Law and Order [1969]

 1960s were marked by fierce civil rights movements and anti-Vietnam War protests that deeply reshaped the US. Hence, when Frederick Wiseman decided to make a documentary on Kansas City’s police department – in the same year when the city, like many others, were rocked by massive unrest following Martin Luther King’s assassination and the ensuing police brutality – he planned an avowedly anti-police film. His approach, however, evolved as he and cameraman Bill Brayne embedded themselves into the daily patrols and rode with the cops for over 400 hours all-day long. The viscerally unsettling work, that remains topical to this day, was consequently more nuanced than what Wiseman had originally intended, while delivering a powerful critique on the entrenched institutional racism, sexism and violence blatantly cloaked in impunity. The filmmaker’s observational and “neutral” posture, along with the grainy 16mm B/W images, lent rich undercurrents to his freewheeling street reportage of a string of sequences both significant and mundane. The most chilling moment occurs midway when a group of cops viciously break into an apartment and one of them holds a helpless black sex worker in a chokehold; one can only guess if the camera’s presence stopped him from crossing the line, or if that even made any difference. Other unnerving instances included two teenagers carrying guns being apprehended in a clothing store, along with an unrelated guy with the same skin colour; and a delinquent young man, accused of hit-and-run, being handled with visible roughness upon his arrest. The crisscrossing episodes together underscored the brazen power imbalance that was on display where a majorly black town – mired in impoverishment, ghettoization and systemic oppression – is controlled by a decidedly white police force.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Institutional Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

Seconds [1966]

 Seconds – the nightmarish final chapter in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ – wasn’t an overly political film, unlike the two that preceded it, viz. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. It was, instead, a bleak and discordant foray into mid-life crisis and existential disillusionment, along with an unsettling study on the malleability of identity – through the dystopian premise of “rebirth” via next-gen plastic surgery – that recalled Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another; this latter facet, incidentally, would keep recuring in both future arthouse films (e.g. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In) and mainstream movies (e.g. John Woo’s Face/Off). However, that said, it wasn’t without political undertones thanks to its sharp critique of the American Dream that’s supported by conventional suburban family, corporate job, material wealth, consumerist desires and heteronormative existence. This was clearly a work of two halves. In the brilliantly constructed first half, middle-aged, well-off and deeply dissatisfied New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is lured by a shady company – through hilariously sleazy salesmanship (by Jeff Corey), spurious smooth-talking (by Will Greer) and wicked entrapment – into agreeing to shed his current identity and transform into bohemian Malibu-residing artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), in lieu of a steep price that they exact in return. In the rather formless second half, Tony struggles to adjust in his new persona and life – finding it equally empty and meaningless – and faces a horrific destiny in the memorably macabre closing sequence. The film’s visceral mood was amplified by the expressionistic B/W cinematography and jazzy score which, along with its free-flowing Kafkaesque segments, made it feel closer to a European than an American film.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US

Seven Days in May [1964]

 The Cold War, a period marked by paranoia and political conspiracy, saw the US playing a particularly fiendish role in “spreading democracy” to other countries, while undermining it internally in the name of battling “red terror”. American filmmakers memorably responded to this anxiety-ridden atmosphere with multiple fine movies, with three in 1964 alone by Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Lumet and John Frankenheimer. The latter filmmaker, who’d made the baroque and unsettling political thriller The Manchurian Candidate two years back, took that ahead with Seven Days in May – the middle chapter in his ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, which he’d conclude with Seconds – that refocussed from McCarthy-era hysteria to murky machinations during the nuclear age. When pacifist US President Lyman (Fredric March), in a courageous but unpopular decision, signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the highly decorated, megalomaniacal and right-wing zealot Air Force General James Scott (Burt Lancaster) plots a nefarious coup d'état to replace the elected government with a military junta, as he believes that the President is undermining America’s strength and power by going soft on Communism. Colonel “Jiggs” (Kirk Douglas), who reports to Scott, uncovers the ploy from a series of suspicious clues, and takes the difficult call of choosing insubordination over allowing constitutional principles to be trampled. Though tad heavy on verbal exchanges at times, it wasn’t short of crackerjack thrills and intrigue, and was propelled by a menacing turn by Lancaster that was reminiscent of the chilling masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success. The storyline bore additional self-reflexive irony given how the United States frequently enabled military coups during the 20^th century, while Lancaster would star in another similar conspiracy thriller a decade later with Executive Action.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Train [1964]

 Watching The Sorrow and the Pity and The Train within a few days of each other was rather ironic, given how the former demythologized the idea of widespread French resistance during the German occupation while the latter emphatically celebrated it. John Frankenheimer, who took charge after Burt Lancaster got Arthur Penn fired, dramatically altered Penn’s script – which was more character-driven and primarily focussed on the value of art – into a kinetic, action-packed movie foregrounded on the titular locomotives. Along the lines of John Sturges’ The Great Escape from a year back, this too was fiction spun around facts – or “faction”, as one might call it – set during WW2, and was a similarly rip-roaring war film that nevertheless retained tangible character developments and political stances. It’s August 1944 and Colonel Waldheim (Paul Scofield), an “aesthete Nazi” who loves “degenerate” modern art, decides to take the crème de la crème of artworks housed in Jeu de Paume to Berlin – at any costs necessary – upon sensing Paris’ imminent liberation by the Allies. The museum’s desperate curator appeals to the French Resistance to prevent this given their incalculable cultural significance. Labiche (Lancaster), a railway inspector at the station from which this prized cargo will depart and leader of the local Resistance cell down to its last three men, reluctantly agrees to sabotage Waldheim’s plans despite not caring much for art. Stunningly photographed in B/W – deploying a mix of wide-angles, deep focus, and ingenious single takes – the battle of wits between the two men, manically driven by contrasting objectives, was matched by thrilling set-pieces involving authentic trains. The fine support cast included the striking Jeanne Moreau as a brusque inn-keeper forced into chooses sides.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Action/Thriller/War

Language: English

Country: US

The Sorrow and the Pity [1969]

 Few films have so powerfully combatted collective historical amnesia like Marcel Ophüls’ monumental 4-½-hour-long documentary did by dismantling the carefully established Gaullist myth – much to everyone’s chagrin – that the French populace had resisted the Nazi Occupation en masse and were tragically martyred by it. No wonder, he had to secure funding from German and Swiss television after the French network refused to support an exercise as unpalatable as this, and a French release was made finally possible at a small left bank theatre thanks to Truffaut. This engrossing work – its colossal runtime notwithstanding – was a complex, multi-perspective investigation into the puppet, autocratic and collaborationist regime that was helmed by Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, which made France the sole occupied country during WW2 that had a functioning government that actively cooperated with German occupiers. Ophüls documented this dark chapter through an assemblage of diverse personal testimonies, memories and reflections – perpetrators, apologists and bystanders, as well as heroes, dissidents, and those who realized their folly on hindsight; fascists and antifascists; French people, of course, but also former Wehrmacht officers and British agents – which made this a simultaneously lucid, desolate and devastating oral history. Broken into two halves – “The Collapse” covered France’s rapid surrender, armistice, the disgraceful Vichy government, and how most people were okay with it; “The Choice” focussed on the active and passive collaborators, fearless members of Resistance groups, and the murky liberation process – its most unforgettable section comprised of a freewheeling conversation with working-class former Resistance fighters who melancholically share how easily everyone had embraced virulent racism, anti-Communism and xenophobia, the associated moral rot, the futility of seeking revenge against informants, and the eventual whitewashing of wartime culpability.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/War

Language: French/German/English

Country: France

The Damned [1969]

 The Damned was a scintillating outlier in Luchino Visconti’s oeuvre. Daringly provocative and subversive, packed with outré plot developments, shot in lurid colours, and driven by the unholy tussle between decadence and depravity, it bore the undercurrents of an exploitation movie, and was therefore radically removed from the Italian trailblazer’s customary stately forms and elegant compositions. The first chapter in his acclaimed “German Trilogy” – it was followed by Death in Venice and Ludwig – told the contrapuntal story of the disintegration of the aristocratic von Essenbeck family that owns a massive steel corporation, and Hitler’s consolidation of power. The family patriarch Joachim (Albrecht Schönhals) hates the Nazis, as does Herbert (Umberto Orsini) who’s married to Joachim’s niece (Charlotte Rampling). Not surprisingly, the former is murdered and the latter falsely framed over the course of an elaborately staged opening segment featuring a family gathering during Joachim’s birthday. Those present, a microcosm of the country, include the brutish Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff), a member of the SA that enabled Hitler’s rise but would soon fall out of his favour; Joachim’s crafty and cunning daughter-in-law Sophie (Ingrid Thulin); her slimy social climber fiancé Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde); his cold and ruthless friend Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), who’s part of the SS and pits one family faction against another; Sophie’s paedophilic, incestuous and easily manipulated viper of a son Martin (Helmut Berger); and Konstantin’s artistically-inclined son. Over the course of the turbulent narrative that unfolds, the violent machinations within the family paralleled the corruption, moral rot and grotesquerie that the Nazis embodied, while its showpiece segment – that divided the film into two halves – graphically recreated ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ when the SS massacred the “Brownshirts”.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Genre: Drama/Historical Drama/Political Drama/Family Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Still Kill the Old Way [1967]

 Elio Petri’s filmography can be roughly divided into two categories – relatively restrained films (albeit, not completely bereft of stylistic flourishes) during the first half of his career, and formally exuberant and politically outspoken works subsequently – with We Still Kill the Old Way squarely belonging to the former camp. This muted and moody political conspiracy thriller reminded me of the tone, build-up and oblique storytelling of Francesco Rosi’s superb film Illustrious Corpses. No surprises, perhaps, that both were adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novels, this one being from To Each His Own. It began with an audacious long-take – with a “flying” camera providing panoramic views of the Sicilian town in which it’s set – before dramatically diving into the narrative as an oddball Tati-esque postman, while on the way to delivering a letter, discusses about it with the town’s laidback but curious residents. The said letter is an anonymous threat to a womanizing pharmacist, which soon materializes into his murder by unknown assailants during a hunting trip with his friend Antonio. While this is treated as an open-and-shut case of honour killing, a mild-mannered but dogged leftist Professor (Gian Maria Volonté in a fine atypical casting) starts suspecting that Antonio was the real target instead, rather than an unlucky collateral. Sparked by his identification of the newspaper – read by political and religious conservatives – that’s used for composing the threat mails, he starts obsessively digging into the death that’s bound to be detrimental to his physical wellbeing. Along the way he finds himself falling for his dead friend’s widowed wife (a delectably inscrutable Irena Papas), as the plot increasingly thickens. Vivid cinematography and Luis Bacalov’s idiosyncratic score added to the film’s captivating atmosphere.

Director: Elio Petri

Genre: Crime Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Assassin (L'Assassino) [1961]

 L'Assassino, Elio Petri’s solid if underrated debut, combined three aspects of his filmmaking that’d manifest more markedly in his later, better-known films. It introduced his love for genre cinema, B-movies and gonzo aesthetics; it underscored his disdain for unchecked consumerism and moral rot in contemporary Italian society (a theme in multiple landmark Italian films of the 1960s); and it provided teasing glimpses into how his left-wing politics was inseparable from his craft (he formerly wrote Marxist film criticisms for L'Unità). Then matinee idol Marcello Mastroianni, who Petri scored for the lead role (they’d collaborate thrice more), retained a soft corner for this film, even though he starred in some of the most seminal Italian films of that period. He was excellent as Alfredo, an antiques dealer of dubious standing, a lothario, a bon vivant and a scoundrel, who’s arrested from his posh apartment in Rome on suspicions of murdering his older ex-mistress Adalgisa (Micheline Presle), a wealthy socialite who was also his business sponsor and partner until recently. He owed her money, was one of the last persons to see her alive and had just switched to a younger girlfriend who’s a moneyed heiress, and therefore the suspicion. Additionally, the Commissario (Salvo Randone) – who’s heading the case and hopes to wear him down with interminable waiting and interrogations – hates his “type”. Scripted by the great Tonino Guerra, the film alternated the “present” – which occurs over 1 ½ days – with frequent flashbacks into Alfredo’s chequered past, thus making this as much an investigation into the protagonist as one into the case at hand. The sparkling B/W cinematography and smooth jazz score added to the fatalist atmosphere of this “anti-realist thriller”.

Director: Elio Petri

Genre: Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The War Is Over (La Guerre est Finie) [1966]

 The War Is Over – the (translated) phrase with which Franco had declared the end of the Spanish Civil War – was as much its ‘Left Bank’ auteur Alain Resnais’ as it was screenwriter Jorge Semprún’s and actor Yves Montand’s. This landmark film, which comprised of a remarkable interplay of political discourse and actions with existential and moral enquiries, alternated between arresting 1960s zeitgeist and introspective memories. Resnais portrayed these contrapuntal elements by juxtaposing a classically structured narrative thrillingly laced with the here-and-now of the present, reflective voiceovers and dazzling montage sequences – including a nod to Godard’s magnificent A Married Woman – that fragmented the past while suffusing it with impressions, premonitions and déjà vu. Semprún, who wrote the nuanced screenplay, composed the film’s protagonist Diego Mora – an ageing Spanish Communist, anti-Franco resistance, career revolutionary and exile – based on himself. Montand, in one of his most celebrated performances, imbued the character – a person of many identities, no permanent home, and bouncing between his ideals and dilemmas – with such profound weariness that it exuded from the screen. Set over the course of a few days in Paris – he’s just about escaped getting caught while leaving Spain, but is determined to go back prior to a massive general strike being planned – he finds himself vacillating between his girlfriend Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who he always returns to, and Nadine (Geneviève Bujold), a young leftist woman who’s part of an extremist group with political views radically different from his own; meanwhile, he also senses growing differences with his own party comrades. Shot in sensuous B/W by Sacha Vierny, this moody, poetic, understated and formally exhilarating work was therefore as politically engaging as it was profoundly personal.

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: French

Country: France

China Is Near [1967]

 Marco Bellocchio’s second film China Is Near retained the wild farce and blasphemy of his astounding debut feature Fists in the Pocket. If it was slightly less feverish and feral, it was as unapologetically offensive and risqué, and upped the satirical ante and ribald buffoonery while delivering a Molotov cocktail aimed at political, social, religious and sexual mores. In a fascinating coincidence, Godard’s dazzling gem La Chinoise and this – which released in the same year – didn’t just share zany humour, anti-bourgeoise filmmaking, Maoist references and impudent nonconformity, they even shared the Special Jury Prize in that year’s Venice Film Festival. Its principle targets are three siblings belonging to a hideously funny family of affluence and aristocracy in a provincial Italian town – Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), the rotund eldest brother, has tried his hands with various centre-left political options and has presently settled for the Socialist party to escape his guilt, look progressive and attain power; Elena (co-writer Elda Tattoli), the middle-aged, promiscuous and still glamourous sister, loves taking young partners from lower social classes, while ensuring that they never stake claim to her wealth; and Camillo (Pierluigi Aprà), the repressed and unhinged youngest of the lot, has started a three-man hardline Maoist cell to combat his dilemmas with aristocracy and Catholicism. Meanwhile, Carlo (Paolo Graziosi) and Giovanna (Daniela Surina), former lovers and belonging to the working-class, begin a scheming journey up the class chain, as the former seduces Elena while the latter decides to succumb to Vittorio’s ogling, hoping to marry rich. Splendidly shot by Tonino Delli Colli in baroque B/W and idiosyncratically scored by Ennio Morricone, it featured public brawl, fratricidal assassination attempt, failed abortion and other assorted craziness.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy