Zhangke: Tian Zhu Ding (A Touch of Sin) (2013)

The first vignette in Jia Zhangke’s latest film – a tribute to the great wuxia, or martial arts films of the 60s and 70s - would seem to be a bit of a departure for this master of mood and atmosphere, plunging us into a visceral revenge narrative centring around a disenfranchised factory worker. However, the retribution’s so rapid, so shorn of any martial arts relish, that it’s over before it’s begun, exhausting pretty much all narrative and dramatic tension in the first half-hour. What comes next isn’t anticlimactic so much as  postclimactic, setting us adrift in the odd, meditative space after total revenge, the unsettling peace that descends when there’s not even retribution left to live for, as Zhangke proceeds to converge three more loose vignettes with a camera that itself feels too converged with the world it's describing for either documentary detachment or fictional dissimulation. As in the first section, all three stories are based on recent flash points in Chinese social media, all of which ended violently, but here the violence is immediately subsumed back into the film’s ambient textures, as if retribution were so unthinkable in this world that, even if it happened, it still wouldn’t have happened. As with Still Life, that takes us through a bewildering array of cities in transit, streets and subways where you can almost see industrial alienation devolving into post-industrial alienation before your very eyes, space and time melding into space-time. So uneven is the development across this terrain that there’s no real middle ground between ancient Chinese edifices and giant construction sites – at least, nothing of any permanence, nothing that couldn’t be demolished or flooded out in moments – while even the most venerable ruins feel like works in progress, harbingers of some as yet unimaginable China. It’s rare, these days, to see films set in real time and space where characters are as dwarfed by their surroundings as they are here - even in extreme close-up, there’s usually some vast panorama just out the window, pitched at a scale that’s more otherworldly than even CGI, as if Chinese Generated Images were what all digital spectacle was really yearning to capture. And so it finally feels as if China has colonised capitalism at its most fantasmatic, which can’t help but give the film itself a certain lurid, insatiable ambition, a ceaseless drive from spectacle to spectacle, atmosphere to atmosphere. No less than The World, its ambitions are planetary, as Zhangke strives to envisage the decentred centre of everything we know, in all its unfathomable flexibility.

Robbe-Grillet: Gradiva (2006)

Based as much on Freud’s analysis of Jensen’s novel as on the novel itself, Gradiva revolves around a young art historian who travels to Morocco to retrace Eugene Delacroix’s footsteps in the late nineteenth-century. Entranced with North African culture, Delacroix was renowned for having got closer than any other European artist to a Harem, the epicentre of the Orientalist imagination, especially in his iconic painting of Women of Algiers in their Apartment, which percolates across the film’s compositions. However, the Harem remained a fantasy even for Delacroix, a site of almost unimaginable sensual pleasures and practices – and it’s those practices that Alain Robbe-Grillet’s art historian finds himself initiated into when he’s coerced into a present-day Harem, where he’s held captive and subjected to an array of humiliating, sado-masochistic sexual tableaux. In other words, torture porn becomes the degree zero of orientalism, as if to evoke an era in which the Middle East has become more exotic than ever before, hallucinated to a millenial torture-harem that often seems to exceed the imagination of even the most sensational media. To Robbe-Grillet’s credit, though, his film’s not sensational, even or especially when it’s most shocking or violent. In part, that’s because his style is so writerly – like most of his films, it feels as if it would offer much the same experience as a script, or even as a cine-novel – but also because there’s quite an odd disconnect between sound and image. Shocking spectacles are often entirely silent, while empty spaces are often set to agonising cries, such that Robbe-Grillet dissociates orientalism as much as he demystifies it, breaking it down into a series of component ingredients that feel oddly familiar but don’t quite cohere into a recognisably hysterical whole. Watching it, then, is like performing dream-work, or tracing the distinctive lines of one of Delacroix’s preliminary sketches – all the co-ordinates are there, but they haven’t quite come together yet, as if putting the onus on us to fill out the fantasy in a different manner, while testing us with its most lavish, lascivious, seductive ingredients.

Pasolini: Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) (1966)

As they developed over the 1950s, the earliest, rawest impulses of Italian neorealism blossomed out to a mystical, Franciscan humanism, a vision of history offered up for the weak, the powerless and the invisible. In many ways, Pasolini’s third film, released in the late 1960s, plays as a swansong for this moment, familiar enough with it to be a bit irreverent as well. Like most neorealism, it’s propelled by wandering – in this case, the wandering of an old man, played by legendary Italian comedian Toto, and his son, played by Pasolini’s lover Ninetto Davoli, across the Italian countryside. However, where neorealism envisaged the Italian landscape as a site of desecration, or desecration that was just starting to disguise itself as reconstruction, Pasolini’s vistas are choked with half-built highways and apartment complexes, colonised by all kinds of American pop culture, inducing a surreal, picaresque film-within-the-film – narrated by a talking crow – in which Toto and Ninetto try to reconnect with nature by talking to hawks and sparrows, in their own version of Francis’ sermon to the birds. Laced with Pasolini’s sharp wit, his taste for demystifying ritual and ceremony, it would probably play as straight parody were it not for the fact that Toto himself was the most Franciscan of Italian actors, an iconic, omniscient lover of the poor and friend to animals. In lieu of parody, then, Pasolini collapses neorealism into the cult of Toto, here expansive and beatific enough to incorporate even the loss of Palimiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, whose elegy opens the film. And, as in so many of Pasolini’s films, his Franciscan Communism crystallises around the saintliness of young men, which is to say the saintliness of Davoli. In later years, Pasolini said that Hawks and Sparrows was his favourite film, and it may be because you can see him falling in love with Davoli before your very eyes; every shot of his face feels hand-held, or hand-stroked, forerunners of the Gus van Sant of Paranoid Park, or Bryan Singer’s take on Brad Renfro in Apt Pupil. For all its occasional spikiness, then, it’s one of Pasolini’s most tender, reverent offerings, and possibly his greatest declaration of love, both for Davoli and for the country that created him. 

De Oliveira: O Estranho Caso de Angélica (The Strange Case of Angélica) (2010)

This strange, beautiful film is about a young photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trepa), who’s called to the deathbed of a young woman, Angélica (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), to perform a postmortem photograph. After returning home, he finds himself haunted by her image and spirit, and starts roaming his small Portugese town in search of some trace of her presence, some sign that she hasn’t entirely departed this world. As befits a film about photography, it’s largely composed of long takes, with very few close-ups and no camera movement, full of details that hold your attention for a long time. Among other things, that suffuses every mise-en-scene with the hush of a deathbed – but it’s a magical, devout hush, the aura of a room where the spirit’s just left the body and is still hovering, beneficent, somewhere nearby. In that sense, the film’s shot more from Angélica’s perspective than from Isaac’s, as de Oliveira imagines how it might feel to hover, watching, in those first minutes, hours and days, conjuring up the deep quietness of a world in which you’ve suddenly become invisible. And in making you feel the deep quietness of being invisible, it simultaneously makes you realise how provisional your invisibility usually is when it comes to films – although, in most films, there’s no doubt that the characters can’t see us, there’s also no doubt that, if we were actually there, they could. Here, that’s not necessarily the case, making for something estranging and melancholy about life just continuing as usual, the way neorealism undercuts magical realism. At one point, Isaac wanders into a discussion of antimatter, and the film often plays out as a vision of the matter from the world of antimatter, a vision of the material world from the realm of the immaterial. Perhaps that’s why de Oliveria’s silence is so pregnant, so potent – at 101 years of age, he’s not only old enough to remember when cinema was still an offshoot of photography, but he’s perhaps the only director who’s worked in both silent and digital cinema. And the film uses digital cinema to renew the extraordinary, uncanny immediacy of silent cinema – when we first see Angélica, she’s so close to life that it’s impossible to believe in the finality of death, much like watching this beautiful, paradoxical memento mori.

Bujalski: Computer Chess (2013)

Although mumblecore films take a world decimated and dissolved by social media as their premise and point of departure, they rarely show characters interacting with social media at any great length. In part, that’s because it’s already there in the ambient, mellifluous mumble that cocoons them, just as the very jerkiness and paucity of their images internalises the mobile screen you might be watching it on. But it’s also because mumblecore is more attuned to being off social media while knowing everyone else is on it, or at least being doomed to some backwater of social media where you can’t gain quite enough traction to hook into the flow that seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. And, with Computer Chess, Andrew Bujalski finds a way to make a mumblecore film that’s almost exclusively set across social media platforms while managing to retain that peculiar sense of loneliness – he makes the first mumblecore film set in the past. Specifically, it’s set over the course of a weekend-long chess computer conference in the 1980s, as a group of technical afficionados, many played by actual professionals from the computer industry, descend on a small hotel to share and showcase the latest innovations in online gaming. Armed with a trio of cameras that are clunkily conspicuous as the computers themselves, Bujalski uses the corporeality of this massive yet delimited system to visualise those redundant spaces of social media where so many mumblecore corners, corridors and couches are sprawled. In a very real sense, the only places in the hotel left open to the film’s narrative are those that aren’t central or critical to the primitive intranet that’s installed across it, in a prototype of the mumblecore present – and Bujalksi’s images are grainier and more impoverished than anything in the movement to date, confusing past and present in the same way that his peers confuse day and night, or real and artificial light. Far from trying to create an immersive, plausible period piece, then, it’s as much a placeholder for the present as any other mumblecore offering. And to watch it is to feel the full force of a here and now that’s imperceptibly reprogramming what’s come before, a standing wave of information history cascading through everything with alien hilarity, as if to evoke an evanescent present that’s become even more remote than the past.