Black God, White Devil [1964]

 Trailblazing Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha – a “surrealist, futurist, Dadaist and Marxist” who spearheaded the radical Cinema Novo movement and interposed militant politics with formal experimentations – was only 25 when he directed the landmark Black God, White Devil. Combining firebrand leftist dialectics and mythologization of Brazilian folklore with revisionist Western genre, stark palettes with operatic expressions, and abrasive landscapes with poetic lyricism, he made a film that seethed with blistering fury, violence and fervid anti-authoritarian energy. Its anti-narrative was broken into two halves, as indicated by the title. Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey), an impoverished cowherd, kills a wealthy and cheating rancher, and goes on the run with his impassive wife Rosa (Yoná Magalhães). Desperately looking for both miracle and penance, he falls under the spell of Sebastião (Lidio Silva) – the titular “black god” – a harsh prophet who has founded a cult by rebelling against the establishment. Rosa, however, is deeply sceptical of the preacher for having whipped his disenfranchised subjects into a state of hysteria, while the Catholic Church hires Antonio das Mortes (Maurício do Volle) – a laconic bounty hunter who inspired Sergio Leone’s ‘Man with No Name’ – to assassinate the renegade religious leader. Upon the nomadic movement’s massacre, the couple joins a gang of revolutionary bandits led by Corisco (Othon Bastos) – the “white devil” – and his wife (Sonia Dos Humildes), who pillage rich landowners; the bounty hunter, however, is soon on his trail too. Filled with gritty B/W images and frenzied editing, the film’s themes of systemic exploitation, religious fanaticism and romanticized outlaws was underpinned by its unorthodox aesthetics, and it was accompanied by Sérgio Ricardo’s hypnotic, guitar-strummed folk ballad that replaced traditional voiceover narration and Villa-Lobos’s bombastic compositions.

Director: Glauber Rocha

Genre: Western/Political Drama/Political Drama/Adventure/Avant-Garde

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

Memories of Underdevelopment [1968]

 Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece of Cuban cinema and a sensational example of the ‘Imperfect Cinema’ manifesto, Memories of Underdevelopment portrayed a pivotal period in the island-nation’s post-revolution history – the months between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis – through an elastic form allowing interpretations shaped by the viewers’ political positions. Alea – a left-wing intellectual who admired Fidel Castro, co-founded the prestigious Cuban film body ICAIC, and fresh from his brilliant and darkly funny previous film Death of a Bureaucrat – composed a deadpan, caustic and fascinating look into the existential ennui, emotional alienation, amorous pursuits, political ambivalence, crisscrossing memories and intimate imaginings of Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), a well-to-do man and self-professed intellectual residing in an upscale Havana apartment. He harbours a disparaging view of the vapid Batista-era bourgeoisie and demonstrates scorn when he sees them fleeing the country, including his wife with whom his marriage was in doldrums. However, his inertia, privilege and false sense of self-importance, rather than any real political convictions, make him stay back. His classist attitude towards fellow citizens and moral shallowness are manifested during his frivolous and exploitative affair with Elena (Daisy Granados), a young and naïve working-class girl, who he treats with superiority and disdain for embodying his country’s underdevelopment. He therefore exists in an asynchronous flux, fantasizing about his housemaid, spying from his balcony, remembering an ex-girlfriend, attending political discourses, and sliding towards irrelevance. Adapted from Edmundo Desnoes’s novel Inconsolable Memories, this stunningly shot and composed film – interspersed with documentary footage and experimental formal choices – manifested its revolutionary consciousness through negative dialectics, sharp critique of Sergio’s entrenched bourgeois consciousness, and instigation of viewers’ participation in reconciling the paradoxes and contradictions.

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

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama/Existential Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Cuba

Double Indemnity [1944]

 When Billy Wilder adapted James M. Cain’s spare, sordid and sizzling hardboiled novel – and seminal roman noir – of lust, greed, obsession and murder, and teamed up with Raymond Chandler for its script, the resulting work became a foundational film noir that – along with The Maltese Falcon, Laura and Murder, My Sweet – led to French critic Nino Frank’s legendary coinage of this filmmaking style. Its cultural impact has been particularly massive, as it provided the blueprint for crime movies for generations to come – viz. a seemingly regular Joe getting drawn by a sultry and duplicitous femme fatale into committing murder. When hotshot insurance salesman Walter (Fred MacMurray) chances upon Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck), a bored and frustrated woman stuck in a loveless marriage, he’s immediately smitten by her seductive allure. It’s therefore only a matter of time before he’s plotting and executing her boorish oilman husband’s death in order to jointly bag a hefty insurance payout. The perfect murder, however, starts unravelling before long, on account of growing mutual suspicions, and an astute claims investigator, Barton (Edward G. Robinson), with an uncanny ability to sniff out fraudulent and felonious cases. In one of a few fascinating departures from the source novel, Wilder filmed the tale via flashbacks, accompanied by Walter’s voiceover drenched in fatalism and addressed to his dear friend Barton. Shot in moody and expressionistic B/W by John F. Seitz – “He went to the limits of what could be done”, through his extensive use of dark shadows, atmospheric “Venetian blind” lighting and oblique camera angles – and scored by Miklós Rózsa, Wilder revised both the book and the script’s climaxes, and even reshot the entire ending, to achieve his specific vision.

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

Director: Billy Wilder

Genre: Crime Thriller/Film Noir

Language: English

Country: US

In a Lonely Place [1950]

 Nicholas Ray’s brooding and viscerally arresting film In A Lonely Place eschewed classic noir conventions by subsuming crime under existential inquiries, but definitively remained one for its moody atmosphere and fatalism. While adapting Dorothy B. Hughes’ dark and terrific novel, Ray retained just the core framework and characters, and drastically diverged from there. A direct adaptation of the book’s chilling POV of a misogynistic sociopath wouldn’t anyway have survived the Hays Code; he, instead, delved into the self-destructive and emotionally alienated world of its protagonist – changed from a terrifying and unemployed drifter to a cynical, formerly successful Hollywood screenwriter in an extended creative slump – and his brief, passionate and ultimately doomed affair with a woman who’s torn between love, doubts and fear. Humphry Bogart gave one of his fieriest turns as the tormented and lonely Dix Steele, who’s suspected by the police of murdering a hatcheck girl – primarily on account of his violent temper, and also as an accusation by the moralistic social order for refusing to display sorrow upon the girl’s death and then doing an unsettling reimagining of that with a cop buddy and his wife – while Gloria Grahame, in a crumbling marriage with the director at that time, was commendable as the luscious, seemingly hardboiled but inwardly vulnerable Laural, an aspiring actress, who gives Dix his alibi, falls for him, and eventually becomes intensely conflicted, thus leading the film to its crushing finale that was altered by Ray (vis-à-vis the script). The movie was considerably metatextual – be in its jaundiced portrayal of tinsel-town, or Dix’s free adaptation of a book within the film, despite being asked to remain faithful, thus ironically mirroring what Ray himself did.

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

Director: Nicholas Ray

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Film Noir/Romantic Noir

Language: English

Country: US

Chorus [1974]

 Mrinal Sen’s radical and electrifying Calcutta Trilogy – Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik – received an absurdist epilogue with Chorus, which continued the trilogy’s political ferocity, sardonic mood and dazzling formal adventurousness. However, with the brutal crushing of the Naxalite revolution, this marked an end to this thrilling four-film cycle for the firebrand leftist intellectual, as he decided to pivot to more restrained palettes. Blending Third Cinema’s revolutionary manifesto with bold stylistic experimentation and proto-cyberpunk elements, and training a pungent lens towards cultural hegemony and religiosity, Sen constructed a dystopian world where the state apparatus operates for corporate interests, and how this order – maintained through manipulation and violence – starts crumbling as soon as the proletarian forces rise up in furious rebellion. The film’s subversive stance was evident from the get-go when a “Brechtian bard” (Rabi Ghosh) sarcastically reveals, through parodic ballads, the hypocrisy of organized religion. He keeps reappearing in the anti-narrative dealing with the escalating consequences of a sham job opening, at a powerful organization, that draws 30,000 applicants. When their disingenuousness becomes apparent, the swelling anger spirals into a massive resistance, and that makes the company’s conniving chairman (Utpal Dutt) – afraid of the dissent unleashed by the voiceless masses – resort to ever-increasing draconian measures through the police that’s servile to power. In parallel, we witness the personal stories of a few applicants desperately looking for jobs – an impoverished farmer’s son whose uncle is a slimy money-lender; a guy whose father is a disillusioned trade unionist; a helpless young woman – and a detached journalist doggedly following the unravelling story. Energetically shot by K.K. Mahajan and filled with polemical political songs, this anarchist gem hits its viewers with a Marxist sledgehammer.

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

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Fantasy/Experimental Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds) [1980]

 Eleven years after his enduring anti-war masterpiece Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Satyajit Ray returned to his two everyman comrades possessing magical musical capabilities – Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh) – with the prescient, dystopian and terrific political satire Hirak Rajar Deshe. In place of the former’s playful humour, Ray resorted to Marxist agitprop devices for a ferocious denunciation of totalitarianism. His allegorical target is the titular monarch (Utpal Dutt in a towering performance), a narcissistic and authoritarian dictator who lords over his fiefdom, sycophantic minions and disenfranchised citizens – impoverished farmers and exploited workers in a diamond mine that gives him his power – and despises education as it ignites dissent by increasing knowledge and critical thinking. Anyone he can’t buy with glittering diamonds or terrorize by unleashing violence, he indoctrinates through state propaganda – brilliantly conceived couplets drenched in irony and disingenuity – and a machine invented by a loony, self-serving scientist (Santosh Dutta) that turns people into brainwashed automatons. His arch-nemesis, unsurprisingly, is Udayan (Soumitra Chatterjee), a freethinking rebel-teacher, who, unlike the despot and his unctuous lackeys, doesn’t speak in rhymes, openly disobeys state diktats, and inspires his students to question authority. Goopy and Bagha join the dissident teacher’s ragtag resistance in dismantling the tyrant’s oppressive empire from within. Made in low budgets – the static visuals, spare set décor and minimalist setup ensured that the core subtexts were never subsumed under fancy glitter – the fantasy-musical contained a string of memorable compositions by Ray himself, and, in particular, three moments of rousing political protest – the haunting folk song “Kotoi Rango Dekhi Duniyay”, the furious anti-fascist anthem “Nohi Jantro”, and the climactic battle-cry for liberation “Dori Dhore Maaro Taan, Raja Hobe Khan Khan.”

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Musical/Fantasy/Adventure

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha) [1969]

 Great children’s cinema or literature is never just that, and Satyajit Ray’s timeless gem – adapted from his illustrious grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s short story – remains an evocation of that truism. As a playfully irreverent fantasy and adventure film, it remains a funny and immensely enjoyable watch for kids; and as an exercise in political and social satire and farce, it appeals equally to adults through its stirring anti-war commentary, and ironic observations on class, madness for power, and state oppression. It was also an unforgettable, ingeniously imagined musical, with all its extraordinary songs – from the joyous “Maharaja Tomare Selam”, the angry “O Mantri Moshai” and the biting “Halla Cholechhe Juddhe”, to my two personal favourites, the melancholic “Ek Je Chhilo Raja” and the magnificent anti-war anthem “Ore Baba Dyakho Cheye” – written and composed by Ray himself, drawing upon diverse forms and styles. Goopy (Tapen Chatterjee) and Bagha (Rabi Ghosh) are poor, tone-deaf and outcast village simpletons who’re granted three boons by a spectral ghost king – impressed by their good-hearted innocence – including the ability to transfix people through music. Through these gifts, they endear themselves to the King of Shundi (Santosh Dutta), whose kingdom is a paragon of peace and happiness, and stop the kingdom of Halla – whose ruler, the former’s brother (Dutta), is drugged into a violent maniac by his evil prime minister (Jahor Roy), aided by a sorcerer (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) and served by hungry, miserable subjects – from waging a senseless war against Shundi. The film’s showpiece sequence – striking for its infectious performances and Soumdendu Roy’s visual creativity – was the stunning, 6-½-minute ‘Dance of Ghosts’ tableaux; aided by a percussion-based soundscape, it delivered a pointed critique of class hierarchies.

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

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Musical/Fantasy/Adventure/War

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Vivek (Reason) [2018]

 The English title for Anand Patwardhan’s searing and sprawling political documentary Vivek – made over 4 years, clocking a colossal 4 hours and 20 minutes (making this his magnum opus), and alternating between unsettling street reportage, fearless investigative journalism, exposés on religious majoritarianism and political extremism, scorching inquiries into toxic social fault-lines, and a no-holds-barred expression of dissent – is ‘Reason’. The closer translation of the word, however, is ‘Conscience’. The two incidentally formed the dual pillars on which Patwardhan constructed this blistering exercise that, unsurprisingly, faced significant censorship hurdles, and which the director managed to circumvent through canny bending of procedural guidelines. Divided into eight chapters that touched upon multiple interconnected topics informing the dismantling of contemporary India’s secular and pluralistic fabric with brazen impunity – thereby giving it the form of an epic and wide-ranging non-fiction book shaped by harsh objective truths and ironic authorial observations – it began with the murders of anti-superstition advocate Narendra Dabholkar and Communist social activist Govind Pansare, for their outspoken public campaigns against blind beliefs and medieval religious practices. It then branched into targeted violence, systemic persecution and extrajudicial vigilantism against any person or community considered antithetical to right-wing political forces and majoritarian religious and caste demographics – covering mob lynchings of Muslims; Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula’s death; shadowy supremacist and ultra-nationalist organizations with fascist agendas; the conspiracy surrounding ATS chief Hemant Karkare’s death; and massive agitations by the freethinking left-wing students of JNU, led by Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid. The dominant emotions that ran through the vast canvas of this defiantly pugnacious and confrontational work – which ended with journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh’s murder, thus bringing the film a full circle – were rage, angst and lamentation.

Director: Anand Patwardhan

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Investigative Reportage/Political Documentary

Language: Hindi/Marathi/English

Country: India

Jai Bhim Comrade [2011]

 Anand Patwardhan’s Jai Bhim Comrade remains political filmmaking at its most elemental – fearless, angry, uncompromising, rebellious, carrying a fiercely subaltern lens, and rejecting the idea of “art for art’s sake” – and a brutally unflinching examination of Dalit experience in India. Heroically and expansively filmed over 14 long years – its runtime of nearly 3 hours remains 2^nd only to Vivek in his filmography – it began with footage of the Dalit-Marxist poet-singer Vilas Ghogre from Patwardhan’s exceptional film Hamara Shahar from 12 years back, and whose tragic suicide in 1997 triggered this work. His self-annihilation was driven by extreme disillusionment – or was it a final act of protest? – upon the murder of a dozen Dalit residents of Mumbai’s Ramabai colony by the police, the zealous agents of a violently casteist society and state. Thereon, it branched into four intimately interrelated branches – a deeply personal memorialization of the Ambedkerite activist’s life-long resistance; an investigative reportage, over the following 1 ½ decades, into the brazen killings, the sham probe and mockery of justice that followed, and the despair that it left in its wake; an extension into other Dalit activists and artists – in particular, the dissident cultural troupe Kabir Kala Manch that performed anti-caste street theatre and songs, and the firebrand speaker and Dalit Panthers co-founder Bhai Sangare –; and documentation of the systemic oppression, caste atrocities and otherization that continues unabated, perpetuated by a majoritarian social order, right-wing political factions, and a proudly bigoted middle-class. Filmed in unvarnished visuals using portable video cameras, the weaving in of incendiary revolutionary music into its epic length – which reminded me of Barbara Kopple’s similarly courageous Harlan County, USA – remains its most electrifying and enduring aspect.

Director: Anand Patwardhan

Genre: Documentary/Investigative Reportage/Political Documentary/Essay Film/Musical

Language: Marathi/Hindi/English

Country: India

Hamara Sahar (Bombay: Our City) [1985]

 Anand Patwardhan, with his remarkable fourth film Hamara Shahar, firmly established himself as India’s foremost documentary filmmaker. Made using grass-root financing, shot with a mobile 16mm sync-sound camera, and distributed through alternative working-class channels to sidestep restrictions imposed by state authorities and corporate powers, this was like a bristling pocket-sized dynamite. Patwardhan – who blended political resistance into his filmmaking, influenced by the manifestos of Third Cinema and Imperfect Cinema – resorted to a deliberately dialectical approach while recording the extreme plight of the impoverished and disenfranchised slum and pavement dwellers of Bombay. The megapolis’ middle and upper classes, on one hand, cruelly and callously exploit their labours for building high-rises, disposing wastes, getting domestic help, and whatnot, while on the other treating them like bottom-feeders, complaining how they pollute the city’s shiny ambiance, illegally occupy lands that’re screaming to be monetized, and simply refuse to disappear. Along with proudly expressing their monstrous apathy, they also weaponize the police into destroying their shanty homes and forcibly evicting them through wanton violence. The director demonstrated radical empathy for the poor – across caste and religious lines – while recording their extreme tribulations and capturing their devastating misery; in parallel, he made his biting scorn eminently clear by allowing the city’s Municipal Commissioner, Police Commissioner, wealthy industrialists and pompous residents to express their classism, hypocrisy and casual apathy in the comfort of their sprawling homes, exclusive clubs and posh surroundings. These alternating and arresting interrogative segments were anchored by a song dripping with cutting anger and profound pathos performed by a street theatre troupe led by the Marxist-Dalit poet-singer-activist Vilas Ghogre. His shocking demise 12 years later would provoke Patwardhan’s magnum opus, Jai Bhim Comrade.

Director: Anand Patwardhan

Genre: Documentary

Language: Marathi/Hindi/English

Country: India

A Man Vanishes [1967]

 Shōhei Imamura’s fascinating hybrid documentary A Man Vanishes was like a virtuosic jazz composition – freely improvisational, filled with syncopated rhythms, and subverting formal boundaries over a progressively experimental jamming session. His first foray into non-fiction cinema was made at the peak of his remarkable creative burst. Imamura, being who he was, radically pushed the envelope in his deadpan style and turned it into a teasing metatextual exercise on the overlaps between truth, reality, artifice and performativity, and thereby sardonically reinforced the ironic idea that “objectivity is [nothing but] one of the fifty-seven kinds of subjectivity.” It began in the veins of a matter-of-fact investigative account. Post-War Japan was plagued by “Jōhatsu” – or “evaporated people” – as numerous ordinary individuals were walking away and disappearing from their lives, families and jobs. The film zooms in on 32-year-old salesman Tadashi Oshima, who went missing 2 years back. With actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi serving as the interviewer, and accompanied by the missing man’s enigmatic fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa who’s looking for closure, the director starts unearthing this supposedly timid man’s murky existence – he was caught upon committing financial embezzlement at his workplace, had a three-way torrid affair with an older woman, his samurai background was offended upon finding out Yoshie’s elder sister’s sexual relationships, and even supposedly demonstrated growing intimacy with the latter – and then did a volte face by shifting his focus to Yoshie instead and then on cinema itself. Strikingly shot in grainy, high-contrast B/W, sparingly laced with a deliciously idiosyncratic score, and the conversations and visuals often running out-of-sync, the DNA of this complex exercise was carried by such future Iranian masterworks as Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.

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

Director: Shohei Imamura

Genre: Documentary/Mystery/Avant-Garde Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

In Memoriam: Patricio Guzmán – Filming the Haunted Memories of a Nation

 Few filmmakers have chronicled their country’s story with such devastating brilliance, uncompromising commitment and unflagging defiance as Patricio Guzmán, who passed away on 15^th Sep 2026. His oeuvre formed an interconnected story of Chile – encompassing Allende’s revolutionary hope, the brutal military coup and Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, heroic resistance and enforced disappearances of leftists, collective and personal memories, and finally the pulsating 2019 uprising that reconnected the thread with Allende’s presidency.

Filmmakers who readily come to mind, whose filmographies have similarly served as tireless and disobedient mirrors to their countries’ political histories, faultlines and memories, include such radical storytellers and documentarians as Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), Francesco Rosi (Italy), Andrzej Wajda (Poland), Carlos Saura (Spain), Mrinal Sen (India), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Wang Bing (China), and Anand Patwardhan (India), among others.

On a personal note, my knowledge of Chile during my school days had largely been linked to Ivan Zamorano and Marcelo Salas, stars of their fine football team during the 1990s. It was thanks to Guzmán, and my immense admiration for his unforgettable documentaries, that I came to really know and understand this Latin American country, and develop a rather deep connection with it – one that has only grown since then. Along with other masters of this exciting yet often-neglected form, he also helped establish my profound love for non-fiction cinema.

Presenting a collage of the 9 films by the Chilean maestro – or 11, if one considers The Battle of Chile trilogy as three separate films – that I’ve watched. Also list below the links to my reviews of these titles, in chronological order of their release:

• The First Year (1972)
• The Battle of Chile (1975, 1976, 1979)
• Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997)
• The Pinochet Case (2001)
• Salvador Allende (2004)
• Nostalgia for the Light (2010)
• The Pearl Button (2015)
• The Cordillera of Dreams (2019)
• My Imaginary Country (2022)

The First Year [1972]

 3^rd November 1970 was a momentous date as Salvador Allende became the first democratically elected Marxist head of state for Chile and overall Latin America. A then 31-year-old Patricio Guzmán, who’d just completed his diploma in filmmaking from the prestigious Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía in Madrid in 1970, returned to Chile and jumped into his feature-length directorial debut with the bustling enthusiasm and creative energy of a young man witnessing extraordinary social and political transformation unfold in front of his eyes. The First Year recorded the radical and jubilant first year of Allende’s presidency. He interacted with the country’s poor and working-class citizens – miners, farmers, fishermen, factory workers, and indigenous people who’d all been exploited and denied their fundamental and historical rights – and through that recounted the astonishing changes that were underway, from nationalization of resources and industries to land redistribution programmes that started liberating people from the abusive grip of neo-colonialist American corporations, predatory businessmen and entitled landowners. His reportage culminated with Fidel Castro’s visit that drew vast crowds. Alongside these ecstatic developments, he also captured – with sardonic undertones – deliberate reactionary attempts by the wealthy and the bourgeoisie; these foreboding undercurrents take grim and fatalistic meanings with the hindsight of what would transpire for Chileans and Allende two years later. This crackling work, made in grainy B/W and filled with dynamic music, formed a memorable prologue to his titanic The Battle of Chile trilogy that he made next, as well as a fine companion piece to both Salvador Allende and My Imaginary Country. Chris Marker, incidentally, saw an early cut while visiting Chile, became an immediate admirer, added a prologue in French and enabled its distribution in Europe.

Director: Patricio Guzman

Genre: Documentary/Reportage

Language: Spanish

Country: Chile

Hôtel Terminus [1988]

 With Hôtel Terminus, Marcel Ophüls completed a trilogy of Holocaust-themed films – monumental exposés on guilt, complicity, inconvenient truths and the broken consciences of nations – following his two earlier magisterial works with similarly mammoth runtimes, The Sorry and the Pity and The Memory of Justice. The defiant preserver of closeted political memories had stunningly dismantled cherished French narratives in the former film and crafted a complex, multi-geographic tapestry in the latter, and brought both aspects together in this 4-½-hour exploration of individual and collective evil, and the Machiavellian crimes of nations and institutions. Its putative subject was Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal and sadistic Gestapo chief in Occupied France (which earned him the moniker “Butcher of Lyon”); he was recruited by the US intelligence after the war for anti-communist activities, and was then helped by them and the Vatican to flee to Bolivia using rat-lines, where he established a successful career advising the country’s repressive right-wing military dictatorship and other illegal pursuits; he was eventually extradited to France upon Bolivia’s return to democracy and convicted for crimes against humanity. Ophüls expanded the film beyond a conventional biography for a devastating commentary on historical trauma and hideous machinations driven by realpolitik, through interconnected threads, anecdotes and an extraordinary assemblage of people he interviewed. It was formally audacious – in the way complementary and contrasting responses were juxtaposed through cross-editing –, sprawling in its scope – spanning three continents, four languages and nearly five decades –, and a powerful public expression of “J'accuse”. It was also engrossing in how it unfolded like a detective story, with Ophüls, as its deeply moral anchor, teasing out confessionals through disarmingly incisive questions and a masterclass in interviewing techniques.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War/Biopic

Language: English/German/French/Spanish

Country: US

The Memory of Justice [1976]

 The Memory of Justice, Marcel Ophüls’s 2^nd meditation and inquiry into the Holocaust, following his masterful The Sorrow and the Pity which remains his best-known work, was a monumental work in every respect. At 4 hours and 40 minutes –albeit, consistently immersive through its mammoth runtime, complex layers and disquieting topics –, and containing interviews with around 50 individuals – Germans, Americans, English and French, representing a staggering breath of backgrounds and political views – that were interweaved with archival footage, the film’s sheer formal audacity was clearly discernible. Add to that the massive turmoil that Ophüls had to navigate in order to realize his uncompromising vision, a daring act of heist by two women from the film’s crew to unite him with his original edit, and its lengthy and painstaking restoration after it was lost for many years, and one even has sufficient material for a thrilling behind-the-scenes story. However, what ultimately made it such a powerful and unforgettable exercise lay in the great documentarian’s nuanced, morally courageous, multilayered, sharply intelligent and self-reflexive examination of individual and collective guilt, political memory, nature of justice, and the utmost necessity of universal doctrines for judging crimes against humanity. Ophüls employed a dialectical and digressive approach – at once absorbing and nuanced – while juxtaposing the Nuremberg trials – a momentous event despite some failings – with the “victors” going unpunished for Hiroshima, Dresden and other atrocities during WW2, and Vietnam (particularly My Lai) and Algeria thereafter, and interfaced with war criminals and victims, strident “patriots” and fearless dissenters, nationalists and universalists, statesmen and civilians, old and young, and even his wife, daughter and students, thus folding both historical interpretation and personal expression into this extraordinary document.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English/German/French

Country: Germany/UK/US

The Hour of the Furnaces [1968]

 The Hour of the Furnaces – the title being a double reference to American imperialism by Che Guevara and Spanish colonialism by Cuban poet José Martí – was an underground revolutionary manifesto, agitprop audiovisual essay on the Marxist idea of praxis, powerful dialectical treatise on Argentine and Latin American political history, a diptych to Eduardo Galeano’s masterful Open Veins of Latin America, a rebellious poem for the oppressed and the abused, and an explosive battle cry for liberation through violence. Co-directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, co-founders of the film movement Grupo Cine Liberación, the monumental work presaged their influential essay on ‘Third Cinema’ – viz. militant guerilla filmmaking where cinema is a collective “weapon of truth”, as opposed to vacuous commercial movies (First Cinema) and artistic auteur-driven films (Second Cinema) – and served as a blueprint for such radical trailblazers as Godard (and Dziga Vertov Group), Marker, Rocha, Guzmán and Mrinal Sen. Its nearly 4-½-hour “notes and testimonies on neocolonialism, violence and liberation” was broken into a three-act structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The 1^st part, filled with white-hot rage, was a sprawling indictment against relentless exploitation of Argentina’s impoverished working-class; the alternately mournful and arresting 2^nd part chronicled Peron’s popular left-wing democracy and its brutal crushing by the military dictatorship; the final part was an electrifying call for arms. Made in secrecy and distributed through clandestine networks, watching the film was an act of resistance in itself. Aside from its scorching political discourse, it was also a blazing exercise in the interplay of images and sounds through assemblage of newsreels, film footage, still photos, dazzling montages, incendiary sloganeering, riveting sound design, protest songs, talking heads, narrations and haunting silences.

Directors: Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Agitprop Cinema

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Public Housing [1997]

 Through his extensive, sprawling and immersive documentation of the Ida B. Wells public housing development in Chicago, Frederick Wiseman traversed both the particular (a specific public housing community) and the universal (what we see in this desolate, messy and yet furiously “alive” complex resonates far beyond its specific geographic and temporal milieus). Emerging through this disarmingly ambitious 3-½-hour piece of unsparing, novelistic and observational portraiture – that can very well be classified as “Wisemanian” – was therefore a radical and humanistic ethnographic study of a ghettoized community and a marginalized people. The apartment building complex, named after the eponymous civil rights activist – that was eventually demolished between 2002 and 2011 – housed over 5000 African-American residents. Impoverished, mostly unemployed, mired in familial dysfunction and teenage pregnancies and addiction, under constant surveillance and harassment of cops permanently stationed around the society who treat the residents as drug peddlers and criminals by default, frequently patronized by unctuous authority figures who lecture them how they can easily improve their economic conditions if only they put in some efforts and enterprise, and at the absolute mercy of a distant and bureaucratic state, this is less a habitat and more an oppressive architecture. Yet, despite the hardships, squalor and violence, it also thrives through its feisty community leader Helen Finner who isn’t afraid of picking battles with those in positions of power, joyous expressions of fleeting freedoms through hip-hop dance celebrations and lively basketball games, selfless community programs hoping to drive micro improvements in the inhabitants’ lives, and incremental steps to elevate themselves from the daily grind of survival. Wiseman stitched these myriad interweaving vignettes – shot on low-fi 16mm colours – with nuance, compassion and undercurrents of irony.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Juvenile Court [1973]

 Both formally and topically Juvenile Court continued Frederick Wiseman’s exceptional fly-on-the-wall portraits of American institutions that he began 6 years back. His 7^th film, however, marked a pivotal shift, as with this he started transitioning towards more long-form documentaries that he’s most strongly associated with. It also carried a notable personal connect, as he’d graduated in law from Yale and also briefly taught the subject at Boston University before his foray into filmmaking. In this magnificent 2-½-hour work, he brought in his consummate observational, reportage and editorial eyes, and fused deep social empathy for young offenders and victims from working-class and impoverished families with sharp underlying critiques on America’s carceral society, while covering a complex variety of cases that’re brought before the Shelby County’s juvenile court in Memphis, Tennessee. Presided over by the paternalistic Judge Kenneth Turner – a surprisingly even-tempered and ostensibly fair-minded man, who nevertheless lays considerable importance on conventional sociolegal structures, must frequently take prejudicial stances and wields life-changing powers – prosecution and defence lawyers, along with cops and social workers, debate on cases ranging from domestic abuse by parents and guardians to kids running away from foster homes, from accusations of sexual molestation to charges of prostitution, from consumption of drugs to their distribution on the streets, and from petty shoplifting to allegations of being an accomplice in armed burglaries. The piercing, absorbing and richly nuanced film, pieced together from grainy B/W footage shot over 2 months that Wiseman spent at the courtrooms and its adjoining halls, offices and detention centres, breaks your heart with its bleak accounts of broken homes, destroyed lives and how guilt gets assigned (or not) based on casual conversations behind locked chambers.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Legal Documentary

Language: English

Country: US