De l'autre cote (Chantal Akerman, 2002)

For the first hour or so, Chantal Akerman’s De l’autre cote observes the Mexican side of the border with the US, the camera either trained on or tracking along desolate landscapes, sometimes with the border wall plainly in sight, or else fixedly recording the often fragmented testimony of a series of witnesses. This portion of the film feels like a search for something that can’t be fully articulated, perhaps because it’s so fully defined by absence – of those who left and never came back, of a clear sense of what the promise of America will really amount to, but also of an ability to escape its pull. The film then switches to the American side, taking on a relatively more conventional and diagnostic feel, its interviewees more self-righteously certain of themselves (inevitably though, watched in an era of covid-19, the couple who worry about disease coming in over the border and about who should get the vaccine first in the event of limited supplies resonate a bit differently now). With great efficiency (because the political story is essentially simpler than the human one) it sets out the policy decisions that focused greater resources on certain established crossing points, with the (possibly unintended but surely at least foreseeable) effect of increasing the suffering and death in the desert; all of this perpetrated by an economy that in large part depends on the very people it so demonizes. The film ends by contrasting the ultimate abstraction of migrants reduced by heat-tracking technology to blobs of white on a screen, with a final extended story of perseverance and ultimate loss. Measured by geographic distance covered, it’s not such a “large” film, and yet the hindsight of subsequent years confirms the fraughtly elevated nature of its subjects, their lives narrowly defined by immediate life experiences, and yet charged with a symbolic and political significance that challenges us across time and distance.

Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)

The title of Samuel Fuller’s Underworld, U.S.A. points to its major irony: this is an America where organized crime has reached its highest calling, operating out of a fancy office building with a rooftop swimming pool, hiding in all but plain sight behind legitimate tax-paying businesses and charitable endeavours and organized into reporting units, with a CEO who chides his lieutenants for under-performing numbers (unforgivable, when so many of the country’s 13 million children have yet to be converted into dope fiends). The organization’s single-mindedness swamps the resources of law enforcement (itself depicted here as either corrupt or else pathetically susceptible to manipulation), but it remains vulnerable to a dose of its own poison, delivered here in the form of Cliff Robertson’s Tolly Devlin, who as a teenager watched from the shadows as four men ganged up to kill his father, and now seeks to get revenge on the three survivors (all now high-ranking, if hardly impregnable, executives), by feigning loyalty and working his way up inside. The idea of family runs through the film in various perverse ways, from his hard-bitten quasi-mother figure whose doll collection is, it’s suggested, a compensation for her inability to have children; to Tolly’s contemptuous reaction when the forlorn “Cuddles” suggests he and she might get married; to a daughter calmly bearing witness to the unmasking of her police chief father’s corruption; to the astoundingly pitiless killing of a little girl as a means of putting pressure on her informant father. The movie mostly lacks the more grandly-conceived moments that so elevate Shock Corridor or The Naked Kiss, but its controlled relentlessness serves all the better to establish the challenge to societal optimism. It serves up a fantastic closing set-up though, of Tolly’s demise under a blood donor poster, and the final ultra-Fuller-ish close-up of his dead clenched fist.

Vivre ensemble (Anna Karina, 1973)

Anna Karina made her directorial debut Vivre ensemble in the wake of her main period of international stardom, during which she was usually cast as a pretty enigma, seldom explored as a human being (although she does play the least artificial character in The Magus, for what that’s worth). Vivre ensemble, in which she also stars, might have been conceived as an explicit rebuke to such categorization, emphasizing in every scene her character’s individualism and impulsiveness. At the start, it teases us with the promise of a straightforward love story, emphasizing the bolt-of-lightning attraction between Julie and Alain, set against peppily soft music, and soon afterwards establishing the intoxicating nature of their sexual connection. But Karina takes her film in unpredictable directions – literally so in the case of an interlude in New York, providing a fascinating outsider’s perspective on Vietnam protests, drifting lifestyles and pre-gentrification neighborhoods. On returning to France they have a child, prompting her to a greater sense of purpose and direction, but by then he’s stuck moving in the opposite direction (Days of Wine and Roses may come to mind as a general reference point) – they break up, and the film ends on a note of well-judged, hurting uncertainty. The film is well attuned to the limits of its titular state of being together, its point-of-view close-ups suggesting they see each other rather as movie characters, most alive when directly confronted, but otherwise largely unknowable (Karina deglamorizes herself in some respects, while often suggesting that her wide eyes and easy smile are as much a disguise as a window). This may link to a vein of otherwise unacknowledged movie love which evokes Karina’s formative period with Godard – posters of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers prominently displayed in the apartment, an argument over whether the baby’s name is Jules or Jim. Overall, the film should be seen as far more than a quirky footnote in Karina’s filmography; perhaps it can be understood as a weary conversation with much of what preceded it.

The United States of America (James Benning & Bette Gordon, 1975)

Lasting just 27 minutes, James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The United States of America is nevertheless a film as big as its title, following a spring 1975 road trip from New York to the West Coast, the two of them in the front seats, the camera observing from the same unchanging fixed position behind them. The approach quickly establishes itself, holding a shot for ten seconds or so before replacing it with another one from further along in the journey, passing through small towns and large ones, through mountain ranges and plains; with each transition, the sound of one radio station merges into another, providing a snatch of yet another staple of the period (Minnie Riperton’s Loving You comes up several times) or of the latest news update on Patty Hearst or Vietnam. There’s no conversation between the two, and we never get a good look at their faces – as such this might seem like a bizarrely reductive approach to the subject. But it’s a film where the smallest variation - such as the couple of times when she takes the wheel - becomes almost thrilling, and the editing is superb, establishing the time and distance elapsed while evoking a kind of transcendental, above-it-all state of being. The last thing we hear on the radio is a dumb quip about the President’s golf game, after which there’s emptiness, an abandoned vehicle and the vast ocean stretching ahead, a moment of arrival that can’t help but be anti-climactic, even banal, for how much can one ever understand as a spectator, whether the seat is in a car or before a screen? Seen as such in the present day, the film seems to be foreseeing the subsequent fracturing of American unity and resolve, positing it as a structural construct imposed on a near-infinity of unresolved diversity and difference.