Ceylan: Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011)

The sixth film from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is divided into two semi-distinct parts. In the first part, a group of policemen and other officials drive around the denuded foothills of Anatolia, in search of a buried body. In the second part, they recover the body and remove it to the nearest police precinct, where it’s prepared as a piece of evidence. In other words, it segues police procedural into bureacratic procedural, presenting procedural as the bureaucratic genre par excellence. And, with little faith in bureaucracy, it plays, quite oddly, as a procedural deliberately made in bad faith, a concerted evacuation of procedural pleasure. That’s perhaps clearest in the interminable search for the body, which takes up the majority of the film, as Ceylan mines the inexhaustible monotony of the Anatolian foothills to present something like a procedural topology before any of the details, nuances or contours have been filled in. Every place is the same place and every shot is the same shot – it often feels as if it might all be shot on the same short stretch of road – while the landscapes feel entirely synthetic, isomorphically compelled by Ceylan’s digital camera. Although the dialogue’s been lauded for its ellipses, it’s perhaps more striking for its similar procedural emptiness – everything feels dictated, making for a very smooth transition to the second part of the film, where the screenplay consists largely of official dictations of the coronial examination and autopsy, building to a gruesomely clinical conclusion. Everything moves across this procedurescape with the same uniformity – people, cars, siren lights, falling apples – and yet the film never quite settles into ultra-long takes or extreme slowness either; Ceylan brings procedural as close to abstraction as possible while remaining procedural. And that’s what finally poises the film at the mind-numbing tedium and frustration that attends all bureaucratic work, in a rare procedural that feels made for the people and situations it actually depicts. 

Dardenne & Dardenne: La Promesse (The Promise) (1996)

Before The Promise, the Dardennes had largely confined themselves to documentaries, and their breakout feature is more a distillation of documentary than a departure from it. Based on many of the themes and figures of their earlier works, it centres on the plight of undocumented workers in the Belgian town of Seraing, and how it impacts a young Belgian boy and his father. At one level, it operates as a surrogate documentation, a straightforward depiction of people who are officially invisible or non-existent. However, the Dardennes strive to evoke the conditions for labour as much as the conditions of labour – their mobile camera segues into the wind corridors of Seraing to beautifully embody the kinetic flux from which all labour emerges and into which all labour returns. As a result, there’s something powerfully undifferentiated about the film’s vision of labour – keeping their narrative loose and their cinematography blank, the Dardennes make it impossible to extract the labour of any one actor or object, leaving no place for the eye to settle or call home. It’s as if the moment at which labour recognises itself as such is already an alienated moment, even as it enables self-knowledge. And that paradox produces a kind of self-immolating labour-image: caught between imaging labour and participating in it, documenting and undocumenting, the film’s never quite a film, or never quite exclusively a film. And that, in turn, is what offsets its apparent pessimism – there’s a confidence, here, that the amount of labour-power in the universe is constant. It might be transformed from one form into another or transferred from one party to another, but those processes are mutable and reversible. Converting their film into something else, then, allows the Dardennes to release a quantum of labour, the sparks of a welder, turning Seraing into a fleeting portal to the vast labour-power of the cosmos.

Chabrol: Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women) (1988)

A rare period drama from Claude Chabrol, Story of Women is based on the life of Marie-Louise Girard, who performed almost thirty abortions during the French Occupation, and was subsequently guillotined. It’s an unusual period film, in that’s it’s largely devoid of period detail – although it moves between a number of different social stations, the backdrop always feels drab, unglamorous and functional, and never exceeds a small collection of rooms at a time, all of which feel more or less interchangeable. That’s appropriate, though, for a drama about occupation – with the streets continually patrolled, monitored and curfewed, the sense of outside tends to vanish in an occupied country. More pervasively, period detail is precisely what an occupation is designed to remove; a country can’t make over another country in its own image without anonymising it somewhat first, reducing it to a certain blankness and formlessness, perhaps explaining why the film itself is considerably less stylistically flamboyant than Chabrol’s more canonical works; his camera does little more than occupy space here. And that’s the perfect mode for Isabelle Huppert’s performance of Marie, which is one of the most opaque and inscrutable in her career. Speculations on whether Marie was a feminist or a mercenary dissolve in the materiality of Huppert’s face, which rarely changes or modulates, as Chabrol meticulously refrains from assuming why a woman might choose to have or facilitate an abortion. In doing so, he transforms Huppert into a object lesson in the ambivalences of collaboration – it’s genuinely unclear whether Marie was assisting France or Germany by aborting the children of absent French soldiers and transitory German lovers (and Marie herself certainly doesn’t know). What is clear is that the trial and execution, as Chabrol presents it, is completely devoid of moral sentiment: it’s a bureaucratic gesture, a way of making a public statement. And that suddenly makes the film contemporary, makes the lack of period detail feel right, as Chabrol evokes a moment of bureaucratic disavowal that hasn’t properly passed, a collaborationist past that continues to haunt the present.

Ingster: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Stranger on the Third Floor is a fascinating comparison between what it means to be a screwball eyewitness and what it means to be a noir eyewitness. It opens in screwball mode, with fast-talking reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) providing the key testimony in a high-profile murder case. Within this comic, conversational universe, Mike is absolutely certain he has identified the right man. Upon returning to his apartment, however, he encounters a mysterious “stranger” (Peter Lorre) who seems connected with the murder in some way. As night falls, it becomes clear that the stranger is the killer and that he's somehow managed to distort Mike's perception of the crime scene. It’s at this point that Ingster introduces the distorted perspectives of classic noir, turning the apartment complex into a forerunner of the great noir cityscapes of the 1940s. Although the stranger’s power is never clarified, it feels as if he’s somehow managed to erect an alternative, dystopian city between his crimes and their eyewitnesses. In order to catch the stranger, then, Mike has to traverse this alternative city – and that’s risky, since it means subsuming himself into its compositions and sightlines, until he finds himself accused of the very murder he witnessed. Meanwhile, the stranger largely eludes the camera, hovering around the fringes of perception like Lorre’s performance in M. As that might suggest, it’s as much late Expressionism as early noir, shot through with an almost supernatural terror – by the end, it feels like noir xenophobia is just an indirect response to the strangeness of this new city, and the self-strangeness of anyone who spends too much time in it. And that means that noir emerges as a late flowering of silent cinema, a return to silence after the cacaphonous conversations of screwball, the sound genre par excellence. It’s no coincidence that Ingster’s noir schemes put an end to dialogue, relegating it to flashbacks and dream sequences, as Mike’s’s tortured inner monologue propels the rest of the film. In doing so, it conflates strangeness and silence – it’s precisely Lorre’s silence that makes him strange – until the noir city emerges as a new kind of hush, a silence beneath the silence of the everyday city, that’s even more stifling than the silence of silent cinema, because it comes after the revelations of screwball sound.

Rohmer: Conte d'été (A Summer's Tale) (1996)

The third of Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons revolves around a young man, Gaspard (Melvil Poupard), holidaying at a seaside resort in Brittany, where he becomes close to three very different young women (Amanda Langlet, Gwenaelle Simon and Aurelia Nolin). It’s ostensibly about Gaspard choosing which woman he wants to romance, but Rohmer seems more interested in diffusing the space between friendship and romance – and it becomes more diffuse as the film progresses. In part, that’s because Rohmer structures it as a series of loose, lazy walks – you can really feel his influence on Linklater – as the characters explore every coastal path, or every path with a view of the coast, in the area. Although their conversation keeps coming back to love, they’re almost equally obsessed with the deep history of Brittany, especially the arrival of the Celts and the departure of the Newfoundlanders. And that obsession with the coast as a point of arrival and departure is beautifully accentuated by Rohmer’s trademark use of diegetic light and medium shots – they work to evoke the sheer circumambience of the ocean, which always feels present, even when we’re inside. In fact, it clarifies the affinity between Rohmer’s camera and the ocean - Rohmer already shoots space oceanically, which means that the ocean radiates out into every space; it feels like the object of every shot and the destination of every walk. In some ways, then, it would work best shot entirely on the water (it opens and closes on a boat), were it not for Rohmer’s unique combinations of walking and talking, which bob with an ebb and flow all of their own. In any case, the tide recedes as the film progresses, so that by the end the coastline and ocean have collapsed into a limitless beach anyway – an ambling, abstracted ambience that extends in all directions, fusing the magic and melancholy of travelling alone with the magic and melancholy of a brief, barely formulated love affair.