Korine: Mister Lonely (2007)

Harmony Korine’s third feature takes place within the impersonating community, revolving around a Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) who meets a Marilyn Monroe  (Samantha Morton) on the streets of Paris and follows her to an impersonator commune deep in the Scottish highlands. Populated by Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Madonna and the Queen among others, it’s an eccentric, oddball community in the vein of Gummo, partly because these characters, as their professions might suggest, take an imitative rather than a reactive approach to the world and each other. For the most part, they don’t respond to things, they replicate them – or respond by replicating – meaning that’s there’s no moment or movement that’s not an attempt to become something else, or an effort to displace whatever’s happening around it. As a result, there’s something deeply transfigurative about Korine’s mise-en-scene – or, perhaps, more accurately, his mise-en-abyme – as his camera adopts takes the same imitative approach, jettisoning any trace of ironic distance or detachment in the process. In fact, Korine’s camera goes further than his characters – in its hands, imitation isn’t merely a principle of human interaction but of the entire universe, harmonising the most unusual objects, spaces and atmospheres by way of their alchemical ability to imitate and generate each other. On the one hand, that makes for something generative and self-replicating about the film’s dialogue, which is always centrifuging around monologues of infinitestimal self-imitation, as the characters latch onto a phrase, tic or hook and see how many ways they can impersonate it. At the same time, the dialogue’s subsumed into the logic of music video, rather than film – specifically, the way music videos manage to make the most diverse, disjunctive situations feel like manifestations of a single pulse, rhythm or melody; after all, it was Michael Jackson who gave credence to music video as an art form, fusing animal, vegetable and mineral into a new kind of mimetic grace. It makes sense, then, that there are no song fragments on the soundtrack – every song is allowed to play out in full, as Korine treats each musical moment as the pretext for a full-blown music video phantasmagoria. And Korine ultimately includes himself in this imitative cycle, punctuating the main story with a series of music videos in the life of a transfigurative priest and pilot, played by mentor Werner Herzog, that feel less like a subplot than an actual short by Herzog interpolated into the film as an object of imitation and veneration – and there’s no better subject for Herzog's “dreams that allow us to find one another” than Michael Jackson.

De Palma: Sisters (1973)

Sisters was the first of Brian de Palma’s great reinventions of Hitchcock, meaning that it’s something of a mission statement, a new, plastic reading of the master for what promised to be the least euphemistic decade in sexual and cinematic history. Taking its cues from Rear Window, it revolves around a murder that appears to have been committed by Danielle (Margot Kidder), a recently separated Siamese twin, and witnessed by reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt). For the most part, the drama’s driven by Danielle’s shadowy twin Dominique, also played by Kidder. However, unlike the doubles that abound across Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Danielle and Dominique are offered as biological freaks as much as psychological abstractions – there’s a literalism at play here that devolves classical Hitchcockian suspense into emergent body horror in a quite original way. Among other things, that means that Hitchcock’s privileged narrative objects are refurbished as kitsch, divested of their cathartic potential; where, say, the glass of milk in Suspicion or the earrings in Vertigo act as repositories of dramatic tension, de Palma’s objects stubbornly and comically refuse to act as placeholders for suspense, even or especially when they’re integrated into suspenseful matrices. That makes for a kind of off-suspense, suspense that isn’t suspended consistently or concertedly; if Hitchcock excelled at suspending his mise-en-scenes across thought-networks and observation-networks, geometrical arrangements of sightlines and thoughtlines, then here those networks face significant interference from the bodies and objects that actually support them. And that’s not just a revisionist twist but the actual nature of Dominique and Danielle’s plight: having spent their whole lives occupying the same sightline, plugged into the same sensory-nervous system, their separation is too recent for them to suspend disbelief in their individual thoughts and perceptions. That makes suspense feel like a phantom limb that’s always about to corporealise, whether through sex, surgery, split screens or the Staten Island backdrop, which de Palma shoots as if it’s just been severed from Manhattan. In other words, where Hitchcockian suspense works by bringing things into visibility, here it’s suspense itself that’s brought into visibility – de Palma isn’t interested in the horror of what can’t be seen so much as the horror of a world in which there may soon be nothing left unseen, nothing left to even unsee, as all horror becomes somehow simultaneous, exhausting in its availability and banality.

Kubrick: Fear and Desire (1953)

Stanley Kubrick desperately tried to prevent his first feature, Fear and Desire, being seen, going so far as to seek out every available copy to ensure that it would be destroyed for posterity. In retrospect, that’s a little unusual, since there’s nothing especially embarrassing or even amateur about it. At times, it does feel slightly provisional, or uncertain, but that suits the story, which follows a group of four soldiers (Frank Silvera, Kenneth Harp, Paul Masursky and Steve Coit) stranded far behind enemy lines in an unnamed war. Most of the film involves them figuring out how to outwit the enemy and make their way back to their own camp, although it’s considerably more contemplative and surreal than that might make it sound. In part, that’s due to a series of poetic inner monologues, but it also reflects the way in which Kubrick anonymises the terrain, or at least prevents any clear allegories being drawn or disseminated. The soldiers are continually anticipating the end of things, but, at its strongest, the film suggests that the apocalypse may have already occurred, that we might be in the midst of the spirit world without knowing it. Perhaps that’s why The Tempest plays such a critical role in the film’s most notorious scene, as Kubrick follows Shakespeare in crafting a political allegory that only serves to make politics feel after the fact, part of a vanished world. If he’d started filming a decade earlier, chances are Kubrick would have cut his teeth on war shorts, so there’s also a sense that this has all somehow played out before, world without beginning or end. And, at only an hour in length, it pares back anything resembling a stable beginning or end - it simply emerges, which is quite a striking quality for a feature-length debut. Scored to the continuous muffle of distant explosions, and swathed in Lethean fog, it perhaps works best as a melancholy, hypnogogic mood piece, a rehersal for Kubrick’s more fully-formed mindscapes, his fascination with figures who can’t quite figure out if they’re experiencing their own mind or someone else’s.

Téchiné: Impardonnables (Unforgivable) (2011)

Based on Philippe Dijan’s novel, Unforgivable revolves around a group of French and Italian characters living in Venice – a writer, his daughter, his granddaughter, his lover, his lover’s friend, and his lover’s friend’s son. Although Téchiné takes his cues from Dijan’s narrative, it’s suffused with his own peculiar proclivity for unusual combinations and conjunctions of characters, his ability to take family dramas and almost imperceptibly queer them. Relationships emerge incidentally, almost subliminally, making for a shifting, evanescent tone that never quite crystallises into a thriller, but is somehow all the more unsettling and memorable for that. Certainly, Téchiné situates the story within a Venetian Gothic lineage – the writer is a Gothic novelist, and a great deal of the film involves him searching for his missing daughter among the ruins of aristocratic Venetian capital – but the claustrophobic streetscapes of, say, Don’t Look Now, are effaced by Téchiné’s decision to foreground the outer suburbs and islands over the more iconographic vistas. This is a city of lagoons, rather than a city of canals, which is not to say that that the inner city doesn’t play a critical role, but that it tends to have more of a negative presence, as a glittering line on the horizon, a place people commute to across wide stretches of water. In fact, it’s hard to think of a Venetian film that so viscerally captures the vast flatness of the landscape, the way water invisibly gives way to land, making it the perfect canvas for Techine’s textural tracking-shots, which tend to flatten macro-space and open up micro-space, tracing all the minute gradations that connect apparently disparate zones and characters. Among other things, that approach segues quite naturally into surveillance footage, and surveillance itself, as the characters perpetually watch and follow each other for minute thresholds in attitudes and experience that only Téchiné’s camera can fully capture. And that makes it peculiarly suited to his method of shooting his films as a sequence of semi-discrete shorts, the peculiar elasticity with which he distends scenes and the spaces between them. Like Venice, these characters live at the brink of submergence, while somehow also surviving it, reborn each time they sink a little bit further into the film.

McQueen: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Based on the 1853 memoir of the same name, 12 Years a Slave describes how Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freed man, was abducted in Washington D.C. and sold into slavery in Louisiana, where he worked for twelve years before managing to get word of his whereabouts to his family and friends. Without ever feeling historically inauthentic, it’s as visceral and immediate as if it were shot in the present, partly because Solomon finds himself abducted from the present and cast into the past, jettisoned suddenly and unbelievably from the progressive North to the regressive South, in one of the most disorienting openings in media res in recent memory. More generally, Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley pitch the brutality of the film at such a level that it can’t help but feel present – this is racism so horrifically accumulative that it can’t ever be satiated, not even a hundred and fifty years later. In part, that’s because McQueen refrains from the exploitation aesthetic of, say, Django Unchained, to present the living, breathing reality of an economy founded on slavery, capturing just how easily something so unbelievably horrific might become normalised under the aegis of political economy, touching every transaction with its terror. And, although terror abounds, it peaks at those moments at which Solomon finds himself at a pivotal point in the political economy of the nation and its plantations – it’s no coincidence that his one flashback is to his brief existence as a consumer. So, along with breaking ground in its depiction of slavery, it’s also one of the first films to seriously and systemically anatomise the economic organisation of the ante-bellum South – and its visceral genius lies in the ease with which the two come to amount to the same thing. As the film progresses, then, Solomon finds himself less and less able to believe in the value of impressing his captors with his various acquisitions, less and less able to believe in passing for white, until all he can do, when he’s finally reunited with his family, is to apologise for the very system that’s liberated him once again. And that generates an extraordinary reflexive impotence – the sense that things are unbearable but that there is simultaneously no alternative, least of all the vigilantistic fantasies of Django. Certainly, there is no alternative to be found from anyone white and, despite a supporting cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt, everyone white quickly fades into the remote distance – in fact, it’s impossible to be white and to experience it without shame, since this volatile vision isn’t here to reassure white audiences that things have changed, but to remind black audiences that they haven’t.