It Was Just an Accident [2025]

 Jafar Panahi’s blistering work It was Just an Accident was defined as much by the edgy specificity of its milieu as by the stirring universality of its appeal. Though his ban from filmmaking has finally been lifted, he must still work in the shadows due to his fierce intellect and defiance. He powerfully demonstrated that, in a voice that’s also profoundly moral, thereby making his first fully narrative feature in a long time – intimately informed by his personal experiences – essential political cinema. It began by focusing on a seemingly banal family man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving his wife and daughter home when, upon accidentally hitting a stray animal, stops at a garage to get his car inspected. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an auto-mechanic, recognizes him – through the squeak of his prosthetic leg – as the brutal tormentor who’d physically and psychologically tortured him during his time as a political prisoner. He decides to seek justice by kidnapping the man and burying him alive in the deserts. However, when doubts creep in about his identity, he decides to seek second opinion, and thus begins a darkly funny road trip as fellow victims each of whom carry devastating traumas – a photographer (Mariam Afshari), a would-be bride (Hadis Pakbaten) and her fiancé, a troubled man (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) – gather in his van, debating what ought to be the man’s punishment. Panahi complemented the guttural howls against tyranny and ethical quandaries of violent revenge with wickedly absurdist humour and subversive irony in this riveting and tightly scripted political thriller, that also comprised of virtuoso long-takes. Vahid was superb as a man broken by the state whose humanity hangs by a thread, as were his fellow actors.

Director: Jafar Panahi

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Mystery

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Secret Agent [2025]

 The Secret Agent is intimately linked to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s filmography – fondness for B-movies and old theatres, novelistic approach and meandering conversations underlined by subversive political subtexts, setting in Recife – while its ambitious narrative construct and period backdrop provided fascinating departures. This roguish, genre-bending and engrossing political thriller – crafted with aplomb and mischief, alternately devilish and melancholic, and interjected with deadpan humour and hilarious schlock – is situated in 1977, during Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship. Armando (Wagner Moura), widower and academic blacklisted for his political leanings, returns to his hometown using an alias to reunite with his young son and emigrate. He’s hosted by the vivacious, diminutive, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), a retired anarcho-communist and antifascist partisan who provides refuge to political dissidents in her lively apartment building; he finds employment at an archival centre, for cover and hoping to find his vanished mother; and he’s aided by a resistance network who he meets at a movie theatre run by his kindly father-in-law, while a vengeful industrialist has engaged lethal father-son hitman pair – who in turn subcontract it to a vicious lumpen – to kill him. Meanwhile, an oafish cop (Robério Diógenes) harasses people for fun; sleazy newspaper stories about a “murderous hairy leg” have sparked public hysteria; revelries at the ongoing carnival provide an ominous counterpoint to the atmosphere of dread, paranoia and terror; and a young history student (Laura Lufési) in the present day is moved by Armando’s story while piecing together archival material on the dictatorship. Gorgeously mounted in sunny visuals and anchored by Moura’s magnificent turn, this unfolded into a smouldering and multi-layered meditation on political and cultural memory, pointlessness of violence, and passage of time.

Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

The Conversation [1974]

 Right from its bravura opening sequence – shot in grainy analogue and single-take using a telephoto lens which slowly zooms in from high-up, starting with a crowded scene bursting with activities and ending by focussing on Gene Hackman’s central protagonist – The Conversation announced itself as a thrilling work of its time. Much-sought-after surveillance expert and professional eavesdropper Harry Caul, ironically contrary to his vocation, is fiercely protective of his anonymity and privacy, while his drab and banal existence – he lives alone in a stripped-down apartment, spends his free time playing on the sax to jazz music, and never lets off his emotional guard – sharply contrasted his professional brilliance, adroitness with state-of-the-art technology and bespoke innovations. His latest assignment – employed by the Director of a shady organization and his sinister assistant (Harrison Ford) – involves snooping on a couple, through intricate planning and triangulations, while they amble around San Francisco’s Union Square. While extracting their conversation from the ambient noise, he becomes convinced that their lives are in danger, and his extreme anxieties, catalyzed by his severe guilt from a past job and repressed childhood memories, precipitate his devastating psychological meltdown. Made between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola crafted this riveting, low-key, chilling and magnificent exploration of seething paranoia, personal demons, and moral conflicts – and an exercise in melancholy in a minor key – that remains a high watermark for political conspiracy thrillers. Hackman was electrifying in conveying Harry’s complex contradictions, obsessions and unravelling, while the surveillance trade fair that he attends – followed by vulgar one-upmanship by a jealous professional rival and a rare night of hedonism, intimacy and betrayal – amplified the film’s caustic commentaries and haunting prescience.

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

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette) [1948]

 Visconti pioneered neorealist cinema and Rossellini took it to exalted heights; but it was Vittorio De Sica who gave this profoundly influential movement – that redefined a filmmaker’s gaze by foregrounding it on gritty, authentic stories of working-class struggles, shorn of artifice and embellishments – arguably its most emblematic monument with Bicycle Thieves. It was remarkable when it was made in 1948, for its vivid portrayal of post-war Italian society – plagued by poverty, unemployment, corruption and disillusionment – through understated and deceptively unassuming brushstrokes; that it has retained its modernity and impact even seven decades later reconfirms its enduring legacy. This was the quietly devastating story of Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), a simple and impoverished man, whose life takes a hopeful turn when he lands the job of pasting advertisement bills, and his wife (Lianella Carell) gets his bicycle – a prerequisite for the profession – released from the pawnshop. His luck, however, promptly takes a nosedive when the cycle gets stolen while he’s busy affixing the poster of a Rita Hayworth movie. The remaining film captured his desperate and futile search, with his son Bruno in tow. During his Roman odyssey, co-written by Cesare Zavattini from a Luigi Bartolini novel, he visits the city’s black market, finds himself in a church as well as a brothel, ambles through thoroughfares and alleys, walks by piazzas and the riverfront, visits a fancy restaurant, and ends up in a rough neighbourhood; shot on location with throbbing immediacy, this was, consequently, a great city symphony too. Along the way he encounters camaraderie and empathy, hostility and hopelessness, and a society in a complex state of flux, with Antonio’s existence both persuasively standing out and eloquently representing the collective.

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

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Long Farewell [1971]

 Iconoclastic feminist filmmaker Kira Muratova’s second solo directorial endeavour, The Long Farewell, was a daring, dazzling, hypnotic and radically experimental work that was informed as much by the Soviet montage theory of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as Godard’s love for playfully shattering the conventional inter-relationships between audio and visual grammars. Thus, while her previous film Brief Encounters – the two often considered as companion pieces – earned the displeasure of the censors, this was treated by them as a downright expression of mutiny; consequently, not only was it shelved and released only with the advent of ‘Perestroika’ in 1987, Muratova’s directorial career too was impacted for years, forcing her to shift from Odessa to Leningrad and work outside the industry until her rehabilitation; the parallels with between her and avant-garde Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová are unavoidable. Yevgenia (played by renowned theatre actress Zinaida Sharko) is a well-off, vivacious middle-aged woman admired by her colleagues and friends. She’s also a domineering single-mom who dotes on her teenage son Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) to the point of extreme emotional dependence and exasperation. Hence, when he decides to move in with his dad in Novosibirsk upon experiencing a growing sense of estrangement with his mother, she begins to unravel. Her discontentment and Sasha’s disconnectedness were portrayed through splendid impressionistic bursts, interspersed with moments of quiet candour, and made particularly haunting by Muratova’s use of off-kilter formal choices – elliptical editing, repetitions, syncopated dialogues – along with stunning camerawork, moody B/W photography and a jangling, brilliant piano-based score. Yevgenia’s escalating inability to communicate with her son, ironically, stood at odds with her vocation as a successful translator, while the film’s freeform style underlined the duo’s unnerving push-pull relationship.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)

El Sur (The South) [1983]

 El Sur, Victor Erice’s first film in a decade since his unforgettable debut with The Spirit of the Beehive – his next narrative feature, Close Your Eyes, would come half a century later – is that rare cinematic gem that succeeded in becoming one despite being an unfinished film… or maybe, because it was one. Adapted by Erice from the novella of the same name by his wife Adelaida García Morales, this sublime exploration of memories, disillusionment, loss and the inescapable ravages of time – awash in painterly beauty and profound melancholy – was supposed to have a runtime of 2-½ hours, but was stopped short at roughly the two-third mark by its producer Elías Querejeta citing that funds had extinguished, but real reasons never fully disclosed. The film as it stood, however, turned into a particularly haunting longing for the mythical “south” of the title as the final part – that was supposed to finally take us there – never got made. Life the earlier work, this too was a coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of a young, lonely and imaginative girl, and was underscored with the desolate remnants of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s totalitarian regime. Estrella (marvellously played by Sonsoles Aranguren and Icíar Bollaín as the initial 8-year-old and the later 15-year-old, respectively), who stays in a remote house in northern Spain with her parents Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and Julia (Lola Cardona) – they were both anti-Francoists and never seen speaking to each other now – is fascinated by her taciturn dad and entranced by the magical “sur”. Hypnotically photographed by José Luis Alcaine, the film’s standout central moment featured a rapturous single-take dance between father and daughter to paso doble music.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Man of Marble [1977]

 Man of Marble – the first chapter in Andrzej Wajda’s electrifying diptych of ‘Solidarity Films’ along with Man of Iron – was a dazzling assemblage of political critique, formal audacity, and deconstructive meta-narration, making it both a vivid historical document and thrilling investigative reportage. Both films recalled Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Francesco Rosi’s Mattei Affair in that they constructed their eponymous individuals’ lives through subjective memories and objective evidences. The individual in question here is Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), a simple bricklayer who shot to stardom as a Stakhanovite symbol upon accomplishing a superlative feat of labour during the Stalinist era, but over the years fell out of political favour, became a persona non grata, and slipped into obscurity. Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), a brash young film school student, has defiantly selected this enigmatic man for her graduation project, and goes about making that by interviewing people who knew him in the past – a festival-hopping director who’d once made state propaganda films on Birkut; a former state security agent who tailed Birkut when he became increasingly outspoken and disillusioned; his oldest comrade (Michał Tarkowski) who was arrested during the purges and has become a dodgy bureaucrat post his rehabilitation; and Birkut’s estranged, self-hating wife – as well as archival news and film footage to piece together the jigsaw puzzle about this now forgotten socialist hero of unknown whereabouts. Flamboyantly shot through a mix of wide-angles, low-angles, close-ups, dynamic hand-held cameras and vivid colours, which complemented the wan backdrops and flat B/W reels, and accompanied by a pulsating, idiosyncratic score interspersed with old socialist songs, the film – aside from its stylistic bravura and edgy political commentaries – remains a fascinating depiction of subversive, guerilla filmmaking.

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

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

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 Spirit of the Beehive [1973]

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

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

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

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Fantasy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

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

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Close-Up [1990]

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

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

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Documentary/Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

The Godfather Part II [1974]

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

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

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Family Drama/Epic

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

The Godfather [1972]

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

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

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Epic/Family Drama

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

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

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

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

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

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

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