Secret Défense [1998]

 Jacques Rivette, in a rare foray into genre cinema with Secret Défense, made the narrative both freer and more expansive while also retaining the brooding atmosphere that one associates with slow-burn crime movies. The resulting work was a compelling exercise in psychological suspense that succeeded, over a generous runtime of nearly three hours, in being a taut thriller as well as a meditation on secrets, obsessions, modernity and solitude. Rivette’s smouldering emphasis on the moments and spaces between actions made the film particularly intriguing, and that was exhibited through the near-real-time sequences involving Paris metro rides, and – in perhaps the film’s most riveting segment – an anxiety-ridden 20-minute train ride sequence. Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a research scientist still getting over her father’s death five years back, gets an unanticipated visit from her troubled younger brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) – they haven’t spoken since the funeral – who tells her that their dad’s death wasn’t accidental; he’s convinced their dad’s former business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who’s taken over his company, stays in the sprawling mansion where they’d grown up, and maintains a discomfiting proximity with their mother (Françoise Fabian), has murdered their dad, and he therefore intends to exact a bloody revenge. Sylvie isn’t fully convinced but jolted enough, and decides to do the job herself so that Paul is spared the agony. Things, however, become messy when she accidentally kills Walser’s stunning young secretary/lover (Laure Marsac), only for her sister (also played by Marsac) to start looking for her missing sister. The formally rigorous work was marked by visual interplay between technological modernity of life in Paris vis-à-vis ominous serenity of the country, and excellent turns by both Bonnaire and Radziwilowicz.

Director: Jacques Rivette

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

The Spirit of the Beehive [1973]

 Victor Erice’s celebrated debut feature The Spirit of the Beehive remains both a seminal Spanish film and an exceptional chronicling from a child’s POV. Made during Franco’s fascist regime – which was notorious for suppressing “non-compliant” works of art – Erice was compelled to express his critiques and disillusionment through elliptical, allegorical and allusive means; one therefore must engage in critical readings of the film to interpret its brooding political undertones. What remains unambiguous, however, is that this was a haunting and ethereal masterpiece, and a sublime text on how cinema can be a distillation of magic, poetry, memory, politics and defiance rolled into one. Set in a rundown village in 1940 – with the devastating Civil War having just ended with the Republicans’ defeat – the moody, minimalist and delicately weaved narrative is centred around wide-eyed six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent). Her ageing father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) remains absorbed in beehives, while her mother is lost reminiscing about someone she’s lost in the war. Her closest friend is her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), who loves playing little pranks on her naïveté. When James Whales’ Frankenstein is screened at a rundown theatre which the sisters watch in awe, Ana becomes fixated by the misunderstood monster – more so, when Isabel teasingly convinces her that he exists as a disembodied ghost at an isolated cabin nearby. Consequently, upon encountering a wounded Republican soldier who’s taken refuge there, she helps him assuming he’s the spirit’s manifestation, and is deeply scarred when he’s killed. Torrent, who’d star in Saura’s equally haunting masterpiece Cria Cuervos 3 years later, and Tellería were unforgettable, as was the magnificent, washed-out cinematography by Luis Cuadrado who started losing his eyesight during the filming.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

p.p.s. This also happens to be my 2000th film review at Cinemascope.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Fantasy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

 The Hawks and the Sparrows ingeniously harboured parallel tracks, as it was both informed by the austere aesthetics and social commitment of neorealist cinema that Pier Paolo Pasolini had a strong background in, and was expressive of the radical, modernist, and asinine aspects of his subsequent filmography. This picaresque road movie, Marxist parable, and darkly funny commentary on social inequality demonstrated that pivot. Its farcical, eccentric and subversive whimsy were evident from the get-go as it began with an amusing song, accompanying the opening title credits and introducing the cast and the crew, including how producer Alfredo Bini might’ve “endangered his position and reputation” by backing this work. An idiosyncratic father-son duo – played by the celebrated thespian Totò as the elderly, droopy-eyed, Chaplinesque dad, and Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and frequent collaborator, as the goofy, curly-haired, skirt-chasing son – are on an ambling walk through the gritty countryside of Rome, albeit going nowhere, and meeting oddball characters and having offbeat encounters along the way. They’re joined in their peregrinations by the Crow, a talking raven and left-wing intellectual. He spouts gentle advices, wry reflections, and philosophical musings, and chronicles an allegorical tale involving two monks (also played by Totò and Davoli) who’re asked by St. Francis – presented as a Marxist cleric keenly conscious of class conflicts, and reminiscent of Pasolini’s celebrated preceding narrative feature The Gospel According to St. Matthew – to preach the gospel to the haughty, powerful hawks and the humble, vulnerable sparrows. Filmed in sparkling B/W and irreverently scored by Ennio Moricone, it interplayed between political satire and dialectical analysis, and contained an homage to just-deceased Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti through a stirring montage of news footage.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Road Movie/Fantasy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Close-Up [1990]

 Abbas Kiarostami, right from his 1973 debut feature The Experience till the end of 1980s – Homework was his last film of that decade – had been making narrative films with underlying documentary attributes and documentaries with discernible performative elements. With Close-Up, he blurred the already porous boundaries between the two into something indistinguishable. That he also crafted a work that was simultaneously audacious in its formal conception and deceptively simple in its execution, playfully self-conscious and profoundly humane, radically metatextual and deeply moving, made this an extraordinary gem. The film’s unforgettable protagonist is Hossain Sabzian, a poor and unassuming cinephile who impersonated the well-known Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and faced trial and a short jail-term when the Ahankhahs – a well-off Tehran family who he promised to cast in the fictious film that he was supposedly planning to make – caught his fraudulence. Kiarostami cast Sabzian, members of the Ahankhah family and Farazmand – a journalist who too was drawn to the story – as themselves for recreating the interactions and moments that formed the backstory, as well as convinced the compassionate judge to allow him to shoot the trial – which he did using two 16mm cameras and where he casually inserted himself into the cross-examinations. Through this extraordinarily hybrid approach, an absorbing multilayered meditation unfolded on art, cinema, identity, representation, and originality vis-à-vis artifice, and perhaps paved the way for Makhmalbaf’s own similarly hybrid and beguiling masterpiece A Moment of Innocence. The film, interestingly, comprised of impish asides – as in the remarkable opening taxi-ride sequence –, an emotionally naked evocation of Sabzian for whom truth is subjective and art is absolute, and a haunting coda when the fake and real Makhmalbafs finally meet.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Fellow Citizen [1983]

 Fellow Citizen was Abbas Kiarostami’s first full-length work foregrounded on cars, aside from being his first longform documentary. Cars blur the boundaries between the private and the public, representing a liminal space coalescing the two, and that facet became an absorbing motif in his cinema hereon, which made this playful, deadpan, and deceptively observational essay a significant entry for aficionados of his filmography. The Iranian giant had incidentally worked as part-time traffic cop during his student days at the University of Tehran, to support his studies, and that injected a personal connect into this work that was steadfastly focused on traffic officer Reza Mansouri. Owing to traffic woes, the city’s authorities decided in 1980 to impose a limited hours’ ban on private cars in the city centre. Kiarostami, sensing the possibility of drama within the mundane, and the battle of wits between regulation and disorderliness, set up his camera to capture – through close-ups using telephoto lens – the mix of matter-of-fact, amusing, conciliatory, exasperated and argumentative conversations between Mansouri – whose role is being a gatekeeper to the forbidden zone – and a flurry of automobile drivers cajoling, coaxing and convincing him to let them through as an exception. There was, therefore, also this fascinating element of performativity as the citizens try using a variety of techniques – from drawing his sympathy and laying importance to his position of power, even though he’s in essence a simple cop, to impromptu storytelling and even demonstrating their social positions – in order to be allowed into the forbidden zone. The series of impassively recorded interactions, consequently, ended up taking deceptively layered allegories. The documented vignettes, by the way, were edited from over 18 hours of footage!

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Report [1977]

 The Report may well be the frostiest and harshest work of Abbas Kiarostami’s oeuvre, devoid of either the infectious playfulness or philosophic inquiries or wry ironies that one associates with his films. Made during the final days of Iran’s corrupt and hated imperial regime, which was soon to be upended by an oppressive theocratic state, most of its copies were destroyed during the Iranian Revolution and was banned thereafter; this was also a rare foray for him outside “Kanoon”, which he returned to with his fascinating and experimental next film First Case, Second Case. Influenced by his own marital troubles which eventually led to divorce – making it a rather caustic self-portrait – this was an unsentimental and downbeat examination of a miserable middle-class couple stuck in toxic matrimony. The husband, Mahmad (Kurosh Afsharpanah), is an unlikeable civil servant who’s accused of taking bribes, and loves spending his time outside work drinking, gambling and even engaging with prostitutes in company of his two buddies; the wife, Azam (Shohreh Aghdashloo), has come to disdain everything about him – his emotional apathy, avoidance of familial responsibilities, denial, and spending hours away from home – and vacillates between anger and irritation bordering on hysteria, intent of leaving, and suicidal tendencies. The film’s depiction of a fractured marriage, consequently, had a dystopian quality about it, informed as much by Kiarostami’s own personal woes as by the political turmoil brewing outside the frames. He would direct another film centred on marriage 33 years later – viz. the fabulous and beguiling masterpiece Certified Copy – but the two couldn’t be further apart in their tones, forms and structures; this was, instead, a closer precursor to Asghar Farhadi’s compelling film A Separation.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Social Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Traveller [1974]

 The Traveller, Abbas Kiarostami’s second full-length feature – or first, depending on whether you consider his evocative and poetic preceding work The Experience as one – was an absorbing, madcap and quixotic paean to childhood and adolescence. It was, in turn, the Iranian master’s love letter to a kid’s impudence, exuberance and non-conformism, which’re invariably bound to be heavily frowned upon by adults and viewed as reckless folly and insubordination. What the movies represented for Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s unforgettable The 400 Blows – as much a brewing passion and a beautiful dream as a means for adventure and escape from the dreariness of existence – football played that role for this film’s impish, 12-year-old pint-sized dynamite Qassem (Hassan Darabi). Obsessed with the game, he freely disobeys his desperate parents and dogmatic teachers to play football in the alleys with his buddies. His obsession reaches a state of monomania upon deciding to embark on the seemingly crazy quest to collect enough money to sponsor a trip to Tehran and catch a game of his favourite team at Azadi Stadium. He demonstrates exceptional doggedness, ingenuity and resourcefulness, and freely crosses ethical quandaries to fund his odyssey – including, in arguably the film’s most memorable segment, taking money from kids and their parents by staging a fake photoshoot using a broken camera – with the help of his loyal friend Akbar who truly wants Qassem to succeed. Shot in grainy B/W with a blend of frenetic energy, playful irony and empathy, and with storytelling flair vividly complemented by documentary realism, this was a joyous act of solidarity against stifling impositions and restrictions, while the insouciant, irrepressible and rebellious kid remains an indelible creation in Kiarostami’s oeuvre.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Comedy/Slice-of-Life

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Experience [1973]

 Abbas Kiarostami’s gently observational feature-length debut The Experience – produced by the filmmaking department of ‘Centre for the Intellectual Development of Child and Adolescent’ (“Kanoon”) that he’d helped found – was informed by the neorealist form, Iran’s social realist milieu, and Kiarostami’s deep empathy for nonconformist kids and adolescents living in the margins, for a tender, impish and poetic subversion of the ‘poor boy falls for rich girl’ trope. Gorgeously photographed in richly composed B/W frames, with images often shot through glass panes which gave them a subtly voyeuristic quality, we follow a day and a half in the life of an impoverished teenager whose dreams add a sliver of hope and escapist joys into his tough Dickensian existence. The orphaned Mamad works as a lowly factotum in a photography studio – serving tea, brooming the floors, assisting with developing the negatives – where he also sleeps at night. Though constantly scolded by his middle-aged employer, more so when he indulges in acts of pubescent naughtiness by creating a cut-out from a signboard featuring an attractive model, he keeps getting drawn towards small acts of playfulness and rebellion. He’s also, in the meantime, become enamoured with a lovely girl slightly older to him; she’s far beyond his social station, but that doesn’t stop him from blushing at her sight, or day-dreaming about her, or crafting a little plan to get closer to her. He's therefore the quintessential Kiarostami kid who’ll indulge in bolder and more reckless displays of mischief and disobedience in the magnificent run of films that he’d make featuring young actors. This delicately-strung work, incidentally, was nearly devoid of any dialogues, which made it all the more affecting, meditative and impressionistic.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Social Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Ten [2002]

 Ten – Abbas Kiarostami’s first film shot entirely in digital – formed a clear companion piece to his much-lauded Taste of Cherry from a structural standpoint, as both films comprised only of conversations inside a moving car between a person driving the vehicle and various people joining in the front passenger’s seat, and eschewed conventional narrative arcs in favour of fly-on-the-wall approaches. However, while the earlier film was a sombre dive into existential inquiries and moral quandaries, the latter may well remain the Iranian maestro’s sharpest political expression, as well as his most radically stripped-down tableaux. This engrossing and episodic docufiction set in Tehran – a chamber drama, if you will, in how it’s rigorously confined within a car and shot using two dashboard-mounted cameras – captured, through ten vignettes, the interactions between a beautiful, confident and fiercely modern woman (played with irresistible self-assurance by Mania Akbari), who’s always seen driving, and five different passengers, viz. her petulant son (played by Akbari’s real-life child Amina Maher) who’s angry with her for having divorced his father, her elder sister facing marital crisis, a delicate young woman jilted by her fiancé, a prostitute who uninhibitedly shares her opinions on the hypocrisy of men and idiocy of their wives, and a religious old woman. Kiarstoma’s belated answer to an Iranian critic’s question to him on the possibility of making films on independent and working Iranian women – repurposed from an earlier idea of a psychologist conducting her sessions in a car on account of renovations at her workplace – blurred the lines between private and public spaces through these nakedly intimate and free-flowing conversations that touched upon patriarchal norms, gender identities, cultural mores, societal impositions, and feminist assertions.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Taste of Cherry [1997]

 While Abbas Kiarostami’s films evolved over two broad phases –exuberant early films centred on gently rebellious kids and teenagers living in the margins, and engrossing subsequent ones revolving around cerebral middle-aged outsiders – three facets remained largely intact. His protagonists were nearly always moving, fiction and non-fiction elements would frequently bleed into each other, and his impish love for formal subversions. All were on display in Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or. The entire length of this minimalist, melancholic and quietly moving work involved Mr. Badii (portrayed with stoic restraint by Homayoun Ershadi, who was discovered by Kiarostami at a traffic jam) driving his Range Rover through alternately grubby and ravishing landscapes outside Tehran over a single day. With no backstory on offer, all we know is that he’s suffering from a great despair and wants to commit suicide; however, as that’s forbidden by Islam, he’s looking at paying for someone’s services to check if his act has been successful, and to then bury him at his chosen spot. Over the course of the meandering roads and discursive narrative, he converses with three individuals who provide very different responses to his ask – a Kurdish teenager, who’s just joined the army, flees in fear; an Afghan seminarist tries reasoning, before declining; and a ageing Turkish taxidermist (Abdolrahman Bagheri), who understands Badii’s existential crisis and reluctantly accepts the job, but tries dissuading him through a blend of philosophical reflections and storytelling. Stunningly shot with a mix of wide-angled shots and close-ups, and bereft of non-diagetic sounds, the film ended with a remarkable rupture of the fourth wall, with low-fi camcorder accompanied by a Louis Armstrong score.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Philosophical Drama/Road Movie

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992]

 David Lynch’s arresting prequel to Twin Peaks – greenlighted after the show was cancelled, and which massively polarized everyone upon its release – couldn’t have been more radically different from the television series. While the first two seasons were splashed with cute Americana, despite the outrageous events that unfolded, the film was edgy, visceral, grungy, nightmarish and enthralling. The two together, consequently, reminded me of three of his films – Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – in how they’d juxtaposed idyllic exteriors with grotesque underbellies. The film, which evoked a suburban purgatory through disturbing depictions of abuse behind closed doors and monsters inside the closets, took the viewers into the turbulent life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) leading to her vicious murder that the series began with. It, incidentally, kicked-off with a MacGuffin involving two FBI Agents – Chester (songwriter Chris Isaak) and Sam (Kiefer Sutherland) – investigating Teresa Banks’ brutal murder that the show had referred to. The narrative, subsequently, dove into the final seven days of Laura – a beautiful high-school student who everyone admires, but whose secret double life is spiralling out of control, exacerbated by the assaults she’s been facing at the hands of her obsessive father Leland (Ray Wise) who’s possessed by the malevolent spirit of Bob, cocaine addiction, wilful prostitution, self-destructiveness and intense trauma – leading ultimately to her tragic end. The film’s most gripping sequence took place in a grimy underground pub – accompanied by a loud, jangling and addictive score – where the tortured heroine, along with her best friend Dona (Moira Kelly, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle who didn’t reprise her role) are swept into a netherworld where three leery middle-aged men take advantage of the two underaged girls.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Horror/Psychological Thriller/Crime/Mystery

Language: English

Country: US

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

The Godfather Part II [1974]

 The Godfather wasn’t just scintillating cinema, it was a smash hit too. Francis Ford Coppola, consequently, got a free-hand for the follow-up, and he expanded the tapestry into a breathtaking saga which was broader and richer, as well as darker and edgier. He leveraged unutilized sections from Mario Puzo’s titular novel covering the past – beginnings and rise of a young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) – while simultaneously taking the principal narrative centred around Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) forward as he accelerates his chilling spiral – driven by the Machiavellian quad of power, capital, corruption and violence – which he’d embraced in the previous film. The second part, therefore, was both an adapted prequel and an original sequel backed by a sprawling script. While Vito’s journey was laced with warmth and was driven by memories of Sicily, familial loyalty, bonds he forged with fellow Italian-Americans, and street-smarts, making the flashback sections an elegiac immigration story, Micheal’s was colder and harsher as he displays a terrifying ability to outsmart his rivals and terminate anyone who offends him, propelled by his ruthless cunning and an absolute inability to forgive. Thus, as he battles the duplicitous Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) and antagonistic politicians, he also gets into shattering conflicts with his simple-minded elder brother Fredo (John Cazale), his profoundly disenchanted wife Kay (Diane Keaton), and hot-headed old-timer Frank (Michael V. Gazzo). While the film – aided by Nino Rota’s haunting score – abounded with stunning performances, Pacino’s stood out as one of devastating ferocity which made Michael’s character simultaneously arresting, volatile and diabolical; his interactions with Fredo were particularly unforgettable. The film, incidentally, also painted a captivating time-capsule of Cuba as it transitioned from Batista to Castro.

p.s. This is my latest revisit of this film. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Family Drama/Epic

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

The Godfather [1972]

 Right from its magnificent and elaborately staged opening sequence – featuring the boisterous wedding party of the daughter of formidable Sicilian-American “Don” Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), intercut with the mafia boss bestowing extra-judicial favours – The Godfather established itself as a work of mythic ambitions and immersive power. Adapted from Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel of the same name, this became a remarkable turning point for Francis Ford Coppola – who agreed to direct it because he was struggling with debts – as he went on an incredible four-film run the kind of which is rare in world cinema. This epic tapestry on the warped honour codes, complex familial bonds, elemental forms of justice and retribution, and the unholy marriage of harsh Sicilian mores and brash American capital, was gloriously evoked through its sprawling length, brilliant ensemble cast, mix of leisurely plot developments and stunning brutality, majestic cinematography and score (by Gordon Willis and Nino Rota, respectively), and a gripping peek into the closed world of organized crime that gave a bold new direction to both the gangster genre and immigrant story. The operatic tale of a once powerful patriarch passing his reigns to a reluctant heir – Micheal Corleone (Al Pacino) – and the latter’s conversion from someone who’d embraced a civilian life into an incarnation of chilling ruthlessness, was further enriched by its array of supporting characters (featuring James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Sterling Hayden, etc.), plot detours, unforgettable set-pieces, and dark social and political commentaries. Coppola’s fiendish spins on life’s supposed conventionalities – marriage, friendship, family gatherings, religious occasions, etc. – made it especially engrossing, and which he expanded into an even grander dimension in the magisterial sequel The Godfather Part II.

p.s. This is my latest revisit of this film. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Epic/Family Drama

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

One Battle After Another [2025]

 Reworked from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – making this his second Pynchon adaptation after Inherent Vice – One Battle After Another was P.T. Anderson at his most thrilling and sardonic. Alternately goofy and gritty, laidback and bristling with urgency, facetious and serious, politically informed and riotously entertaining, the film heavily reminded me of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s radical and anarchic neo-polar comedy-thriller novels; it also bore imprints of the Coens’ insouciant absurdism, and Friedkin and Peckinpah’s muscular actioners, thereby blending elements of left-wing political thrillers (a sub-genre that’s largely vanished) with black comedy, action, chutzpah and rollicking fun. In an extended prologue, we’re introduced to the far-left groupuscule ‘French 75’, that’s led by the fiery revolutionary Perfidia (Teyana Taylor); her boyfriend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), an explosives expert, stands out as a misfit white guy in this outfit engaged in guerilla rebellion against the establishment. During a mission to free detained immigrants, she teasingly humiliates the comically twisted and reactionary military officer Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who becomes fixated on her despite his hatred for back people, while simultaneously massacring the group. 16 years later, Bob is now a washed-out stoner who lives off-the-grid with his feisty teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). His past, however, catches up with him when Lockjaw – wishing to rectify past interracial transgressions to protect his membership in an exclusive white supremacist club where racial purity is sacrosanct – decides to liquidate Willa under the garb of busting illegal immigration. What ensues is pure pandemonium, and an elaborate chase sequence that transitioned from the farcical to the visceral, accompanied by a terrific, jangling score by Jonny Greenwood. The excellent cast also included Benicio del Toro as a deadpan leader of an undocumented community.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Genre: Thriller/Comedy/Political Thriller/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Action

Language: English

Country: US

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty [2000]

 Jonas Mekas’ magnum opus – with a title that mirrored its achingly intimate self-expression, moving tone and expansive length – both underpinned and subverted the idea of experimental filmmaking. At close to 5 hours runtime, it was his longest film; that, along with its fragmentary, loosely-strung, collage-like nature, bereft of any narrative patterns or pay-offs, and unhurriedly paced, emphasized its alternative form. Covering a staggering 30 years – from 1970 to 1999 – it was also the most monumental diary film of his career. That said, it was plaintive, lyrical, effervescent and self-effacing – a “masterpiece of nothing” in his words – which imbued it with joyous simplicity and accessibility. Forming an unintended New York triptych along with Walden and Lost, Lost, Lost – and ‘Diary of an Exile’ tetralogy of sorts when one also includes Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania – this was a home movie in the purest sense as it captured moments that weren’t just autobiographical but also profoundly personal. Composed of a vibrant flurry of 16mm footage shot primarily in New York City but also elsewhere in the US and Europe – which he then assembled in a randomized order (as opposed to chronologically) – it’s lovingly centred on his vivacious wife Hollis, their cherubic daughter Oona and their son Sebastian. These three individuals and the memories they shared – daily life in their Manhattan apartment and outside, lazy Sundays at Central Park, noticing his children’s first steps, celebrating birthdays, loving moments with his wife, playing with his pet, experiencing new places, observing seasons change – represented paradise for him. These laced this exquisitely poetic memoir and most unassuming epic – accompanied by Mekas’ lilting narration and a wistful score – with radiance, melancholy and a gossamer-like delicacy.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania [1972]

 Jonas Mekas’ poetic and profoundly personal 2^nd feature-length diary, made 4 years after the sprawling and absorbing Walden, formed a vital companion piece to his spellbinding next diary – and possibly his greatest masterpiece – Lost, Lost, Lost. In the latter, he’d powerfully evoked his finding a new habitat and home as an émigré and displaced person. This, conversely, chronicled his brief trip back to his erstwhile home which he was compelled to leave forever many years back. After over 2 ½ decades of leaving Lithuania with his brother Adolfas – they’d left in 1944 and emigrated to the US in 1949 – they were finally able to visit the village of Semeniškiai, the place of their birth and formative years. It began with a short preface that comprised of footage shot on his first Bolex during his initial years in America. The central segment, titled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania”, was a syncopated montage – a simultaneously playful and evocative collage shaped through varying film speeds, exposures, colour palettes and camera motions – which took us into that agrarian, impoverished and sparsely populated village, the rickety house where they lived, their aged mother who likes to cook outdoors, their gregarious relatives who frequently drop by, and the villagers who love dancing and drinking. The high-spiritedness transitioned into bitter melancholy in the epilogue that captured their visit to an establishment in Elmshorn – a town on the outskirts of Hamburg – which’d served as a labour camp during WW2 and where they were interred for nearly a year. Mekas, incidentally, interlaced the film with oblique social/political observations, while cheekily remarking, “You would like to know something about the social reality… but what do I know about it?”.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches [1968]

 Jonas Mekas – towering godfather of American underground cinema and pioneer of diary films – made a momentous feature-length debut, composed of ecstatically shot “haikus” or short reels, with Walden. At once epic, pulsating, freewheeling, elegiac and intimate, he made this 3-hour kaleidoscopic work by stitching together a dazzling blend of encounters, moments, happenings, portraits, events and experiences, that he shot from 1964 to 1968 using 16mm Bolex camera – his comrade of 50 years from 1950, when he purchased his first Bolex upon arrival in the US as a displaced person, through to 2000 when he finally switched to digital – via an intensely subjective lens. With its title borrowed from Thoreau and imbued with Cartesian spirit – “I make home movies, therefore I live” – it was particularly remarkable in its capturing of a vital period in New York’s trailblazing art and culture circuit, as we see gatherings featuring Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground’s first performance, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage at his getaway mountain cabin, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s visit to the city, John Lennon and Yoko Ono carrying out their radical 1969 “bed-in”, etc. Mekas alternated these with moments embodying 1960s zeitgeist – e.g. street protests by a feminist group and African-American construction labourers spotlighted as “back power” – as well as kinetic bursts of “pure cinema” – observational shots of streets and Central Park, an ecstatic montage on a circus, etc. – and even some anachronistic wedding sequences. These protean images – possessing different colour tones, frequently overlapping and often at accelerated speeds – were accompanied by an eclectic audio track which ranged from jazz riffs to throbbing percussive sounds that he mixed by playing his vinyl records and radio, and occasionally also his lilting, chirpy voiceovers.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Lessons of Darkness [1992]

 Werner Herzog’s hypnotic essay Lessons of Darkness was an assemblage of two strikingly contrasting facets. It was an intensely grim and fatalistic meditation on warfare, carnage, the abyss of human folly and madness, and their infinite capacities for cruelty. This bleak meditation was accompanied by spectacular aerial photography of the ecological disaster wrought upon by the 1991 Gulf War, and these were made even more viscerally arresting through slow-mo shots, long takes, Herzog’s distinctively clipped style of speaking, and grand Wagnerian score. This, therefore, was akin to an apocalyptic tone poem on derangement and destruction by a filmmaker who’s been classified as a “poet of doom”. No wonder, some viewers were offended by it upon its release – alleging that this was akin to aestheticization of wars – and which Herzog angrily countered by quoting examples of Hieronymous Bosch and Goya who’d also made breathtaking artistic works foregrounded on violence and grotesquerie. Broken into thirteen short chapters, the moody docu shows us scarred and damaged landscapes, and in particular nightmarish images of the Kuwaiti oil fires, albeit largely without any political or geographical contexts. In his typically ironic tone, he even shows us how the expert fire extinguishing team reignited the fires – by throwing torches into the gushing oil flows – so that they have something more to extinguish. These flamboyant, widescreen and “obscenely beautiful” vistas were briefly interspersed with sobering chronicles of torture and trauma experienced by the locals, and shared by a couple of women. The film’s ominous undercurrents, vivid abstractions, and counterpointing of sparse and lurid expressions made it a fitting member of the German filmmaker’s oeuvre that’s filled with similar exercises across both narrative fictions and essayistic nonfictions.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: German/Arabic

Country: Germany

Prison Images [2000]

 If seeing, prying and witnessing were the running motifs in Harun Farocki’s filmography, then his analytic video montage Prison Images can well be his most emblematic work. Through this hour-long essay, he delved into a pointed examination of the carceral society through images of prisons from two parallel streams – viz. representation of prisons in cinema, interspersed with actual camera footage from American prisons. While he sourced sequences from multiple films for the former, two particularly stood out in their imagery – Jean Genet’s unnerving Un Chant d’Amour, where the prisoners adopt performative roles for the gratification of guards peeping into their cells, and Robert Bresson’s masterful A Man Escaped, where the protagonist meticulously stages an escape – as these two thematic tropes have recurred in countless films. These were juxtaposed with CCTV camera footage, and the message underpinning them was one of power, control, and the transformation of societies into surveillance states. In a mordant comparative analysis, Farocki posited that prisons, departmental stores and shopfloors are bound by their shared obsession with endless surveillance both as a means and an end. We therefore see how inmates are made to wear tracking devices so that their every movement can be monitored and inspected. In the essay’s most disturbing sequences, we see footage of how the authorities deliberately instigate prison fights – e.g. by placing antagonistic groups or inmates in closed spaces – and then stopping them through violent means. Through these, the Marxist director’s disdain for what prisons embody was unequivocally evoked. Hence, though not expressed in as many words, the underlying tenor was emphatically analogous to Joan Baez’s battle cry “raze the prisons to the ground” in her powerful protest song ‘Prison Trilogy’.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: German

Country: Germany