Carruth: Upstream Color (2013)

Some ten years in the making, Shane Carruth’s second feature is as elliptical, elusive and fascinating as his first. In essence, it’s about a parasitic micro-organism that migrates from humans to pigs to orchids over the course of its life-cycle, infecting – or perhaps blessing – its hosts with the ability to commune and commingle in the same consciousness. At one level, there’s a clear human narrative here, revolving around a man (Carruth) and woman (Amy Seimetz) who find themselves falling in love after they’ve both been infected. However, Carruth makes sure that the human stage of the parasite’s life cycle isn’t especially prioritised – as with Soderbergh’s Contagion, this is epidemiology from the parasite’s perspective, collapsing human, animal and even plant consciousness in quite wild and disorienting ways.  Nearly all the shots feel disconnected, or discontinuous, but only because they also feel like versions of the same shot, or the same mind, as if the whole film’s happening at once, or apprehending us at once. To watch it is to participate in the condition it describes, and yet a condition of the condition is that once you have it, you can’t articulate it, or anything outside it; the more discontinuous the film becomes, the more it captures the deeper, counter-intuitive continuity of all living things, everything in the parasite’s purview. In the same way, Carruth’s total auteurism – he did pretty much everything – feels less about securing continuity for the film than embracing his own inner discontinuity, his multiple existences as director, actor, writer, producer, designer and composer, none of which can form a meaningful whole without incorporating the entire ecological universe that surrounds and sustains them. In other words, to truly apprehend ecology, we have to become infected by a new synthetic, synaesthetic perception - the parasite breeder is a field recorder and Foley specialist - as if only the most radically distributed consciousness could fulfil the true romance of Walden, which plays a critical role in the parasite’s transmission. And in infecting us, it's probably the most ambitious cinematic natural history since The Tree of Life - except where Malick contemplates creation, Carruth infects himself with it, melting celluloid into cellulose until the grain of the film becomes positively granular, almost too ambient to immerse us in any fixed or stable way, invoking our fantasies of nature only to disperse and diffuse them.

Winterbottom: The Look of Love (2013)

Pornography dates more than any other genre, so it’s a great vehicle for our current fetish for datedness, our fascination with anything that’s had the luxury of sinking into its own place in history. At least, that’s the attitude that Winterbottom takes in his latest film, a study of porn magnate and strip club entrepeneur Paul Raymond, played by Steve Coogan. At the time of his death in 2008, Raymond was the richest man in Britain, having amassed his fortune through a variety of porn enterprises that started with small burlesque shows in the 1950s, taking him into the Golden Age of cinematic and VHS porn in the 1970s and 1980s and out the other side. Given Winterbottom's focus on evoking the particular texture of each of these pornographic periods, it’s really only a biopic in the sense that Yankee Doodle Dandy or The Great Ziegfeld are biopics, as Raymond becomes the epicentre for all the minute ways in which pornography registers changes in taste and technology. That’s not quite to say that Coogan’s extraneous, or even secondary, but that he’s developed such a synergy with Winterbottom that he can slip in and out of the film’s ambience quite seamlessly. In fact, the film was as much Coogan’s project as Winterbottom’s – he’s got a knack for characters, like Raymond, who are introspective without being insightful – while Winterbottom’s direction often simply involves following Raymond’s direction, which appears to have been just as invisible, flexible and provisional, producing quite different styles of spectacle across his career. Different, but equally lush and luxurious, since Raymond was nothing if not a master of mise-en-scene, just as the film is a tribute to the art of pornographic ambience and set design, soft-focus backdrops that eroticise even the most mechanical performances, décor that cushions and sustains fantasy. 

Duplass & Duplass: The Puffy Chair (2005)

Road trips often have an expansive, panoramic vibe, which might not seem to sync with the micro-indie aspirations of mumblecore. Yet that’s exactly what occurs in the Duplass brothers’ first feature, which follows Josh (Mark Duplass), his girlfriend Emily (Katie Aselton) and his brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) from New York to Georgia. Although that’s a somewhat epic scope, the point of the trip is to pick up an old chair that they’ve bought on eBay for their father’s birthday – in other words, a typical mumblecore fetish, one of the numberless discarded, kitsch objects that leach anything like expansive time or space out of the genre’s mise-en-scenes. As an epic of microscopic proportions, then, it’s more interested in the characters’ movement around minute spaces than in the romantic vistas of the road, if only because the film stock tends to be most resolved in close-ups or extreme close-ups, in something like Sherman’s March reimagined for the digital camcorder. Not only are the trio indefinitely delayed in the small town en route to Atlanta where they pick up the chair, but the film’s full of their micro-explorations of transitory or disposable spaces, most memorably in an extended set piece that sees them trying to hide in the back of their van in a motel carpark. In that sense, the road is more something that moves by them, stranding them at motels and gas stations, part of the vast slipstream that floods mumblecore whiteness with white noise. And, perhaps because it’s so heavily improvised, the film moves further than any previous mumblecore outing into something like a white sociolect, somewhere between an impoverished hippy lexicon and washed-out faux-bromanticism, until there’s hardly a conversation that’s not liberally punctuated by “dude” or “man.” At one level, there’s something cloyingly insular about that – it’s almost predictable that the only non-white characters are a pair of illegal Honduran workers that Josh barters to get his precious chair reupholstered – but, then again, it’s such a minor cinema that it inevitably concedes the decline of whiteness, if only by offering it as a subcultural boutique niche. Bleached by all the voices that aren’t there, it ends as incidentally and abruptly as it begins – like most road trips, really – haunting precisely because it does so little to assuage its own fragility, or to ensure any kind of survival for posterity.

Burger: Limitless (2011)

Neil Burger’s third film is elegantly simply in its premise: Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, looking suspiciously like David Foster Wallace) is a struggling writer in New York City who stumbles across a new brand of drug that gives him access to 100% of his brain, rather than the customary 15%. Most of the film toys, stylistically, with that possibility, as Eddie not only manages to write the book he’s always dreamed he would write, but quickly becomes as knowledgeable as Google, and as perceptually prescient as Google Street View. In fact, it’s the first definitive portrait of New York, or of any city really, in the aftermath of Google Street View – not only does Burger replace cuts and shots with stitches and pivots, but most of Eddie’s epiphanies take place on the street, as the drug sucks him into the slipstream of the Google Camera Car, endowing him with a nictating eyeball that makes him a valuable commodity for the city’s attention economy. It’s only a matter of time, then, before he’s snatched up by a wealthy, corrupt investor, Carlo van Loon (Robert de Niro), who’s in desperate need of someone who can remain attentive to every piece of information they’ve ever processed, someone who can actually perceive the market, in its entirety, as it unfolds. As might be expected, it's also only a matter of time before Eddie runs out of the drug, and has to elude the very Street View he’s helped envisage, in a quite extraordinary reinvention of the 70s paranoia mode, and its search for the hush that eludes surveillance. And that devolution is the most fascinating part of the film, as Eddie finds that he can’t go back to operating on 15%, not just he’s become hooked on 100%, but because the drug has actually merged his brain into new and different combinations. In one of the film’s tensest scenes, Carlo cautions him not to become one of those guys who gets distracted by a screen in the room, but, by this point, he’s already become the screen in the room. Like an odd, oblique superhero, or a latter-day Mabuse, he’s transformed into himself, discovered that his mind was always post-human, it’s just that he wasn’t able to access that part of it before now. 

Coppola: The Bling Ring (2013)

Based on real events, The Bling Ring follows a group of jaded Hollywood teens, led by Nicki Moore (Emma Watson), who break into the houses of the rich and famous. Not quite a film, it takes place at the intersection of a whole range of post-cinematic technologies – Facebook, fashion blogging, Google Street View, Google Earth – just as the celebrities that the Bling Ring targets tend to be quasi-cinematic, more famous as celebrities than for any of their particular films or roles. Like The Canyons, then, it attempts to envisage how a city founded on cinema might look in a post-cinematic era. And, like The Canyons, it decides that something like the myth of total cinema has come to pass, as the dispersal of cinematic infrastructure and experience across the entire urban landscape allows cinema to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Among other things, that means that there are no firm cinematic thresholds anymore – it’s as impossible to enter the film as it is to leave it, just as every space and moment takes on the breathless threshold-magic that hangs over the entrance to a cinema, the beginning of a film, the sense that another world is imminent. Where that exhausted The Canyons, it positively exhilarates Coppola, partly because her New Wave romanticism has always fixated on just this brand of breathless ambience, the sense that every moment is a threshold in the making. And, for the most part, the Ring sets out to harvest this threshold-magic from the Los Angeles firmament, rarely stealing enough to be caught or even detected, often preferring to try on clothes rather than actually take them, more than stimulated by the thrill of garages, doorways and cupboards materialising out of the night (apparently it was only after the fifth burglary that Paris Hilton even realised there had been people in her house). Perhaps that’s why Coppola’s nightscapes are so pregnant, so fragrant, so redolent of that cinematic flavour of darkness that has all but disappeared with the decline of the multiplex, let alone the traditional theatre. With the addition of Harris Savides’ cinematography, it’s the most breathless, romantic space in her whole oeuvre, which is saying something, as well as an incredible swansong for his incredible career. Certainly, the recourse to computer screens, phone screens and GPS systems might puncture the mood at times, but it’s a testament to his fastidiousness that they’re always folded back into it as the precondition for its lush, aromatic textures. By Somewhere, Coppola’s yearning for transcendence was on the verge of imploding if it didn’t transcend itself, slip free of its cinematic shackles, and that's exactly what's achieved here, in what can only be described as a post-cinematic masterpiece.