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The Conformist: Godard Meets Freud
Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) is everything that a viewer could ask for - a great story, interesting characters, stylish visuals and a purely cinematic language to convey them all. Using images that possess the judiciousness of a Tati, meaning of an Antonioni and elegance of an Ophuls, Bertolucci, not even 30 at that time, conjures up a film of both high mojo-quotient and long "shelf-life". Evidently inspiring The Godfather series, The Conformist is the kind of film that persuades you to understand what the difference between direction and visual illustration is.
Jeanne Dielman: Life as an Aquarium
Chantal Akerman's most famous film gives away all that is factual about it in its name itself. The rest of it follows what the titular Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) does in this 23, Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles house of hers, over a three day period in almost in its entirety...
La Jetée: The Cinematic Tense
Who would have thought that one could make a sci-fi masterpiece in just 27 minutes? Well, I didn't. I was wrong. La Jetée (1962) has left behind it, a legacy that many filmmakers have attempted to inherit, time and again, through the years. Its vision of the future of the world and its inhabitants - a sunless earth, cold expressionless faces and almost machine like emotional states - and the possibilities of experiment with cinematic and real time, that it has opened up, have become almost a standard template for sci-fi movies....
Persona: Landscape of the Face
Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) isn't like anything I've seen of his other works. Perhaps this is the first time, I'll replace the word ‘˜meticulous' with ‘˜avant-garde' when describing his films.
Last Year At Marienbad: Bypassing Reality
Last Year at Marienbad is a study of how the human memory works. Resnais presents memory as a tool to retrieve the past. The fainter it becomes, the more possibilities it presents. When we are forced to confront it, we try to synthesize the remaining bits and pieces, blending what was with what would have been, into a coherent experience with unmarred chronology and logic. More painful that past is, more comfortable is the version synthesized - A version that is sore enough to recall those dreadful incidents...
Los Olvidados: R.I.P. Neorealism
The children in the classic Neo-realist films were sympathetic and often pawns of fate or power plays. Buñuel's Pedro is also a product of his environment and the prejudices against him. But that does not mean all of Buñuel's kids are sympathy-magnets. Most of them are, in fact, instigators of social disturbances that the "neo-realist kids" are subjected to. Buñuel breaks away from that "objective gaze" of the Italian pioneers and takes us on a tour into the subconscious world of his protagonists. Moreover, Buñuel questions the moral integrity of its protagonists, or rather does away with that concern completely
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