Bergman: Sommarlek (Summer Interlude) (1951)

Many of Bergman’s early depictions of the Swedish Archipelago have a personal flavour, but Summer Interlude is his most autobiographical. Based on a brief love affair Bergman had as a teenager, it revolves around a ballet dancer, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), who returns to the Archipelago to recall her brief romance with Henrik (Birger Malmsten), a naïve college student. It’s not hard to see why Bergman considered it a  transitional work, since it effectively establishes his cinematic vocabulary for the next decade. However, it’s also unique on its own terms, suffused with a breathless, lovesick innocence that Bergman would never quite recapture – a romantic awe that continues to nurture new feelings and sensations, even or especially after the beloved has departed. In doing so, it provides the kernel of resistance that would allow Bergman and his characters to endure, for the next forty years, despite everything – it suggests the beginning of a more radical affirmation of life, the sheer will to live, than his earlier films, paradoxically by doing away with their need for happy endings. That also means a more radical affirmation of cinema – and while Bergman still feels most comfortable on the stage, the genius of Summer Interlude is that he finally manages to transform nature into his stage. At least, his camera animates nature in a new way, making unfilmed nature feel as inanimate as a stage – there’s even a short animated segment halfway through – as he choreographs the ocean into Marie’s ballet segments, which punctuate the narrative. And so the Archipelago is both dreamier and more merciless than ever before – for the first time, we’re encouraged to gaze down through “days round and lustrous as pearls” at the seabed, although when the glittering opacity of the surface does finally return, it’s fatal.  

Kaurismäki: Laitakaupungin Valot (Lights in the Dusk) (2006)

Like the other two films in Aki Kaurismäki’s Finnish trilogy, Lights in the Dusk is about a loser – Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) a security guard who finds himself swindled by nearly everyone he trusts, and ends up with nearly nothing. It sounds like a bleak story, and in some ways it is, so what’s most noticeable is the brightness of Kaurismäki’s vision – which is to say, the brightness of the Helsinki docklands and urban core, where most of the story takes place. On the one hand, it’s an industrialised, functional brightness – but, on the other hand, it does perform its function well, since it gives the film a certain optimism despite itself; the fact that it is a palpably plastic optimism doesn’t necessarily make it feel like a gesture of bad faith. Cheery as stainless steel, the entire city feels prefabricated, a series of preformed compositions and shots that Kaurismäki merely happens to capture – the film is already there, in the architecture of Helsinki, just as its loose narrative seems to tap into a series of free-floating cinematic tropes, characters and moments that are continually circulating around the city. As a security guard, Koistinen has a peculiar access to those shots – in effect, his job is to make sure the shots and compositions look right, as he patrols empty mall after empty mall, making sure every cubicle is organised and secure. At the same time, though, these spaces don’t quite make sense empty, since whoever or whatever has designed Helsiniki has well and truly factored in people as architectural accoutrements. As a result, virtually every character feels pressured to conform to a certain architectural, compositional optimism – a critical part of the design plan, they’re not exactly trapped, but they’re not exactly free either, and it’s in the brief beat between their prefabricated positions and their flickering autonomy that the film’s drollness lies. And it takes little more than changing the direction of their glances – momentarily snapping out of their off-camera stares – to unite Kaurismäki and Koistinen, director and security guard, in their efforts to out-monitor a city that threatens them with too much cinematic cheer.

Bergman: Nära Livet (Brink of Life) (1958)

Brink of Life tends to be overshadowed by The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, which immediately preceded it. However, in retrospect, it feels just as critical in the development of Bergman’s style as those films. Set exclusively in a maternity ward, and revolving around three very different patients, it’s an exercise in the kind of tortured, intense close-ups that would become synonymous with Bergman over the next decade. Nearly every surface is white – for all his love of chamber dramas, it’s Bergman’s first film to take place entirely inside – and the women are often shot horizontally, lying in bed, with the result that their faces seem to hover above blankness, suspended across the void. That makes for some incredible close-ups, to the point where a second face starts to morph out, a glimpse of the foetal, embryonic face that Bergman would attempt to capture in his next film, The Virgin Spring. Not only do these faces carry the burden of the whole body, they carry the burden of another face and body – they’re faces in labour, as the final birthing scene makes horrifically clear. And that makes it Bergman’s first film to really hone in on the peculiarities of the female face, and female facial labour. Perhaps that’s why there are so many pairings of female faces – just as the female face can give birth to another face, so Bergman delights in compositions where one female face seems to somehow contain or encompass another face. That makes it a clear antecedent of Persona, especially given the clinical setting - and if there’s any weakness, it’s that even the few appearances of male actors detract from the hypnotic communion between the women and their nurse, which garnered the four of them a single Best Actress award at Cannes.

Davies: The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

The Deep Blue Sea is an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play of the same name and centres on Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a 1950s London housewife who finds herself neglected by both her husband and her lover. For the most part, Davies’ adaptation is gestural, rather than psychological – he’s not especially interested in Hester’s inner life, or in what drives her to have an affair, so much as the way the affair brings out a new series of poses, or postures. The thing is, those postures remain as unsatisfied by the affair as by the marriage, gesturing towards some new way of being close to people, a form of togetherness that takes place outside of the marriage-adultery bind. In part, that’s because Hester’s – and Weisz’s - postures feel like an organic extension of theatre into cinema, prescient of the camera’s presence in a way that other characters and spaces in the film are not. To that end, Davies desiccates his mise-en-scenes until the camera feels positively corporeal, which corporealises Hester in turn, especially against the backdrop of the London streets, which take on the provisional theatricality of a soundstage, as if the hush just before the last bomb had settled and spread. And, as that might suggest, there’s a strong connection to Davies’ earlier period dramas – except that this is somehow both a period drama and a protest play, apocalyptic and nostalgic at the same time. You sense that what’s ultimately been killed by the war is the regularity or reliability of time, just as Hester finds herself unable to return to the pastness of her marriage or contemplate the futurity of her affair. Instead, she’s jettisoned in a new kind of present, the distended presence that Davies often associates with the discovery and apprehension of cinema. Yet this isn’t a straightforward discovery, or straightforwardly about discovery either. Rather, Hester’s yearning converges with Weisz’s performance in an elegy for cinema’s capacity to speak to inchoate, corporeal protest, protest that dwells in the deepest recesses of the body. As a result, Hester’s no more a character than Weisz’s performance is representational, just as we’re not finally presented with a film so much as an elegaic evocation of coming to cinematic consciousness

Kalatozov: Neotpravlennoye Pismo (Letter Never Sent) (1959)

The second of Kalatozov’s great collaborations with cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, Letter Never Sent revolves around a group of geologists exploring the remote Siberian Plateau. Their mission is to find diamonds for the Soviet government, but they end up fending for their lives after being caught in the midst of a massive forest fire. It’s presented as a cautionary tale, but it’s not warning against personal greed or natural exploitation so much as the dangers of neglecting the camera’s power in colonising new worlds. Building upon the extended sequences of The Cranes are Flying, Kalatozov and Urusevsky present the camera as a geophysical tool, or perhaps a geometaphysical tool – a fusion of fire and water that purifies the air before it and transforms the earth beneath it. Swifter than water and nimbler than flame, this camera doesn’t move through air so much as remove air, sending forth a vacuum to prepare its passage. In doing so it emits a different kind of space from the spaces it depicts – it is as if it carried a small pocket of outer space around in front of it (and the point of the diamonds is to provide funding for the Soviet space program). Among other things, that means that there’s no real middle distance in the film, as the foreground perpetually falls back into utter remoteness, often by way of precipices and shorelines, which drop suddenly to unimaginable voids. Suspended between fire and water – the film actually ends with fire suspended on water – the lens collapses cinematography into space exploration, making for one of the most cosmic, dynamic visions of Communism ever committed to film, a manifesto and blueprint for exploring the most distant reaches of the ideological universe.