Merhige: Begotten (1990)

Begotten attempts nothing less than to recapture the peculiar horror and uncanniness the very earliest silent cinema might have offered to its audiences. A largely abstract, ambient film, detailing the ritualistic birth and death of some kind of supernatural being, it's as much a work of sculpture as of cinema – Merhige apparently spent at least an hour on each frame, and the print is so evocatively manipulated, handled and distorted that it’s often hard to tell where image ends and glitch begins (in some ways, it feels as if the exhibition and inspection of the print itself is an integral part of the experience). Apart from capturing the enormous affinity between silent cinema and occult ceremony – watching it is a bit like reading viscera for signs – it conjures up a time when the gap between celluloid and human perception was so great that cinema wasn’t yet a predominantly realist medium. At least, it often feels like an attempt to think through the perception of people before they had cinema to deflect and direct their sense of reality – as well as their capacity to dream, since the images only feel capable of being seen in the same way as images in a dream can be seen, as projections on the back of an eyelid. Released in 1990, it might be argued that it’s ahead of its time in the way it anticipates found footage horror, except that it remains innovative in the way it treats all silent cinema as found footage – insofar as there are references to later silent cinema, it’s as an unrestored medium, just as Merhige works to unrestore our familiarity with the body, taking us back to those earliest films when all its familiar positions, postures and movements were learned anew. 

Luhrmann: The Great Gatsby (2013)

Baz Luhrmann is more a master of anachronism than adaptation, conjoining canonical texts and traditions with everything that might seem incommensurate with them. That incommensurability has always had a spatial component, but it’s perfected in The Great Gatsby, which alternates mise-en-scenes cluttered with an unimaginable number of visual planes with mise-en-scenes dominated by single, monolithic, remote visual planes. In both cases, there’s almost a sense of depth perception, but not quite, making for something like 2.5D cinema – it looks too sculptural to be 2D cinema, but too flat to be 3D cinema. That’s peculiarly appropriate for a novel that’s perpetually poised at the breathless cusp between inside and outside – “once again, I was within and without” – meaning that the more anachronistic the film becomes, the truer it actually feels to Fitzgerald’s particular brand of romanticism, as if to suggest that anachronism has become the only authentic way to reflect upon our disconnection from the past. And it’s that odd fidelity that makes it Luhrmann’s most audaciously romantic film since Romeo + Juliet – swathed in gorgeous, pastel crepuscularity, texured by glints of impending or receding warmth, everything gleams with the transitory fragility of early dawn and late dusk. That’s not to say it’s exactly warm – in fact, it’s shot through with the peculiar coldness and emptiness of “a man with nothing but a grand vision.” But there’s something immersive and cushioning about that vision, even as individual characters and figures become less distinct, subsumed into Gatsby’s dream-architecture - unlike the 1974 version, and Fitzgerald’s novel itself, this version of the story is told from Gatsby’s perspective, with all the lurid cosmicity that entails. At times, it’s almost as if the characters’ perceptions have been jettisoned from their bodies to hover at the closest window, jetty or threshold, just as the film’s 2.5D style means that the spectator is destined to hover at the threshold of their 3D glasses, at the threshold of visibility, much like Fitzgerald's most pregnant and powerful images.

Ruiz: Shattered Image (1998)

Shattered Image marks Raul Ruiz’s first and last effort at a big-budget American picture – and it’s not hard to see why it flopped at the box office, since it’s just as uncompromising in its labyrinthine narrative visions as Genealogies of a Crime. On the one hand, Ruiz presents us with Jessie (Anne Parillaud), a Nikita-like hitwoman who tracks her male victims through a postmodern cityscape; on the other hand, there’s Jessie (also Parillaud), a writer holidaying in Jamaica with her husband Brian (William Baldwin), where she’s trying to shake off Hitchcockian suspicions that he might be trying to kill her. There’s no indication which of these narratives is meant to anchor us, and the connection between them becomes more Moebius-like and porous as the film progresses, suggesting that it’s their interface that most preoccupies Ruiz – specifically, their interface between a postmodern architectural universe and a Hitchcockian architectural universe. At first, this interface feels quite unlikely, but as the worlds become more intertwined, it makes sense: just as Hitchcock’s mise-en-scenes brim with observation-networks in which anything and everything could be watching, so postmodern space tends to jettison sightlines from any specifically human agency or vision. Among other things, this places the burden of narrative, suspense, and even acting onto the film’s objects, making criticisms of the highly stylised performances somewhat irrelevant, since these actors only ‘act’ insofar as they accept their continuity with the uncannily enlivened objects that surround them. And virtually every object brims with threatening, talismanic sentience, until it feels like space itself is contoured more by the infinite regression of objects than by any conventionally geometric co-ordinates. Ruiz has long been interested in surfaces that morph in and out of three dimensional sentience in this way, but whereas those surfaces are usually pre-cinematic (friezes, tapestries, tableaux vivants), here they feel more aligned with hyperreality, or virtual reality, largely thanks to the way in which cinematographer Robby Muller heightens an already lurid big-budget Hollywood aesthetic, drawn equally from the neo-noir of the 1980s and the erotic thrillers of the 1990s. It’s hard, then, not to regret that Ruiz didn’t have more of a future in the American market, if only because the film is one of his most fascinatingly futuristic, taking up Hitchcock’s mantle just as Brian de Palma was starting to discard it. 

Feig: The Heat (2013)

Although Melissa McCarthy’s become something of a buzz-word over the last year or so, she hasn’t starred in a film since Bridesmaids that’s really played to her strengths. In part, that’s because she’s a great character actor, and great at riffing in particular, meaning that her best moments still tend to be stored away in corners of films headlined by other stars (her rant in This Is 40), or pockets of the internet (her Saturday Night Live sketches on YouTube). The Heat is probably the first film to really find a way around this bind, and its solution is elegant: cast McCarthy in a dramedy, rather than a straight comedy. As far as dramedies go, police buddy films are some of the most reliable, and so Paul Feig focuses his film on the rapport that ensues when FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is called in from New York to investigate a Boston drug ring on Detective Shannon Mullins’ (McCarthy) turf. Bullock is the perfect foil to McCarthy – the dramedic actress par excellence, she shines in roles in which she's supposed to be funny but isn't, or can't quite figure out the point of being funny, providing a perfect point of transition between McCarthy and the wider, dramatic scope of the film, which plays as a suspenseful, atmospheric Boston procedural. And if there is any feminist revision here, it’s of Boston itself – gone is the cloying, masculinist sincerity of Affleck auteurism, replaced with a spirited conviviality that structures Bullock and McCarthy’s rapport as a series of corners, or pockets, within which McCarthy’s riffing can elasticise, expand, bounce off every available surface. Gone, too, is the recent tendency to elegaically retourist Boston as working-class graveyard - in his own quite unpretentious way, Feig presents a city of corners, in a film that’s quite prescient and appreciative of the audience that dwells among its many location shots and extras.

Ruiz: Généalogies D'un Crime (Genealogies Of A Crime) (1997)

Even more so than Brian de Palma, Raul Rúiz interprets Hitchcock as an architect, rather than a director, crafting neo-Hitchcockian thrillers which attempt to envisage how Hitchcock might have looked if his narrative proclivities hadn’t got in the way of his architectural proclivities – or, alternatively, how Hitchcock might have looked without a screenwriter, or as his own screenwriter. As one of Rúiz’s most self-consciously Hitchcockian films, Genealogies of a Crime perfects this dissolution of architecture and narrative, in its twisted tale of a lawyer who moves into the house of a murdered woman, both played by Catherine Deneuve. While it doesn’t really work as a film, it works beautifully as a building – the narrative quickly convolutes to the point where it becomes plastic, tangible, and malleable enough to act as a foundation for the reticulated spaces that Ruiz erects on top of it. And Rúiz’s construction materials are his extraordinary tracking-shots, which continually trace out the contours of a building which seems at once coextensive with and oblique to the actual rooms, corridors and stairwells we’re inhabiting. These tracking-shots don’t deepen the mise-en-scene in a conventional way – in fact, they tend to remove mise-en-scene altogether, flattening each shot to a tableau, just as the lens assumes the plasticity of a hypothetical wall or surface. Rúiz’s affinity for tapestries, friezes, wall hangings and other decorated surfaces – the nexus between two and three dimensional spectacle – has been well rehearsed throughout his career, but it’s put to particularly spectacular use here, as people become indistinguishable from the spaces in which they appear and objects flatten as soon as they approach the camera; one of the few narrative flashpoints revolves around a psychoanalytic society that “uses tableaux to represent the instant just before a fatal gesture.” Reinterpreting Hitchcock as a canon of objects – or, rather, a canon of object relations, objects just emerging as discrete bundles of space – Rúiz distends and develops his dream-sequences into something other than both cinema and architecture – a dream-architecture that resonates with the film like dreams resonate with waking life, at the most unexpected moments and in the most inexplicable ways.