Dunham: Tiny Furniture (2010)

In some ways, the premise of Tiny Furniture isn’t that different from Girls – Lena Dunham plays a loose version of herself, struggling to cope after her mother cuts her support following graduation. The difference, in this earlier narrative, is that Dunham, or Aura, hasn’t moved out of home yet – in fact she moves back home, leaving her Midwestern university for her mother’s loft in TriBeCa, armed with nothing more than a film studies degree. Critics of Girls have complained that it celebrates the indulgences of the wealthy, and while there’s some truth to that, Tiny Furniture encapsulates everything about Dunham’s outlook that resists it as well. In part, that’s because moving back home to a wealthy mother - played by Dunham's actual mother, Laurie Simmons - really clarifies the growing financial-generational gap, even or especially among the wealthy.  And what makes Tiny Furniture so memorable and poetic is that it suggests that this difference in prospects has become so pronounced as to produce something like a Regency drama, a vision of precarity in the midst of privilege. It might be a bit of a stretch to say that it transplants Jane Austen to 2010s New York, but there’s the same urgent desire to leave the family home and move out into the world, as well as the same anxiety about qualification – except, in this case, it’s professional qualification more than romantic qualification, which, in true mumblecore spirit, tends to be dispersed and dissolved. To that end, Dunham envisages New York as a series of cramped Regency spaces – Aura’s continually clinging to fire escape balconies, and climbing through windows, navigating a pruned, cultivated universe that seems to resist her at every turn. Even when she’s outside, the camera hugs walls and corners, while the most expansive romantic encounter takes place in an aluminium pipe, light years from the establishing shots of Girls. It feels appropriate, then, that Aura’s family wealth stems from her mother’s photographs of miniature rooms, since the film exudes the cloistered claustrophobia of domestic space made over as exhibition space - that peculiar awareness, in a loft apartment, that every object has been meticulously positioned on the floor. Every single room feels like a piece of perfectly completed installation art, as Aura continually tries – and fails – to install herself somewhere, anywhere, in a perfect vehicle for Dunham’s slumped, downbeat brand of physical comedy.

Malle: Black Moon (1975)

One of Louis Malle's most experimental films, Black Moon opens with a young girl (Cathryn Harrison) travelling across rural France, fleeing what appears to be a war fought by transmission and radiation. She eventually takes refuge at a bizarre farmhouse, where the rest of the film plays out as a series of tableaux in the lives of its unusual residents (Joe Dallesandro, Therese Giehse and Alexandra Stewart). What holds it all together is the way this war, which is always in the background, appears to have brought human and animal sound onto the same transmissive plane. In the first ten minutes alone, Malle introduces  badger, snake, millipede, praying mantis, beetle and unicorn cries, while twisting and contorting human dialogue, with the result that human and animal sounds tend to converge on a series of glossolalic, operatic utterances, a typology of almost-language. To that end, Malle introduces sounds before the organisms making them – or listening to them – are presented, meaning that new sounds emerge in more or less the same way as new shots, scenes or images, as the main syntax and momentum of the film. That exquisitely evokes sensoria in which sound is prominent and precedes visuality, or at least sensoria in which sound is integrated with the other senses in different ways from our own. By the end of the film, it feels as if the skin itself has become a lingual interface, or speech is something that radiates out from the entire body, just as Malle manages to disaggregate ambience into all its component languages, all of which are revealed to be continuous with our own language. It’s the very definition of surrealism – surrealism as heightened realism, or naturalism – as Malle ponders what would happen if we could simply isolate every organic sound at any given moment. Perhaps that’s why it manages to be so lyrical as well – it was filmed on Malle’s estate and it’s clear that he loves its vistas, which periodically reaggregate or reconstitute all his disparate noises into beautiful, blue-green expanses of space, thanks in part to Sven Nykvist’s chilly cinematography. Like the best fairy tales, then, it captures the strangeness of nature in the most domestic and homely of spaces, and if it never quite embraces its magical overtones, that’s because Malle’s supernatural is just that – supernatural, an intensification of nature, rather than an escape from it.

Bergman: Skepp till Indialand (A Ship Bound for India) (1947)

With A Ship Bound For India, Bergman extends the theatrical naturalism of his first two features into a more fully-formed grotesquerie of human cruelty, by way of the impoverished Blom family, who make their living salvaging boats, and are torn and tortured by various decisions, demons and deformities. As in so many of Bergman’s later films, it presents the coastline as Sweden’s bleakest and most radiant vista, a glittering waste whose devolution of sparkling possibility into entropic nothingness cries out for cinematic capture. Yet it’s precisely that cinematic availability that seems to make Bergman ambivalent about it, perhaps because the seductions of cinematic beauty offer a false consolation untenable in the theatre. As a result, the film’s tension between theatrical and cinematic language plays out as a series of tensile mise-en-scenes, in which Bergman offers the spectacle of the water’s surface only to wrench it away again. That ambivalence extends to the salvagers themselves – on the one hand, they mercilessly excavate and demystify the seabed, but at the same time Bergman can’t quite refrain from elevating their labour to mythological proportions, as they occasionally glimpse a profundity that the film doesn’t seem inclined to condone; the dreamlike refraction of water on roofs and walls. It feels right, then, that we’re also presented with Bergman’s first vision of imminent blindness, as Kapten Blom receives a diagnosis quite early that sets the narrative in play. That subsumes the most exquisite shots into imminent nothingness, but it also elevates the most banal moments, since salvaging his last vessel, which happens to be the most decrepit, ghastly vessel he’s ever salvaged, becomes a summative act and spectacle for Blom - it has to crystallise everything he’s ever seen and everything he’s ever yearned to see. That perfectly summarises Bergman’s scepticism about the consolations of cinematic beauty, and perhaps accounts for his exquisite script, one of his most poetic as a screenwriter, which continually competes with his scenes and shots for aesthetic primacy.

Bergman: Det regnar på vår kärlek (It Rains on Our Love) (1946)

Like many of Bergman’s early films, It Rains on Our Love is about a pair of drifters. In this case, it’s David (Birger Malmsten), recently released from prison and Maggie (Barbro Kollberg), recently pregnant after a one-night stand. They’ve got little in common other than an inchoate yearning to arrive “somewhere” – and part of the power of Bergman’s vision is the way he manages to craft a narrative that doesn’t come from anywhere or go anywhere. It opens in a railway station and closes at a crossroads, while the first encounter between David and Maggie is too identified with the opening of the film to even be described as occurring in media res – it occurs in the middle of nothing, as we meet them at the exact instant they meet each other. As the film progresses, David and Maggi live out their love against transitional, transitory spaces, which prevents the stage-bound dialogue ever making the film feel theatrical, just because these spaces and sound stages are even more ephemeral and insubstantial than the theatrical stage. That recalls the B-noir developing in America at the same time – like so many noir characters, David and Birger live by night, desperately trying to put a dark past right, but confronted by bureacuracy at every turn, culminating with an infernal trial in which they’re accused by virtually every character they’ve tried to treat with dignity and respect. That makes for a fascinating combination of noir claustrophobia with Bergman’s nascent chamber aesthetic, but what’s most striking about the film is how vertiginously, even spontaneously, it oscillates between hope and despair. Perhaps more than any of Bergman’s other social realist dramas from this period, hope doesn’t feel like a straw man – it’s more than the mere canvas for despair. Instead, it feels like the film was written, and hoped, as it was shot – and the flipside of that hopefulness is a rawness and rage that’s quite surprising for those used to the supremely resigned pessimism and stylised existential angst of Bergman’s latter work. It makes for one of his most self-consciously political films – a protest film, really – and a materialist foundation to his later, free-floating angst. Even more extraordinarily, it produces something like a happy ending – certainly the happiest ending of any of Bergman’s tragedies – that doesn’t feel natural or allegorical so much as a sheer act of directorial will on Bergman’s part, perhaps explaining why he resorts to a supernatural avatar, who appears at key moments to expostulate on the characters, intercede in the drama and restore justice.

Arnold: Wuthering Heights (2011)

Andrea Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights is the first to cast a black actor in the role of Heathcliff (James Howson), reframing the story – which, like most adaptations, omits the second generation of characters – as something of a displaced slave narrative. Perhaps the most powerful result of that post-colonial twist is that it allows Arnold to bring out the sheer strangeness of Bronte’s Yorkshire in a quite original way – from the very first sequence, the moors feel as if they’re more remote than the most distant colonial outpost, or wherever it is that Heathcliff is from. In part, that’s due to the stark, brittle shooting style, which is almost Dogme in its austerity – apart from the closing shot, there’s no music, and hardly any speech, as Arnold seems prescient that it won’t work with a writer like Emily Bronte to simply transplant dialogue to the screen, or resort to dialogue at all. Similarly the camera’s nearly always in chaotic, handheld motion; it feels as beholden to wind as to light, buffeted from one barely glimpsed vista to another. Among other things, that means that we’re never allowed to repose upon the moors as a panoramic spectacle – in fact, their expansiveness is so monotonous and monochromatic that it ceases to ramify spatially at all, and becomes positively claustrophobic as Arnold fuses it into a single, oceanic abstraction. As a result, it’s Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) and her family, rather than Heathcliff, who feel alien – and, although that means that Heathcliff is very much the protagonist, it doesn’t seem like we’re meant to sympathise with him in a conventional psychological way. Instead, our identification is more visceral and tactile – in a stark riposte to the deep-focus long takes of Wyler’s 1939 version, the camera rarely strays from close-ups of Heathcliff’s face and body and, when it does, tends to include him in the blurred foreground. That makes focusing exhausting – gaining visual traction – and beautifully evokes the shock of Heathcliff’s eyes and body at his new landscape, even as it abstracts and bleeds him into the wild air, clearest whenever his communion with Catherine is strongest. And that zone between Heathcliff and the air is where the film’s drama occurs, where it feels most universal. Combined with Arnold’s grotesque botanical and zoological interludes, halfway between a bestiary and a memento mori, it conjures up some vast, ecological drama, of which Heathcliff and Catherine’s romance is just one oblivious, tortured moment.