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

Images of the World and the Inscription of War [1989]

 The German word “Aufklärung”, as Harun Farocki informs in this intellectually rigorous meditation and exceptionally dialectical video essay, means both “enlightenment” and “reconnaissance”. This paradoxical implication intrinsically informed the work and what it posited – viz. scientific reasoning and technological progress are intimately related to the military-industrial complex and warfare. The specific technology under Farocki’s forensic investigation, here, was that of photography, and in turn a branching into how perception of an image and the contexts and meanings that one infers from it, are heavily influenced by what we’re trying or intending to see. These complex aspects were clinically evoked, principally, through the examination of an aerial photograph of the IG Farben industrial plan that was taken by an American aircraft in 1944, as a precursor to bombing it (though that wasn’t ultimately carried out). It was only 30 years later that 2 CIA analysts realized that it had also captured the Auschwitz extermination camp – the barracks, gas chambers, crematoria and even trucks delivering poison pellets disguised as a Red Cross vehicle – but which remained a “blind spot” until then. Hence, if the American bombers had destroyed IG Farben it, ironically, wouldn’t have been for its role in the Holocaust. The essay also covered enquiries into surveillance and camouflage – from WW2 to police identikits – which makes images inherently political and induces image manipulations. In perhaps the film’s most haunting moment, Farocki showed an inmate at a Nazi concentration camp – a beautiful woman – instinctively striking a pose for the camera. The docu was especially fascinating in the massive ground covered in its slender length, and also how it turned out to be such a riveting work despite its highly analytic form.

Director: Harun Farocki

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English

Country: Germany

Videograms of a Revolution [1992]

 Prolific experimental German documentarian Harun Farocki’s dazzling masterpiece Videograms of a Revolution, which he co-directed with Romanian documentarian and scholar Andrei Ujică, was both a riveting historical reconstruction of the 1989 Romanian Revolution and a powerful analytical thesis on the role of formal and informal media in both revealing and shaping political history. On the former aspect, its post-facto documentation of one revolution – one that, in around 5 days, witnessed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu from getting ready to deliver what turned out to be his final public speech (the thrilling climatic moment in Bogdan Mureșanu’s The New Year That Never Came) to being executed after a summary trial – made it a fascinating companion piece to, on one hand, Patricio Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile and My Imaginary Country, which were immersive reportages of mass uprisings, and on the other Chris Marker’s A Grin Without A Cat, which was an expansive essay that navigated through multiple global revolts. As for the latter aspect, it underscored the role of cameras and images in mobilizing public actions and as sources for historiography. It accomplished that by meticulously piecing together those 5 days from a myriad sources which included state television broadcasts, which transitioned from Ceaușescu’s lackeys to those seizing control, and ‘found footage’ secretly shot by citizen journalists that Ujică had unearthed through his contacts. Accompanied by a narration analysing and interpreting these images, thus creating a distancing effect from the immediacy of the upheaval, this magnetic work strikingly elucidated how mass and alternative media had been both observers and participants in recording and constructing epochal political changes far before the advent of 24/7 television channels, mobile phone cameras and social media.

Director: Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Reportage

Language: German/Romanian

Country: Germany

Love Meetings [1964]

 Taking inspiration from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s landmark cinéma vérité documentary Chronicle of a Summer, Pasolini crisscrossed Italy – from the industrialized north to the impoverished south, from bustling urban locales to relaxing beaches, from prestigious universities to crowded factories, from charming cafés to working-class neighbourhoods – accompanied by his camera, interviewing vast swathes of people, freely inserting himself into the frames, and shaping the conversations. Love Meetings, however, wasn’t just an Italian response to a pioneering French work. Pasolini, being the radical, interrogative and profoundly political intellectual that he was, brought in his uncompromising and insolent self into the mix, as he went about composing a fascinating essay about his fellow citizens’ complicated, conflicted and reactionary attitudes and mores related to sex in everyday life, and branching off to gender equality, homosexuality, prostitution and divorce (which was illegal at that time in Italy). What must’ve been deeply disappointing to Pasolini, nearly every male person he interviewed – old and young, well-off and poor, educated and not – expressed different shades of conservative and regressive mindsets; but what must’ve provided him cause to cheer, the women were oftentimes more liberal and open-minded. He therefore interspersed his indefatigable investigations with weary meditations with fellow intellectuals – celebrated novelist Alberto Moravia, psychologist Cesare Musatti, journalist Oriana Fallaci, actress Antonella Lualdi – on trying to make sense of what he heard, engaging in Marxist interpretations of social prejudices, and quipping on how the middle-class steadfastly refused to participate. That this was the 1960s – when Italy was rocked by social protests and political rebelliousness – made this a particularly ironic time capsule of that period. Curiously and amusingly, he followed this up with The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Documentary/Cinema Verite/Reportage

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

F for Fake [1973]

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, chicanery and double bluffs – was one final act of wily chutzpah by the man who loved subverting boundaries. Conjoined with Abbas Kiarostami’s late-career masterpiece Certified Copy in their shared admiration for fakes and teasing questions on authenticity, while ironically being ravishingly original works themselves, it operated in the intersection of documentary, essay and hybrid – as it often blurred the lines separating non-fiction from fiction. It primarily focused on two fascinating charlatans who drew Welles to this film in the first place (François Reichenbach had initially planned to direct it, but happily became its producer instead). On one hand there was Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger who fooled renowned art galleries with his fakes thanks to his insouciance and brilliance; now retired, he’s settled at Ibiza where he regales his guests with wry anecdotes. Joining him was Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who then insolently walked in his subject’s footsteps by writing a fake “authorized autobiography” of Howard Hughes. Along with his infectious portraits on the two men – who he treated with undisguised fondness as fellow journeymen – Welles freely deployed the canvas for musings on how art, like magic, is an amalgamation of truth, lies, illusions and sleight of hand, and then proceeded to self-deprecatory reflections on his own journey as an artist – using false identities and fake stories, and even fictionalizing Howard Hughes in Citizen Kane – and, in arguably its most irresistible sections, amusing meditations and “stories” on Picasso. Captivatingly shot in grainy colours, it extensively featured his muse Oja Kodar in a series of sultry, shape-shifting personas.

Director: Orson Welles

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: France

Monterey Pop [1968]

 The three-day Monterey Festival in 1967 was a watershed moment in the context of both popular music – in elevating the stature of pop and rock-and-roll as artforms and providing an enormous fillip for all future music festivals – and the 1960s counterculture movement that embodied the ideas of love, peace, communal living and non-conformism. D.A. Pennebaker, who’d pioneered the “rockumentary” with his seminal ‘direct cinema’ work Dont Look Back, established the enduring template for all future concert films – from the filming and editing styles to the look and atmosphere – with Monterey Pop, his exhilarating documentary on this phenomenal event co-organized by Lou Adler and the Mamas & the Papas front-man John Phillips, among others. It was only appropriate, therefore, that it began with infectious visuals of people streaming in, in their delightfully sunny attires and carefree demeanours, to the sounds of ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’, the unofficial anthem for that age written by Phillips. Seamlessly alternating between rousing performers and enthralled audience as a distinctive formal choice, it covered 12 out of the 30+ artists who took stage, using 5 portable sync cameras operated by fellow documentarians Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles. The film’s most iconoclastic and indelible moments included The Who’s Pete Townshend smashing his guitar after ‘My Generation’, only for Jimi Hendrix, after an exceptionally risqué act, putting his on fire; stirring vocals by Janis Joplin and Otis Redding; and elucidation of the show’s international spirit through electrifying South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and the virtuoso Indian duo of sitarist Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha Khan to whom the final 15 minutes – a whopping 19% of the runtime – were devoted.

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

Genre: Documentary/Musical/Concert Film

Language: English

Country: US

Dont Look Back [1967]

 D.A. Pennebaker’s trailblazing film Dont Look Back (the missing apostrophe was a conscious choice) – a landmark in ‘direct cinema’ and the first feature-length documentary on Bob Dylan – provided an intimate peek into the opaque, magnetic and mercurial persona of the iconoclastic poet, prophet and troubadour. Playfully operating at the intersection of music reportage, diary film, rockumentary and even a biographical essay in its intimate, unfiltered, behind-the-scenes portraiture, it had Pennbaker following Dylan – shot in grainy, gorgeous B/W using a customized, portable 16mm camera that he’d co-developed with compatriot Richard Leacock – through his 1965 England tour. The docu began with a legendary music video – one that was conceived by Dylan himself – featuring the songwriter presenting a series of cue cards bearing words and phrases from his song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, while that plays in the background, and with poet Allen Ginsberg and folk singer Bob Neuwirth seen interacting in the industrial backdrop. While, over the course of the work, we get to see Dylan performing at different concerts, it’s primarily set inside hotel rooms and cars, at corridors and backstages, and with friends, reporters and strangers. What emerged, through these candid observations of moments and interactions, was a kaleidoscopic impression of an individual alternatively funny, gregarious, inspired, reflective, prickly, aloof and enigmatic. The film’s most memorable segments included his impromptu jams with Joan Baez, Donovan and Alan Price, taunting a Time’s correspondent, and bemused reactions upon being labelled an anarchist. Incidentally, though he was on the cusp of superstardom when it was made, by the time it eventually released two years later he’d released two seminal albums, had a motorcycle accident, switched to electric, married and become an unprecedented phenomenon.

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

Genre: Documentary/Musical/Diary Film

Language: English

Country: US

Welfare [1975]

 Frederick Wiseman weaved an extraordinarily multi-hued and multi-layered tapestry – a vivid, chaotic, complex, kaleidoscopic and microcosmic portraiture of diverse peoples connected by their desperation and struggles – in his monumental and quietly devastating documentary essay Welfare. With an expansive run-time of 167 minutes – which Wiseman pieced together from over 100 hours’ footage shot over a three-week period – this sprawling work captured the workings within the massive welfare office in NYC that made me feel stationed amidst the crowd within this bustling set-up. On surface, it served as an intricate examination into this institution, as helpless and anguished claimants hope to have their meagre requests – in nearly all cases the last resort before losing their shelters, going without food, being deprived of the last vestige of dignity and even considering to end it all – approved by the workforce governed by doubts, rules, policies and indifference, with just the hint of empathy on occasions. What emerged from the evocative vignettes – interactions both polite and furious – was a sobering and painful report on personal and collective despair, ranging from unemployment, homelessness and destitution, to debilitating medical difficulties, domestic abuse and familial estrangements, to severe marginalization, systemic discriminations and abandonment by the state. Hence, despite never overtly intending to, Wiseman ended up presenting a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that’s simultaneously nightmarish and absurdist, and a disconsolate commentary on societal apathy. The loosely edited work allowed ample time for each interaction to unfold – involving a vagrant couple, an ex-convict, a German immigrant, vulnerable middle-aged women, an angry daughter, a former teacher forced into becoming a petty thief, a racist war veteran, an equanimous Black cop – and made this an astonishingly vital impression of 1970s New York City.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English/Spanish

Country: US

Hospital [1970]

 Hospital, Frederick Wiseman’s magnificent exercise in ‘direct cinema’ – his fourth consecutive observational investigation into public institutions, but his first with an outlook permeated with radical humanism and generosity – was an audacious, bleak and absorbing essay on a massive and overcrowded general hospital that, unlike its private counterparts, is dedicated to admitting difficult and messy cases involving the underprivileged and the marginalized. The Metropolitan Hospital, located in New York’s East Harlem neighbourhood, consequently, wasn’t just a flurry of activities where the staff must continuously deal with nerve-racking emergencies, intensely stressful scenarios and complicated conversations, it also served as a sobering peek into lives mired with violent crimes, drug addictions, social ostracizations, ethnic dispossessions and class inequalities. Filmed in grainy B/W using 16mm cameras, with an unblinking gaze, and in an equanimous tone amidst the anxiety and desolation, one witnesses a young victim of gang violence, a transwoman who’s been shunned by everyone, an overworked father struggling to ensure his infant kid’s wellbeing, a former alcoholic unable to articulate his ailments, and a daughter helplessly grappling with her mom’s mortality. Through these disparate medical cases, one notices a medic expressing his annoyance at another hospital’s negligence of due process, a sympathetic physician trying in futility to get his patient on welfare, and doctors interacting with broken and panic-stricken patients with great composure. The work was especially remarkable in how Wiseman covered, through his editing, such an extraordinarily wide and disparate ground, while never rushing through any of the segments. French filmmaker Claire Simon named this as a key influence for her marvellous recent documentary Our Body, while Wiseman delved into the subject of caregiving again 19 years later with Near Death.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

High School [1968]

 Frederick Wiseman, in his sophomore documentary feature High School, toned down on the scalding nature of his subject selection from his incendiary debut Titicut Follies, but retained both his formal and topical choices – viz. fly-in-the-wall observational essays on institutions, organizations and communities, which became his directorial signature – in this ‘direct cinema’ classic. Its matter-of-fact tone notwithstanding, the captivating piece, centred on the Northeast High School in Pennsylvania, comprised of pointed undercurrents, and that was discernible in the teacher-student interactions that it focussed on which were representative of power contrasts in a hierarchical structure existing at the knife-edge between progressive pedagogy and rigid discipline. One therefore sees, on one hand, a Spanish teacher explaining Sartre and existentialism, a hip literature teacher selecting Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Dangling Conversation’ for her poetry class, and a wisecracking gynaecologist providing sex education to adolescent boys; on the other hand, one finds the school’s grumpy principle instructing students on the utmost importance of obeying authority, even if that means accepting unfair reprimands, and blindly following the stringent dress codes of prom, when he’s not hunting for rulebreakers in the corridor. Ironically, the same principle then patronisingly advises a parent not to impose their desires and expectations on their children, and accepting it if they’re not the smartest kid in the block. Excellently shot in grainy B/W using a roving, curious and unobtrusive 16mm camera, the docu was therefore teasingly informed by a deadpan outlook on the uneasy juxtaposition between conformity and self-expression in the school – which attained an especially sardonic meaning given that 1968, the year in which it was made, was defined by global protests by rebellious youth – while avoiding any heavy-handed elements.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Titicut Follies [1967]

 Frederick Wiseman both decisively established his rigorous fly-in-the-wall cinematic grammar and fearlessly pushed the boundaries of art, ethics and the paradigms of documentary filmmaking with his searing and unsettling debut Titicut Follies. This powerful exercise in ‘direct cinema’ had evoked a massive legal backlash – ostensibly on questions of privacy violation and obscenity, but essentially because it revealed the grotesque inner workings within a state-run institution – which led to it being banned for 24 years. Wiseman trained his unnerving lens – through gritty, grainy, spare and haunting B/W images – on the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he spent 29 days documenting the conditions inside it. What emerged through it – like a blast of cold fury – was the treatment that the inmates received from the authorities, guards and doctors, which alternated from apathy, mocking and bullying to being shorn of their autonomy, agency and dignity. The film’s most disturbing moments included men being frequently stripped naked, a doctor hideously poking out fetishes out of a sexual offender, and in what was particularly tough to sit through, an aged inmate who’s stopped eating being force-fed through a tube inserted into his nostril, while the doctor, who’s carrying it out, glibly smokes a cigarette perilously close to the feeding tube with casual indifference. These harrowing sequences were interspersed with moments of candid eloquence, as when a guy engages in a political speech that spoke to that era of anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights movements, or a nurse fondly speaking of a letter of gratitude that she’d received from a former “patient”. The docu, ironically, began and ended on deceptively light notes, viz. the institution’s titular musical talent show.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Accattone [1961]

 Pier Paolo Pasolini – who was already an acclaimed poet, established writer and prolific editor by then, and had also dabbled in cinema, having assisted Fellini in the screenplays of Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita – made a fierce and persuasive filmmaking debut with Accattone. As a firebrand Marxist with a deeply conflicting relationship with his Catholic background, and possessing radical empathy for those who belonged to the “urban underclass”, it was only apposite that his first two films – this and his furious follow-up Mamma Roma – were both harsh portrayals and poetic paeans to pimps, prostitutes and lowlifes, with religious undertones. The film, interestingly, ostensibly bore neorealism’s social, formal and moral commitments – emphasis on everyday struggles, “real” locations, non-professional actors and gritty authenticity – while also being deliberately mannered, expressionistic and with a stirring allegiance towards an existential choice that’s fundamentally opposed to societal expectations and middle-class aspirations, which steadfastly placed it beyond neorealist boundaries; this dichotomy made this lyrical and edgy film a strikingly modernist work, despite its seemingly classical façade. Vittorio (Franco Citti, the younger brother of the film’s co-writer Sergio Citti, in his acting debut), who prefers to go by the eponymous name which means “bum”, is a pimp who lives in the working-class suburbs of Rome, and like his destitute pals, he’s proud that he doesn’t work. When the woman who supports him through prostitution gets jailed, his life becomes increasingly tough, desperate and even doomed, and more so when he becomes smitten with a naïve young woman. That said, one might say that the life of this “saint of the gutter”, like that of his fellow marginalized and delinquent drifters, was doomed to start with.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis [1970]

 Giorgio Bassini’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Garden of Finzi-Continis was as much a haunting Holocaust novel as a stirring ode to unrequited love, and through the titular Finzi-Continis – a wealthy, aristocratic and intellectual family who lived a life of cultured seclusion and went to their deaths without any resistance – a lamentation on the passage of a certain way of life. Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation echoed, with a touch at once tender and wistful, the book’s understated tone, melancholy, personal heartbreak, collective loss and doomed atmosphere. The narrative began in 1938, just as Mussolini’s fascist government starts enacting oppressive and restrictive laws against Jewish-Italian citizens, and ended in 1943 when the Jews started getting rounded up and herded to death camps. That fateful stretch was evoked through the Finzi-Continis family – with their huge mansion, refined manners, sprawling gardens, and cloistered existence within large walls – and especially the enigmatic Micòl (Dominique Sanda). They’re portrayed through the eyes of Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a studious middle-class guy, who’s hopelessly in love with the strikingly beautiful Micòl and enamoured with the family. When Jews are banned from the local tennis club, the family’s private tennis court is opened to them – though the ones who join include non-Jews too, like the left-wing Malnate (Fabio Testi) – and when the public library becomes off-limit, Giorgio finds refuge in the family’s huge personal library. Things, unfortunately, go further downhill rapidly, as he finds Micòl becoming ever more aloof and beyond reach, and the Jewish community in Ferrara being pushed towards annihilation. Beautifully photographed in soft-focus and washed-out colours, the film – initially supposed to be directed by Valerio Zurlini – became a late-career revival for the once pioneer of Italian neorealism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/War Drama/Romantic Drama/Holocaust Movie

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Il Posto [1961]

 Ermanno Olmi’s tender, low-key, delicately strung and achingly beautiful masterpiece Il Posto – shaped from his personal experiences – remains such an acutely evocative and vividly realized work despite hardly much happening during its runtime. Though it carried the legacy of neorealism – with its humanist story, on-location filming and non-actors – its exploration of urban loneliness in the backdrop of a rapid post-war societal shifts towards giant corporations and social mobility possibly placed it closer to similar examinations by Antonioni, Godard and Tati, even if this stood apart on account of its hushed, understated and bittersweet tone. I, instead, found it profoundly reminiscent of two Jiří Menzel masterworks – Closely Watched Trains and Larks on a String – in their shared poetic restraints while dwelling on mundane moments, blend of wry humour and absurdist irony with pathos, critiques of conformism, and muted comings-of-age of gauche, soft-spoken young guys. The said protagonist is Domenico (Sandro Panseri, whose perplexed demeanour, in turn, mirrored Václav Neckář from the two Menzel films), who follows his parents’ advice for a job at a big nameless organization. He travels from his cramped apartment in the outskirts to Milan, becomes besotted with the ethereal Antonietta (Loredana Detto, Olmi’s future wife), gets hired, is initially posted as a messenger and finally becomes a junior clerk in this vast bureaucratic setup. Gorgeously shot in grainy B/W – imbued with intimacy and melancholy – the film’s two most unforgettable segments featured the fleeting relationship between the two youngsters during the job interview, and a New Year’s Eve office event that transitioned from pensive to exuberant through droll humour and staging, and which reminded me of another Czech New Wave jewel, viz. Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball.

Director: Ermanno Olmi

Genre: Comedy-Drama/Coming-of-Age/Romantic Comedy/Social Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Ogro (Operación Ogro) [1979]

 Gillo Pontecovro – former chemistry student, anti-fascist partisan during WW2 and Marxist journalist after the war who was catalysed into filmmaking upon seeing Rossellini’s seminal neorealist work Paisan – is perennially associated with his blazing masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, that remains both landmark political cinema and formally daring exercise. Operación Ogro – his largely overlooked final feature – might’ve lacked in pulsating ferocity, but was no less a cinema of resistance that straddled between rigorous documentation of the eponymous operation and ideological discourse on revolutionary actions, and a compelling political thriller too. Shot in washed-out colours, it’s structured along two interweaving strands, thus covering the divergent routes taken by two comrades-in-arms due to deep dialectical divergences despite their shared love for Basque identity and detestation of Franco; this aspect – and how the death of the one whose choices were underpinned by a more violent method represented the end of a chapter – heavily reminded me of Ken Loach’s powerful IRA film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The primary track, set in 1973, chronicles in riveting details the mission undertaken by four men and two women belonging to the far-left separatist group ETA – the methodical cell leader Izarra (Gian Maria Volontè), the hot-headed former priest Txabi (Eusebio Poncela), Txabi’s wife (Ángela Molina) and the rest – who relocate to Madrid with the plans of kidnapping Franco’s Deputy PM Carrero Blanco (aka ‘ochre’), but changes that to assassination when he becomes the PM. In the melancholic parallel tract, set few years after Franco’s death, ETA has come to the negotiating table led by Izarra, while Txabi continues to be a radical separatist. The music was scored by Morricone while Ana Torrent featured in a cameo.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Docufiction/Historical Thriller

Language: Spanish/Basque

Country: Italy/Spain

Sinners [2025]

  Ryan Coogler delivered sensorial overload with Sinners, a genre-defying exercise that was seductive, tempestuous, rip-roaring, political, bloody and bad ass. It’s that rare vampire movie that captivated three diverse viewer groups, viz. those searching for rollicking entertainment, those craving for grindhouse sensibilities, and those looking for subtexts and preoccupations which transcend genre thrills. Set in the 1930s, identical twins Smoke and Stack – the names serving as a tribute to the great Howlin’ Wolf, and played with thumping swag by Michael B. Jordon – return to Mississippi Delta, having earned money and notoriety with the Chicago Mob, to start a juke joint for blues music catering to the local Black community. There’re, however, two violent deterrents; it’s the Jim Crow era, with the Black populace largely poor and ghettoized cotton plantation workers trapped under oppressive laws, KKK’s atrocities and religious fervour; furthermore, there’s lurking in the shadows a diabolical primeval force – bearing rich sociopolitical metaphors – led by the feral Irish-immigrant vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell). The film reached its ecstatic crescendo at the mid-way mark, with this standout section bearing the intoxicating vitality of Lovers Rock. It’s the joint’s opening night, and the packed crowd is brought to its feet – while both past lineage and future descendants of African-American music bleed into this electrifying sequence shot in glorious single-track – as blues prodigy Sammy (musician Miles Caton in an impressive movie debut) and local harmonica-legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) jam on “I Lied to You”. That and the uninhibitedly sultry “Pale, Pale Moon” were the two most pulsating compositions in the superb earthy soundtrack co-scored by Ludwig Göransson. The segment’s smouldering atmosphere was followed by a sinister mood build-up and a grisly carnage.

Director: Ryan Coogler

Genre: Horror/Musical/Period Film

Language: English

Country: US

Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) [2010]

 With Certified Copy, the great Abbas Kiarostami joined an exclusive group of non-francophone filmmakers like Buñuel, Kieślowski and Losey who made cinematic masterpieces in French. At once deliciously beguiling, seductively beautiful and disarmingly ingenious, this breathtaking exercise subtly channelled Rosellini’s Journey to Italy, the distinctive flavours of archetypal European arthouse cinema and his own marital disintegration, and echoed the futility of authenticity and originality, while ironically being a ravishingly original piece of work. It began like a dry essay – a form that Kiarostami had extensively partook in since his earliest days – with British writer James Miller (English opera singer William Shimell in a fine acting debut) introducing, at a gathering in Tuscany, the Italian translation of his eponymously titled book which posits the relevance of reproductions. After the lecture he meets the unnamed “Elle” (Juliette Binoche in an effortlessly triumphant turn) – a French woman and single mom who runs an antiques store selling replicas – and the two strangers decide to chat while exploring the charming locales. They initially drive and then stroll around, with their freewheeling and intelligent conversations bearing edgy undertones. The gently ambling narrative underwent a stunning pivot at a trattoria where they’ve stopped for coffee. The café’s matronly owner assumes that they’re a married couple, and they seemingly decide to participate in this charade. However, one soon starts wondering if they’re playacting or they’re indeed an estranged couple carrying years of differences, disappointments and bitterness. Magnificently shot in fluid long takes – a sequence where they’re driving with the gorgeous surroundings reflected on the windshield was especially captivating – this enigmatic and richly textured film delivered sharp reflections on both art and relationships over one sumptuous Tuscan afternoon.

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marital Drama/Avant-Garde

Language: French/English/Italian

Country: France

Wolfsburg [2003]

 Christian Petzold’s spare and chilling psychological thriller Wolfsberg carried the weight of Germany’s political history, even if that wasn’t explicitly laid out; the titular city’s past is intertwined with the Nazi era as, founded by Hitler in 1938 as the seat for Volkswagen’s massive automotive factory, it became a military-industrial complex during WW2 during which it produced armaments and freely utilized slave labour. Car as a symbol of modernity, class hierarchy and commodity capitalism, unsurprisingly, played a pivotal role, and the film’s themes of grief, guilt and moral crisis hinged around it. Additionally, like The State I Am In which preceded it and Yella couple of films later, it also culminated with a shattering car crash. The film began with an unsettling hit-and-run incident as Philipp (Benno Fürmann), an auto salesman having an argument with his fiancée over the phone while driving his luxury car, accidentally hits a kid on a bicycle. He leads an entitled life, but at the cost of tolerating his domineering boss – the owner of the auto dealership where he works – and his self-obsessed girlfriend who’s his boss’ pampered sister. The kid’s mother Laura (Nina Hoss), meanwhile, is a single mom and exploited supermarket worker. While Philipp is silently racked with contrition upon being unable to confess – more so when the kid dies – Laura is crushed to the point of contemplating suicide as well as seeking vengeance. Guilt, grief, secrecy and wrath make for a messy cocktail; consequently, when these two lost souls get drawn into a tender romantic relationship, it’s bound to lead to damaging repercussions. Hoss and Fürmann were both magnetic in Petzold’s icy portrayal of dread, three-way class conflict and societal alienation.

Director: Christian Petzold

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Drama

Language: German

Country: Germany