Hôtel Terminus [1988]

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

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War/Biopic

Language: English/German/French/Spanish

Country: US

The Memory of Justice [1976]

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

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/War

Language: English/German/French

Country: Germany/UK/US

The Hour of the Furnaces [1968]

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

Directors: Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Agitprop Cinema

Language: Spanish

Country: Argentina

Juvenile Court [1973]

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

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary/Legal Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

Harlan County, USA [1976]

 Barbara Kopple’s debut feature Harlan County USA – a stunning potpourri of cinéma vérité, leftwing political advocacy, reportage, and newsreel – remains a cornerstone for protest films and working-class cinema. The cinematic equivalent of the immortal labour anthem “Which Side Are You On?” that was written by Florence Reece and popularized by Pete Seeger – the song served as a recurring motif throughout – Kopple took a steadfastly partisan stance (she was no neutral) while delivering a riveting account of the fierce and defiant 13-month-long strike by the coalminers from the titular Kentucky town, against Duke Powers Company, to secure the right to join organized labour union. When she arrived to document the miners’ struggle and resistance, she was initially viewed with suspicion and scepticism as a hippie New York filmmaker; however, she won their hearts, stayed at their homes, became part of their community, joined them in the charged picket lines, heard their stories of exploitation and suffering, and filmed their dogged fight for survival for over a year. What particularly emerged through her images, with unforgettable impact, was the role played by women – who were fearlessly at the forefront, going heads-on with violent company-paid strike-breakers, thugs and cops – thereby making this a great feminist exercise too. The film’s extraordinary soundtrack comprised of a string of rousing protest songs by bluegrass and folk artists – Reece, Hazel Dickens, Marle Travis, David Morris et al – while the chronicle of the bloody labour battle was interspersed with historical reference points, ugly manoeuverings by those hungry for power and profit, exposé on the abominable working conditions, and a heartbreaking death that finally turned the tide, thus making this a haunting mosaic of moments, actions and voices.

Director: Barbara Kopple

Genre: Documentary/Protest Film/Reportage

Language: English

Country: US

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On [1987]

 Iconoclastic and rebellious Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s most emblematic work – and groundbreaking “action documentary” – The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On focused its gaze on a man who’s so fervently anti-war that, ironically, he’s even ready to use violence for his activism. Kenzō Okuzaki, a veteran of Japan’s notorious campaign in Papua New Guinea during WW2, was a one-man truth squad and defiantly anti-establishmentarian agitator – driven by righteous fury bordering on madness – against his country’s hideous war-time atrocities, and his monomaniac crusade to hold Emperor Hirohito and Japan’s military to account often landed him in long prison stints. Introduced to this fascinating provocateur by his idol and mentor Shōhei Imamura, Hara made a film – amalgamating anti-imperialist politics with gripping investigative journalism, cinéma vérité techniques and searing condemnation of militarism and blind nationalist obedience – that was as radical, complex and riveting as its subject. Okuzaki, with Hara’s camera in tow, goes about exposing a particularly horrific chapter from over 40 years back when two low-ranking privates were executed – supposedly for desertion – even though the war was already over by then. With their respective brother and sister as company – later, when they decide to part ways, replaced by his stoical wife and a fellow-anarchist as stand-ins – he goes about confronting the now-ageing officers and perpetrators, often bullying and even beating them to extract confessions. Hara alternated the edgy interactions in closed spaces, shot using handheld cams and unbroken long takes, with stunning panoramic shots and street footage of Okuzaki driving his van filled with political slogans and having passive-aggressive altercations with cops, for a work that pushed the limits of nonfiction filmmaking by inciting reactions, shattering social conventions and uncovering buried truths.

Director: Kazuo Hara

Genre: Documentary/Investigative Documentary/Biopic

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later [1984]

 A landmark political documentary and masterpiece of Latin American cinema, Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s genre-fluid cinema vérité essay traversed from resistance to lamentation to healing over the course of three episodes that were woven into it. In 1964, he started making a hybrid docu-drama – blending neorealism with agitprop – on João Pedro Teixeira, a fearless activist who was brutally murdered 2 years back by the military police and lackeys of local landowners, for his outspoken advocation of land reforms and peasant rights. Coutinho cast non-actors, including Teixeira’s widowed wife Elizabeth playing herself, and shot for 35 days at a recently collectivised farm before being shut down by the military coup d’état in Brazil. Nearly everything was seized, some folks were arrested, and rest – including Elizabeth, who’d become a rebellious voice herself after her husband’s death – went into hiding. The self-reflexive and kaleidoscopic middle chapter, shot in 1981 as the dictatorship was losing its grip, sees Coutinho returning and reconnecting with the stalled film’s participants, screening the recovered footage, and recording memories from 17 years back, reflections on lost years, and stories of harsh punishments, reconciliations and survival. In the extraordinary final segment filmed over the following 3 years, Coutinho first tracks down Elizabeth – she’d escaped overnight and had been living incognito ever since – so that she’s finally able to reclaim her identity, voice and life, and then her many children, most of whom have grown up dispersed, carrying fading recollections of their mother. This deeply moving final chapter powerfully extended the individual histories of direct participants, for a meditation on the personal costs of resistance, chronicle of interruption, and expression of cinema’s capacity for defiance, endurance, remembrance and driving closure.

Director: Eduardo Coutinho

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political Film

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

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