down to Deborah (Jeanne Crain), Lora (Linda Darnell) and Rita (Ann Sothern) – who receive a letter from their arch-nemesis, Addie Ross (voiced by Celeste Holm), telling them that’s she’s run off with one of their husbands – Brad (Jeffrey Lynn), Porter (Paul Douglas) and George (Kirk Douglas) – moments before they board a boat for a charity picnic. As the day passes, and they wonder which of their husbands could be the philanderer, we’re presented with a series of flashbacks that anatomise the peculiar problems and challenges of their respective marriages. At the time the story was written, Cosmpolitan magazine was still very much a family publication, rather than an upwardly mobile professional publication, meaning that Klempner’s acerbic vision was destined to be read among the very small-town suburban tableaux that it describes. In that spirit, Mankiewicz also aims for a film that could be watched in the spaces it describes – which is to say, in 1949, a film that looks forward to its imminent remediation on television, carving out its own televisual niche. However, perhaps because it wasn’t quite omniscient enough at this point in time to have become part of the national consciousness, Mankiewicz frames television negatively, as the exhausation and marginalisation of radio over the three years that had elapsed since Klempner’s story was published. In that sense, it’s something of an experiment in outlining all the ways in which cinema might exceed radio, and thereby converge itself with the televisual future. And Mankiewicz makes a pretty amazing argument for film as the new cutting-edge of vocal technologies, subsuming the dialogue into Holm’s languorous, mellifluous voiceover – one of the most memorable in classical Hollywood, infinitely more ingratiating and intimate than any late-night radio broadcast – and orchestrating a synthetic voice, a proto-Vocoder, to connect the stories. Hallucinating melodrama into electronica, it’s fascinating to return to this moment when television was still a new perceptual horizon, a horizon that would only expand over the next decade, as film responded with the suburban science fiction that’s so memorably established here.

DiCillo: Delirious (2006)

For the last twenty years, Tom DiCillo has set out to reimagine Cassavetes' New York, drawing on a regular pool of friends and actors to craft a series of transient, low-budget portraits of the city. Delirious is perhaps his most furtive, intimate effort yet, tracing out the connections between a scrambling paparazzo (Steve Buscemi), a homeless model (Michael Pitt) and an insecure teen idol (Alison Lohmann). All three are entranced by the fragile romance of faces glimpsed and remembered in transit, having spent most of their lives being given a ten-foot berth – and it’s at that radius that DiCillo positions his film, renewing something like the giddy, aspirational thresholds of the great New York gangster films and backstage melodramas in the process. At times, it resembles the peculiar preciousness of Sofia Coppola, her visions of the homelessness of celebrity, and the momentary celebrity of the homeless, but there are ultimately too many gritty, grungy moments to sustain that kind of phantasmagoria. Instead, it feels like DiCillo’s sitting on the threshold between cinematic wealth and straight-to-video austerity, oscillating quite vertiginously between flamboyance and functionality, widescreen and small screen spectacle. At times, it’s a bit like looking into a cinematic release from a straight-to-video release, or into a straight-to-video release from a cinematic release, anchored by extravagant disestablishing shots, location shots that feel shot without permission, or at least linger just a little longer than they're permitted. By this point in his career, Buscemi's charisma might seem well and truly exhausted, but DiCillo’s approach rediscovers him as one of New York's most incidentally, casually glimpsed actors: watching him is a bit like the cinephilic epiphany, the burst of raw charisma, you'd get from just seeing him on the street, or sitting on the subway. And it's that incidental quality - Buscemi playing a glimpse of himself - that gives the film its grace and charm, as well as turning New York into a micro-city, a city in a minor key, unrecognisable to anyone but the most transient local.

Hung: Mui du du xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya) (1994)

Sometimes a director’s vision emerges as if miraculously, fully-formed from their very first frame, and that’s very much the case with The Scent of Green Papaya, which launched Tran Anh Hung to immediate international acclaim. Narratively, it’s quite slight – less a coming-of-age story than a coming-of-age atmosphere, it constellates around a young servant girl, Mui, who comes to work for a suburban Saigon family in the 1940s, before jumping forward to her relationship with the family in the 1960s. Like Hung’s subsequent films, it’s not really driven by characters so much as proprioceptive potentials, as both Mui and the camera continually test where their contours end and where those of their new environment begin. Most of the film takes place at the very outermost limits of Mui’s perceptual awareness, her spatial and architectural horizons, which determine Hung’s insatiable tracking-shots as tangibly as if they were actual physical co-ordinates. And, at this cusp of consciousness, this odd, frictive zone between camera and world, other forms of consciousness start to emerge – not just the consciousness of Hung’s camera, but of the entire natural universe, as if the only thing that could form a horizon to Mui’s sentience were the existence of another, radically different type of sentience, whether of adults, the middle class, or the endless animals (usually reptiles and insects) that she encounters throughout the film. Films this dependent on spatial cognition often work best in closed environments, so it feels right that Hung virtually never leaves the house, a decision that also adds to the period authenticity – filmed in its entirety on a sound stage in France, the mise-en-scene doesn’t just capture how French Indochina might have looked in the 40s and 60s, it captures how it might have looked in 40s and 60s film, poised somewhere between The Letter and Tokyo Story. And this stately mid-century Saigon feels especially indebted to Ozu’s mid-century Osaka – at times, it almost plays as Ozu with tracking-shots – so it’s not hard to see why Hung was chosen to direct Norwegian Wood some twenty years later either. Swathed in blue-green crepuscularity, it’s a coming-of-age vision that still hasn’t come of age, just because Mui never does – her consciousness never closes in on itself, never ceases to be an interface for other minds at their most mysterious, or mysteries we might not even recognise as other minds.