Bergman: Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) (1953)

Many of Bergman’s early films revolve around the lost hopes and dreams of youth, and Summer With Monika is no exception – it’s about a young working-class couple, played by Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg, who retreat from Stockholm to the Swedish Archipelago, where they live out a blissful summer before being forced to return to the city and its constraints. What sets the film apart, and turns it into something of a transitional piece, is the lyricism and naturalism of its vision – there are very few films in Bergman’s body of work that present nature as optimistically and romantically as occurs here. Admittedly, that makes the return to the city even more startling – it feels as if Bergman has made his romantic vision purely for the purpose of forsaking it – but the lyricism’s not incongruous with Stockholm either, even at its bleakest. In part, that’s because Bergman makes so much of the connective tissue between the city and the Archipelago - around half the film is shot from the water, surrounding everything with a erotic sheen, while the journeys in and out of Stockholm are particularly spectacular. At the same time, Bergman evokes a slight bleakness around the edges of the Archipelago itself – for all his summery, tranquil montage sequences, there’s a residual starkness that anticipates the arrival of winter, however distantly; an ever so vague presentiment of the allegorical landscapes of The Seventh Seal and the oneiric landscapes of the Silence trilogy. Combined with the neorealist sensitivity to Stockholm evinced in the opening segments, that means that it’s only by returning to the city that the couple manage to feel the full import of the landscape they’ve left behind. And that represents a significant step in Bergman’s chamber dramas – the moment at which his chambers become truly agoraphobic, by managing to distill the outside world to its most elemental, expansive and cinematic. It’s appropriate, then, that it’s also one of the most self-reflexive of Bergman’s films – along with a series of direct stares to camera that well and truly break the fourth wall of his earlier, more theatrical works, the whole return to Stockholm is initially motivated by the couple’s yearning to revisit the American film of their first date. That obviously enhances the bleakness, especially since they’re not actually able to afford to see the film once they do return, but it also subsumes it into a wider New Wave yearning to reimagine Europe in the light of Hollywood cinema, perhaps explaining why Godard championed it as Bergman’s masterpiece.

Spielberg: Munich (2005)

Spielberg’s first historical drama since Saving Private Ryan, Munich is a dramatisation of the Israeli reprisal attacks in the aftermath of the Palestinian massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told from the perspective of Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a loose version of Yuval Aviv, the supposed co-ordinator. Like most of Spielberg’s films, the moments of overt soul-searching and reflection are largely confined to what it means to be a good father – or a good son – while Israel’s more or less literalised as the mother country, just another player in a pretty familiar family drama. What sets the film apart, then, are its extraordinary procedural segments, as Kaufman and his team track the Palestinian perpetrators across a bewildering array of European cities. That might seem to suggest a film that also functions as a historical travelogue – except that there are virtually no depictions of travel, or of the team’s movement from city to city. Instead, new cities just appear, semi-distinct, shot through with the anonymity that the team is so anxious to preserve. On the one hand, that means that they come to embody the most precarious cusp of Jewish diaspora even or especially as they’re fighting for their homeland, but it also gestures towards a world in which all citizenship is on the verge of becoming diasporic, since their search for the Palestinians overlaps quite naturally with the more general information economy of the late Cold War, “a world of intersecting secrecies.” In other words, the Israeli team are yearning for a nation state in a world in which the nation state is on the verge of dissolution, giving their mission a peculiar poignancy and timeliness. That may also be why their ideological mission continually collapses into a kind of spectacular mission – as Kaufman present it to them, they’re not simply avenging the Israeli Olympic team, but trying to reclaim terrorist spectacle back from the first internationally televised terrorist attack, as well as the way in which it was immunised by the spectacular infrastructure of the Olympic event itself. As a result, Spielberg’s depictions of the various reprisal attacks – which take up the majority of the film – are shot through with a mesmerising, stylised glassiness that’s light years away from the hand-held grittiness of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Suffused with fluid, elastic sightlines, these poetic sequences make it feel like the terrorists are faced with the impossible task of mounting their attacks behind glass, for all the world to see, while managing to elude their crystalline reflection.

De Palma: Obsession (1976)

Obsession is Brian De Palma’s great tribute to Vertigo, developed from a screenplay by Paul Schrader that relocates the film to 1959 New Orleans and 1975 Florence. However, Schrader has repeatedly disavowed the film, on the basis that De Palma cut most of his screenplay, and that’s not hard to believe, since there’s very little screenplay at all – the film’s fantasy is that Hitchcock didn’t need screenwriters, and that De Palma’s inheriting a mantle of undistilled auteurism. That makes for a burnished sense of purity and purpose, a vision of how Hitchcock might have looked if his entire post-1959 career had been dedicated to refining and distilling Vertigo – a film, in other words, that consists of little more than tracking shots and trailing sequences, a gesture of obsession as much as devotion. In some ways, that does away with any need for narrative momentum, and that’s probably a good thing, since, for anybody who’s seen Vertigo, the narrative twist is pretty clear from the outset – unlike most of De Palma’s other Hitchcock homages, there’s really one one film being referenced here. More strangely, it does away with suspense – or, distributes it equally across the entire film, meaning that everything feels suspended, distended across a dream. Scenes that aren’t actually shot in slow-motion are always on the verge of slow-motion, while every scene continually feels as if it’s just beginning and just about to end.  That sense of emergence makes for some of Hitchcock’s most powerful moments – the dawning of a revelation that has somehow already occurred – but it’s quite unusual to see it extended into such sustained canonical reverence; watching it is a bit like seeing Hitchcock enshrined in the stately classicism of Louisianan and Florentian architecture (at a time, incidentally, when Hitchcock himself was still actually working, and had just shot Family Plot in San Francisco). If there is any auterist concession, it’s in the way De Palma calls upon Bernard Herrmann, whose score is more continuous than in nearly any of Hitchcock’s films, and as architectural as De Palma’s direction – it provides a continual cloister within which Hitchcock can be contemplated and worshipped. And it’s here that things come full circle and we start to glimpse Schrader’s film – the true double that haunts the narrative – as a kind of reimagining of Hitchcock as a transcendental director, spiritually akin to Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, whom Schrader had tackled academically some years before. In that sense, it’s a true canonical gesture – it eternalises Hitchcock and, in doing so, transfigures him, but with so much conviction that it’s hard not to believe, momentarily, that this is the Hitchcock we’ve always known and loved. 

Mizoguchi: Utamaro O Meguru Gonin No Onna (Utamaro and His Five Women) (1946)

As Mizoguchi’s first film made during the American Occupation, Utamaro and his Five Women clearly couldn’t continue in the patriotic vein forced upon him by the war effort. At the same time, the aftermath of defeat wasn’t exactly the right time for the searing critique of his 1930s films either. As a result, Utamaro is one of the most comic, casual and autobiographical films in Mizoguchi’s career. As an anecdotal look into the life of the great printmaker, it’s got a cosy, domestic view that lends itself to multiple, partial viewings - or viewing by an expatriate American audience, since the visual language comes closer to Hollywood than any of other Mizoguchi’s other films, perhaps clearest in the preponderance of forward pans, which make his world more accessible, and take us deeper into his mise-en-scene, than would ever be permitted again. As with The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, the recourse to a male protagonist expands Mizoguchi’s perennial geisha narrative into the narrative of an artist’s growth – geisha, after all, simply means artist – except that this film’s considerably more optimistic about what it takes to achieve artistic satisfaction. Perhaps that’s because the parallels between Mizoguchi and Utamaro are so marked – in many ways, Utamaro’s defence of printmaking against painting simply plays out the defence of cinema against theatre a century earlier. Like cinema, printmaking’s presented as a mass-produced, populist, realist genre, strongest (at least according to Utamaro) when it’s black-and-white, if only because that allows its greatest asset – sharp, precise lines – to really shine. Moreover, Utamaro insists that printmaking means a new opportunity to realistically represent women, and in fact moves between printmaking and tattooing, directly inscribing his designs on the skins of his muses. And it may be that Mizoguchi’s slightly more exploratory, forward-moving camera represents his own movement from cinema to tattooing – although we’re brought closer than ever before, it’s still not that close, just enough to penetrate the upper layer of the skin. The flipside of that, though, is that there’s very little of the masterful mise-en-scene of his 1930s films, meaning that his affinity with Utamoro’s command of line and depth is not especially evident in this tribute to him. That said, Mizoguchi does draw on Utamoro’s command of the floating world to capture a lyrical rapture in nature that’s quite alien to his earlier social realism, as streams, forests and gardens abound in mystical energy – at one point the camera follows geishas underwater – gesturing towards the dream-worlds of Sansho, Ugetsu and Oharu.

Mizoguchi: Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum) (1939)

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemum is a late nineteenth-century period piece that examines the tragic relationship between Kikunosuke (Shotaro Hanayagi), an aspiring kabuki actor, and Otoku (Kakuko Mori), a servant. As might be expected, it’s a romance that produces enormous suffering and resignation, but that’s also what allows Kikinosuke to finally triumph in what the film conceives as the most difficult and complex of all kabuki roles – that of the geisha. That’s an unusual education, since kabuki actors aren’t traditionally encouraged to sympathise too much with their roles - but, then again, Kikunosuke’s no ordinary actor. It’s clear that he’s too naturalistic – or cinematic – for the kabuki stage, but he’s also a little too theatrical for the film: not only is he the only character who continually appears in make-up, but Hanayagi was himself a kabuki actor, and his stylised face never quite gels with the rest of the cast. Too theatrical for cinema, and too cinematic for theatre, Kikunosuke and Hanayagi are merged into a ghostly space where cinema and kabuki can contemplate each other, resulting in one of Mizoguchi’s most inventive films to date. Most shots last at least a minute and, while there’s a great deal of camera movement, it’s always lateral, never puncturing the plane that separates us from the action and rarely venturing closer than the middle distance. At most, the camera rotates on its axis, but for the most part it’s as self-effacing as it is ingenious: there’s no phallic exhibitionism on display here, no gendering of the camera as inquisitively or intrusively masculine. As might be expected, that produces quite a sublime aesthetic, but it’s a different kind of sublimity, say, from the stillness of high Ozu. With Ozu, you sense that the camera’s contemplative stillness takes its cues from what’s happening in the scene, whereas here that stillness feels more contained by the camera, and much more extrinsic to the vulgar, vernacular details of the scenes playing out before it. In that sense, Mizoguchi anonymises and universalises the particulars of his mise-en-scene in much the same way as kabuki; it is as if the camera has put on a kabuki mask, and cinematic perception has been overlaid with kabuki perception. That enables a twofold appreciation of every shot – first, as an overwhelming collection of cinephilic particulars, thanks to Mizoguchi’s extraordinarily complex, deep-focus compositions; second, as an exhaustion of those particulars at the hands of his equally extraordinarily long shots. It’s a magical alternation that consolidates his achievements of the 1930s and paves the way for his great films of the 1950s, finding in the kabuki mask a way of collapsing the suffering of geisha into an even more universal suffering – the suffering of artists.