Dardenne & Dardenne: Rosetta (1999)

For the Dardennes, Seraing, Belgium means something like what Flint, Michigan means to Michael Moore – a declining industrial node, it’s a centre of dark forces, releasing the vast, undifferentiated labor-power of the universe as it decays. And the Dardennes’ purest vision, Rosetta, is also their most distilled portrait of their home town, presenting us with an economic premise more than a narrative premise, the mere precondition for late capitalism, as Rosetta, played by Emilie Dequenne in a Cannes-winning role, traverses Seraing in a search for subsistence employment that can never come. For the most part, the camera never moves beyond the orbit of Rosetta’s immediate awareness, usually following her but sometimes circling around her, as she continually attempts to incorporate objects and scenarios into her purview, in a perceptual tug-of-war with her overseers and exploiters. Less a stream of consciousness than a stream of sensation, its kinaesthetic immediacy leaves even The Promise miles behind, to the point where Rosetta’s more an avatar than a character, ancestor of the first-person shooters of The Kid with a Bike.  In the process, the vast wind-tunnels of The Promise segue into a version of Seraing where gravity seems to operate with heightened intensity, requiring the most extraordinary propulsive energy to avoid being grounded, prostrated, even as the ground sometimes seems like the only thing to cling to, the only thing that’s not in continual flux. And even as Rosetta keeps moving, jacking in to the city’s vast slipstreams to conserve energy, she still finds herself propelled into other propulsions, floored by sudden gusts of gravity that bring everyone to their knees. Merciless in its critique and infinite in its sympathy, it’s the Dardennes’ masterpiece of masterpieces, utterly dissolving itself into their desperation, touched with didactic naturalism.

Swanberg: Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007)

One of the key films in what's come to be known as the mumblecore movement, Hannah Takes the Stairs features Greta Gerwig as Hannah, an intern at a television office who has romantic liasons with two of her co-workers, Mike (Mike Duplass) and Paul (Andrew Bujalski), as much to distract herself from work as for any other reason. As that might suggest, nothing much happens – the film’s set in a kind of empty time and space, the times between times and the spaces between spaces. Perpetually slouched in the same inchoate huddle, trapped by the same dead, drab corners, the characters feel torqued by WASP torpor, not quite depressed enough to be depressed – just “chronically dissatisfied” with their inability to do anything more than waste time. As a result, the film itself feels like something of a time-wasting exercise, not that different from the endless conversational scribbles that it rehearses, as if the cast were searching for a way to improvise themselves out of the same dead space-time as the characters, slaves to the same odd, quivering body language, blocking that never quite gels into customary or continuous postures. Even the camera feels like it’s perpetually slumped and suspended in a tepid, lukewarm bath– the digital film quality’s so poor that you can almost see the humidity in the air, accrued over minutes, hours, days of exhaling. Certainly, as some critics of mumblecore have pointed out, it’s bleached with whiteness, obsessed with the leisure class – but it’s not the splendidly isolated leisure class of, say, Whit Stillman or Noah Baumbach. Instead, it’s a leisure class whose aspirations have been incorporated and integrated into the professional workplace, leisure remediated as down-time, meaning there’s no real difference between being at work and being at home, between quitting your job and slacking off on your job - just an interminable waiting seeping into everything

Almodóvar: Los Amantes Pasajeros (I'm So Excited!) (2013)

I’m So Excited – or The Fleeting Lovers in its literal translation – is Almodóvar's take on the prevalence for apocalyptic precarity in recent film, small-scale end-of-the-world narratives in which people are forced to face the end of things in a local, domestic way. Set on an aeroplane en route from Spain to Mexico, which is forced to prepare for an emergency landing when the landing gear malfunctions, it has all the ingredients for a sober, gripping existential drama. So it’s wonderful that Almodóvar plays it as a comedy, by staffing the plane with a collection of unbelievably camp gay stewards. Totally, melodramatically embracing the stereotypes his films usually sideline, Almodóvar presents us with a trio who have absolutely no vested interest in futurity or productivity – they’re just there to have a good time, for as long as they can. And that means that the imminent air disaster just comes to feel like business as usual, which is to say partying as usual – each loop around the airfield, each moment that brings them closer to annihilation, is just another level of intoxication; the more precarious and apocalyptic it becomes, the more normal it seems, the more cosy, domestic and comforting the stewards and their lifestyle feel. With characteristic wryness, then, Almodóvar paints air stewards as the coal face of the precariat, as if queer labor were the most vulnerable and volatile form of labor in existence, or all labor were queer insofar as it found itself in similar positions of vulnerability. Admittedly, that does mean that the film falters when it jumps back to the ground, but that doesn’t happen that often, and never punctures the excess of the air too much. Similarly, some critics have found the stereotyping offensive, but there’s also something liberating about seeing such a beacon of queer tastefulness, even of queer consensus, make a really gay film – and it’s really, really gay, dishing out fellatio jokes, and fellatio, like there’s no tomorrow.

Wajda: Niewinni Czarodzieje (Innocent Sorcerers) (1960)

Part of what made Andrzej Wadja’s war trilogy so powerful was the way in which it dissociated ideology from individual perception and cognition. By Ashes and Diamonds, it was almost as if Wajda had found a cinematic language for capturing the mass migration of ideologies across faces, crowds and even inanimate spaces. Innocent Sorcerers was his second film after Ashes and Diamonds and, to its credit, it doesn’t try and perfect what had already been perfected. Instead, Wajda turns his eye in the opposite direction, focusing on a new generation of disaffected Polish youth, who refuse to engage with history or politics if they can avoid it. Of course, that refusal just makes them an even more ambitious canvas for Wajda’s camera, which is faced, for the first time, with a total lack of net ideological movement. As it moves through twenty-four hours in the lives of these wandering, New Wave vagrants, you gradually realise that their languorous apathy simply results from the pressure of too many competing demands, especially the equally applied pressures of an older and newer socialist Poland. Nothing moves, but movement is everywhere, which can make it feels less formally innovative than the trilogy, but somehow more luxuriant and leisurely in its formalism at the same time, as Wajda comes about as close as a perfectionist can to something resembling improvisation. At its most mercurial moments, it’s as if these fleeting impressions of a generation are only really available to ideology in the same way that, say, jazz improvisers are available to musical structure, which denatures and deforms as it moves through them, possessing them even as they feel they’ve possessed it, fragmenting them even as they feel they’ve gathered it under their countercultural individualism. In that sense, it perhaps pairs Wajda’s camera with what it was anticipating all along – a post-ideological society, a society in which ideology’s liberated from our capacity to even recognise it as such. And that’s quite a backhanded tribute to this new Poland, a series of choices and gestures that somehow keep on returning to the same choices and gestures, slaves to the amniotic ambience with which Wajda surrounds them.

Pasolini: Porcile (Pigsty) (1969)

None of Pasolini’s films play so parsimoniously to his strengths as Pigsty – it’s equally poetic, cinematic and schematic, refusing to draw any distinctions between his vocations as writer, director and theorist. In part, that’s because it occupies a pivotal position in his career – it was his last original screenplay, and the last film before his literary adaptations of the 1970s. At the same time, it culminated the formal experimentation of his earlier work, to the extent that it plays as a piece of criticism as much as cinema – specifically, as an experiment in theorising, through cinema, how cinema might transform bourgeois canons of literature and language, by dialectically incorporating two quite different narratives and worlds. The first is silent, primordial and mercurial, following a young man through a volcanic waste, where he gradually turns to rape, pillage and cannibalism for survival and, eventually, for pleasure. The second is clotted with speech and symmetrical compositions, following another young man who turns to bestiality to flee his bourgeois father’s business negotiations with an ex-Nazi. As might be expected, a great deal of the film’s beauty and ingenuity comes from the transition between these two registers, especially the way Pasolini cuts between the ritualistic phonemes of the first world and the denuded, mechanical speech of the second. In both cases, there’s a haunting sense that language has been hollowed out by visuality, whether through the ingenious compositions of the first world, which tap into the same premythological flux as Medea and Oedipus Rex, or the hyper-conventional compositions of the second world, which overwhelm bourgeois conversation with the cinematic structures that are supposed to to support it. As they're visually eroded, these primal tics and bourgeois flourishes converge on something like a class molecule, the smallest possible complex of class allegiance or anatagonism, dynamic and synaesthetic enough to ensure that it can only be heard at the fleeting interface between visual regimes, and can only be seen at the fleeting interface between sonic regimes. In other words, a unit of measurement that can only emerge once bourgeois conversationalists step into the pigpen and concede that they can speak to swine - or once pigs themselves start to converse with industralists. In either case, it's a grotesque, hilarious recipe for how Pasolini might mix cinema and literature most effectively, or dialectically, over the next decade – namely, by treating every utterance hallowed by bourgeois taste as a dark comedy, drawing out its hidden horrors in hope of a happier ending to history than its current horizons allow.