Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959)

Basil Dearden’s Sapphire makes for queasy, vividly challenging viewing, at once lost in an ungraspably distant time and place and yet much more presently troublesome than one would wish it to be. The film opens with the discovery of a dead woman on Hampstead Heath and is driven by the subsequent police investigation: one strand follows her fiancée (provided with possible motive because she was pregnant, possibly imperiling his academic plans) and tight-knit family; the other opens up when Sapphire is revealed to be of mixed race, capable of passing for white, with a much darker-skinned brother, and various entanglements in the city’s “coloured” (this being the film’s prevailing term) community and establishments. This allows the movie to present (in the manner of a sober carnival) a sad catalogue of prejudice and suspicion - the landlady who would never have rented to her if she’d known, the policeman who muses things would be better if that sort were all sent back where they came from, and so forth. Inevitably, one cringes now at elements of it – such as the theory, apparenrtly endorsed by what’s depicted on screen, that one’s underlying blackness will be revealed by involuntary rhythmic reaction to music – and even at its most well-meaning (and it is that), the film always sees blackness as Other, as a state understood in terms of its difference and by the nature of its positioning within a white reality. Still, it does have the wherewithal to acknowledge the existence of another side to the coin: one black interviewee archly remarks that his father would never have allowed him to marry Sapphire…because she was half-white. Although seen only as a corpse and in a photograph, the dead woman’s spirit dominates the film: the dialogue constantly evokes her uncontainable vivacity and energy, in itself a threat to a drably ordered society, made deadly and uncontainable by her racial non-conformity.

Morel's Invention (Emidio Greco, 1974)

If one didn’t know Emidio Greco’s L’invenzione di Morel was based on a novel, it might easily be taken as a response to Tarkovsky’s then-recent Solaris – although not set in space, its isolated island setting amounts to much the same thing, and the plotlines are similar in their blurring of the line between humanity and illusion, and in the related capacity for cinematic metaphor. With tweaking and a much-souped-up visual style, Greco’s film could also feel like the forerunner of a Black Mirror installment. A man is washed up on the island, his boat wrecked beyond repair (there’s little backstory beyond a passing reference to political problems) – the island holds a large structure that’s part museum shell and part industrial complex but initially seems uninhabited, but then he starts to see people, dancing and conversing with little attention paid to their challenged surroundings, and with none at all paid to him (the most striking among them is played by Anna Karina, who even more than in most of her post-Godard work is utilized here as pure image). The film is strikingly composed and edited, often wordless for long stretches, at others dense with exposition and self-interpretation as the title’s Morel, gradually revealed as dominant among these dispossessed individuals, reveals his invention, and the place of the others within it. As noted, the film draws on a classic cinematic proposition, of the screen and the spectator’s submission to it as a rewriting of and usurpation of reality – in this respect, it necessarily belongs to a time of cinema as physical destination, long predating the tyranny of tiny screens. It’s not the most galvanizing of works – there’s no respect really in which Greco is as interesting as Tarkovsky, and the film does skirt turgidity at times – but it has an elemental enigmatic power, and deserves better than its substantially forgotten status (an ironic fate perhaps, given its premise).

Machorka-Muff (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, 1963)

Straub and Huillet’s Machorka-Muff introduces itself, in an opening title signed just by Straub, as “an abstract visual poem, not a story,” which at once prepares the viewer for the narrative challenges of the following 18 minutes, while perhaps underpreparing him or her for its precision and tangibility. The film certainly has far more story than, say, a Stan Brakhage short: it contains both personal and professional development, it conveys a lot about character, it draws on an identifiable surrounding time and place, it has a beginning and middle and end, in that diegetic order. It even has a certain amount of dry, arch comedy, mostly based in the protagonist’s suffusing self-regard and unrepentant militarism. In all these respects it’s a remarkable feat of condensation, even making time for what may appear like digressions, such as the precious moments devoted to a waiter as he fills a drinks order. It perhaps feels least like a poem in its montage of (apparently genuine) newspaper headlines that advocate for German rearmament, drawing Jesus Christ into the cause and concluding by asking whether Germany will be a hammer or a nail, but at the same time this constitutes the most dramatic expansion of the filmic space. Viewed at a time when class-based expectation and division is only reasserting itself, and when post-war institutions are under escalating economic and political threat, the film feels like a warning, even a stern one, but it never feels confined by advocacy; the hard-edged specificity is always in conversation with the asserted abstraction, allowing the feeling of a film at once oppressive and yet strangely liberating. The final note, an assertion of embedded social power that no one’s ever dared to oppose,  goes unanswered within the film, but sets a challenge for Straub-Huillet's ensuing body of work, with its emphasis on resistance and engagement.

Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (Sarah Jacobson, 1996)

One’s reaction to Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore is inevitably conditioned by the knowledge that it was the only feature completed by Sarah Jacobson, who died a few years later of cancer at the age of just 32. I don’t think it’s only in hindsight that the film carries a sense of looming darkness – actually it’s explicit in the pervasive use of black backgrounds, often giving events a rather disembodied feel. It makes for peculiar viewing, given that in summary the film might sound well within a tradition of brightly raunchy sex comedies – Mary Jane unsatisfactorily loses her virginity (in a cemetery yet), triggering a heightened interest in her own sexuality and that of her circle of colleagues at the movie theatre where she works (the programming for which appears to be carried out in some underwhelming parallel universe), most of whom are older and worldlier than she is (much is made of her origin in the suburbs). The movie has a punk-infused feel, often feeling on the verge of tipping over into something more radically unbound (the acknowledgement in the end credits of “everyone who ever bought me a beer” is a nice touch), but remains primarily in investigative mode, accumulating something of a dossier of mixed-bag “first time” stories and gradually expanding its field of concern and awareness to encompass bisexuality, unplanned pregnancy, sudden tragedy, and more, ending (rather abruptly) on a note of self-determination and moral victory. Those closing credits roll over an extended rant into the camera by a disgruntled theatre patron, basically a verbal assault on just about everything, as if to emphasize the movie as an act of resistance. It’s more persuasive than not: it would be pointless to oversell the film’s impact, but when you reflect on the great careers that followed from comparably (or more) modest beginnings, the sense of loss is severe.

The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut, 1964)

The title of Francois Truffaut’s The Soft Skin seems to promise a sensuousness that barely exists in the film itself, thus perfectly summing up its examination of the gulf between romantic fantasy and drab, logistical reality. It’s among his gravest and most sober films, to an extent that has sometimes left viewers puzzled or underwhelmed, but might as aptly be judged as one of his most effective fusions of form and content. It’s apt that the protagonist Lachenay, a high-profile public intellectual of a kind that can hardly be conceived of now, falls for a flight attendant, as the movie dates from the period when the romance of air travel was at its highest: Truffaut makes the initial mutual intrigue easy enough to grasp, but after that he hardly attempts to probe the heart of the relationship, focusing instead on complications and obstacles, in particular a bleakly comic ulterior-motivated trip to Reims where everything intervenes to keep the two apart. The affair’s ultimate end, similarly, comes like the brisk cut of a scalpel, and although the film ends on a classic “crime of passion,” it’s hard to tell whether it’s really that, or whether we’re watching the almost unconscious acting out of a socially-determined cliché, as much as the arc of the affair itself. The film pointedly includes moments when we witness Lachenay’s mind momentarily turning at the possibilities of other barely glimpsed women, and others that record how a woman can barely walk alone in the street without being harassed: but then equally as significant is the way that his hosts in Reims load up his schedule with a dinner at which they pepper him with mostly trivial questions, to be followed by a reception (which he skips out on). That is, whether in one’s cultural or intimate pursuits, the movie leaves a deep sense of weary, dissatisfied compulsion taking precedence over truth and self-awareness.

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top feels distinctly overwrought now, with its nakedly ambitious protagonist Joe Lampton barely uttering a word in the early stretch that doesn’t relate to his calculated social-climbing, and then reduced to near-catatonic silence in the end as he achieves a version of his ambitions, at the cost of (at least temporarily) losing his soul. The notoriously problematic actor Laurence Harvey tacks too strongly into both states, eradicating much possibility of subtlety, but at least aiding the film’s harshly elemental impact (one of the film’s most effective elements is his unspoken realization that the wealthy girl of his dreams is, basically, unbearably boring). Despite these excesses, it remains a fascinating social document, depicting a society of painful limitations, consumed by self-defeating power games (one of the more striking scenes is that in which the husband of Lampton’s older lover confronts him, setting out with cold meticulousness why the affair has to end, the relish he takes in his victory far outweighing any remaining feeling for his wife). Certainly it’s not a world devoid of pleasures and camaraderies, but they depend on a benign acceptance of limits, a shutting of one’s mind to all vertical possibilities. Sex, of course, is the most prominent of the horizontal availabilities, fueling a significant hidden infrastructure and a network of behind-back conversations. Simone Signoret won an Oscar as the lover, but even the mild exoticism she brings to the film feels like more than the milieu deserves or can accommodate (albeit this is largely the point). Looked at now, it’s no doubt a museum piece on any levels, not least for the prominence of heavy manufacturing in the economic hierarchy. But while Britain may have given itself several coats of paint since then, the inequalities and abandonments have only become more savage, rendering the film’s moral contortions almost quaintly benign by comparison.

The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch is a work of contrast and opposition, inevitably (for better and for worse) less unified and imposing than we often expect of his work. The most obvious contrast exists between the Bergman milieu we’re accustomed to (Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson’s long-married couple) and the very different cultural resonances attaching to Elliott Gould, playing David, a visiting archaeologist who has an affair with Andersson’s Karin (the optimal prints are those in which the couple and others use English with Gould, and Swedish otherwise). Bergman presents the marriage as being essentially happy, if stagnant - Sydow’s Andreas is submerged in his work, Karin in domesticity and ritual (the film is sometimes oddly and parodically peppy in portraying this); in contrast, David is unstable and destabilizing, subject to erratic impulses and mood swings (and frequently changing hairstyles). The demands of the present – the lying and evasion required of Karin in maintaining the affair – contrast with the inescapable burdens of the past: the evocation of the Holocaust in David’s family history, and of centuries past in his work. It’s never that simple though, and Bergman keeps challenging our understanding of the relationship and the film: an almost offhand reference to a suicide attempt by David and an even less resolved one to Karin’s pregnancy; the late introduction of David’s sister in London, heavily trailing other unexplored narratives; a long-dormant cluster of larvae that come back to destructive life. The ending, somewhat displaced from the main body of the film, places us in a garden, and a final attempt at paradise that rapidly disintegrates into further disrepair and separation. If the film under-achieves and frustrates, as has often been claimed, then that may be because of its unusual and productive openness and receptivity; either way, it ranks in Bergman’s body of work as more than a mere oddity.

Scrubbers (Mai Zetterling, 1982)

Mai Zetterling’s Scrubbers certainly feels sociologically and humanly scrupulous, examining the fraught community within a female borstal while largely avoiding swaggering stereotypes and easy titillation.The recurring use of bawdy folk-type songs is just one suggestion that for all its forced unnaturalness, the world that the inmates craft for themselves may preserve English community and culture more fully than what lies outside – by comparison the portrayal of the staff is mostly clipped and sparing and deliberately disconnected. Zetterling seems most artistically stimulated by the environment’s inherent abstraction, triggering the film’s most unexpected impact, its outbursts of visionary Kubrick-like strangeness. That would be both Kubrick past (a dispossessed mother’s dreams of her kid might almost have slotted into The Shining) and even – relative to the film’s 1982 release date – Kubrick future: the prison might well share a designer and all-seeing cinema-eye with the dorms of Full Metal Jacket. Just as in Jacket, the rituals and tasks (such as assembling cheap plastic dolls) of the institution barely contemplate the chaos of the real world battle to come - the institution seems in no way to provide a meaningful response to the transgressions of its two main protagonists (one can only think of being reunited with her infant daughter; the other was motivated primarily by apparently unrequited love for another inmate), whether as punishment or rehabilitation (a more conventional but still well-handled vignette has one of the tougher inmates released into a world for which she’s entirely unprepared). It follows that the film withholds any kind of closure, leaving the prospects of its key characters uncertain after a final disorientating plunge into the outside world, ending on a recurring exterior nighttime shot that eavesdrops on the inmates as they yell out their goodnights and other parting shots for the day. This device may seem to evoke The Waltons of all things, but it’s certain that nothing else in the movie will.

Mille milliards de dollars (Henri Verneuil, 1982)

Henri Verneuil’s Mille milliards de dollars doesn’t rank as a major film: among other things, it’s of limited stylistic interest, and the narrative mostly takes a familiar form of notable actors (Jeanne Moreau, Charles Denner and so forth) popping up for a scene or two to point the way to the next link in the deductive chain. Patrick Dewaere plays a journalist who receives a tip-off of scandal surrounding a notable public figure: the investigation leads him deep into the machinations of an American multi-national, and ultimately into the lingering moral stain of WW2. The film retains interest for several reasons though. Viewed as a time of anxiety about corporate power that transcends national boundaries and evades political or regulatory control, it’s rather darkly instructive to view a 1982 film driven by similar concerns (albeit of course under very different technological conditions): the influence is so invidious for instance that the French subsidiaries are forced to exist on New York time, holding key meetings in the middle of the night.Verneuil devotes a surprising amount of time in the corporate weeds, inviting for us for instance to dive into the mechanics of a particular corporate result that falls far short of the forecast, and having the corporation’s leader (Mel Ferrer) deliver a mini-lecture on international transfer pricing. The film’s tone can’t help but draw on the sad resonances surrounding Dewaere, who would be dead by his own hand within months of the film’s release (a scene in which a would-be assassin writes a fake suicide note on his behalf thus assumes a particular chill). The closing stretch allows us some room for hope that the truth can come out (an independent newspaper plays the role that nowadays would most likely be filled by citizen journalism) while allowing the journalist’s personal concerns rather to push aside the larger story. But maybe that’s a mark of one thing that hasn’t changed over thirty-seven intervening years: that the liberal and anti-corporatist cause must too often content itself with strictly incremental steps forward.

The Coca-Cola Kid (Dusan Makavejev, 1985)

I doubt that many unprompted viewers could identify The Coca-Cola Kid as the work of the director of Sweet Movie, especially as they’re only separated by one intervening film (Montenegro). The earlier picture is outrageous, shocking and compelling, taking its celebration of freedom to unsettling extremes, constantly asking us what price we’re willing to pay for it, and apologizing for nothing; in contrast, The Coca-Cola Kid timidly opens with several screens’ worth of disclaimer regarding its very title. The movie sounds in summary like a satire – an American whizzkid “fixer” comes to Australia, his focus entirely on monetization, only to become sidetracked by local oddities and temptations – but the focus is obscure, and the sainted brand gets off pretty lightly. Where Sweet Movie revels in sexuality, the fixer spends most of the movie trying to avoid it; his eventual change of heart in this regard seems under-motivated, a product of movie calculation rather than ideological triumph. The film focuses, strangely, on something that would seem tangential at best: the fixer’s fixation on bringing Coke to the one region of the country from which it's excluded, a local magnate monopolizing the market with his own brews, but the resolution of this too is grim and murky, certainly not allowing much in the way of symbolic victory. Perhaps then the main point of the film lies in this very sense of defeatism, in positioning such global brands and infrastructures as essentially impervious to meaningful mockery, or even to normal narrative forces and influences: the closing caption tells us that the following week in Japan the next world war began, which might appear only to acknowledge that the whole movie has been an exercise in looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. In that sense it draws nicely on Australia’s established peculiarity – as a place that looks exactly like the West, while gradually revealing itself as being stubbornly and unyieldingly Other.

L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

It’s only in the closing moments of Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou that we learn the rehearsal process we’ve observed for much of the preceding four hours was limited to three weeks and that an opening night is looming; for much of the film we might have believed the process to be effectively infinite and self-justifying, the idea of a finished performance solely notional. In this regard, the play mirrors the challenging length and rhythms of Rivette’s film, and of his cinema as a whole – he would go from this to the twelve-hour Out One (for which L’amour fou often in itself resembles something of a rehearsal). It’s among his more pessimistic and closed films though, with a strong, entropic feel: the viewer might take from it the sense that such an artistic exploration is inherently capable of reaching an end, and that the attempt may only cause stagnation and collapse. As the film starts, the married couple Sebastien and Claire are respectively director and star of the play (Racine’s Andromaque) – she rapidly flees the production, ostensibly unable to tolerate the film cameras that he’s allowing to film everything. He recasts the role with an old girlfriend, while Claire continues to hover around the edges of the production: as his creative process breaks down, she experiments with finding her own mode of expression, some of this entailing the film’s most comic notions (as when she becomes obsessed with bringing home a particular breed of dog). Rivette deliberately confounds any clear reading of their relationship – a scene of apparent rupture might be followed by one of togetherness; ultimately they withdraw entirely from the world for several days, wrecking the apartment and seeming on the verge of becoming feral, but this too suddenly comes to an end. Claire ultimately breaks out, commenting that she’s “woken up”; Sebastien, it seems, can be allowed no such escape, art being ultimately less malleable than life. Rivette’s body of work would evolve toward easier pleasures and more composed expression: L’amour fou almost carries the sense of incubation, of one of cinema’s greatest artists ruminating and pondering his own future direction and its attendant limits.

Flying Deuces (A. Edward Sutherland, 1939)

In most respects, Flying Deuces is run-of-the-mill Laurel and Hardy – rickety in much of its plotting and execution, and not particularly inspired in most of its set-pieces. It warrants some serious reflection as a contribution to their oeuvre and mythology though, for its (I would say) quite unnerving preoccupation with death, and worse, suicide. It’s not so much that Ollie decides to kill himself after being rejected by the girl he loves, but that he assumes Stan will come with him, cold-bloodedly painting him a picture of the derided, unviable existence he’ll lead, absent Ollie’s oversight and guidance. The argument works too, until external intervention sends them on another path - into the French foreign legion, where they’re again rapidly faced with a mortal threat, sentenced to death for trying to desert. But then, at the end, Ollie actually does die, leaving Stan alone (and looking as happy as he does through the whole film) until a bizarre reincarnation/transmigration intervenes. Perhaps there’s something inherently metaphysical in the discontinuous L&H universe – for example in how they go from having wives and apparent social respectability in Sons of the Desert to having no apparent life experience at all in other movies, the only fixed point being each other – but Flying Deuces makes that weirdly explicit. But in case this makes the movie sound like an anticipation of Ingmar Bergman, there’s the offsetting moment where even in the midst of life-threatening mayhem as they run from pursuing soldiers, they’re captivated by a bunch of musicians and stop for Ollie to sing Shine on Harvest Moon while Stan performs a lovely little dance. Their work wouldn’t be so beguiling if not for the recurring optimism, for the regular surrender to something hopeful and elevating, even as their dimension-spanning mutual dependence provides an existential barrier to such opportunities being more than fleeting.

Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s last film Un flic may not necessarily seem to add much to his filmography: it’s another terse, tight-lipped crime thriller, shot through with isolation and alienation. The film’s primary (and tertiary) interest may lie though in just how far it takes those attributes, seeming to push with chilling certainty toward a kind of vanishing point where people might hardly register at all, except as disillusioned, hollowed-out markers, playing out a pointless destiny. The film features one of the most passionless sexual triangles in memory: Simone (Catherine Deneuve) sleeps with both the policeman Coleman (Alain Delon) and a villainous club owner Simon (Richard Crenna), apparently with the knowledge of both, but Melville makes such limited use of Deneuve that her presence almost seems to pose some kind of puzzle. The film contains several counterpointing portraits of quiet anguish – one of Simon’s partners in crime who’s driven by unemployment, watched over by his anxious wife; a transgender informant who seems to stare at Coleman with unexpressed longing – but they mainly only serve to underline the detachment of the principals. The major wordless set-piece – the daring theft of a consignment of drugs from a moving train – is largely self-contained, with only minimal narrative connection to what comes before or afterwards; when resolution comes, it’s without even a moment of exultation, and the concept of closure hardly comes to mind, partly because of what still hangs (or at least should hang) over Coleman and Simone (he shot too soon and killed an unarmed man; she carried out cold-blooded murder) and otherwise because it’s never clear what exactly was open. Melville’s choice of exteriors – from the most isolated bank to be found anywhere outside a Western; to the modernist exterior of the police headquarters – supports the sense of abstraction; he drains the interior of Simon’s club of any sense of pleasure or eroticism. One certainly wouldn’t recommend the film as the place to begin with Melville; but it’s a disquietingly apt place to end.

Bad Timing (Nicolas Roeg, 1980)

From one perspective, the use of Billie Holliday’s “It’s the Same Old Story” over the closing credits of Bad Timing might seem like a rather tritely ironic take on the disturbing narrative we’ve just witnessed, an implication that every dreamy love story is just one twist away from comparable sickness. But the song’s greater resonance is in the invocation of stasis and repetition, of events being drawn toward a singularity or vanishing point. At one point, Theresa Russell’s Milena expresses a wish that Art Garfunkel’s Linden would understand her less and love her more, or put another way, join her in following the emotional and sensual demands of the moment over those of a structured narrative (Linden is a research psychoanalyst who we pointedly see at work in Vienna’s Sigmund Freud museum). The film works toward a particularly nasty granting of her wish, circling around a moment where Linden indeed submits to the demands of a key moment, but at the cost of completely objectifying and dehumanizing her, even of bringing her to the brink of death. The third main character, Harvey Keitel’s detective, doesn’t so much investigate the event as will himself into being a displaced participant in it, seemingly seeing in Linden’s transgression some kind of terrible, humbling artistry (that of the director behind it?). Several scenes take place on the border between Austria and (as it was then) Czechoslovakia, on the border between freedoms and ideologies, and Linden periodically does profiling work for the US army, an underdeveloped strand that nevertheless feeds a sense of paranoid destabilization. For all the fragmented evasiveness of the film’s structure, Roeg’s visuals are direct and intimidating and accusatory: it isn’t a particularly “pleasant” watch by conventional measures, its prevailing tone drawing heavily on Garfunkel’s snotty, self-righteous Linden, but that’s just another measure of Roeg’s aesthetic fearlessness during his peak period.

Les uns et les autres (Claude Lelouch, 1981)

Claude Lelouch starts his epic Les uns et les autres by citing Willa Cather: “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” This initially plays as an acknowledgment of the universal calamity of war: the film sets up scenarios in France, Germany, Russia and the US, then plunges them into immediate upheaval, dispatching some people whom we might have expected to be major characters so rapidly and cleanly that the impact is almost subliminal. As it travels into the present day, the film’s narrative keeps gathering speed, often carrying the sense of a teetering helicopter: transitions from meetings to relationships to break-ups take mere seconds; fates are sealed in a couple of lines. Intentionally or not (it’s hard to tell), Cather’s maxim comes to seem not so much like an assertion of shared experience but as one of existential meaninglessness and stasis, in which nothing really evolves across generations (underlined by casting several actors as both mothers/fathers and their daughters/sons, and minimizing the use of aging make-up) or borders or transitions, and in which the national and social distinctions of the earlier sequences fuzzily converge. The redemption, it seems, lies in music: the movie overflows with performance – spanning dance and orchestral and pop videos and jazz bands, played to large crowds and empty halls, before cameras and in rehearsal rooms – culminating in a final extended showpiece that brings together most or all (it’s hard to keep track) of the surviving characters either as performers or as spectators (the notion of sublimation into spectacle is one of several respects in which the film brings Scorsese’s New York New York to mind, although the comparison only underlines the recurring passionless of Lelouch’s creation). The film has no shortage of diversions then, and the ambition is almost hypnotic, but the further it pushes toward greatness, the smaller and emptier it ultimately feels.