Mission: Impossible (1996, Brian De Palma)

As episodic as the titular series, Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible is a compendium of indelible set pieces, each as elaborate as the ever-shifting personas of his spy protagonists. Adhering to action in lieu of story, De Palma manipulates what is seen through misdirection and subjective visual perspective, allowing the viewer to construct their own false narrative. Technological advancements are also exploited in the name of fostering paranoia, predicting a world where truth is impossible to discern, easily doctored, and readily ignored. Employing form to comment on the text and camera angle to experiment with mood, Mission: Impossible is a rarity among blockbusters, not as idiosyncratic as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but no less fascinated by atmospherics and the symbiotic relationship between enchantment and deception. 

Deceit is the only certainty in the world of espionage, explicated in the film’s commencing masquerade of staged murders, rubber masks, and false walls. Exhibiting this ruse through grainy closed-circuit television further cements the fallibility of the human eye, demonstrating the role visual displays have in corrupting fact and obscuring detail. Cameras are as integral in this game of misdirection, both the withholding eye of De Palma’s omniscient Panaflex Platinum and the dubious images captured by his characters’ body cams. 

Shot choice and positioning of the camera are just as disorienting, shifting from the deep focus of Split Diopters, to the jagged vertical lines of the Dutch tilt, to shadowy, furrowed low angles. Aesthetics are as much a contest to De Palma as scamming the CIA is to the film’s standard-bearer (Tom Cruise’s indefatigable Ethan Hunt), and he modernizes old tricks to keep up with emerging technologies. Capturing multiple characters’ points of view on a single screen prophesied the teleconferences of the future, except De Palma reflects the anonymity of the profession by disembodying the visual action from the human visage.

Equally foreign and bewildering is the labyrinthine location. Prague’s cobblestone streets, unbound by the rigidity of American city planning, carry the mystique of history and desolation, populated only by a dense layer of stage fog that heightens tension and intensifies ambience. Color is also used to conjure mood and symbol, specifically in the Akvarium café sequence, which employs soft neons and glacial blues to reflect cold detachment and the chill of betrayal. 

This potential for perfidy hangs over the film like a specter, transforming every exchange into a stratagem of half truths and false pleasantries. Ultimately, the sole motivation of the undercover operative is autonomy, both in the psychological and philosophical sense, since consolidation leaves one vulnerable to exposure. De Palma captures the genuine dread at the core of this fantasy scenario, predicting a future where intimacy is replaced by connectivity, and the previously private is laid bare. 

Sexuality, once De Palma’s primary release and preoccupation, is inhibited by accessibility, reflected in the hypertension of a hero who relishes the tease, but never samples “the goods.” We’re just as captivated by the distraction, drawn down dead-ends by a lavish game of hide-and-seek. The true frisson lies just beneath the surface, taking root in parallels between the esoteric and familiar, magnifying our own fears by shrouding them in horse feathers.

Mission: Impossible (Paramount Pictures, 1996)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by Bruce Geller (based on his television series “Mission: Impossible”), David Koepp (screenplay and story), Robert Towne (screenplay), and Steven Zaillian (story)
Photographed by Stephen H. Burum

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Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)

Exploiting our Pavlovian response to camaradic cliché, Top Gun arouses by coupling human tenacity and mechanical precision, revealing an erotic tension at the center of competition. Wavering between esoteric and nostalgic, this beautifully-rendered bit of folderol succeeds when sticking to its insular world, transfixing through the calculated disorientation of aerial photography. The ambiguity of its innuendo only heightens the pleasure, though it eventually succumbs to the mandates of melodrama and narrative convention, abandoning aesthetic in the name of practicality.

At its most enthralling, the assembly of images dances between the volatile and ethereal, manifesting hulking aircraft from windswept alien landscapes, each vision awash in the tumult of tinny radio transmission. The vastness of oceanic skies is contrasted by the intimacy of the cockpit, shot only at close range and as solitary as a coffin, humid with perspiration and echoing with the disembodied voices of isolated men. Obscured by their helmets, these faceless pilots resemble the featureless noses of their aircraft, embodying an anonymity that befits the chaos of dogfighting.

An intellectual vacancy pervades the work, suiting the purely cinematic nature of the bookended aeronautics, but clashing with attempts at psychoanalysis, specifically the unresolved guilt and father complex of our cocksure protagonist. As a renegade airman, Maverick’s (Tom Cruise) enfant terrible routine jibes with Tony Scott’s war room bluster and two-fisted flight sequences, but both are undermined by superficial dalliances with the notion of military ancestry. Whether consciously addressing Maverick’s absentee father or reckoning with the forfeiture of the Vietnam War, subtextual insights into hegemonic masculinity are foreign objects, rejected by the pugnacity of the picture’s action sequences. 

The prerequisite romantic subplot is just as discordant, smothering Maverick’s virility in twilight blues and Giorgio Moroder’s maudlin synthesizer. Fumbling into emotional honesty also betrays the film’s central conceit, especially as catastrophe strikes and Maverick receives retribution for a chauvinism championed in the exposition. The fact that the object of his anguish only functions as a pawn in his metaphorical castration further implicates the machinations of plot as corruptors of the overarching concept.  

As all story threads are knotted and familiar notes of love, loss, guilt, and triumphant recovery are struck, Top Gun begs pardon for its bravado, imposing moral conflict onto its feats of balletic motion and transforming unabashed aviophilia into an excuse for Phoenician rebirth. The completed piece is a work at loggerheads with itself, relishing visual art and perseverance, before abandoning both in the name of audience expectation and narrative symmetry. 

Top Gun (Paramount Pictures, 1986)
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Ehud Yonay (based on his article “Top Guns”), Jim Cash (screenplay), and Jack Epps Jr. (screenplay)
Photographed by Jeffrey Kimball

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Cobra Verde (1987, Werner Herzog)

“Evil is a trick.”

Setting iniquity and indifference side by side, Cobra Verde exposes the canard of an obscure malevolent force, finding desolation at the heart of man’s arduous pursuit of martial and sexual authority. Acting as the physical manifestation of this ideological inertia, Francisco Manoel da Silva (Klaus Kinski) cultivates an outlaw’s persona from a life without kinship or compassion, prevailing through happenstance and an insect’s resilience. Kinski’s embodiment of this thematic callousness approximates a primal scream, but the character’s impulses remain nebulous, ensnared within a symbol that benefits the cumbersome narrative, but not the development of abstractions into living flesh.  

At odds with Werner Herzog’s preceding scoundrels, Francisco lacks delusions of grandeur, waging war with concealed psychic scars, as opposed to the omnipotent forces of God and creation. The weathered, gaping maw of this malcontent is painted in taut portrait, evincing a child forsaken, sustained only through the surge of unrestrained barbarity and metaphorical flights of fancy, drawing parallels between white snowflakes hydrating the sterile sertão and the cleansing waters of spiritual renewal. 

In spite of these emotional ambitions, da Silva takes the primrose path in the name of survival, exercising control over domination by adopting its tenets. The slave trade befits this “cretinous existence” and the infamous Cobra Verde projects his own lack of self-worth on his detainees, accepting tyranny as a suitable replacement for insecurity. This cross to bear acts as a lightning rod for his hypocritical masters, extending from the philandering plantation owner repulsed by a taste of his own medicine to the English sugarcane consumer blind to the scourge of a sweet tooth.

Herzog detects an ironic slant on his principal metaphors in da Silva’s venture, humbling spectacle to unearth contrast. The first reiteration fashions an infinite succession of human chattel as an allusion to Aguirre, the Wrath of God’s labyrinthine trek through the Andes, perverting the unification of a submissive mankind beneath nature by employing the viciousness of the yoke and chain to show humanity bound unto itself. The willpower and simple machinery on display in Fitzcarraldo’s miraculous steamboat procession is corrupted in equal measure, sunken to the foamy shore alongside our pitiable villain, beleaguered by his cowardice and the mire of lubricious sand. 

The swash of the ocean on Francisco’s furrowed brow acts as a resolution, awarding catharsis to a callow protagonist and liberation to his legion of victims, exploiting the ambiguity of both parties in a plea for audience empathy. Though the sentiment isn’t dubious in either scenario, the lack of exposition lays bare a blind adherence to plot mechanism, giving rise to an unearned transcendence that solicits tragedy from an inchoate husk and apotheosis for a faceless mass.

Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1987)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Written by Bruce Chatwin (based on his book “The Viceroy of Ouidah”) and Werner Herzog (screenplay)
Photographed by Viktor Růžička

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979, Werner Herzog)

Adorned with dashes of the arabesque and muted, dulcet tones, Werner Herzog’s reinterpretation of the Germanic vampire tradition transmogrified architecture and locale into sentient entities, evoking emotion and eroticism through vast panoramas and gentle shifts in illumination. Employing day and night as an exemplar of the contrast between good and evil, Herzog envisioned the nocturnal Nosferatu as a surrogate for biological necessity, aligning his reign of pestilence with the majesty of verdant landscapes and tranquil canal waters, ultimately representing his triumph as proof of death’s inevitability and impartiality. 

The hushed intimacy of the rose-colored prologue functions as the opposite side of the coin, illustrating the tenderness that cocoons protagonists Jonathan and Lucy Harker from the realities that survive beyond their row of idyllic, pastel grachtenpanden. Seeking vigorous adventure and experience, Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) ventures into the Carpathian Mountains at the behest of an affluent count, ignoring local superstition of shape-shifting necromancers in the name of practicality, profit, and philosophical balance.

Herzog capitalizes on these notions of the supernatural throughout Harker’s expedition, transforming the banal into the transcendent by treating atmospheric extremes as practical effects, manifesting both wonder and dread through a rapid procession of clouds and daunting swirl of precipitation. Finding rhythm and harmony within these terrestrial miracles, Herzog draws physical motion into lockstep with non-diegetic sound, utilizing crescendos in Popul Vuh’s multifarious score to extol natural dominion, representing a spiritual alignment between earthly beauty and heavenly deity rivaled only by Fantasia’s stirring “Ave Maria” devotional.

Though Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu is pallid in comparison to the magnitude of creation and Harker’s virility, his wantonness and insatiability cast a long shadow, aided considerably by beams of dusklight that cloak each corridor of his castle in charcoal-stained ambiguity. Enrobed in opaque black, his slender form and darting gestures mimic a vampire bat plummeting towards its prey, further cemented by a recurring reverie of an airborne specimen, inhabiting the midnight blue sky and Lucy’s (Isabelle Adjani) subconscious. 

A glimpse of Jonathan’s betrothed in a locket portrait revives the hunter’s humanity, symbolizing the ardor, sanctity, and felicity extinguished by immortality. In the prospect of Lucy’s embrace, Nosferatu finds salvation from the “absence of love,” bonding the pair telepathically through a dichotomic seduction and repulsion beyond Jonathan’s emotional intelligence. The affection trapped in Harker’s diary is articulated in the vampire’s yearning, each expression and notion haunting Lucy’s dreams as the meister’s fangs contaminate her beloved’s circulatory system.

While this “plague” and its legion of rats lay siege to the inland waterway, perverting the serenity of the opening passages, mankind scrambles for preservation and pleasure, the remains of their culminating feast illustrated as a Last Supper for the quietus, each rodent and ripe berry preserving the existential equilibrium. Though the phantom’s tenebrous coffin looms over Wismar, ruination must lead to a rebirth, demonstrated by Lucy’s reconsecration of Nosferatu’s crypt, her white gown and blue mantle evoking Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer and anastasis. 

In a final act of sacrifice, both on behalf of mortal and celestial, Lucy grants her body to the solitary ghoul, bestowing her throat and breast as charity and cunning gambit. At dawn, a golden shaft of sunlight withers the jubilant count and windswept petals blanket the departed martyr, emphasizing the grand and eternal pilgrimage from conception to decomposition, painted with profuse beauty and sincerity by an artist keen on understanding life and embracing death.

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1979)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Written by Bram Stoker (based on his book “Dracula”) and Werner Herzog (screenplay)
Photographed by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein

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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)

Acting as the first strand in a thread coursing through his entire oeuvre, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God examines the paradox struck between nature’s beauty and barbarity, likening the existence of human consciousness and its accompanying ego to a fulfilling, but futile, act of defiance. The brazen Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) embodies Herzog’s vision of opposition, bellowing in the face of authority and fragility, clamoring to take dominion over animal, habitat, and deity. The enormity and impenetrable precipitation of the Andes function as Aguirre’s adversary and Herzog’s personification of God, their lack of remorse and magnitude further amplified by the entrancing stagger of Thomas Mauch’s handheld photography and nebulous drone of Popul Vuh’s sonic evocations. By invoking a dream amidst the severity of the untamed wild, Herzog affixes divinity and infallibility to the natural order, transforming man’s venture to survive and conquer into a Sisyphean nightmare.

Pursuing the lost riches of El Dorado and supplementary outposts for the ever-expanding Spanish Empire, a party of conquistadors brave the onyx mud and suffocating brush of the Amazon, sacrificing their safety and sanity in the name of prestige. Third in command behind Pizarro and Ursúa, Aguirre asserts his authority by riding roughshod over his febrile slaves, hastening the caravan forward despite dreadful precipices and sodden terrain. He epitomizes man at his most pragmatic, abandoning ethics in the name of triumph and commiserating only when it favors his Ahabian objective.

Aguirre’s fervid persistence and the tautness of the cinematography impart a claustrophobic confinement onto the seemingly infinite rainforest, enabling the humidity to permeate the lens and manifest the horrors of exposure and depth of the universe’s indifference. As the participatory camera jockeys for space and sight line over craggy trails and foaming rapids, an austere, cyclical rhythm consumes the narrative and its prisoners, signifying man’s slow march to the grave through the frantic paddle of a maelstrom-ensnared crew.

Each environmental pitfall endured by our Earthbound captives is precise and often lethal, but never malicious, countering the corporeal motivations of Aguirre’s moribund warriors and his own metastasizing megalomania. Yet, Herzog detects mankind’s essence in this cowardice and infirmity, bestowing a poignant elegy upon our resignation through a lingering portrait of an abandoned stallion, typifying man’s limitations through the tentative sway of his sunken muzzle.

The throes of delirium even bear traces of Herzogian grandeur and compassion, gracing the last pair of adventurers with visions of canoe-capped treetops and the sensation of nimble arrows piercing their fever-numbed flesh. The leisurely pace taken by the Grim Reaper has made ghosts of these transient vessels, but he grants the withering comandante a fleeting moment of lucidity to defy the inevitable and embody our vainest ambitions. In this final act of resistance, Aguirre throttles a writhing squirrel monkey and attests to his mastery before the frightened beast and unresponsive sky. As the camera encircles his solitary figure, stumbling to save face atop a sinking raft, we see existence incarnate, waging its war against the limits of the body and the contracting barriers of its cage.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1972)
Written and Directed by Werner Herzog
Photographed by Thomas Mauch

Nekromantik (1987, Jörg Buttgereit)

Concealing pathos and sensuality beneath the scarlet letter of exploitation, Jörg Buttgereit leavens the geek-show morbidity of Nekromantik’s subject matter with passion and puerile humor, likening the clash between his sanguine sensibilities and wide-eyed romanticism to the domestic tumult of his grave-robbing leads. By transmogrifying necrophilia and depravity into sitcom-style quirks, Buttgereit pillories European prudishness and its accusations of “systematic desensitization,” allowing the farcicality of his theme and grisliness of its realization to both epitomize their worst fears and lampoon the genre’s barbarity.

Bringing the burden of his forensic cleanup job back to the homestead, Rob (Daktari Lorenz) pilfers discarded human remains from crime scenes, preserving organs and digits in jars of formaldehyde and venerating them as sacred trophies. Though his passion for decomposition is certainly exacerbated by his career, the psychological impact stems directly from childhood trauma, excerpts of which are revealed through hazily-shot memories of animal processing and musings of a coroner’s autopsy. Buttgereit conveniently crosscuts these grotesque visions to parallel the serial killer’s journey from acts like leporicide to homicide, metaphorically condemning experience over artistic transgression as the root cause of spiritual torpor.

Rob and his liebling’s (Beatrice M.) personal evolution from nihilists to necrophiles stems from the acquisition of a water-logged cadaver and resourceful application of a lead pipe. Their polyamorous act of desecration is filmed with the aplomb of actual erotica, importing a perplexing delicacy to viscous heavy petting, each gesticulation conjuring a euphoric reverberation through optical printing and slackened speed. Emphasis on safe sex and the use of gentle piano as accompaniment repurpose an odious endeavor into risible spoof, taking on-screen intimacy to its extreme, both as an affront to hackneyed filmmaking and the safety of cinematic voyeurism.

This frankness can be taxing, particularly in its cruelty to animals, but Buttgereit’s sole purpose isn’t to repulse, rather, he utilizes brutality to expose the financial and venereal insecurities shared by his characters and ignored by reputable German artists. When Rob gets laid-off and his sweetheart leaves for greener pocketbooks and fresher corpses, he retreats to the darkened pews of a picture house, seeking solace from the sepulchral walls of his efficiency apartment. Though his carnal appetite can’t be satiated by the cheapjack viscera on screen, his peers in the audience respond emphatically to a slasher film’s sexualized violence, each howl of amusement and swill of beer acting as a budget catharsis for the paycheck-to-paycheck crowd.

Despite this working-class sentiment, Jörg Buttgereit’s patient, lingering portraiture are far more artful and evocative than those of his kindred spirits, anointing blood and organs as erotic elixirs, equal to champagne and strawberries upon the altar of dime-store romance. Even passages of excess, explicitly a graveyard rape scene and the inevitable climax, speak the language of ornate, Gothic horror, employing the mystique of billowing fog and crimson fluid to affix this work of iniquity to the genre’s storied tradition. Dragging technique, history, and subtext into the sewer is an admirable feat, but Buttgereit’s grandest lark harkens back to the New Testament, manifesting a Christ figure (replete with crown of thorns) from a forlorn degenerate and exalting the dating game and its concomitant fetishes to a contemporary passion play.

Nekromantik (Buttgereit/Jelinski, 1987)
Directed by Jörg Buttgereit
Written by Jörg Buttgereit and Franz Rodenkirchen
Photographed by Uwe Bohrer

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Sweet Movie (1974, Dušan Makavejev)

A dirty joke masquerading as libertine battle hymn, Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie corrupts the propriety of mid-century American advertising, perverting its candyshell colors and doe-eyed piety into a series of mordant provocations, succeeding in evoking anarchy, but failing as a treatise on subjective morality and epicureanism. Initial arguments made against opulence and cultural convention triumph as profane representations of privileged ignorance, but any ideological coherence is diluted by Makavejev’s penchant for shock, a technique that only functions when freed from artistic pretense and banal radicalism.

Broken into vignettes like a variety program, Sweet Movie targets oppressive isms seemingly at random, summarizing its anti-authoritarian polemic through the episodic agony of its impotent lead (Carole Laure). Representing Canada in a televised Miss World competition, our unnamed protagonist prevails on account of the warm glow emanating from her vagina, a feat that can’t be replicated by brutish Yugoslavian or urbanized Congolese contestants. The stereotypes and slurs directed at participants by broadcaster and costumer alike link directly to each woman’s ethnicity, be it a mannish belligerence or bikini of bananas, and bear a vulgarity that suits the limitations of beauty pageants and the meaningless of ordained labels, indicting anthropological grouping for crimes against the individual.

The intentional vapidity of dialogue and disposition play directly into Makavejev’s politics, yet, blissful ignorance is offset by lush photography, proving Dušan’s primary allegiance to aesthetic over civic responsibility. Metaphor and contrast also motivate the surrealistic succession of images, signifying chastity by swiftly cutting from the luminosity of Miss Canada’s womanhood to a surging waterfall and transfiguring the artificiality of papier-mâché and halogen bulbs into sacred objects.

An aquatic passage, captured in mesmerizing slow motion, accents the cosmetic blue pigment of chlorinated pool water, manifesting an oil-slick rainbow of blurred shades from the newly-crowned Miss Monde’s flowing garments. Though her submergence is directly linked to the submissive role of a trophy wife (her victor’s garland was an industrialist spouse), it still relies on the “superficial” joys of visual art, clashing directly with the rigid tenets of Socialist Serbia and the objective purity sought by Monde’s new husband, M. Kapital (Animal House’s John Vernon). By virtue of his antiseptic approach to coitus, which includes a bath in isopropyl alcohol and a deluge of sterile urine in place of ejaculate, Dušan reflects on the mechanics of capitalism, exhibiting the soulless exchange of goods that occurs when the birth canal is reduced to a “sanitation system for unchecked waste.”

In an effort to parallel fictional acts of dehumanization with the genuine article, Makavejev deftly pivots to stock footage of exhumed corpses from the Katyn Forest Massacre, reflecting on the fragments of lives culled from the shirt pockets of indecipherable ashes. Beneath the initial disturbance of veritable inhumanity lies an allegorical centerpiece, one that exhibits extremity as the logical culmination of petty injustices, correlating the treatment of humans as product to the treatment of humans as refuse. As the segment climaxes on a mound of lifeless cadavers, the grim black-and-white of the past is reborn as a puddle of bubbling, crimson wax, presenting the comfort of fantasy over the severity of truth, and admonishing those who enable suffering through callow disregard.

Though these efforts to unmask corporeal and spiritual exploitation thrive when juxtaposing catastrophe and kitsch, Makavejev’s only resolution to autocratic power is sexual nihilism, a dogma that liberates the like-minded few at the expense of the uninitiated. The boundlessness of Sweet Movie’s libido is designed to subvert orthodoxy and disregard governmental control of the human form, but uncomfortable interludes of child grooming and unsimulated bodily function exist only to repulse, struggling to indoctrinate adventurous viewers into a “new morality” as vain and wasteful as its predecessor.

If this ode to the purely physical manages to sell an audience on its revisionist politics and assemblage of amoral stunts, it does so through its polarities, conjuring the seductive and stomach-churning from abject desire and malevolence. At its most resonant, the erotic and morbid are made one, reaching its zenith by coaxing arousal from the sight of bare skin coated in melted chocolate, while conjuring glimpses of sunken Katyn Forest cadavers. This audacity of vision makes for a profound and unsettling set of symbols, ideas marred only by a predilection for the scatological that can’t differentiate between detritus and the divine.

Sweet Movie (Maran Film/Mojack Film Ltée/V.M. Productions, 1974)
Directed by Dušan Makavejev
Written by Dušan Makavejev, France Gallagher (collaborator) and Martin Malina (collaborator)
Photographed by Pierre Lhomme

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I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967, Vilgot Sjöman)

Exploiting the in vogue marriage between “free love” and armchair Marxism, I Am Curious (Yellow) rebels in the name of commerce and controversy, posturing as much as its placard-carrying activists through a chaotic collage of impotent eroticism and interminable rhetoric. Beneath the maelstrom of its motley components, ranging from participatory documentary to absurdist comedy, Vilgot Sjöman and Lena Nyman (the lead) endeavor to interpret sexuality as a function of the class system, sapping it of its biological necessity to expose its contribution to the acquisition and preservation of power. Though the notion is ostensibly accurate, the application is vague, investing more time in vapid bombast than ideological follow-through, condemning Lena for the curiosity it swore to advocate.

Packaged as the auteur’s broken-hearted confession, the first layer of Curious’ fragmentary frame story beholds Nyman as a forlorn item of obsession, positioning its objectifying eye as a meta-commentary on directorial authority that cuts too close to the bone. Despite Lena’s presence, her engagement in Sjöman’s unreliable narrative is limited to glimpses of tousled hair and pouty glances, each pose fashioned to evoke naiveté and chastity. Abrupt shifts from the editing bay to improvised jokes and “man-on-the-street” dialogues flesh Nyman out beyond masturbatory reverie, but belie the enthusiasm of her insights, reducing the tenets of socialism to witless sloganeering and stolen Godardian typography.

The most incriminating aspect of Sjöman and Nyman’s collective agenda, however, lies in the banality of their interview questions, which transform bland sermonizing and 101-level political comprehension into implications of privilege and cowardice, criticisms which are leveled at everyone from anonymous pensioners to Martin Luther King Jr. Aside from revealing Sweden’s all-embracing apathy, the pair do little more than embody the pretenses of modern-day “slacktivism,” trading experience and passion for smug reassurance and the appropriated pleasures of Eastern philosophy.

This bevy of distractions, all furnished to lend merit to black-and-white thinking, treats sexuality as an afterthought, stranding its alleged selling point to the concluding (and most cynical) segment. Positioning an extramarital affair between Lena and a member of the royal family as proof of the intersection between sex and authority, Sjöman drags Nyman through a procession of humiliations, wielding abuse, shame, and scabies as physical manifestations of conservative indifference. If this provocation succeeds as rhetorical exercise, it fails completely as artistic expression, aligning the pleasures of the flesh with the politician instead of the populus, and limiting Lena’s libido to a cheap commodity and plot mechanism.

I Am Curious (Yellow) (Sandrews, 1967)
Written and Directed by Vilgot Sjöman
Photographed by Peter Wester

Tilaï (1990, Idrissa Ouédraogo)

Stately in its simplicity, but with the formidability of folklore, Tilaï examines how community values impact the family dynamic, treating the war between honor and emotion as a breeding ground for duplicity and violence. At the center of this battle is the concept of fatherhood, both as family head and creator of “the law,” seen here as a destructive force, capable of orchestrating tragedy through unwavering allegiance to archaic moral standards. Standing in opposition to this authoritarian power is youthful longing, encapsulated in the pillow talk of our star-crossed leads and the fickle conscience of a devoted brother. Though Idrissa Ouédraogo’s script favors these forlorn players, he never absolves them of their transgressions, likening deception to participation in the patriarchal game and enriching his tale of domestic woe with an impartiality free of sanctimonious sermonizing.

Fortified by righteous anger and the echo of his baritone bone flute, Saga (Rasmané Ouédraogo) confronts his brother about their father’s arranged marriage to an old flame, igniting unspoken indignation and suspicion within their tradition-bound village. Upon realizing that his declaration of love has been reciprocated by the reluctant bride (Ina Cissé), Saga initiates romance and plots their escape, fantasizing about transforming a nocturnal liaison into an irrefutable union. Though the intentions of the reconciled pair are innocent, the clandestine nature of their tryst demands deceit, ensnaring their kith and kin in a downward spiral culminating in banishment and death.

Despite the earnestness of their circumstances and the equity of the presentation, Ouédraogo inculcates his protagonists with a sense of humor and benevolence that lends his parable a sweeping universality, spurning the specificity of era and location to evince the comprehensive human experience. The hushed purr of the sound design and score also strip the proceedings of stilted melodrama, allowing each performance to resonate above the whirligig of soft desert winds and the slink of fitfully-plucked bass strings.

By chastening the production and demonstrating the ordinary within the esoteric, Idrissa Ouédraogo eschewed the superficiality of the romantic comedy, perceiving the quandary at the intersection between love and law and the actual ramifications of sexual double-dealing. In lieu of suspense and slapstick, Ouédraogo manifested morality through Kougri (Assane Ouédraogo), Saga’s brother and only penitent, representing compassion and intelligence in his lament for family and structure. At the core of this conflicted heart lies the imbalance between progress and tradition, a nexus wrought with frustration and despair, only persevering through fabrications that intend to subvert moral authority, but inadvertently tighten its hold.

Tilaï (Les Films de l’Avenir, 1990)
Written and Directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo
Photographed by Pierre-Laurent Chénieux and Jean Monsigny

Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène)

Wielding contrasts in hue as overarching metaphor, Ousmane Sembène detects racial conflict at every rung of the social ladder, revealing ethnicity as emotional baggage to be exchanged in the name of upward mobility. Through his cinematic surrogate, Sembène examines the effects of isolation and cultural bereavement on the migrant worker, treating the allure of cosmopolitan living as a dead end for those unable to abandon their melanin along with their homeland. Despite the dichotomy struck between the communality of the Dakarois and the aloofness of the Maralpines, Sembène finds common ground in the obstacle of acclimation for both parties, exposing acculturation and false altruism as different sides of the same coin.

Enchanted by the calming beauty of the Côte d'Azur’s unclouded waters, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) examines France from the passenger seat, beholding the “exotic” in the same fashion that her Gallic employers marvel at her pigmentation. Advancing from a role as pro tem nanny in Senegal to domestic servant in Antibes, Diouana envisions her future in the vast wall of glass and brick that comprises her apartment complex, mistaking its fashionable anonymity as a remedy for humble beginnings. Ironically, the immensity and uniformity of her surroundings will parallel the soulless monotony of her tasks, ensnaring her in a socioeconomic prison far from her Parisian fantasy and the amenities of home.

Sembène further quarantines Diouana by sequestering her grievances to an internal monologue, utilizing non-diegetic voice-over to mirror detachment from maîtresse and society alike. The natural imbalance between light and dark in black-and-white film stock also channels the disconnection between our protagonist and her surroundings, amplifying the contrast between her complexion and the smooth, egg-shell surfaces of her monochromic workspace, allowing the juxtaposition to be a perennial symbol of inequality.

By limiting Diouana’s personality to passages of servitude and fleeting memories, Sembène employs superficiality as a condemnation of societal roles, uncovering the connection between the demoralizing nature of labor and an ever-growing disparity between the classes. Observing from the surface also magnifies a shared failure for each race in question, correlating the exchange of gifts between Diouana and her hosts as acts of cultural appropriation.

While Diouana’s adoption of a polka-dot party dress reveals a desire to shed her skin and embrace Western culture, her maîtriser’s appreciation for an authentic African mask descends into the realm of commodification, mutating the object into a totem of Diouana’s dehumanization and French colonization. This transformation imparts Ousmane Sembène’s subtle work of domestic drama with a palpable sense of foreboding, manifesting the ghosts of oppression in each blank stare of the aforementioned disguise.  

Black Girl (Filmi Domirev, 1966) 
Written and Directed by Ousmane Sembène
Photographed by Christian Lacoste   

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Yeelen (1987, Souleymane Cissé)

Operating within the realm of fantasy, but stripped of its pageantry and orchestration, Yeelen aligns the mystical and practical, manifesting hallowed earth and sacred talisman from radiant stones and whittled staffs of wood. Its magic is conjured solely through prayer and spat saliva, evincing the profound power of myth and philosophy through the symbiotic relationship between animal, habitat, and divine providence. Though the colloquial nature of its narrative is barely illuminated by an introductory key, it perceives common ground at the core of the family dynamic, bridging geographical and cultural gaps through shared experience and resplendent visions of irrefutable beauty.

Awakening the heavens with a sacrificial pyre as bright as the sun, Soma (Niamanto Sanogo) provokes the Goddess Mari to ferret out his prodigal heir, employing the embezzlement of ancestral sorcery as his motivation for retribution. A “magic pylon,” sculpted from branches and shaped like a battering ram, drags his servants towards the fleeing Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane), refusing to waver in its path, as if beckoned by an unseen magnet. No special effects are used to elaborate on this totem’s supernatural power, but its magnitude blossoms in the mind of the viewer as the film progresses, nurtured by the reverence of the performers towards the inanimate object and the personifying eye of the camera.

Treating this metaphor as a recurring theme, Souleymane Cissé gently mocks the inadequacies of humanity through both animal and terrain, injecting obstacles and enlightenment into our protagonist’s allegorical exodus by way of lucid dream. As the sparse, synthesized pulse of the score reflects the cracked, parched savanna, Nianankoro envisions the adversity lying ahead in the shape of a snickering jackal, each spiteful whimper amplified by the surreal posturing of a man painted to resemble the scavenger. Incantations even repurpose the beasts of Nianankoro’s imagination into agents of terror, summoning conflict from the disembodied leg bone of a calf and blankets of fire from a belligerent swarm of bees. The scorched sand is even given its own, fragile voice, bellowing out in an inorganic shriek of pain and sonic dissonance, acting as an exaggerated spoof of man’s indecipherable howls of fear.

The folly of humanity’s violence, as embodied by father and son and represented by fauna and flora, is humbled before the culmination of Mari’s power, discharged as a blinding beam of light from the gemstone on Soma’s pylon. Its sanctity is paralleled by delicate tracking glides and gentle camera zooms, transforming the breadth of the space into intimate portraiture, creating a lunar exoticism from milky pools of water and solitary, knotty trees. By personalizing folklore and likening the divine to the corporeal, Souleymane Cissé transformed heritage into something tangible and quixotic, separate from the destruction caused by hate and power, but intrinsic to man’s journey and fallibility.

Yeelen (Cissé Films, 1987)
Written and Directed by Souleymane Cissé
Photographed by Jean-Noël Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau

Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper)

Conjuring symbol and superficiality from the stars and stripes of the American flag, Easy Rider recognizes the fickleness of idealism, exposing hypocrisy on both sides of the social schism. Through its fetishization of patriotic iconography, it illustrates a duality within our protagonists, treating their rebellion and wanderlust as inadvertent products of the capitalist system, a counter-cultural cover for egotism and avarice.

Buying their financial freedom with a clandestine drug deal, motorcyclists Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) abandon their watches and set forth for Mardi Gras, treating the tranquility of the open road and the warmth of a campfire as panacea for the stresses of urban life. Closing each day of riding with a twilight discussion, the pair share stoned ruminations on identity and environment, extolling the virtues of the burgeoning Back-to-the-land movement and the humbleness of the independent farmer. Their words feign sincerity, enough so to convince communitarians of their willingness to “drop out,” but their spirits are still stuck in the material world, and each paranoid rant about their stockpile of cash (suggestively stashed in a star-spangled gas tank) and staccato editorial transition propels them closer to ruination.

The conviviality of improvised dialogue and groove of the zeitgeist-summoning soundtrack belie a swelling sense of dread, personified by a pair of hitchhikers that alter the expedition’s course and predict the travelers’ futures. Their unnamed and earliest passenger (Luke Askew) forewarns of the devastation of time and beckons the duo to his farming collective, but their willingness to sample the fruits of his community’s labor without toiling in the field demonstrates an opportunistic attitude, one that will lure them back to comforts of consumerism.

Their subsequent pillion (Jack Nicholson) recognizes the revolutionary nature of true autonomy and the constraints of “antiquated systems” like law and religion, but saddles himself with the burden of the bottle, settling for a debauched existence in lieu of adult obligation. His death, particularly what it provokes within Wyatt and Billy, inspires an aesthetic and intellectual shift, abandoning the earth tones and zephyrs of the film’s first half and perverting the marvels of the American southwest into a hazy, interminable terror.

Birthing a dichotomy between the work’s halves, László Kovács commences with the benevolent yellows and clay reds of Arizona’s deserts, sapping the pallet of color and narrowing the scope as the pilgrims approach New Orleans, culminating in an acid-tinged, monochromatic cemetery freakout. Though the introductory passages hold true to the Western tradition of azure skies and vast canyons, the succeeding vision possesses a pioneering experimentality, uncovering psychic trauma through gauzy grain, incongruity, and the optically arcane.

This stylistic contrast can be concussive, but within this bewilderment lies the crux of the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s bipartisan argument, which exhibits America’s political factions as opposing sides of the same coin and rebukes their respective ardor for violence and vanity. The erroneous legacy of Bohemian rallying cry, presumably proliferated by rapacious marketers, ignores the complexity and solemnity of the work, reducing it to the intellectual dollar-bin of passé novelty. By championing centrism and appealing for clemency over furor, Easy Rider liberated itself from the mire of epoch and nostalgia.

Easy Rider (Columbia Pictures, 1969)
Directed by Dennis Hopper
Written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern 
Photographed by László Kovács

Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)

Bleeding horror of its architecture and romanticism, Night of the Living Dead refuses to shroud death in metaphor, discarding the safety of the exotic and fantastic for a more palpable, localized incubus. Employing the stark and skeletal farmland of Western Pennsylvania as backdrop, creator George A. Romero found antagonism in the ordinary, making monsters of our decaying bodies and prisons of our sanctified homesteads. This betrayal bore an existential strain of the macabre, one wholly separate from the erotic and juvenile, dedicated to documenting human morality and vulnerability in the face of chaos.

Wavering between cruel joke and crisis of faith, Romero set his apocalypse in Spring, orchestrating a cadaveric rebirth at the behest of his indifferent characters. His most apathetic creation is Johnny (Russell Streiner), a pragmatist who figuratively beckons the dead from their tombs with a bitter, graveside indictment of his departed father. Acting as author’s surrogate and polar opposite, Barbra (Judith O’Dea) rebukes her brother’s impious posturing, only to behold his detachment personified in the blank stare and groping arms of a lurking, somnambulist assailant.

The intimacy of the ensuing fight between Johnny and our nameless interloper bears an erratic poetry, each undulation captured in confrontationally tight close-up, channeling the disorder of genuine violence. The score shares in this complicity, employing repetitive horn and string to echo every blow and amplify the piercing clatter of broken glass, imparting menace on the agonized stupor of a torpid antagonist.

Isolation acts as a fitting bedfellow for the growing horde of hungry deceased, epitomized by the spartan decor and desolate chill of Barbra’s farmhouse refuge. Busts of wild boar and the tinkle of music box nod respectively at a gothic past, but Romero’s eye treats domesticity like a contemporary tomb, representing confinement through shards of natural light and flat monochrome. His most artful glance finds Barbra momentarily safe, but solitary, the fading sunlight peeking through a kitchen window, accentuating her shape against the emptiness.

As days fades into the inky void of night, the absence of illumination symbolizes an American homestead stripped of its soul, bearing the heaviness of foreshadowed dread without conspicuous cultural annotation. The text has been argued as a criticism of racism, mass media, and foreign policy, but its impact lies in the display of animalistic instinct, reflected in the perseverance of Romero’s mortal guinea pigs. Ultimately, cooperation will be the saving grace of these sentient prisoners, but paranoia and pride drive a wedge between the ever-expanding survival party, generating a sort of Sartrian dilemma out of failed compromises and human folly.

Acting as pro tem leader of the lucid leftovers, Ben (Duane Jones) plays perfect foil to Barbra’s hysteria, allowing logic and strategy to extinguish feelings of bewilderment and inadequacy. As he vigorously battens down broken windows and splintered doors, fighting off desperate hands and gnashed teeth, he drifts into memory, painting a picture of pandemonium that Romero can’t illustrate on camera, aligning the illusion of a zombie onslaught to man’s impotence in the face of his own mortality.

Ironically, Ben’s physical and emotional barricades are first broached from the inside, penetrated by the cynicism of his Type-A counterpart, Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman), who uses bluster to conceal cowardice and ensnare his counterparts in the mausolean cellar. Romero channels Dracula’s Renfield in each of Cooper’s fevered ultimatums, smirking back at his shocked spectators as he feeds this egomaniac to his vampiric, newly-reanimated daughter. Yet, any sense of karmic satisfaction gained in Cooper’s final moments are fleeting, as our hero is stranded amidst a sea of staggering “ghouls,” left to ponder if suicide or patience is his best chance for a dignified demise.

As night drifts into day, the stillness of morn provides false hope for the endurance of Romero’s homegrown resistance, only to see the noble few immolated by the torches of an angry mob. It’s a grim, but prescient, meditation on dehumanization, evocative enough to mirror the Vietnam War, media sensationalism, and racially-motivated lynching, but bold enough to obscure its intentions and refuse sentimentality. Whether taken as political statement or exploitation, Night of the Living Dead succeeds in its ability to shock without monster or manifestation, terrifying simply by the glimmer of our own reflection.

Night of the Living Dead (Image Ten, 1968)
Directed and Photographed by George A. Romero
Written by George A. Romero and John A. Russo

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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer)

Teeming with bellicose barbs and profligate posturing, Russ Meyer’s ode to the midriff beguiles like a carny’s ballyhoo, rhapsodizing over the “wanton” female form on a wave of slinking bass guitar and gyrating hips. It ogles with the blatancy of a blue movie, shooting from well beneath the brassiere, but never objectifies its trio of crooked go-go girls, instead, ridiculing the vigorously horny voyeurs depicted on screen and seated in the audience. By transforming the predator into the prey, Meyer satirizes the concept of “selling sex,” smuggling gender politics and graphic violence into the fantasy world of cheesecake cinema.

Repurposing innuendo into an open threat, Meyer and co-writer Jack Moran constructed their female leads as agents of forceful insinuation, bestowing each burst of growled slang and disdainful glare with a mélange of danger and sensuality. Lead by the buxom and broad-shouldered Varla (Tura Satana), the gang get their “kicks” behind the steering wheel, throwing down the gauntlet to suburbanites interested in time trials and taking “up all the oxygen.”

Meyer conjures tension at the editing bay, capturing competition at a sprint, interweaving driver-side shots of Varla’s grinning maw and her sweat-soaked opponent, each image drowned in the startling bellow of revved engines and a spindrift of sun-dried clay. The desert setting is even manipulated into a foreboding, alien landscape, bolstered by Walter Schenk’s brilliant spatial photography, which utilizes torsos and the limited flora to construct a closed environment out of limitless space.  

Each declaration is just as brutal and unforgiving as the terrain, perverting the sentimentality and slang of the era into venomous polemic. Meyer’s authorial transgressions are done in the name of insolence, aimed squarely at prudes and ideological gatekeepers, but without the solemnity of his Gallic counterparts. When one of his clueless victims opines, “Are you trying to say something?,” the double entendres go from self-aware to self-deprecating, preventing any attempt at political statement from devolving into fatuous sloganeering.   

The resulting provocation is far sharper than the exploitation label warrants, bearing an economy and acumen that successfully integrates the stimulating and sublime into the confines of a dust bowl potboiler. Russ Meyer’s marriage of the inexpensive and self-reflexive would become the model for independent art moving forward, but few were capable of mastering the object of their parody. A sarcastic attitude shouldn’t imply artistic impotence and Russ Meyer’s films still managed to be ribald and vicious with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (RM Films International, 1965)
Directed by Russ Meyer
Written by Jack Moran (screenplay) and Russ Meyer (story)
Photographed by Walter Schenk

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Kicking & Screaming (2005, Jesse Dylan)

Eschewing the patter and dance of comedy’s yesteryear, contemporary humor takes on the insouciant mugging and improvisation of Saturday Night Live, discarding mannered performance in favor of inanity and playful disobedience. This defiant mentality, directly referenced by plot and subconsciously inferred by structure, wags its finger at patriarchal authority, taking bosses and rivals to task for the oppressive dogma of education and prudence.

Fueled by rivalry and a lifetime of “suppressed rage,” this predominantly male breed of slapstick expounds upon the perpetual fray waged between authoritarian “fathers” and maladjusted “sons,” building allegiance from a like-minded audience that contends with a private Dean Wormer or Shooter McGavin beyond theater walls. The resulting product acts as an opiate for these fraternal masses, granting temporary victory over feelings of inferiority, without directly alluding to the father complex roiling beneath the surface.

Despite a narrative allegiance to this subgenus and the employment of one of its luminaries, Kicking & Screaming surpasses its kindred spirits by targeting the fountainhead of Phil Weston’s (Will Ferrell) anxiety, refusing a surrogate for the emotional damage done by a detached father (Robert Duvall). It even allows Phil’s tenderness and whimsy to act as the film’s centerpiece, setting boundaries between passages of amiable farce and uncomfortable illustrations of Dad’s ruthlessness. By setting this partition, Phil’s neurosis is never made into the butt of the joke, enabling a jovial, fish-out-of-water story to triumph over the insensitivities of a callous artform.

Born into a culture of “benchwarmers,” Phil has endured the failures of an unathletic past, refusing the shame of a sedentary lifestyle for his soccer-obsessed son. Following the teen’s expulsion from his grandfather’s undefeated squad, Phil takes it upon himself to pencil the boy into a starting lineup, enlisting Mike Ditka, sausage-making Italian wunderkinds and the stimulating bliss of espresso in his quest to triumph over a truculent and unrelenting father.

Regardless of a humbling moment and much-needed decaffeination, Kicking & Screaming stays true to an altruistic character, restraining Will Ferrell’s penchant for unscripted puerility to dramatically-vital, and often hilarious, divergences. Though the camerawork is plagued by a quaking best employed in video-game combat, the color palette suits the demeanor, allowing estival blues and greens to parallel the good-natured joshing of adolescence and the idiosyncrasies of suburban parentage. Through this innocuity, each laugh is earned without condescension, encapsulating the sentimentality of summer sport and the enduring notion of a parent venturing to make a better life for his children.

Kicking & Screaming (Universal Pictures, 2005)
Directed by Jesse Dylan
Written by Lee Benvenuti and Steve Rudnick
Photographed by Lloyd Ahern

Victory (1981, John Huston)

Marrying “sporting spectacle” and prison-break adventure, Victory employs professional footballers as symbols of resistance against the German totalitarian state, reshaping a mythic tale of wartime triumph into a vehicle for cross-cultural unification. Pairing the impeccable footwork of Brazil’s Pelé and England’s Bobby Moore with the acting talents of Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone, the collaboration mirrors the narrative trajectory of The Great Escape, aspiring to match that film’s fusion of the suspenseful and emotionally resonant. Though Its construction is skillful and intentions admirable, reflected in the cast’s espirit de corps and a rousing climax at Colombes Stadium, it never builds momentum from its disparate parts, surrendering to schmaltz in its final breath instead of fleshing out characters and nurturing relationships.

As a way to ease tensions with interned prisoners following the death of an escapee, Germany’s Major von Steiner (Max von Sydow) and Britain’s Captain John Colby (Michael Caine) formulate an exhibition football match between stormtroopers and prisoners of war, masking ulterior motives beneath the facade of benevolent competition. Colby’s objective is better food and lodging for his teammates, but the Allied command eyes an opportunity for escape, playing a high-risk chess game with dire results for infantrymen on the bottom rung. As for senior members of the Nazi Party, the bout is fuel for the “propaganda machine,” allowing them to further denigrate the English war effort and align athletic achievement with tactical and genealogical excellence.

John Huston deftly displays these passages of clandestine strategy and their subsequent execution, defining the caste system struck between military ranks by concentrating on the daring acts committed by privates at the behest of their superiors. His visual symbolism is just as adroit, illustrating the uniformity shared between combat and sporting drills and subtly suggesting the firing squad during a last-reel penalty kick.

Regrettably, his consideration for pace doesn’t allow for coherence or introspection, forsaking exposition, tone and the establishment of camaraderie in the name of loud montage. Conversely, each escape sequence is too vague and underlit to inspire tension, foregoing sensory overload or even the most conservative use of cross-cutting in favor of nebulous, subterranean banality. The kinship shared between players and the gravity of their circumstances is just as ill-defined, barring a fleeting look at the effete, skeletal figures cast by Eastern-European recruits to the Allied team, each man sequestered to a single, dialogue-free glower.

Even Sly Stallone’s spirited turn as Hatch, the Allied goalie and foremost escape artist, is whittled down to cultural stereotypes and a handful of intimate glances, many of which uncomfortably echo his definitive role as Rocky Balboa. The only performer unscathed by Victory’s hoary plot mechanisms is Pelé, the momentum from his culminating rainbow kick reverberating on screen in arresting, mesmeric loop. His balletic feet are the only element that doesn’t feel prescribed, liberating the splendor of the game from the narrative constraints of John Huston’s stodgy production.

Victory (Paramount Pictures, 1981)
Directed by John Huston
Written by Yabo Yablonsky (screenplay and story), Evan Jones (screenplay), Jeff Maguire (story) and Djordje Milicevic (story)
Photographed by Gerry Fisher

The Damned United (2009, Tom Hooper)

Forgoing the glory of athletic triumph in favor of administrative rigor, The Damned United is only tangentially interested in the “beautiful game,” utilizing the tension of ranking and rivalry as a metaphor for ego and inadequacy. Told from the perspective of famously vociferous football manager Brian Clough, the narrative corrupts chronology to reflect on the subject at two divergent points in his career, observing the transition from admiration to contempt in the antedated section and the self-destructive nature of the narcissist in the subsequent segment. Despite variations in tone, the fragments are harmonious in their isolation, stranding the viewer on an island of Clough’s design, fortified by his crippling inferiority complex. From this bitter and vain vantage point, Michael Sheen’s interpretation and the work engulfed by it are potent, yet, when truncated at the whim of succinct storytelling, the piece ultimately loses its purpose and panders to the cult of personality.

Filtered in a bluish tint to reflect a bygone era, Damned constructs an England to embody Clough’s inner turmoil, using reenacted press conferences, typography and montage to evoke the muted despair of a rain-soaked newspaper. Its sportsmen are just as dour, even brutish, fabricating a legacy from an anti-authoritarian demeanor and pugnacious style of play, responsible in equal measure for an army of devotees and diminishing returns in international competition.

Once a disciple of Leeds’ and its aforementioned motley crew of footballers, Brian Clough, acting manager of the floundering Derby County F.C., fuels his career on an inadvertent slight from their head coach, Don Revie, weaponizing a fundamental approach to the game as a means to climb the bureaucratic ladder. Through a subjective structure, meant to reflect the progression and end result of Brian’s unchecked ego, the film transforms his roles and sentiments into cinematic signposts, racing from acolyte to enemy to successor to pariah. At the mercy of this perpetual motion and reckless organization, the film can’t help but mirror the manic nature of Brian’s pathology, personifying his sociopathic disdain for collaboration with each crafty shift in itinerary.

While the anatomy of the work functions to expose Brian’s improprieties, it never intends to be an indictment, fashioning genuine moments of empathy from solitary spaces shared between the audience and the subject. For instance, a stationary image of Brian slumped over in a steely, cerulean room resonates with desperation, the facade of self-sufficiency fading with each frantically dialed phone number. Previous shots also focus on Clough’s nervous fingers, whether fumbling with a cigarette or massaging his sweat-soaked neck, replacing obligatory game footage with the anxieties that stimulate his “mad ambition.”

A concluding disciplinary meeting even defines his affliction, capturing powerlessness in a single, cramped zoom. As players and owners thrash out his future behind closed doors, Brian stares at the literal barrier struck between himself and his peers, his sorrow further accentuated by the figurative obstruction developed in his broken mind. This excerpt, if quarantined from a mawkish resolution, represents the vulnerability at the core of athletic and artistic bombast. Unfortunately, sport cinema isn’t known for its self-reflection and this film decides to kowtow to the trappings of audience and genre in its final breath, limiting a man and his merits to a battery of statistics.  

The Damned United (Columbia Pictures, 2009)
Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by David Peace (novel) and Peter Morgan (screenplay)
Photographed by Ben Smithard

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The Quick and the Dead (1995, Sam Raimi)

Alternating between the cartoonish and the cruel, Sam Raimi’s caffeinated riff on the Spaghetti Western refuses the atonement offered by Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves, capitalizing on the surging adrenaline of stylized violence and the sprightly, dizzying locomotion of the dolly zoom. Raimi excels at inserting absurdity into any genre, realizing the satiric potential of hyperbole and caricature, especially when functioning as symbols for human mortality and fallibility. His penchant for the mischievous and morbid lend a taut immediacy to the competition at the core of The Quick and the Dead, employing photographic grandiloquence as a manifestation of mankind’s belligerence and solipsism.   

Embodying the archetypal, anonymous gunslinger, Sharon Stone broods quietly from beneath the brim of her Stetson, chomping the tip of a cigarillo as an obvious nod to her cinematic ancestors (see A Fistful of Dollars). The narrative carries as many knowing clichés as its protagonist, recycling a cinematic canon of the corrupt and courageous as fodder for a quick-draw tournament, rifling through dramatis personae with the misanthropic glee of a side-scrolling fighting game.

Though the setting bears a striking familiarity, Raimi’s color palette shades in the banal with the luridness of a nightmare, exploiting the terror of Stone’s dreams and the glowing pyres of El Día de los Muertos as a reflection of the quietus to come. The overabundance of technique even mirrors the ghastliness of bloodsport, utilizing the kinetic energy of projectiles to propel the camera forward with demonic force (see The Evil Dead) and fanned decks of cards to act as swift wipe transitions.

The fluidity and blocking of each shot is done at the service of a Rolodex of gunslingers and Dante Spinotti’s eye catalogs the dancing of pistols and donning of ceremonial garments like a fashion photographer, reinterpreting outlaw culture as pop art iconography. He even hones in on the spurs of Gene Hackman’s malevolent Herod in tight, fetishistic close-up, allowing the ghostly jangle of each boot to carry bad mojo on the breeze, branding evil with a subtle scarlet letter before it has a chance to wreak havoc.

Hackman’s performance is as chilling and artful as his introduction, ignoring an ostentatious attempt at biblical symbolism by realizing contemporary avarice and barbarism with each breath. His megalomania is only made more concrete by the lamentable cowering of his constituents, sustaining on the stolen garments of lifeless gunslingers and gambling on which desperado will give up the ghost next. This savagery, coupled with Raimi’s sanguine style, smacks of excess and cynicism, only to be validated by a late revelation that exposes an inherited history of violence, trickling downward from the inception of culture to the themes of modern art and entertainment.

The Quick and the Dead (TriStar Pictures, 1995)
Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by Simon Moore
Photographed by Dante Spinotti

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Meek's Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt)

Spoken in a whisper and shot at a reserved distance, Meek’s Cutoff reinterprets the American Western by shunning its adherence to the melodramatic, eschewing the genre’s nostalgia and morality in favor of sober observation. By reflecting the vague indifference of an arid environment, Kelly Reichardt dredges up the fear and compromise ineradicable from the homesteader experience, defining endurance as a triumph of deference over vainglory and prejudice.

Ushering in a weary monotony without preamble, the organic grace of Ellen Heuer’s foley work conjures a disorienting rhythm, hypnotizing the viewer through the babble of a rushing stream and the rustling of cloth against parched flora. The ambling human structures tied to the horizon amplify the alien and surreal ambience, particularly as they traverse aquatic bodies, each possession lifted overhead in exaltation to the detached, searing sun. As potable water evaporates and the party wanders off of The Oregon Trail, the blinding orb above takes on a spectral glow, shining a spotlight on indulgence and miscalculation with a sadist’s glee.

The architect of each collective oversight is Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a curmudgeonly guide hellbent on sniffing out a “second Eden,” willfully endangering his party at the behest of an unrestrained ego. As drunk on rage and pride as Melville’s Ahab, Meek revels in the “chaos and destruction” of the pilgrimage, utilizing this crafty gender metaphor to discount the recriminations of his female compatriots and legitimize his reckless abandon.

Meek’s foolhardy optimism and stubbornness occupy nocturnal conversation between his fellow emigrants, each opaque image as clandestine as the inaudible, disembodied discussion. Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) acts as Meek’s most vocal opponent, orchestrating discontent by firelight and advocating temperance, acting on her word by defending an injured Native American kneeling before the navigator’s shotgun. As suspicions rise and bent strings heighten anxious emotions, Emily’s faith in mankind proves to be no match for insatiable primal urges, sending the company caterwauling toward starvation on a wave of hysteria and intolerance.

Though the conclusion and its unhurried accumulation of tension provide little relief, both signify an ideological turning point, regarding Meek’s prostration before God and nature as a victory for humility. The lack of definition may infuriate a practical audience, but those unconcerned with closure will reap the benefit of texture and tone, extracting pleasure from the esoteric notes of the Native tongue and the allegorical lessons manifested in isolated environs and the sanctity of compassion.

Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond
Photographed by Chris Blauvelt

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Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)

Beleaguered by alleged subtext and branded as histrionic camp, Johnny Guitar’s mature and communicative take on the Western has been overshadowed by its academic cachet, forced to incur the projections of over-eager cultural custodians at the expense of its shrewd artistry. If taken at face value, outside of 60 years of exegesis, a humble romanticism reveals itself, amassed from the years of regret worn into the principal characters’ expressions, evoked by fixed close-ups and the lingering doubt central to Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge’s wistful, analogous performances.

As Vienna, Crawford is taut from head-to-toe, the slight curl of her hair acting as the only infraction to a boot-fit frame, each ounce of femininity muted beneath drab rancher’s wear and the occupational truculence demanded of a saloon mistress. The bar’s foundation is just as sturdy as her demeanor, built into the side of a craggy cliff, each jagged shard of rock jutting from behind the bandstand like a porcupine’s quills. It’s a metaphor worthy of her resilience, each shot echoing a respect unbecoming of neighboring vendors, the organic hues from the Trucolor film stock capturing the rosy tint of her cheeks and the burnish of dusty dungarees.

Her croupier has “never seen a woman who was more a man,” that is, until he meets the pugnacious Emma Small (McCambridge). She’s Vienna’s spitting image, tapered a bit in size and confidence, making up for any disadvantages through amplification and avarice. She arrives at the watering hole with posse in tow, using her brother’s death to reignite past grievances with the proprietor and a gunslinging beau, suppressing sexual feelings for the outlaw beneath a veil of righteous indignation.

Detecting weakness in womanhood, Emma and Vienna adapt to male roles to brave the savagery of the Old West, carving out their place in a phallocentric society by mimicking its traits. However, this habituation doesn’t extend to violence and Nicholas Ray shares their pacifistic nature, ignoring a fist fight between the titular, and oddly inconsequential, Johnny (Sterling Hayden) in favor of coy conversation and verbal jousting.

Yet, this affinity for words doesn’t make the declaration any more candid and Ray struggles to solicit conflict and drive with an impersonal distance akin to third-person narration. This discordance between dialogue and visual composition can be jarring, but Johnny Guitar atones for a lack of tension with rhapsodic, photographic intimacy, exposing an ignoble and cruel vision of the Wild West through the sacrifices of two women stripped of their sexuality.

Johnny Guitar (Republic Pictures, 1954)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by Roy Chanslor (novel) and Philip Yordan (screenplay)
Photographed by Harry Stradling

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