Fincher: The Game (1997)

One of the most original thrillers of the 90s, The Game is about a wealthy, reclusive investment banker, Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas), who’s given an unusual present by his wayward brother, Connie (Sean Penn), for his 48th birthday. It’s a voucher for a game, and although Nicholas has to go through a whole variety of tests before he can enter, he’s never told what the game is – finding out the object of the game is the game, and differs from client to client. In other words, it’s a game that creates its own space each time it’s played, and as it progresses, it forces Nicholas into two quite distinct types of space. On the one hand, there’s the wooden, ochre interiors of his mansion and country club – deep recesses of oaky space, so old you can almost see the growth rings. On the other hand, there’s a series of cold, palatial, technocratic spaces, prophecies of the millennial financial district, where offices, floors and buildings are provisional, expendable and replaceable, changing at the blink of the eye. Alternating between these two spaces recalls the odd combination of noir and soleil that drove Se7en, but it also exudes the cold warmth that will crystallise into the peculiar properties of cyberspace later in Fincher’s career. In other words, The Game takes place at a fascinating juncture between the languages of noir and cyberspace, as Nicholas starts to glimpse a vast, virtual architecture, a second city that’s only commensurate to his paranoid imagination, his suspicion that every single person around him is acting. And that means that the film revives the vast, absolute loneliness of classical noir, even or especially as the game becomes less plausible, since it’s only then that we fully enter the space of the game, become part of a world that’s both separate from and somehow continguous with our own. It makes sense, then, that it’s set in San Francisco, a city so vertiginous that it seems to defy typical of notions of what space is – Fincher opens up vertical space at critical moments, while the film opens and closes with plummets that recall the avant-gamespace of Vertigo. It also makes sense that Douglas is cast as Nicholas, since part of the point of the film is that the corporate sensorium often evolves to fit new media and technology faster than the general population. As the face of that sensorium, there’s always been something avant-garde and revelatory about Douglas’ presence, and Fincher crystallises him into something like an avatar, at least while he’s in the game; watching and identifying with him is like navigating a sandbox city ten years before its time.

Cimino: Heaven's Gate (1980)

Set against the 1890s American range wars between cattle barons and immigrant landholders, Michael Cimino’s magnum opus focuses on the relationship between a baron-turned-sheriff (Kris Kristofferson), an immigrant-turned-baron (Christopher Walken) and a French prostitute (Isabelle Huppert). However, for the first half of this four-hour epic, there’s very little in the way of dialogue or even scenes, as Cimino opts to propel the action through ever-expanding mise-en-scenes. What little speech does occur tends to be oratorical and declamatory, while the few moments of dialogue are either cryptic or inaudible, drowned out by Cimino’s small country of extras. Meanwhile, the vistas get larger and more expansive, until it feels as if the Western horizon simply isn’t wide enough for Cimino’s camera, which has to periodically cram it with beautifully choreographed bodies and objects, as if increasing the surface area of a space meant increasing the space as well. In the process, the film generates that unbelievable, otherworldly ambition that doesn’t really exist outside of a small pocket of silent films – films that were conscious of creating an entirely new medium and, often, a new vision of history in the process. In fact, it’s no stretch to say that this could play as a silent film – everything is subordinated to the visuals (in many ways, it’s a film composed of establishing shots), while the love triangle is largely gestural, suffused with the peculiar innocence that even the most sinister relationships acquire under the silent lens; these characters are children, children of a new medium and its transformative moment in history. It feels right, then, that the narrative only really comes into focus in the final third, since it’s only then that we feel the full enormity of history that Cimino has managed to erect around it. And it’s a highly critical history – under Cimino’s camera, the horizons of Western mythology make their curvature felt, come full circle time and again. By the end, there’s no single standoff between oppressor and oppressed, but a series of concentric confrontations that centrifuges into a mobile abstraction of history itself, leaving little room for reflective distance or sympathetic involvement; the film simply folds you into its vortices. It’s not hard to see, then, why critics went to such extravagant lengths to write it out of history, but like Intolerance, Napoleon and the other films from which it draws its strengths, it's already refashioned the universe that might seek to expel it; some thirty years later, it hasn’t suffered a bit.

Kawalerowicz: Pociag (Night Train) (1959)

This extraordinary film has often been described as the Polish New Wave’s response to Hitchcock, and, on paper, there’s certainly something Hitchcockian about the premise: a man and a woman are forced to share a sleeping berth on an overnight train from Warsaw to the Baltic Sea, during which she starts to suspect that he may be a murderer. For the most part, though, narrative and character are largely extraneous to this mood piece. More specifically, the geometrical carriages of The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train couldn’t be further from Kawalerowicz’s project, which is one of the first films set on a moving train that feels shot on a moving train; in many ways, it is how a phantom ride might look if translated into a feature film. Most of the action takes place in the compartments and corridor of a single sleeper carriage, and most of the time the camera has to dodge at least three or four people to propel or even sustain the mise-en-scene. That might sound  claustrophobic – and it is claustrophobic at moments – but Kawalerowicz’s sinuous, silky sequence shots, usually accompanied by muted xylophones, subsume the camera into the momentum of the train; or, rather, subsume the train itself into its own slipstream and momentum, until it’s no longer a discrete space, but a bundle of movement through space. To that end, the camera tends to float just at the threshold of the train – there’s nearly always a window or a door open – while many of the crucial moments involve characters leaning, looking or climbing out of windows and doors as they move through the night. And, as the night progresses, the characters are also subsumed into their own slipstreams, and those slipstreams into that of the train, until neither the characters nor the train exist except as participants in a collective flux that the camera somehow manages to crystallise and consummate, in a kind of cinematic frotteurism. In the end, it’s hard to say whether it’s fulfilled or dispersed when we finally arrive at the Baltic – the representative limit of so many Polish films of this era – just because it feels fulfilled at the very moment of dispersion, like the tensile togetherness that moves through the audience when the film ends, but the lights haven’t gone up yet. 

Miike: Chûgoku no Chôjin (The Bird People in China) (1998)

In some ways, Takashi Miike’s reputation for ultra-violence has eclipsed his lyricism, perhaps explaining why this earlier feature has fallen out of critical circulation. By Miike's standards, it’s almost a children’s film, centred on a Japanese businessman and yakuza who make a journey to the remote Chinese hinterland to investigate a rich seam of jade. For the first half, the film plays as a tantalising travelogue, as Miike takes us through a series of spaces that are ever more lyrical and unbelievable, shot through with the peculiar exoticism of a Japanese director working in China. However, it’s not merely the subject matter that makes these spaces so memorable – from the first extraordinary montage sequence, Miike nurtures an awry porosity between his spaces and shots, meaning that spaces open up in unusual, unexpected and oblique ways, and interfaces emerge at the most unlikely moments and junctures. That creates quite an airy movement from shot to shot, which makes conventional montage and composition feel static and earthbound by comparison. As the travellers are forced into ever more exotic, elliptical and vertiginous landscapes, so Miike’s exquisite compositions give every space a precipitous edge, until it feels like you’re on the verge of jumping into the void with every cut; these are cuts that open up space, rather than constrict it. By the time the travellers – and the audience – arrive at their destination, the only option for moving forward is flight, and the rest of the film plays out as a kind of fairytale, as the travellers are distracted from their mission by legends of flying people in the area. That’s not to say that the issue of jade becomes irrelevant – if anything, Miike’s rich, green palette announces the seam of jade before the narrative does; in the later part of the film, in particular, it feels as if the lens is beaten out of translucent jade, imbuing it with an affinity for liquid surfaces that announces digital cinema as a new sensitivity to ambience, atmosphere, the air. And, like classical Chinese landscape painting, Miike’s digital camera offers a new kind of sky, a sky that’s no longer tethered to the earth, but surrounds and interpenetrates the earth, dissolving geographical boundaries into a syncretic, synthetic global community. 

Kaurismäki: Le Havre (2011)

For the most part, Kaurismäki’s drollness stems from a certain disconnect between his characters and his mise-en-scenes. Time and again, he focuses on drifters and losers who live empty, banal, squalid lives, but are forced to do so against bright, prefabricated backdrops that continually pressure them to conform to their fairytale co-ordinates. What’s striking about Le Havre, then, is that it is a fairytale – in this encounter between an old French shoeshiner (Andre Wilms) and a young African immigrant (Blondin Miguel) every conceivable complication turns out happily, meaning that it’s the first of Kaurismäki’s films in which the characters actually seem to live in the same world as their mise-en-scenes. That’s a bit of a double-edged sword: since those mise-en-scenes are palpably plastic in their good cheer, there’s also a certain plasticity and artificiality to the film’s optimism. As a result, the film’s possibly even more stilted than Kaurismäki’s previous efforts – it’s just that the stiltedness isn’t so much between the characters and their world as a principle of the world itself. That gives Kaurismäki the opportunity to hold his pauses, beats and blanknesses for longer than ever before, until the entire film takes on something like the archaic, elemental blocking and body language of the classical Western. And it feels like Kaurismäki is, ultimately, outlining something like a new frontier here – it’s reputed to be the first in a trilogy of films shot in major European port towns and, like in any frontier town, sympathies and affilitaions are more urgent than they might otherwise be, meaning that the degree zero of the film's plastic optimism is a quite robust, genuine sense of class solidarity, much of it revolving around the city’s country and western music scene. It’s proof that Kaurismäki’s backdrops were never quite offered in bad faith, and that his drollness always contained the kernel of a more generous, inclusive comic vision – and it’s that crystallisation that makes it such an entrancing and magical film, distilling his portside jukeboxes into the lonesome saloons they always evoked, in what can only be described as his first real comedy, in the richest sense of the word.