Donner: Scrooged (1988)

One of the darkest Christmas films of the 80s, Scrooged stars Bill Murray as Frank Cross, a misanthropic TV executive who won’t make any concessions to his staff for Christmas, forcing them to all stay back for a live telecast of A Christmas Carol instead of using prerecorded material. As the night passes, and Frank is visited by his own versions of the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, it becomes clear that the film’s anxious to dissociate Christmas from television, especially live television – yet, when Frank finally has his epiphany, he’s only able to share it with the world through the same live broadcast that conjured up the ghosts in the first place. Given that bind, the film searches for a new model of live television that’s true to the spirit of Christmas and, like Network a decade before, settles upon televangelism; it’s no coincidence that Frank’s final address devolves into a slightly crazed sermon. In many ways, then, it’s a film that’s quite conscious of its remediation, on television, as a Christmas movie, as well as the competition it’s likely to face from the kind of live broadcasts that Frank promulgates. By concluding with his televangelical conversion, then, it seeks to pre-empt and contain the visceral power of live broadcasts – for all its emphasis on the Christmas spirit, it’s competitive despite itself. And that makes it the perfect vehicle for Murray, who shines as misanthropes who don’t quite redeem themselves, or allow themselves to be tamed – Frank’s final sermon never quite rids itself of the manic excesses of his take on Scrooge, just as you can’t quite rid yourself of the suspicion that, despite his sincerity, he’s still sharing that sincerity in the best possible way to attract ratings. Conversely, Murray plays the whole film like it’s a live broadcast, in one of his twitchiest and most self-conscious roles: whether he flattens the camera with sheer energy, or deflates it with a knowing look or wink, he’s more anxious to be there, in your living room, than in nearly any of his other performances. In a strange way, that makes him the most immediate, insinuating Christmas hero since George Bailey – and it’s not a stretch to say that it’s as much an adaptation of It’s A Wonderful Life as A Christmas Carol; of all the ghosts, the ghost of Christmas future is the most chilling and memorable, if only because he feels like a natural extension of the film’s austere, cybernoir set design, harbinger of a dystopian Christmas future that’s almost already here.

Akerman: La Folie Almayer (Almayer's Folly) (2011)

At first glance, Chantal Akerman might seem like an odd director to address Joseph Conrad’s first and most intricate novel, insofar as she tends to jettison narrative intricacy, if not narrative itself. In her modified version, which moves the setting from the 1890s to the 1950s, Almayer (Stanislas Merhar) is once again a Dutchman living on a remote river in Malaysia, where he marries Zahira (Sakhna Oum), a Malaysian woman, and has a daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion). Although Akerman is quite fluid with the timeline, most of the film takes place after Nina has grown up, moved to the city to enrol in a Western boarding school and, finally, been ejected, at which point she comes back to live with her father on his decaying, melancholy property. While Akerman certainly removes many of the details of Conrad’s vision, her version is equally intricate in the way in which it dodges any straightforward or linear sympathy with Almayer: the film is continually decentering our perspectives and perceptions, forcing us to identify with characters who have no narrative voice, or whom we only experience in incidental and tangential ways, most of whom are related to Nina in some fashion. Nevertheless, that doesn’t quite suggest an alternative narrative so much as a different kind of narrative time buried within Conrad’s vision – the same distended, modernist time that made Akerman the perfect director to adapt Proust – so it’s striking that, like Conrad, she returns time and again to the river and the jungle, which becomes the interface between their two visions, the point at which they mingle, converge and contemplate each other. Great portions of the film are spent suspended on the water or moving through vegetation, since it’s only here that it really feels as if Akerman’s found something commensurate to the slowness and contemplation of her camera; every movement feels modelled on a few key shots in which objects and figures float, swim or row imperceptibly towards or away from the lens. That’s not to say that it mysticises the jungle and river in the same way as Conrad but that it exhausts it, exhausts anything you could project onto it, uncoils and disperses everything that Conrad himself projected onto it - like a map drawn in reverse, a river run backwards or, for that matter, most of Akerman’s other works, it proceeds by subtraction, colonising Conrad from the inside out.

Clark: A Christmas Story (1983)

At one level, A Christmas Story is an adaptation of the oeuvre of writer, radio presenter and raconteur Jean Shepherd, gathering a series of his most iconic anecdotes about growing up in late 1930s Indiana into an impressionistic, atmospheric Christmas period piece. However, given that Shepherd’s body of work was largely oral, that no two versions of the same anecdote were ever quite identical, and that Shepherd himself co-scripted and narrated the film, it perhaps makes more sense to describe it as an illustration, an attempt to imagine how Shepherd’s audience might have imagined the vivid stories he was painting for them on his radio broadcasts and college circuits. While it is nostalgic, then, it’s not quite nostalgic in the same way as a lot of other 80s period pieces – this isn’t a vision of the past made for the present, it’s a vision of the past made for people who still remember the past, however distantly or remotely. In other words, it’s essentially a radio play, or another one of Shepherd’s gigs, not hugely different from watching the earliest efforts of more contemporary stand-up comedians to cross over into feature-length film, except it’s less anxious to make the crossover convincing; the rambling digressions of Bob Clark’s direction and mise-en-scene are part of the charm. That perhaps explains why it wasn’t a huge hit at the time, but it also explains why it was a sleeper hit, since the essence of Shepherd’s anecdotes is that they were repeatable, and lent themselves well to familiarity, becoming more idiosyncratic and surreal even as they became ever more comforting. In that sense, it’s a film made for rewatching, rather than watching – however many times you see it, there’s always likely to be an anecdote you forget, just as you’re unlikely to ever quite recall the exact order of anecdotes; it has a malleability and elasticity that made it perfect for the early thrills of VHS rental, as well as subsequent twenty-four hour TV marathons.

Rouch & Morin: Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer) (1960)

A collaboration between documentary film maker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this unusual film is a critical document in articulating and theorising the texture of everyday life. It’s made up of a variety of segments, some directed by Rouch, some directed by Morin, encompassing staged and unstaged interviews, neorealist narrative segments and conversations with the directors themselves. In some way, the street interviews are the most haunting, shot through with the confessional spontaneity that comes in the midst of a crowd, while many of the staged interviews also aspire to feel shot in transit, in the brief space between shifts, the fugitive zone between working and sleeping. Not all the segments are equally compelling, but nor do they seem designed to be, since it’s precisely that heterogeneous quality that ensures that, when the participants are finally shown the final cut of the film, in the film’s last scene, they’re unable to reach a consensus – an inability that draws them into dialogue, creates a critical community, however momentarily. And so it feels as if the fragmented, piecemeal nature of the film is an invitation to its audience to disagree and, in disagreeing, to reconceptualise themselves as an audience; it is a film that demands participation, rather than spectatorship. As Morin himself puts it, in the concluding conversation with Rouch, “this film, unlike standard cinema, places us back into life,” and in that sense it’s also an injunction to sousveillance, a manifesto for a bottom-up sociology of everyday life in which an accurate account can only emerge, kaleidoscopically, if each citizen imagines themselves as both sociologist and subject, camera and citizen; it’s no coincidence that the final screening of the film models itself on Man With a Movie Camera. In its own way, then, its “chance encounters in Paris” are as self-reflexive as the most experimental and audacious of the New Wave auteurs, except where, say, Godard pursued an alienation effect, here we’re presented with something more like an immanence effect, a collapse of cinema into its own infrastructure in the name of the movie theatre as a revived and renewed public sphere, a venue for "people the audience could meet."

Clayton: The Great Gatsby (1974)

Jack Clayton’s version of The Great Gatsby downplays the thrills and excesses of the Jazz Age to focus on the novel’s quietest moments – the moments when Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) contemplates Gatsby (Robert Redford), or tries to imagine what Gatsby himself might be contemplating. It’s shot through with the  hushed naturalism of 70s Hollywood – the perfect register for a narrator who’s always just on the threshold of things, within and without, as Clayton collapses the whispered conversations and breathy voiceover of Francis Ford Coppola’s screenplay into a continual semi-interior monologue, in which Nick’s never quite sure if he’s experiencing Gatsby’s thoughts or his own. That’s the perfect register, too, for Redford’s presence – for the first half of the film, we only see him in silhouette, a shadow against a series of gorgeous Long Island compositions, collapsed into a series of spaces whose sentience muffle and mute the camera as it moves through them. In other words, it’s suffused with the same melancholy atmospherics as the greatest 70s surveillance dramas – Redford’s next role was in Three Days of the Condor – overseen by Gatsby’s panoptic, scrutinisng gaze, a watchful eye that never quite discloses what it’s yearning for. And that means that everything already feels eroded and somewhat evaporated by Gatsby’s eye – nearly every scene is shot in hyberbolic, iridescent soft-focus, silence made visible, to the point where the camera seems capable of extracting moisture from anything, covering any object with a fine sheen of bejewelled sweat. In the process, the narrative becomes almost extraneous, but it’s at those moments that Clayton’s vision matches Gatsby’s aestheticism, and especially his exquisite Long Island pastoral – if it’s not quite true to his vision as a novelist, it’s eminently true to his aptitude as a prose poet. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Daisy (Mia Farrow) ruptures this diaphanous naturalism so violently – where Waterston and Redford are so ambient they’re almost the same person, Farrow plays it as high melodrama, ripping through Clayton’s crinoline camera with a “vast carelessness” that single-handedly restores the anarchy of the Jazz Age to the mise-en-scene. But it just means that Clayton is as ambivalent about Daisy as the novel, a gesture that seems to have angered some critics at the time, but in retrospect is precisely what prevents the film from sinking flaccidly into Gatsby's fantasies – what keeps us poised at the very threshold of things, within and without.