Ruiz: Klimt (2006)

Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt isn't really a conventional biopic, but it's so beholden to the artistic choices of its subject that it doesn't feel quite right to describe it as impressionistic either. Instead, this odd miscellany from the life of Gustav Klimt, played by John Malkovich, forms yet another chapter in Raúl Ruiz’s fascination with artistry that morphs between two and three dimensions, and between representation and decoration. Painting against the backdrop of the the symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, Klimt set pockets of vivid realism against slabs of tactile colour, drawing particular attention to the decorative materiality of his surfaces through his distinctive use of gold leaf. In an effort to capture this contrast on his own canvas, Ruiz starts by suffusing his mise-en-scenes with a flattening, gilded sheen, framing Klimt and his various lovers, models and patrons in the liquid reflections of yellow, mildewy mirrors, or amidst flurries of glittering, golden snow. However, just as Ruiz’s golden palette flattens and formalises his more realistic segments, so his pools of gilded light are shown to have a depth and distention of their own, as evinced in a bizarre twist, reminiscent of his 90s crime films, in which we’re taken behind his golden mirrors and introduced to a series of ambiguous, criminal figures that are somehow invested in forcing Klimt to relive and replay key moments from his paintings. It’s fascinating to see Ruiz set himself the challenge of imagining Klimt’s paintings as tableaux, only to try and pinpoint the exact moment at which those tableaux morph into decorative line, and his mise-en-scenes lose their three-dimensionality despite themselves. At times, it feels as if he is trying to recover cinema as a fin-de-siecle medium – it often recalls the ambient decadence of Time Regained – perhaps explaining why George Melies’ set designs play such a critical role in Klimt’s artistic evolution. And, as an argument for decorative cinema, an effort to put the novelty back into Nouveau, it doesn’t really matter that certain parts of the film feel functional, since it’s never any more than one component of an integrated interior design philosophy, best experienced adorning one of the lavish spaces that it describes.

Szabó: Oberst Redl (Colonel Redl) (1985)

The second installment in István Szabó’s Hungarian trilogy once again stars Karl Maria Brandauer, this time as the infamous Colonel whose counter-espionage proved so disastrous for the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of World War I. Szabó strays pretty far from previous understandings of Redl’s conduct, painting him as a devoted soldier whose homosexuality forced him to become a counter-agent to the Russians, as well as condensing his character study to the tics and nuances of Brandauer’s face.  From the opening credit sequence, which almost imperceptibly morphs close-ups and freezes of Brandauer, we’re presented with an extraordinary facial tactility and prehensility that’s only enhanced by the sterile austerity of Szabó’s mise-en-scenes, most of which tend to be lit by pinpricks of snowy light, and contoured by stark, stony bursts of speech or sound. In Szabó’s hands, Redl’s face reaches out and caresses other faces, or begs to be caressed by other faces, meaning that, on the one hand, it’s a poignantly, pregnantly homosexual face, but, on the other hand, it’s an eminently military face, moulding as it observes, scrutinising each soldier with an almost sculptural rigour. That's the nature of Szabó’s camera, too, which manages to be both sensually, meticulously exploratory and remote at the same time – it’s a camera that supervises, oversees and manages as much as it relays information; an agent of sensual surveillance. So it feels right that Redl is promoted to head of surveillance, where he becomes a pioneer of surveillance in his own right – nobody’s more qualified for the job, just because nobody in the military has spent more time or fastidiousness observing other soldiers. And the surveillance unit quickly becomes a way of displacing the attention Redl's flamboyant lifestyle was starting to draw by this point in his career, until his face becomes positively holographic, abstracting itself from its gazes as soon as they’re issued, much like military orders or commands. Szabó has stated that Redl’s homosexuality isn’t the point of his film, and it’s true that there are very few depictions of sex, but that’s also what makes it such a powerful evocation of how pleasure, or thwarted pleasure, produces history – in this account, World War I begins as soon as Archduke Franz Ferdinand remarks upon Redl’s remarkable, surveillant face.

Pasolini: Medea (1969)

Whereas Pasolini updated Oedipus Rex by bringing it into the twentieth-century, his version of Medea feels even more ancestral and remote than the play itself. In part, that’s because it’s directed at the myth, rather than the play – unlike Euripides’ version, the first half is centred on Medea’s homeland, and her life before she met Jason. In some ways, this is the most extraordinary part of the film, as Pasolini adopts a documentary, ethnographic approach, shooting on location amongst the anchorite communities of Goreme, Turkey, and devoting most of his attention to the rituals and ceremonies performed by his largely non-professional cast. Insofar as there are recognisable figures or moments from the myth, they’re more a matter of embodiment than characterisation – a mode that’s perfect for Maria Callas, who plays Medea, and simply puts on the role like an elaborate operatic costume. And it’s clear that, for Pasolini, embodying Medea means every embodying single iteration of her – the second half, which focuses on the more familiar story of Medea’s revenge, rotates through several versions of the same events, while Medea herself often feels more like a meeting-point for different mythological traditions, rather than a specific character in any one of them. Watching her is like watching a myth gradually take shape before your eyes – again, a perfect role for Callas – or like watching classical myth itself take shape, as Pasolini’s vision seems to be set at the very cusp of Greece’s separation from Asia, rather than against the urban, democratic classicism that’s more familiar to us from Euripides’ version. By the end, it feels less like an adaptation of Medea than an evocation of the earth from which all myths spring, as Pasolini’s landscapes becomes starker and starker, more and more primeval, as if to envisage how the world looked before myth conquered and transformed its surface. And that means that there’s something curiously undetermined and literal about the film’s image–objects – their pagan sensuality is suddenly available again, thousands of years later, for Pasolini to incorporate into the mythologies that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career.

Hudson: Chariots of Fire (1981)

Unabashedly nostalgic and sentimental, Chariots of Fire tells the true story of two British runners at the 1924 Olympics – Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a Scottish Christian, and Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), an English Jew. Whereas Liddell runs for God, Abrahams runs to overcome prejudice, with the aid of his irascible trainer, played by Ian Holm – and, while that all sounds very sympathetic on paper, the film tends to reserve its most transcendent, breathtaking moments for Liddell, while Abrahams’ cause is often collapsed into a more earthbound competitiveness. In any case, the tension between Christian and Jew is more or less subsumed into the tension between England and Scotland anyway – a tension that’s over before its begun, thanks to the sheer scope of the film’s Anglophilic ambition, as well as the depth of its nostalgia for sport as a quintessence of English etiquette. What does set the film apart then, and provide it with some much needed tension, are its depictions of running itself, which have probably never been bettered. In Hudson’s hands, Liddell, Abrahams and the entire British team don’t run across landscapes so much as bring landscapes into being – for them, running becomes a way of envisaging a new world, a world that’s so fleeting and visionary that it requires the utmost speed to keep up with it, even as it eludes total visualisation. As a result, the vistas that emerge around the runners feel quite synthetic and incorporeal, just as the cultivated compositions are always hovering on the verge of abstraction. Running here is both a visual sport, driven by such singularity of purpose that it envisages victory into existence, and a futuristic sport, an activity in which the future becomes peculiarly available and malleable. Perhaps that's why Vangelis’ iconic score works so well, and feels more foundational to the film than the direction or cinematography - as with Gallipoli, his montage sequences function semi-autonomously, as miniature works unto themselves. And from the moment his soundscape is introduced, against the backdrop of an astral beach, it accelerates the runners into a future that still hasn't arrived, transforming what could have been the most staid nostalgia film into a haunting, retro-futurist period drama.

Malle: Zazie dans le Métro (Zazie in the Metro) (1960)

Zazie in the Metro is an adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s 1959 novel of the same name – a novel that was considered unfilmable due to its dense, allusive word play. Malle’s adaptation follows the same rough narrative as Queneau – it’s about a weekend in the life of Zazie, a young girl who travels to Paris to spend a weekend with her cross-dressing, “homossessual” uncle Gabriel. However, Malle’s adaptation emphasises a particular contour of Queneau’s Paris – the strike that thwarts Zazie’s dream to ride the Metro – as if the best way to translate Queneau’s prose style into cinematic language were to paint a panoramic, comprehensive picture of Paris without the Metro. Most immediately, that explains the strange, dreamlike hyperactivity of the film – without the Metro to contain and satiate its passions, the Parisian crowd spills out into the streets in all its oneiric energy. More specifically, without the Metro, Malle has to work extra hard to make all of Paris feel propinquitous, a jump-cut away – and, like Queneau, his visual puns, jokes and gags tend to revolve around portmanteaux, tableaux that combine different spaces, or different versions of the same space, within a single frame. Watching it, then, is an odd experience – on the one hand, there’s something positively liberating about this release and return of slapstick and surrealist energies into an emergent New Wave cityscape, but it’s a liberation that’s dependent upon constriction, just as Zazie continually finds herself trapped or constrained by scenarios that just seem to enhance her hyperactive ambition. In other words, it’s something of a cinematic lipogram – Malle omits the Metro in the same way that Queneau and other members of the Oulipo movement omitted certain letters or words from their constrained compositions. More specifically, it plays as a cinematic Prisoner’s Constraint, an Oulipo exercise that involves omitting ascenders and descenders – without the rhythmic, quotidian ascent and descent of Metro stairs, the Parisian crowd burns with vertiginous, vertical energy, culminating with an extraordinary sequence shot on the Eiffel Tower. By the end of the film, it feels as if Malle has managed to denature celluloid in much the same way as Queneau denatures language – there’s a twitch, or glitch, to the hyperactivity that gradually discorrelates the camera from the audience’s eye (apparently there are several gags that are only visible at certain speeds) and imbues everything with a subtle, subliminal discontinuity that captures Paris in every single frame, if only because no frame is truly singular.