Cuarón: Gravity (2013)

Six years in the making, Gravity explores what happens when a routine satellite repair job goes wrong. Apart from a few fleeting, radio transmitted voices, there are only two characters – Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a medical engineer, and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), an experienced astronaut – who have to make their way from one piece of space junk to the next, in the hope of encountering some way of communicating with or returning to Earth. While other science fiction films have included gravity free sequences, none have considered what might happen if the camera itself were also operating free of gravity with quite the same meticulousness as is displayed here. And, from the opening shot, it’s clear that Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lebzecki have embraced the fundamental paradox of shooting a film under gravity-free conditions – namely, that the very language of cinematic continuity depends on the discrete bundles of space opened up by gravity. Most immediately, that means that conventional editing doesn’t really make sense, since, in a zero-gravity situation, spatial orientation is relative, with the result that camera angles are also relative - and a great deal of the film’s terror comes from the inability, at key moments, to establish any schematic relation between the different angles and perspectives that are forced upon the characters. More dramatically, perhaps, in a zero-gravity situation, camera mobility doesn’t mean quite the same thing as it does on Earth. Or, rather, the film clarifies that the fantasy of the mobile camera was always a fantasy of zero-gravity – precisely what’s spectacular about cameras that break away from the constrictions of human mobility is the way in which they reimagine space as offering fluid, homogenous movement in all directions. In space itself, however, that fantasy is simply hard, physical truth, with the result that the film comes close to being composed of a single, unbroken take, but only because of the conditions it’s replicating. And in some ways, that’s precisely what’s terrifying about it – as soon as it becomes possible to even conceptualise a physical situation that you could actually experience from the perspective of a single, mobile camera, you realise that absolute continuity is not continuous in any recognisable, earthbound sense at all. In other words it's only the constrictions of gravity that make us feel mobile - without gravity, mobility, and camera mobility, ceases to exist. In its place, Cuarón presents something like camera motility, perhaps explaining why the only sequence set on Earth takes place largely underwater; there's an organic affinity between zero gravity and the camera that's quite terrifying when extended to us. Yet it’s precisely his willingness to surrender himself to camera motility that allows Cuarón to evoke the sheer extension of space, the inadequacy of 3D glasses, in a film that manages to feel shot on location, despite being devoid of any location.

Mizoguchi: Gion No Shimai (Sisters of the Gion) (1936)

In some ways, Sisters of the Gion plays as a companion piece to Osaka Elegy – it was made less than a year later, features the same cast, and also plays out at a little over an hour. Unlike Osaka Elegy, though, it’s set squarely within the walls of the Gion – Kyoto’s historical geisha district – and that tightened focus moves it away from the realist social commentary of Osaka Elegy towards the fatality and grandeur of high tragedy. In essence, it revolves around a pair of geisha sisters and their attitudes towards their profession – where Umekichi (Yoko Umemura) is traditional, and mindful of her obligations towards her patrons, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada) is more sceptical of her patrons, and more strategic in the way in which she handles and manipulates them. Both approaches lead to tragedy, and both beg the question of what it is that a geisha actually does, or is supposed to do, since Mizoguchi makes it clear that patronage is very much a thing of the past. In part, that’s because patronage depends on a patriarchal authority that’s entirely absent from Mizoguchi’s universe, perhaps clearest in the case of Furosawa (Benkei Shigonoya), Umekichi’s patron, who moves in with the sisters after he goes bankrupt, has all his possessions auctioned, and flees his family in embarrassment (none of the men in the film seem capable of approaching the greater gravitas of shame). Mizoguchi opens with a slow, extended pan past this auction, and uses the entire film as an opportunity to develop his tracking-shots as cool decimations of patriarchal authority, continually evoking perspectives and vantage points that supervene the father’s panoptic stasis and stability as head of the family. At some level, that grants most of the film’s mobility to women – unless they’re fleeing responsibility, in a burst of sudden, incongruous energy, men just tend to sprawl in one place, like drunk children. As a result, we rarely see a man move further than a single room, unless escorted or propelled by a woman – a scenario that’s brutally reversed in the film’s tragic conclusion. At the same time, however, movement isn’t necessarily easy for women either – they tend to be most elaborately blocked, constricted and compartmentalised by Mizoguchi’s mise-en-scenes, meaning that there’s an oblique ingenuity and opacity to their movement, much like that of Mizoguchi’s camera itself. And it’s the ingenuity that comes from being a geisha in a world without patronage – for all their differences, Umekichi and Omocho are forced to continually displace the impossibility of patronage, rather than seek patrons per se. That also means displacing the impossibility of paternal authority, the impossibility of husbands, perhaps explaining why’s there’s no standoff between geisha and wife as in Osaka Elegy – in Sisters of the Gion, geishas are wives, and wives geishas, and the film's greatest fear is that Japanese women are destined to become both. 

Mann: Thief (1981)

Thief was Michael Mann’s first cinematic release, but it’s shot through with his distinctive style in a remarkably fully-formed manner. In part, that’s due to his 1970s work on television procedural, which ensures that his narrative here is as clipped and efficient as possible, leaving ample space for stylistic experimentation and flourish. Like many of Mann’s procedurals, it could be described as neo-noir, except that it mercilessly excavates the soft-focus pastness of his contemporaries, instead turning to a kind of semi-futurism to prevent the stark loneliness of classic noir resembling anything like nostalgic consolation. In part, that’s enabled by its central character, Frank (James Caan), an expert safe-cracker and jewel thief who’s coerced, against his better judgment, into working for a larger criminal conglomerate. Frank has spent the better part of ten years in prison, and it’s taught him to have no belief in the future – having lost so much time, he’s learned that the only way to regain time, or to inhabit time, is to stop caring about it, to raise nihilistic disinterestedness to a transcendent pitch. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Frank explains this approach to a burgeoning love interest, Jessie (Tuesday Weld) – and his gradual movement towards caring about her, and caring about life, is the emotional kernel of the narrative. What makes Mann’s vision so powerful, then, is that Frank’s return to life parallels his integration into the criminal conglomerate – in fact, it’s the head of the conglomerate, Leo (Robert Prosky) who provides him with a suburban house, as well as helping him and Jessie adopt a child. As a result, caring about life comes to stifle his vision in much the same way as being beholden to the conglomerate, meaning that his transcendent nihilism lurks around the edges of the film even or especially when it seems most life-affirming. And, in stylistic terms, that means Mann’s nihilistic cityscape textures everything – in fact, Frank first explains his outlook to Jessie in one of Chicago’s iconic tollway diners, the city spread out in the background, as in so many scenes. Distilled to a series of exquisite, futuristic nightscapes in which the conjunction of metal and neon is almost sentient, it’s a city’s that’s already semi-autonomous from its citizens, just as the procedural details of Frank’s heists tend to become jettisoned, semi-autonomous from both the heists themselves and the narrative thrust of the film. At times, it's as if Mann's celluloid has become proto-digital, somehow discorrelated itself from the human eye in its recognition of a deeper, connection between itself and the various electronic devices and procedures with which it rapturously communes. In that sense, it’s a pre-apocalyptic film – every night is shot like it’s the last night on Earth, but it’s utterly devoid of the sublime expectation of apocalypse, just because it’s clear that this city will continue flickering away indefinitely, in the same way the film feels on the verge of transcending celluloid, or any other connection to the organic world. As Mann’s career progresses, his drive towards artificial, electronic light has dovetailed quite naturally with his recourse to the camera as a forensic device – and that tendency finds its foundational moment here, as exquisite cinematography becomes a tool for meticulously, crisply and clinically isolating what will survive all of us.

Mizoguchi: Naniwa Erijii (Osaka Elegy) (1936)

Osaka Elegy was one of the first sound films by a major Japanese director, and it very much plays as a proposal for a Japanese sound cinema. Elegant and economic in its vision of Ayako (Isuzu Yamada), a young Japanese woman who becomes a mistress to her employer to settle her father’s debts, it’s as much a demonstration of a new medium as of the hypocrisies of traditional Japanese misogyny. Or, rather, the two demonstrations amount to much the same thing, thanks to the way Mizoguchi remediates the role of benshi, professional narrator-entertainers who were considered an integral part of Japanese silent cinema. Most immediately, Osaka Elegy doesn’t exhibit the same incredulity at the sheer fact of the voice as early Western sound cinema – by Western standards, it’s remarkably unphased by its command of dialogue, proof that it wasn’t a matter of Japanese cinema arriving at sound belatedly so much as it being a sound medium all along. What would have been striking, then, to a contemporary audience, is the naturalistic gendering of the voices and dialogue – although a small proportion of benshi were women, their roles and performances were usually inflected through the stylised genderlessness of kabuki. However, not only does Mizoguchi contrast male and female voices, but, in collaboration with screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda, prioritises the female voice: most of the dialogue is devoted to women, while the expository burden of the benshi is deflected and distributed into a series of encounters in which women morph out of their supposed roles as vehicles of entertainment to expostulate on the shame and servitude of those roles. That might make the film sound monologic, or expository, but Mizoguchi’s compensation for the lack of benshi is as much architectural as vocal, as he cements and intensifies the elaborate blocking and framing that would become so prominent in his work, perhaps explaining why he considered this to be his first serious film. Nearly every sequence is framed by multiple planes and fixtures, while the camera glides so as to continually position walls, curtains, windows and other interfaces between us and the action – it’s as if the sudden presence of voices within the mise-en-scene has had a tympanal effect, or Mizoguchi has replicated the reticulated echospace of the theatre within the film itself. At times it’s positively noirish, especially when the crushing, cavernous darkness of the theatre is also projected onto Osaka's deterioriating cityscape – a cityscape that’s only enhanced by the subsequent deterioration of Mizoguchi’s film stock, and further devolution of women and neon into pinpoints of incandescent, self-immolating spectacle.  

Frankenheimer: 52 Pick-Up (1986)

Based on Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name, 52 Pick-Up revolves around Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider), a successful car manufacturer who’s blackmailed by a gang of criminals after they discover that he’s been having an affair that might jeopardise his wife Barbara's (Ann-Marget) plan to run for City Council. However, Frankenheimer more or less discards the narrative, relegating it to a series of broad, expository dialogues, instead using the film’s peripatetic scope to conjure up the connective tissue of Los Angeles, where it’s set – in other words, conjuring up Los Angeles itself, a city of connective tissue. From the opening scene, there’s a continual recourse to short segments that can’t quite be described as establishing shots, since they often elaborate tableaux and spaces that are extraneous to the narrative, nor as montage sequences, since they’re not procedural in any productive way either. Instead, they form part of the film’s fascination with the growing convergence of production and exhibition – the blackmailers are all associated, in some way, with the porn industry, with the result that porn’s continually foregrounded as the cutting-edge of closed-circuit cinema, an industry in which films are shot, developed and screened in the same space, often at the same time. As emulations of this closed-circuit aesthetic, Frankenheimer’s interstitial tone poems frequently take on a lurid, hyper-real quality – they feel part of the cityscape they’re describing, offering themselves as both venues and objects of perusal. That imbues Los Angeles with the emergent wonder of a developing polaroid, but it also collapses Frankenheimer's camera into the vast infrastructure that it so exqusitely curates, as it swirls up and down, dovetailing lateral and vertical perspectives, often twirling around some infrastructural detail in the process. It’s appropriate, then, that Harry’s car company is in negotiations with NASA, and that Barbara is running for City Council on the basis of her work on the Clean Air Commission – faced with a screenplay that seems to offer little scope for his signature car chases, Frankenheimer colonises the space between the car roof and the lower atmosphere as a new horizon of the American technological sublime, until being in a car, or just being in a city where cars outnumber citizens, opens up a galactic, hemispherical pornography of space, the desert beneath the streets.