Fleischer: Soylent Green (1973)

One of the more iconic science fiction films of the 1970s, Soylent Green takes place in 2022, in a dystopian New York besieged by global warming, pollution and overpopulation. Virtually everybody subsists on ‘Soylent Green,’ a food product that’s supposedly harvested from plankton – and the film follows what happens when policeman Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) takes it upon himself to investigate whether this is true. Released at the very cusp of neo-noir, or at least the cusp of the lush, lavish brand of neo-noir that Chinatown would popularise the following year, it’s as burnt-out and hard-boiled as some of the earliest noirs, completely disinterested in enshrining, canonising or even venerating their stylistic tics and flourishes. In that sense, it feels more like a continuation of noir, even an exhaustion of noir into science-fiction, rather than the self-conscious genre fusion that would characterise Blade Runner a decade later. Like many of those earliest noirs, it’s surprisingly disinterested in the street, or in the city – nearly all the action takes place in claustrophobic, low-ceilinged rooms, while the outdoor sequences aren’t especially interested in disguising the fact that they were shot on a sound stage. What is perhaps a bit different from those early films is the proliferation of extras, the sheer quantity of sweat that Fleischer wrings out of his crowds as he channels them through ever smaller spaces and passages, towards the final, grim revelation. Bookended by Joseph Cotten and Edward G. Robinson – who passed away shortly after shooting ended – those heaving crowds and masses end up revealing that noir split the difference between present and future so finely that it could only be fully recognised as science fiction after the fact. And it finally feels like Fleischer’s also trying to make the future as invisible as possible here, trying to conceal it deep within the present – from the very beginning, the film takes the cutting-edge of 70s science fiction and depletes it, blandishes it, demystifies it, but that’s exactly what allows it to retain the future so powerfully some fifty years later.

Fejos: Lonesome (1928)

In many ways, Paul Fejos’ Lonesome is New York’s answer to the great city symphony films of the 1920s, albeit there’s little fascination with the fact of it being shot on location, as well as little in the way of what might be called establishing shots. Instead, Fejos presents the New York crowd as the city, flooding his frames with people and building a loose narrative around two young lovers who meet at Coney Island, only to be separated as the crowd reaches its holiday peak. For the most part, Fejos reserves his experimentation for when the lovers are discovering each other, as the camera mirrors their efforts to extricate themselves from the Coney Island city-crowd. That’s no small task, since his camera has such an inherent affinity for the crowd that it has to utterly transform itself to imagine anything outside it, finally turning to a series of colour and sound segments that must have been quite astounding at the time. Full of beautiful cusps where the exuberance of the crowd suddenly gives way to that peculiar loneliness than can only descend in the very midst of a crowd, the sheer mass of people – there must be at least twenty in most frames – becomes almost architectural, an object lesson in how to seek respite from the crowd in the nooks and crannies of the crowd itself. In some ways, that’s not unlike the outlook of The Crowd, released the same year, except that there’s something more optimistic and reparative here, perhaps because the protagonists are working-class, rather than the upwardly mobile professionals of Vidor’s vision – for all that it distresses and overwhelms them, they know that the crowd is also their lifeblood, what’s brought them together, the solution to any problems it might cause. And so it’s a romance with the crowd – a tried and tortured romance, but a romance nonetheless, as if falling in love in a big city were the best way to commune with the crowd at its most hopeful and its most fearful.

Larraín: No (2013)

Pablo Larraín's extraordinary fourth film presents a semi-fictional version of the 1989 Chilean plebiscite, in which the people were asked to vote on whether they wanted Augusto Pinochet to serve another eight-year sentence as military commander, or transfer to democratic leadership. Specifically, it centres on the tension within the 'No' faction between the advertising subcommittee and marketing expert René Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), brought in to run the television campaign. While the subcommittee are anxious to invoke Pinochet's misdeeds, Saavedra insists that an upbeat vision of a democratic future, revolving around a rainbow logo, is more likely to win the plebiscite. At first, the film seems poised for a celebration of the ingenuity of advertising in the vein of Mad Men, but there's a different kind of deftness to Larraín's vision of how a mere consultant, or technocrat, comes to find himself touched and transformed by political consciousness. In part, it's because Saavedra's prescient that this isn't simply a battle between autocracy and democracy, but between the autocracy of the cinematic image and the democracy of the televised image. Where Pinochet's advertisements favour panoramic, monumentalist, cinematic sweeps, Saavedra devotes himself to drawing out the inherent affinities of television, distilling the warmth of every sitcom, music video and telemarketing channel ever aired, and wrapping it all in an ebullient 1980s sheen. It feels right, then, that the entire film is shot on low-quality magnetic tape, not least because the poor resolution adds a refractive rainbow to the edge of every object: the campaign logo is already right there, in the medium itself. And there's a real art to the way Larraín absorbs all the spectra of the rainbow into the pools of light that flood his mise-en-scenes - at times, you can almost see the water molecules in the air, as if something were forever on the verge of pixelating or precipitating out of the tape, or the tape itself were forever on the verge of warping and transfiguring into something even more expansive and collective. Perhaps that's why the ending feels so indeterminate and ambiguous: although Larraín definitely says 'No' to Pinochet, his 'Yes' to democracy feels more provisional, like a stepping stone to something better that hasn’t arrived yet, making for that rare thing: period drama premised on a shared future as much as a shared past.

Miike: Jūsannin no Shikaku (13 Assassins) (2010)

A samurai theodicy wrapped in a genre tribute, 13 Assassins considers a samurai’s duty to his master against his duty to his people. Loosely based on the 1963 film of the same name, it follows a group of samurai, led by world-weary Shizaemon (Koji Yakusho), who decide to ambush and kill Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), the sadistic half-brother of the Shogun, in vengeance for his litany of crimes against the peasants. We’re shown some of these crimes in the opening scenes, and they immediately exceed everything that comes after them, everything that might be imagined - Miike is brilliant at crafting images whose horror defies any commensurate action or response - which is perfect for a revenge film, since revenge only becomes insatiable once it becomes impossible. Even more horrifically, perhaps, Naritsugu positively welcomes the spectacle of his own death, co-opting every vengeful  impulse as an exquisitely staged entertainment for his benefit, a simulacrum of a Golden Age of War that he never got to see firsthand. And, as the film progresses, that starts to blur him with the samurai - doomed to the very end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, soldiers on both sides tremble with the pent-up energies of a extended era of peace, choking on their need for a noble death, aching to cross the murky threshold that Miike evoked so beautifully in Hara-Kiri. That makes for a labyrinthine fecundity of conspiracy and disquiet, an entropic decay and dissolution of Edo architecture, as Miike renews the galactic slow-motion moonscapes of Kurosawa, cascading waterfalls of space that can only be witnessed in geological time. In fact, it often feels more indebted to Kurosawa than to the original film, or at least clarifies just how indebted the original film was to Kurosawa, and to The Seven Samurai in particular. Except that Miike’s siege-spirals are even more vertiginously vortical than Kurosawa’s, if that were possible – this siege and ambush is about trapping criminals inside the state, rather than keeping them out of it – as if he were trying, desperately, to centrifuge action from spectacle, to escape his own film.

Park: Stoker (2013)

Park Chan-wook’s first film in English is taken from a screenplay by Wentworth Miller, and describes what happens when India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) mysterious uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) moves in with her and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), shortly after her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) dies in suspicious circumstances. Despite the title, it’s not a supernatural thriller – and yet there is a supernatural atmosphere, as Park tends to start scenes and even shots just before the previous scenes and shots have ended, creating a kind of cumulative superposition of images and atmospheres that often make the whole film feel like it’s poised on the hinge between scenes, or rehearsing two different worlds at once. At times, it’s almost as if the collision and confusion of scenes releases an immaterial presence, a kinetic energy that Park latches onto as his camera swoops and pivots around the curvaceous, reticulated spaces of the Stokers’ mansion. And given that Park doesn’t speak English, space is the main language that he has at his command, meaning that the house often feels more individuated than the characters, or the characters  feel like so many facets of the house, undead vestibules for a family secret that emerges in quite a gradual, ghastly fashion. It’s quite apposite, then, that Miller’s screenplay more or less plays as an idiosyncratic reinvention of Hitchcock, and of Shadow of a Doubt in particular – Park has indicated that he’s a fan of the master, and the film plays as a kind of experiment in how Hitchcock might look as a pure spatial system, with all his psychic energy transferred onto the mise-en-scene. That’s not necessarily to say that the dialogue and acting is irrelevant, but it feels quite remote from Park, quite Antipodean – it doesn’t feel at all incongruous, for example, that, despite being set in America, all the major female roles are played by Australian actresses, with Jacki Weaver joining the crew for one of the most memorable and chilling sequences. It also means that the acting is quite architectural – Kidman in particular achieves a height of prosthetic plasticity that makes for one of her best roles; she’s like a lush bouquet of fake flowers adorning every interior. While it may not be quite as shockingly inventive as Park’s earlier films, its eerie slow-burn is just as powerful, if only because it evokes a whole host of extreme scenarios that never quite come to pass, making it feel as if the horror could come from almost anywhere, and take any form.