The Vanishing (Spoorloos) A Film by George Sluizer (1988)

At the center of George Sluizer's original 1988 version of The Vanishing (that is, before he made the inconceivable move to recreate it in Hollywood) lies a brutally existential question: is it better to live a life with a perpetual uncertainty or to die having finally understood? It's the stuff of hard, speculative fiction, the kind that challenges presuppositions about life and death and isn't afraid to reveal abysmal ambiguities. The conflict is posed to the film's main character, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets), a young Dutch man whose girlfriend Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) inexplicably disappears at a highway rest stop in the first twenty minutes, and one could say the capricious viewer as well, who is constantly deciding whether to keep watching this creepy, insistent work or turn it off prematurely and never know the answer to its rigorously sustained mystery. But Sluizer avoids some standard whodunit. In fact, very early on The Vanishing signals the kidnapper, and goes so far as to intimately observe his life. Yet the film maintains a taut air of anxiety. There are tougher, more slippery eggs to crack here, and quite literally so (Saskia has a nightmare that she and Rex meet as a pair of golden eggs in space, which is later refrained by Rex in his climactic terror).

Ironically, the film's tag of "psychological thriller" is disingenuous and ultimately false; this is a film whose fundamental mysteries would be made foolish in the face of reductive psychological readings. Attribute this largely to the villainous concoction at the crux of the story, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), as genuinely unnerving a monster as any, and one of the finest screen enigmas to emerge from the 1980's (who strikes again once again, laughably, as a suave, unthreatening Jeff Bridges in the later version). What makes Lemorne such a chilling criminal is his utter banality, the precarious sense that he just might not be so much of a criminal. Throughout the film, Sluizer emphasizes the more respectable aspects of this man's domestic life; working as a chemistry professor, he has constructed a tame lifestyle for himself with an agreeable, though seemingly emotionally comatose wife and two daughters (surely, two of the most oddly, suspiciously forward daughters to hit my television screen in a long time), and he has recently acquired a peaceful country home. When the film shifts gears early on to focus unremittingly on him, it even seems to lighten its mood, if such a notion could be possible when portraying a subliminally quack abductor. Cheesy 80's music, whose tempo and tone are often times reminiscent of the kind of music that would accompany slapstick comedy, collides with the footage of Raymond rehearsing his kidnappings and subsequently checking his blood pressure, making tonally ambiguous what should be eerie and disturbing.

It's funny then how it is precisely this ironic detachment that makes the scenes so eerie and disturbing. It also speaks to the tactic which makes The Vanishing so effective as a thriller. Not that it is loaded with dialectics like these, but that it is so routinely apathetic towards its potentially lurid, B-movie subject matter. Everything about the film exudes commonplace: Raymond's calm, invisible demeanor, Rex's slow, lukewarm pursuit of his girlfriend's abductor, the cosmopolitan scene of the initial crime, and most of all Sluizer's cool, reserved direction, witnessed in the way he drops the expected narrative trajectory after the linear first act. Nothing stands out as an attempt to manipulatively raise the stakes. The ingredients kept secret in most thrillers of this order - the mysterious antagonist, his personal life, the amount of time passed since the crime in question - are front and center in The Vanishing, on display for intense scrutiny, and yet the suspense does not shrivel as a result. Sluizer punctuates the film with ominous synthesizer moans and arpeggios created by composer Henny Vrienten but rarely follows up on what they suggest dramatically, instead leaving them dangling in thin air. The result of all these accumulated sonic red herrings is a general sense of discomfort and dread, the idea of the payoff being suspended indefinitely, poised to release once it has reached the pinnacle of its momentum.



And perhaps inevitably, it all pays off in a sublimely shocking manner. Because of the way Sluizer crafts the whole film like patchwork around the clincher moment, its success or failure lies totally and massively in the hands of a strong dramatic epiphany. What does finalize The Vanishing is as savagely beautiful as it is unsettlingly indefinite, one of those earth-shattering climaxes that has the kind of ineffable impact it does for a distinct reason, in this case the complete and utter lack of rationality. Years after Saskia's disappearance, Rex is still, to the dismay of his current girlfriend Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), cultivating a search campaign, and yet his most likely solution is knocking at his door. He is receiving mail from Raymond offering a meeting between the two in which all of the answers will be revealed (if Saskia is alive, where she is, and what happened to her on that day at the rest stop). Finally, Raymond tracks Rex down himself. He takes him in his car across the French border, dishing out enigmatic philosophical platitudes on the way. If the setup of the film sometimes wavers clumsily in tone and conviction, these final twenty minutes are tense, haunting, first-rate filmmaking. Raymond is supposedly sympathetic towards Rex's irritation, and he wants to save him from "eternal uncertainty", which to him is worse than death. But he's also revealed as a sociopath, a man whose motivations exist on an imperceptible plane. All this multifaceted moral ambiguity is handled expertly by Sluizer, culminating in a blurry close-up of Raymond shot through the rainy windshield of his car right before the momentous revelation, suggesting an inability to grasp the full truth, to really understand him.

This is a deeply pessimistic but ultimately cautionary worldview that Sluizer endorses, the idea that the most savage of evil, as irrational as nature itself, can exist behind the most comfortable surfaces and go entirely unnoticed. The number of times Sluizer frames Raymond and his family in tight, affectionate medium shots is enough to imply that nothing is what it seems, that the ideals of family and love that we create are not without their blemishes. Similarly, the otherwise harmonious relationship of Rex and Saskia harbors its own shade of grimness when Rex abandons her in their broken down car in the dark of a road tunnel during the opening scenes to angrily fetch gasoline. Such subtle observations are what lend a deep, lasting power to The Vanishing, a film that grows more frightening and confusing the more you think about it. It's no ordinary family, it's no ordinary relationship, and it's no ordinary thriller. As always, there are tougher, more slippery eggs to crack here.

Paris, Texas (1984) A Film by Wim Wenders

With Paris, Texas, German-born director Wim Wenders shows a knack for capturing the essence of America's heartland with more grit, honesty, and grace than most Americans can. The film, whose initial inspiration was Sam Shepard's collection of literary tidbits, Motel Chronicles, was developed in the midst of a three-month long trip to the West that Wenders took alone, photographically documenting his travels, and it distills a career-long fascination that the director has had with America. Right from its first images of a solitary figure in a baseball cap and black suit plastered against a cartoonishly vibrant desert landscape, it becomes evident that Wenders' rendering is separate from a mere pastiche of the previous practitioners of the Western - Ford, Leone, Peckinpah, Mann, Hawks. In fact, Wenders' sensibility seems to come out of left field, cultivated in an environment removed from such cultural benchmarks, the vision of an outsider looking in and ecstatically committing his sensations to the screen. The shots are moving, but they might as well be continuations of the photographic diary he kept prior to the filming. This sheer visual rapture partly accounts for the seemingly directionless, ambling mood of the opening thirty minutes, which delight in the aesthetic pleasures of the Western landscape and its archetypal qualities more than they advance any narrative.

The other reason for this dramatic stasis comes from the fact that the central character Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), the figure seen somnambulistically marching through the terrain, is about as blank and inexpressive as Wenders' narrative. He walks and walks and stares off into the distance with majestic, mournful eyes, but his reason for doing so is left unclear. Even when his middle-class, billboard-constructing brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) hears of his whereabouts and jumps at the opportunity to scoop him up, for it seems Travis has been MIA for four years, no words, no explanations, no expressions, are delivered. For whatever reason, Travis has made the decision to stop speaking, and given his near amnesiac state, it seems it was a decision made long ago. Details concerning Travis' past life and human acquaintances are collected gradually through context and incident: his brother is a well-to-do Los Angeles local with a French wife named Anne (Aurore Clément) and the couple takes care of Travis' only son Hunter (Hunter Carson, real son of L.M Kit Carson, who adapted the screenplay); he once had a lovely wife named Jane (Natassja Kinski), but unexplained symptoms procured their splitting apart; at an unexpected point in time, he escaped the reality he carved out for himself, leaving his family to believe him dead. But there's no guaranteeing Travis' presence in America is indicative of any kind of desire to reacquaint himself. Indeed, it is possible he wandered over the Mexican border unknowingly, and any suspected desire is negated when he first stoically escapes his brother's hospitality, bursting headlong back into the vast, empty desert.

Wenders niftily builds a rhythm and tone around blocks of silence, communication sent one way only for the receiving end to discredit or ignore, much like the dilapidated milieu he portrays is littered with weathered signs pointing vainly out into the great nothingness of the West. Walt speaks, Travis stares. Eventually, Travis is brought back with Walt to his home in Los Angeles, where Anne speaks and Travis stares. At one point, he finally begins speaking, muttering the words "Paris, Texas" and following it by showing Walt a photo of a vacant lot where he explains his parents likely planted the seed that began his life. When Travis' finally uses words, his communication is stunted and driven by his own internal logic; he's kind and tender, but not the best listener. Stanton's intense, iconic portrayal though makes it well known that something is eating away at Travis, a dogged determination to right his wrongs, to stitch together the family that lost its way. A deeply nostalgic scene when Travis, Walt, Anne, and Hunter sit down to view an assemblage of old Super-8 home footage confirms a retrospective warmth and comfort at the heart of Travis' life that no longer exists, but which shows a possibility of rejuvenating when the estranged father and son meet eyes longingly for an extended period of time, and soon after when they waltz down the street after Hunter's school day, imitating mannerisms from either side (one of those singular moments of cutesy compromise that often manifests itself once or twice in a Wenders movie).



Paris, Texas eventually levels out to become an exceptionally straightforward story, that of a father and son searching for a mother, so simple and pure in its impact that it takes pictorial and geographical eyes as sharp as Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller to capture in such an arresting manner. Travis and little Hunter travel from the hills of LA to the scrambling metropolis of San Bernadino on the strength of Anne's knowledge that Jane takes a monthly trip to the bank to add funds to an account under Hunter's name. Each locale has a specific visual stamp: the organic, luminous panoramas in the open desert, the neon and black juxtaposition of Walt and Anne's LA-overlook, and the crisp, almost hygienic compositions in the heart of San Bernadino, some of which recall Godard's treatment of the urban metropolis in Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

Wenders' potent visual intuition transforms a laconic story with sentimental undertones into a dense, prolonged (a mammoth running time of two and a half hours that goes by in a jiffy), mythic statement on the essence of the American family, a loving and optimistic but ultimately misshapen ideal. To emphasize this, Wenders has the family periodically speaking through barriers, like the walkie talkies and tape recorders that Travis and Hunter communicate with, first as playful detective devices and then as electronic mediators to deliver sad, intimate monologues, or the one-way mirror that separates Travis and Jane once he finally tracks her down working at a phone chat sex club. The latter, a probing session of long-winded dialogue courtesy of Sam Shepard, beautifully illuminates the film's gentle postmodernist undertow, with Travis' rectangular, cinematic view of Jane in the adjacent room recalling Hunter's earlier comment that the image of Jane in the home video is not his mother, but rather his mother in a movie. With Wenders calling attention to both the artifice of cinema and the fundamentally alienated nature of the central family, it's remarkable that it all manages to be so heart-wrenching anyway, and much of it is owed to Wenders nuanced visual presentation, which in one instance naturally superimposes through the one-way window the faces of Travis and Jane, hammering home their physical proximity while reminding us that it doesn't change their inability to connect.

In the end, Paris, Texas is really a film whose power derives from much more than just its director. It is a genuinely collaborative effort that features effective showings all across the board: the pristine lensing of Robby Müller (who later did similarly sumptuous landscape work with Jim Jarmusch), Sam Shepard's poetic, refined dialogue, which would stand on its own wonderfully, and Ry Cooder's inseparable slide guitar score, jangling its way through the drama like a desert wind. Of course, at the center of it all is Harry Dean Stanton's deeply expressive mug, generating emotion out of every wrinkle. His character is an unbelievably moving evocation of a self in peril, beckoned by the sensual pleasures of life but determined to remedy the people around him at his own expense, a notion constantly visualized through the breathtaking barrenness of the Western landscape, beautiful and limitless but always foreboding, teasing, and powerful enough to swallow up a man. Travis' metamorphoses is both complete and incomplete when in the final shot we see him retreating back into the darkness of the open road, connecting an ourobouric loop of dissolution and reconciliation.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

The first moments of Steven Soderbergh's body of work establish a subtle air of unreality that anticipates a career of confounded expectations and nimbly wrought formal dramas. With a series of mysterious, half-finished character introductions that share an indefinable unease in common with the films of David Lynch, particularly Lost Highway (1997), Soderbergh lays the groundwork for his chatty, perplexing debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The camera points towards the pavement whizzing by, creating a gray abstraction that resembles the television static seen later in the film, when the psychologically repressed Graham Dalton's (James Spader) erotically charged videotapes run their course. Then a woman's soft Southern voice begins, speaking with the same stilted quality of Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE: "Garbage. All I've been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can't stop thinking about it." The voice is that of Ann Bishop Mullany (Andie MacDowell), and she is running off her trivial weekly concerns to her unenthusiastic psychiatrist. Yet Soderbergh lets the monologue provide the primary aural thrust of the entire opening montage - even after cutting to the scene of her speech, where she is sitting cross-legged on a couch in a relaxing sun dress - suggesting, no matter how much it implies insignificance, that it is indeed something to listen to.

What we retain from this scene though is not the content of her words, but rather the way MacDowell speaks them. There is something overly delicate and self-conscious about it, perhaps a facade that masks a level of instability beneath, and it underscores the brief interjections of both Graham and Ann's lawyer husband John (Peter Gallagher), two old college buddies who adamantly express that their paths have parted. There is no way of knowing this at first though, so the deft cuts to the suave, blond-haired Graham arriving in town register suspicion and anxiety, a black-clad enigma making quick detours on his way like an inconspicuous assassin. All of this is presented with a sedate formal tightness that firmly implants the film's storytelling modus operandi: provide deeply analytical editing rhythms, but never show more than the objective surfaces of the scenes, never probe the interior mindsets of the characters, and instead let them materialize in unexpected ways. Sex, Lies, and Videotape is one of the rare films that plays less like a succession of individual chunks and more like one fluid, interconnected montage, with countless instances of "invisible" cutting from one conversation to another in a completely separate space, as if the words are not mutually exclusive but rather endless incarnations and continuations of the same situation. In this sense, it is only inevitable that the little white lies told by the treacherous and sexually promiscuous quartet of central characters cause mayhem and dysfunction by the end of the film.

As a tale of adultery and betrayal culminating in a transcendent comeuppance, Soderbergh's debut has the tidings of a classic Greek tragedy, yet it is told in such an unconventional, elliptical manner that it eludes labels of melodrama and academia. It is a story that, despite its seemingly linear chronology, feels dispersed like a mosaic, and thus it does not involve much dramatic crescendo, at least not in a traditional sense. Ann and John have been married for some time, but do not have sex anymore, for Ann finds it extraneous and unsatisfying. This is not to say that they are sexually inactive though, as John is involved in a meaningless on-call affair with Ann's extroverted, bartender sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), and what Ann finds most intimate is actually sharing honest conversations with others. When Graham arrives and stays a few nights at their suburban home in Baton Rouge, she strikes up an interest in his smooth, personable demeanor and the two go out to lunch after searching for a house for Graham with a Realtor, where she learns of Graham's impotence forged by his devastating break-up with a past girlfriend. It is clear that the grounds for disaster have been thoroughly entrenched, and eventually any potential heterogeneous pairing of the foursome is actualized.



Complicating the situation, and proving to be the ultimate form of threatening exposure, is Graham's habit of videotaping anonymous women as he kindly asks them about their sexual experiences. Ann discovers this when she is at his house and sees the organized conglomeration of labeled videotapes beside his TV, harmlessly probing him about his "personal project" at first and then showing discomfort and disgust when she starts to gather the context of the tapes. For Ann, a surefire prude, this is an unacceptable act of perversion, an intrusion on the privacy of the female for a selfish reason, and this alone is enough to suggest the apparatus of the cinema, a medium that is performing precisely Graham's act of penetrating voyeurism and complicity. It seems an attempt on Soderbergh's part to equate film - a material long used as a means for entertainment and art - and the new practice of video, greeted with much skepticism as what could be a harmfully personal endeavor. Cynthia, representing the passive, oblivious firebrand, barges into Graham's house and answers his questions on tape after her interest is aroused by Ann's expressed apprehension. This also coincides with Ann's increased suspicion about John and Cynthia's affair, and the videotapes inevitably provide the evidence necessary for Ann to tell John she wants out of their marriage.

In her frazzled state and still harboring strong levels of attraction towards Graham, she too confronts him and asks to be taped. Before arriving, Soderbergh shoots her drive over in one bizarre cut from her sitting in her driveway covering her eyes while the engine kick-starts, then taking her hands away when it stops to find herself right in front of Graham's house. It's a bracingly avant-garde move, announcing the disorienting sprawl of the final thirty minutes, which rivetingly intercut Graham and Ann's intimate discussion and John watching the resultant tape later in fury in Graham's living room. The performances here are incredible, explaining how the potentially soapy material becomes something altogether entrancing and devastating, but it is MacDowell who communicates the most significant transformation. She strips away the uptight reluctance that stems from her suburban ennui and reaches a more fundamental understanding of the people around her and what drives them. It's an intensely moving, masterfully orchestrated sequence, in many ways a summation of the film's themes of alienation, betrayal, and objectivity vs. subjectivity. And more significantly, it is one of the finest debuts in film history, announcing Steven Soderbergh as a fresh talent with a knack for shattering convention and creating dense, thoughtful meditations on modern life.

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) A Film by Wim Wenders (1987)

If you have ever wished you could fly, see Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire on the big screen. This may mean suspending your disbelief however and accepting that you have become an angel to Wenders, because in our secular world, Wings of Desire is an unabashedly spiritual film. That may take some getting used to for some people, but if you can warm up to the idea that the protagonists we sympathize with are indeed immortal spirits lovingly observing life in holy black trench coats, you are in for a gloriously elegant visual symphony. In it, Wenders does not just want you to watch the angels go about their business; he wants you to be an angel too. His camera hardly ceases its weightless movement throughout the film, hovering flawlessly over the mundane moments that make up the lives of Berlin citizens. Wenders has a way of making the mundane seem extraordinary though, and this is very much the purpose of the film, which ultimately surfaces an unusual irony: to grow accustomed to an empyreal perspective is to gather a paradoxical longing for the concrete, sensual pleasures of real life.

Such is the case with Damiel (Bruno Ganz), an angel who has grown bored of his task to spend eternity without human sensation. Instead, he mournfully watches both public and private moments unfold, periodically resting a hand on a woeful victim's shoulder without being seen or felt. He has the uncanny ability to tune in to the inner monologues of random pedestrians, catching snippets of their thoughts before moving on to new subjects, a tactic which sometimes results in a whispered aural collage. For instance, he'll track down a line of subway passengers or peruse around a spacious public library witnessing testaments that range from the humorously momentary to the abysmally philosophical. His partner in voyeurism, Cassiel (Otto Sander), goes about the same routine, although his pursuit is far more ascetic; he treats it like the deeply compassionate activity that it is rather than an unfortunate inevitability. In Wenders' Berlin, the immortals are very much in coexistence with the mortals, even when neither realizes it. Both seem equally relevant to the flow of everyday life.

Evidence towards this is present in the starry-eyed gazes that children cast in the direction of the angels once in a while, and also in the character of Peter Falk (playing himself) who admits to having made the "transition" long before the film begins. Falk is the good-natured, gruff film actor starring in the film-within-a-film, which appears to be some sort of concentration camp thriller. In the middle of Wings of Desire, while ordering coffee at a concession stand on the side of a drab street, he begins addressing Damiel directly, claiming he senses his presence. He starts explaining how the blissful combination of coffee and cigarettes is what swayed him towards switching to a mortal life. Despite the odd impression Falk makes on the confused passersby, Damiel is touched by the unfettered joy he gets from the simplest of human excitements. At this point, he has made up his mind: he wants to become mortal.



Falk is not the only factor in this persuasion however. The other - a beautiful trapeze artist Damiel is enamored with - ultimately thrusts the film in a wayward direction. Throughout the film, he sits in at circus rehearsals in which the woman, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), contorts in phenomenal directions high above the rest of the performers while the camera downplays its graceful movement to be replaced by her astonishing displays. Damiel even observes her privately in her trailer home swooning to records and relaxing in her bed, a privilege that thousands of peeping toms spend their lives yearning for. Wings of Desire's final chapter, in which Damiel makes the transition to mortality and guilelessly searches Berlin for Marion, essentially feels tacked on and insipid, as if Wenders could not resist an urge to endorse the film with conventional appeal. The contemplative tone of the long black-and-white preface is dropped in favor a color-drenched romantic fable that is burdened by the melodramatic nature of Damiel's cloying naiveté. Although we sense that Damiel's lust for sensation is finally met, the overlong ending makes Wings of Desire needlessly bifurcated.

Yet the meditative perfection of the majority of the film overshadows its near spoiler of a conclusion. Working with exemplary cinematographer Henri Alekan and assistant director Claire Denis in her early stages, the film is a recipe for beauty. The soaring but cautious crane and dolly shots that capture elaborately choreographed scenes adopt the first-person perspective of the angels and emphasize their affectionate scrutiny. To accompany the magnificent visuals, Jürgen Knieper's minimalist cello score pairs with the inner monologues of Berlin citizens to create intricately layered sound design. All of this works to exhibit a Berlin that is stung with an acute sense of melancholy that is similar to that of Angelopoulos' Greece, yet it is not without its celebration of life's pleasures as well.

Stardust Memories (1980) A Film by Woody Allen

Stardust Memories opens in the style of European angst-ridden art cinema, presenting, quite uncharacteristically for an early Woody Allen film, an elongated silence aboard a train where Woody himself sits blankly amidst a crowd of sick, sad souls he believes are staring at him. The train begins moving, Allen grows paranoid and bangs on the walls to get out, and eventually he finds himself and the passengers trudging a deserted plane littered with heaps of smashed car parts, quiet with the exception of the solemn wheeze of the wind and the caws of the circling crows. The scene is unapologetically fraudulent of both Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, two of Allen's most cherished directors; precisely, it is an homage to opening scenes from two of their works, respectively: 8 1/2, where Mastroianni's character is trapped inside a car in a traffic jam, and The Silence, where the young Johan travels on a train to an unknown destination (at least figuratively), the rhythmic exchanges of light toppling over his face much like they do to Allen's and his fellow passengers. This unexpected repose jarringly concludes to reveal silhouetted film producers bickering about how the aforementioned sequence is too pretentious, too arty, and that it ventures into that tired territory of art reflecting anguished state of minds. Of course, they look at it in an unfairly reductive manner, for the sequence, which proves to be test footage for the new film by comic director Sandy Bates, is actually one of those moments of touching homage in Woody Allen's career, and it succeeds marvelously. That it's so compelling despite its brevity, and that the jabbering, half-witted entertainment heads respond to it so negatively, speaks both to a central conflict in the film and Allen's rebellious stance.

This conflict deals with Bates' desire to flee from the satirical comedies that made him a filmmaking icon and move towards richer, more mature pieces of art that reflect reality and human suffering, while his audience insists he remain a purely comic genius. Trouble is, Bates doesn't feel funny anymore; there's no passion to compel him forward with the type of works shown at his popular retrospective. Imbued with a bit of Bergman's own life (the retrospective takes place on a bleak seaside), Sandy Bates is clearly a doppelgänger for Woody himself at this point in his career, although that certainly doesn't imply that Allen ceases to be funny, only that he's growing distressed by the widespread reduction of his filmmaking to mere comedy. Bates is frequently reminded by his omnipresent fans that they especially enjoy his "early, funny ones," and it's an obvious reference to that favored adage of Allen's early admirers. While Stardust Memories often times shares much in common with the very films these fictional fans allude to, it's also one of Allen's most outspoken attempts at cinematic art rather than just a slapped-together, one-off comedy romp.



A vivid example of this artistic ambition is Allen's structural play in the film. Rarely in his career does he venture out of his comfort zone, which is mainly straightforward narratives, but here he aims to adopt the extemporaneous weaving of past and present, reality and fiction, and memory and dream that is not only specifically reminiscent of Fellini's 8 1/2, but also more generally of the films of Godard, Bergman, and Antonioni. Bates' confused, casual interest in three woman – his emotionally feral ex-girlfriend Dorrie, his current French lover Isobel, and an intellectually earnest young brunette he meets at his retrospective – is depicted in an atemporal manner, the three figures fusing into the film at random times to illustrate the feral, immediate nature of Bates' desire. Not only does this uncertainty in romantic affairs contrast strongly with Allen's head-over-heels devotion to women in films like Annie Hall and Sleeper, but it lines up evenly with the common arthouse treatment of the modern woman in the 1960s as beautiful but distant and enigmatic. The assembly line of raucous fans begging for autographs or artistic explanations – who more often that not look directly into the lens as we adopt Bates' perspective – frequently set off unexpected detours to completely different scenes to emphasize the need for escapism, a concept that directly recalls Mastroianni's impotent director in 8 1/2. Allen shifts between these moments with surprising efficiency and impact, suggesting a director with a capability to do more than just tell one-liners.

What do all these intertextual references add up to? Well, I think they're little more than Allen's warmhearted tributes to the cinema he loves. Many cite the film as an especially insubstantial or solipsistic for Woody, and they're not entirely wrong. But what's so striking about Stardust Memories is the way it distills so many of the heavy European arthouse concerns into measly hour-and-a-half running time that boasts all of the sharpness and nervous energy expected of Allen's filmmaking. Stylistically as well as structurally, the film pushes the boundaries of Allen's work; experimental tactics routinely break up a more formal approach, such as when Dorrie, played perfectly by Charlotte Rampling, breaks down in front of the camera via close-up, a frenetic series of fourth wall explosions meant to remind us of Liv Ullmann's camera address in Bergman's Persona. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Allen provides a long close-up of the blond Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) as she pulls her hair back, mirroring another shot of Bibi Andersson in the same film. Stardust Memories' most poignant achievement though is its ineffable mood, which lasts with the viewer in a way that his loose comedies don't: the feeling of mortality and insufficiency breezing through with the lightness of the crows in the opening sequence, and of the attempt to grapple with warm memories during an irritatingly impersonal event.

Dune (1984) A Film by David Lynch (or is it Alan Smithee?)

If one were to apply some sort of numerical system for rating the consistency or artistic similarities in David Lynch's oeuvre, it might look something like this, with Dune being that fat, bulky outlier in no man's land. The last project the film community expected Lynch to partake in following his initial two features was the adaption of Frank Herbert's colossal saga, Dune, a 412-page novel now and then declared as one of the greatest sci-fi epics ever written. Lynch condensed this into a three hour epic of his own which targets the grand tradition of Star Wars but lands somewhere altogether different. Taking into account the harsh critical bashing that is often lobbed at the film - not to mention the dispensation of it as "A Film by Alan Smithee", the official pseudonym used in Hollywood when a director wishes to disown his project - Dune stood before me as a brutish task. As a Lynch "completist", I knew I had to see it, but could have easily watched something else before it. Well, now I have indeed seen it, and it certainly is a confusing enigma, an undeniably bizarre sojourn into big-budget filmmaking for the otherwise self-motivated artist.

One of the greatest mistakes the film makes (to distinguish from a mistake Lynch makes, because it is difficult to say with the finished product what was the studio's addition and what was Lynch's) is in the first ten minutes, when a didactic narration accompanies Herbertian paintings of galactic scenes, the rapidity of which strands the viewer in left field. The narrator, who sounds like an indifferent, drunken Gene Hackman, fires establishing information at us about the Dune universe, the desert planet, the three sparring planetary houses (House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corrino), the gargantuan worm that lives beneath the desert and harvests a certain spice that induces eternal life, and also a bit about the tapestry of individuals. Duke Leto Atreides is the good in the universe, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, a bile, tumor-laden, flying obesity, is the evil. The Duke's son Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) is destined to become heroic but must first stave off an unnamed traitor he is informed of. The supporting narration - seemingly a reason to make comprehensible that which is skidded over in Lynch's kinetic storytelling style - returns variably throughout the film, providing more and more dense information in a slapdash manner. These were likely manifested as extended descriptions in Herbert's novel that required rereading.

Another device frequently used in the film that requires prerequisite knowledge of the book in order to make sense of it is the slew of internal monologues spoken in portentous whisper. Paul is the heftiest purveyor of such confusion; when faced with a difficult situation, he resorts to his conscience, gasping lines like "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." or "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.", and also connecting occurrences to celestial meanings regarding "the second moon...", "the spice...", or "the voice...". However, one cannot say that the film is from the point of view of Paul, because several other times throughout Dune we hear the same device utilized for Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, the Duke, and Piter De Vries, a bushy-eyebrowed deceiver of Atreides, to name a few. Lynch's use of the internal monologue here is haphazard and listless, providing us with combating modes of thought that echo in the mind as they do on the soundtrack. It is uncertain what kind of grasp the "director"/studio-heads have over the project, for it seems a beast as unpredictable as the massive, spike-mouthed worms that seethe beneath the desert planet, and the result in an inchoate blob of sci-fi schtick.



All narrative inconsistencies aside, the film has a special kind of visual allure that spawns not out of calculation of tone but rather out of a certain gaudiness inherent in the special effects work. Dune is the kind of film where the illusion of reality is shattered when it becomes blatant that action sequences are taking place largely in front of green screens. This is visible when Paul lassos the worm and lands on its back, when space shuttles hover smoothly over planetary surfaces, and when crew members are shown from the inside of their flying devices. Scenes like this back-peddle through cinema history to a point where Kubrick's 2001 is undeniably superior. But believing in the action is not what counts; it's often an enjoyment just to marvel at the artifice. Also, the costumes and sets are spectacularly elaborate - albeit relatively plastic-like on the outset - so that there's frequently something within the frame to pick out and stare at when the drama goes haywire. Unfortunately, the color seems to have been mildly drained out to a putrid brownish.

The film is a classic case of heavy studio interference. Lynch apparently shot a great amount more than what is seen in the finished product. It's arguable whether or not any more length or personal vision would have enhanced this film; it seems more likely that it would augment the already tedious nature of the current version. Despite this, there are several times when the film rushes through segments, most crucially the finale, which boasts Paul as a hero but does not accompany his stature with filmic grandiosity. The narrative has its best moments when Lynch slows down the pace, such as when Reverend Mother Ramallo tests Paul's strength through a miniature box designed to infict mental suffering. Dune only occasionally stumbles over a recognizably Lynchian element (the brief dream sequences involving dense superimpositions with ominous hands), and when it does it is largely unsatisfying, like a lazy reprise Eraserhead's cosmic imagery. One leaves the film with a bad feeling, both for having witnessed such a grueling, incomprehensible film, and also for thinking of the great amount of sets, talent, and labor that went to waste.

The Cowboy and the Frenchmen (1988) A Short Film by David Lynch

The Cowboy and the Frenchmen is an absurd, tongue-in-cheek short made by David Lynch as part of a television program called The French as Seen By..., which otherwise included shorts by Jean Luc-Godard, Werner Herzog, and Andrzej Wajda, among others. The film is probably the least intellectually demanding Lynch has ever been, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It takes place on the range where a troupe of cowboys (Henry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Tracey Walter) spontaneously witness a Frenchman skidding down the mountainside nearby. They are unsure of who or what it is at first, Stanton's character "Slim" continually exclaiming "What the hell is that thing?", but their xenophobia eventually wears off when they begin searching his suitcase, unearthing baguettes, romantic pictures, french fries (of course, Lynch can't deny this joke), and all other matters of stereotypical French paraphernalia. The Frenchman's overall excitement towards America, specifically citing the Empire State Building, unites him with the cowboys for a night of galavanting around the stables, singing "home on the range" campfire style, and hitting it off with a few local gals.

Ultimately, the film becomes a no-holds-barred joke. Every chance Lynch gets, he hyperbolizes the already mindless caricatures; the Frenchman, with his beret, suit, and mustachio, does little more than stare like a puppy dog at his surroundings and swoon romantically to the tune of his journal, the cowboys shoot birds and snakes uncontrollably and repeat their orders dumbfounded, and the women wear high jeans while serving the men food or offering them someone to sleep next to. Lynch has a way of drawing his character's gestures out so that they become awkward or unnatural, and thus humorous. What really gives the film its goofiness though is the deliberately stodgy aesthetic. The video quality looks several notches below professional. Clumsy superimpositions, iris effects, and stagey dance sequences are all put to good use. An amusingly simplistic honky-tonk score fills out nearly every one of the twenty-six minutes. There is even a motherly shot of three woman harmonizing quick ditties over the landscape which is repeated frequently throughout the film. I wouldn't say The Cowboy and the Frenchman holds an important notch in Lynch's resume, but it at least stands as a testament to the variety of his material. You'll only walk away from it knowing one more thing: this is apparently the French as seen by David Lynch.

Blue Velvet (1986) A Film by David Lynch

David Lynch's first three features, albeit sharing several elements, were each distinctly singular films. They were made under different circumstances, with Lynch's motivations shifting spontaneously from artistic inner sources to oppressive external forces. It was not until Blue Velvet that Lynch would start hitting a stride of consistency, not only in terms of production but in the tone of his work, a streak that remains alive today. With Blue Velvet, Lynch began looking in at America rather than simply making films that are set in America. Utilizing a touch that seems both personally inflected and artificially calculated, he establishes a hygienic small town rife with clichés - red roses and green lawns set against romantic royal blue skies, policemen waving as they ride down the street, little children playing in their yards - only to implant it with the bizarre, hyperreal dreamscape of his imagination. This is the first time Lynch weaves this specific trick, and it is something we still see in his most recent films: the penchant for genre-busting. For the first ten minutes or so of the film, everything tells us we are viewing an average small town mystery. Lynch hits all the right notes, right down to the naming of the characters (the angelic blond high-school girl as Sandy (Laura Dern, with shades of Laura Palmer), her football star boyfriend Mike) and the nowhere-but-anywhere feel of the microcosmic American suburb. Then a disembodied human ear is found in a field.

Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle Maclachlan in a role that seems a tryout for his subsequent turn as Cooper in Twin Peaks, is the innocent young claimant of this ear. He takes it to the police but is told to remove himself from involvement. Jeffrey becomes uncontrollably suspicious, determined to fill in more pieces to the puzzle he began. He enlists the Police Investigator's daughter Sandy, who shows interest as well but not to the degree that he does. Despite this, she stays by his side throughout the proceedings, simultaneously out of a perverse curiosity regarding the expanding mystery but perhaps more so out of a fascination she has with Jeffrey, even to the dismay of her boyfriend. Jeffrey's courageous investigation leads him into the foreboding apartment of the femme-fatale, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a local night club singer who croons night after night the alluring Doo-Wop single, "Blue Velvet", which comes to be the primary visual and aural motif of the film. Dorothy is mixed up with a gang of evil, mysterious men whom Jeffrey witnesses firsthand.



Such a plot sounds prime for some old-fashioned, conventional sentimentalizing. This is what Lynch wants. When Sandy asks Jeffrey "You like mysteries that much, don't you?" after he reports to her a whole bunch of tomfoolery, she could just as well be asking Lynch the same question. He likes them so much that he's willing to ride a thin line between self-parodying schmaltz and the dichotomous, sinister world he forges. Scenes involving a pirouetting camera as Jeffrey and Sandy kiss at a party, or when Jeffrey picks up Sandy in his shiny red sports car from school, a swarm of impressionable girls staring wide-eyed at him, are supposed to clash heavily with the dark material in the film. Dennis Hopper's portrayal of Frank Booth, a maniacal, unpredictable, sadistic sexaholic, is the embodiment of the sheer gravity of Lynch's willingness to take us to the shocking extremes of his chosen genre. The first time Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy's apartment, he witnesses from her tinted closet Frank as he has his way with the submissive Dorothy, sucking violently on a hospital mask and screaming at her to not look at him. His eventual discovery of Jeffrey, whom he hitherto deems "neighbor", sends the film into its most Lynchian territory, via a "joy ride" to hell that recalls the transformative use of open road in Lost Highway. In Blue Velvet though, it's a matter of transitioning between genres rather than realities. Several of Frank's pawns encircle Jeffrey, whispering confusingly unfinished inside jokes to him while more Elvis-like music reverberates in the background, a scenario that exemplifies Lynch's use of obscure comedy.

Another line that Jeffrey and Sandy habitually fall back on is "it's a strange world, isn't it?". The main problem with the film is that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether Lynch's philosophy is actually any deeper than these words, spoken out of the naive mouths of simple folk. The first time I saw the film, I was suspicious of this, a phenomenon Ben Livant hits on the head in an article over at Cinemania: "All of the seedy stuff is merely juxtaposed against the red fire engine with the dalmatian dog, not really intertwined, stapled together for the fun of making a Siamese twin out of a dichotomy, not dialectically related to create a new thing of value." The perfection juxtaposed with the degeneracy seemed too convenient, too easy. Upon second viewing, I found that the pull of the surface pleasures was too strong to worry about this flaw. Granted, Lynch's application of genre tropes has become more refined as his career has progressed. Blue Velvet stands as his initial juggling of this concept, and it is an oddly compelling piece of work indeed, with a memorable atmosphere and cast.

The Elephant Man (1980) A Film by David Lynch

The Elephant Man came as a significant departure for David Lynch when it was released in 1980, being only his second feature following Eraserhead. With several big names involved - Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Hurt (who only became more widely acknowledged after the film's success), and even comedy staple Mel Brooks as the executive producer - the film stood as a big break for Lynch, an opportunity to reach a wider audience following his independently produced debut, which barely broke out from the midnight movie crowd. And although some of the recognizable abstractions of Eraserhead remain fairly intact in The Elephant Man, at heart, they only cushion what is a fairly meat-and-potatoes plot rather than working to primarily elevate the film. Furthermore, the film's story, which on the outset was a difficult sell, is actually quite in line with many "serious" Hollywood dramas, given its somewhat shrill "triumph of the human spirit" undertones. John Hurt plays John Merrick, "The Elephant Man", a man deformed at birth from a mother who was struck by an elephant. He lives miserably under the ownership of a freak-show proprietor until a doctor and anatomy professor working in London (Anthony Hopkins) discovers him and takes him under his wing in light of Merrick's chronic bronchitis. The professor, Frederick Treves, thus battles with his patient's well-being, his own conscience, and eventually the greedy underbelly of London, forever marked by Merrick's previous owner.

It's interesting to see how Lynch revisits the theme of birth deficiency in such a different situation. Whereas Henry's baby in Eraserhead arrived in a strictly lyrical, immaterial manner, Lynch gets right to work detailing Merrick's mother's backstory, underlining the film's progression as a logical one. The opening montage poses a series of fragmented images detailing the mother's incident with elephants, an episode that is horrific and enthralling and most importantly, one of the more stylized in regards to the film as a whole. Without ever showing the mother again, albeit through Merrick's allusions and his sacred framed portrait of her, Lynch has given the viewer the luxury of understanding his deformation. One of the finest moments in the film is a dream sequence which is introduced directly by a swooping camera movement over Merrick's sleeping body, which then gives way to a mosaic of nightmarish images containing back-alley industrial workers and tons of smoke. Everything, from the sound design to the more expressionistic camerawork, tells us we are viewing a dream. This is something we rarely receive in Lynch's work, that privilege to engage without constantly wondering where reality and allusion intersect.

Therefore, The Elephant Man is Lynch's pursuit of a Hollywood message drama with an intent not to devalue his skills with mise-en-scene. In several spots the film becomes academic and labored, most specifically when Treves is integrating Merrick into the hospital environment while a handful of authoritative figures struggle with the idea of taking in an incurable against the hospital's guidelines. The scenes progress with melodramatic weight as The Elephant Man transforms rapidly from a grunting monster to a kindhearted, elegant soul. Anne Bancroft makes a cameo as a notable London theatre actress who treats Merrick with compassion, and thus triggers, along with other admirers spawned by the local newspaper, an important question in Treves: has he sinned by becoming just as exploitative with Merrick as his previous owner? Lynch extends this question but does not answer it, one of the more admirable choices when placed aside some of the saccharine tendencies that film has, like giving Merrick such saintlike innocence, treating all foes not with depth but as greedy, drunken ignoramuses, and providing the overtly uplifting moments with traditional dramatic cues.

Notwithstanding these occasional narrative blunders, The Elephant Man is a work of cinematographic excellence. This is the second time I've seen the film (the first time under proper circumstances) and I remembered it as having a clunkier, more retro look than it actually does. Truth is, Freddie Francis' lighting and camera techniques are sophisticated and modern. Moreover, the film has great range of contrast rather than muted grays, which are what I remembered. With these visuals, the elongated London hospital hallways have more in common with Eraserhead's shadowy walkways than expected. Also, the relentless fog in the darker areas of London where the freak-show owner deprives Merrick makes it seem like Lynch's Philadelphia is the neighboring town. John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins do tremendous jobs in their roles, Hurt bringing out humanity from beneath a grossly deformed, tumor-laden exterior, and Hopkins sustaining an aloof but tender disposition throughout. The film is an uncommonly modest effort from Lynch that has won the hearts of audiences that have scoffed at his more personal works.

After Hours (1985) A Film by Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of Martin Scorsese's most unnerving studies of urban paranoia, but unfortunately is a film that is frequently forgotten amidst more mammoth works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Mean Streets. Filmed in the mid-80's, it was a decidedly smaller production than most of his films, and as a result has slipped into near anonymity aside what preceded it (The King of Comedy (1982)) and what followed (The Color of Money (1986)). It does not lack the energy that such a fact would suggest however; by contrast, the film is always on the move, its camera an imaginative manifestation of its main character's shifty thoughts.

Bringing to the screen a quick-witted, savvy screenplay by Joseph Minion, Scorsese turns a night for Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a pragmatic guy working in a cubicle, into an insanely unlucky fever dream. When the night is young, Paul meets a charismatic blond lady named Marcy in a cafe through a mutual fondness for the book he's reading. They exchange numbers and soon enough he's being driven by a raucous taxi driver to her friend's Soho apartment, during which his only 20 dollar bill blows out the window. The apartment is the habitat of a classic lower Manhattan art-freak, Kiki, who works tiresomely on obscurely contorted body sculptures and exercises a life of sadomasochism and claustrophobic punk clubs. Paul gradually becomes creeped out by Marcy, tells her off, and later that night discovers her dead body. Following this, he bounces randomly from apartment to diner and back again in search of someone who will either lend him some money to ride the subway - whose prices increased at midnight - or offer him a bed to sleep in. To add to his troubles, the neighborhood's fed-up denizens are forming a clan in response to a spontaneous series of robberies, asserting the frantic Paul as the primary suspect.

Scorsese imbues this harrowing outing with a surreal, fable-like quality and a Kafkaesque sense of perpetually accumulating doom. His vivacious shooting style incorporates subtle, subconscious messages that manage to make the audience feel the same aggravated, discombobulated feelings that Paul has. Continuity will break, such as when the sound and image do not exactly match up during a scene when Paul sneaks into Marcy's pocket book and discovers a cream designed to soothe burns only to quickly slip it back in upon her return, and the camera will exaggeratedly glide towards objects that either propound Paul's terror or provide hope of salvation, on display when a phone rings in an apartment and Paul lunges towards it with rhythm-snapping immediacy. Scorsese also tracks along the seedy Soho streets in a voyeuristic manner behind or beside Paul, sliding across the ground like a snake bushwhacking through the immense amounts of incessant rain and manhole fog.

In a way, the camera embodies the very movement of mischievousness, as if it's involved in an endlessly hostile practical joke played on Paul. Each time he leaves Kiki's discomforting apartment to the sound of Howard Shore's haunting, minimalist synthesizer jingle, the camera wheels by the sculptures in a POV shot, looking as if they're pushing him away while warning him of eternal damnation. However, eternal damnation is eventually what he evades by some unlikely stroke of luck in the slick, devilishly clever finale. With this, Scorsese hyperbolizes the ourobouric flow of urban life: one can always make it back to work in the morning only to begin another seemingly menacing day in the city.

Bagdad Cafe (1987) A Film by Percy Adlon

German director Percy Adlon's American debut is a strange effort, a film that has largely been forgotten but remains adored in small alcoves of film culture. That it did indeed wisp away into the kind of nowhere that the film is set in is more of a justification of its uneven retelling of ancient myths, a subject that has been more interestingly explored in countless other arthouse films, than a testament to its flaws. While Bagdad Cafe is almost arrhythmic and awkward as a whole, it does contain some preciously offbeat characters and scenarios. Adlon does not necessarily assemble a situation in direct reference to a particular ancient tale, but rather modernizes the general notion of a hero that arrives supernaturally to bring about change.

He sets his film in the middle of the desert, somewhere vaguely in the American West, and treats it as a place that is in an anxious standstill, desperate for a change. At the Bagdad Cafe, where the frizzy-haired African American owner Brenda (CCH Pounder) scuffles uncomfortably through the premises sneering at her children and husband and the dilettante Italian chef lounges around without any incentive to reverse the broken coffeemaker situation, one can smell the unease. So from the boonies, lead by an illusory pair of lights in the sky, comes a plump, orderly German woman named Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht), fresh off a fight with her husband that left her stranded without a car. She sharply contrasts the disheveled look of both the employees and the regulars, a foreign Goddess in a tightly wound dress (a modern day robe) who brings with her a camouflaged distaste for American sloppiness.

Her arrival immediately sparks suspicion in Brenda and eventually, when Jasmin begins spending time with her children, jealousy. Brenda believes she is in the middle of a cat and mouse game between the two, but Jasmin's intentions are clearly all good. Brenda even prompts the arrival of the sheriff who comes to inspect Jasmin's unusually tidy habits only to find her completely harmless. She acts as a typically stubborn figure for most of the film, but finally upon discovering she may be the only one left with bad vibes towards Jasmin (Jasmin even works up a tender relationship with an ex-Hollywood set painter (Jack Palance), who roams the film as a laughably kind-hearted and nervous cowboy), she rethinks her position. One afternoon, she snaps at Jasmin while she's playing with her kids and immediately, feeling guilty of evil, returns through her motel room door and apologizes. This relationship reversal comes too abruptly, and what follows - a gradual give and take of lifestyles until an equilibrium is reached - feels rushed and unrealistic. Jasmin loosens up her clothing and Brenda allows her son to play on the piano during work hours, an activity that had previously ticked her off greatly. The Bagdad Cafe, previously a haven for sweaty drifters, turns into an entertainment escape, with Jasmin's magic tricks as the main act.

Bagdad Cafe's strengths are ironically sometimes also the source of its weaknesses; Adlon's wickedly wry humor rides a thin line between amateurishness and intended drollery. Frequently it is an uncertainty whether one is supposed to laugh or take something seriously. Adlon also seems to get a kick out of graceless edits, so that when he is establishing a visual gag, he'll cut away clumsily to a brief shot of a truck passing in the street, silence the music, and then return as if nothing happened. Much of the film is reminiscent of 2004's Napoleon Dynamite however, both in its similar setting and its modern breed of "awkward" black comedy, so the balance between humor and disguised poignancy is understandable. While Bagdad Cafe is indeed forgettable, it stands as a unique departure from most decidedly small filmmaking projects, and is sometimes enjoyable just for its clumsiness.

It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988) A Film by Richard Linklater

A twentysomething ditches a semester in college to look for something to do, taking train and car rides across the West while meeting friends and family along the way. Sometimes he spends his time in a worthwhile way (hiking to see a glacier in Montana), but for the most part his activities are meandering (sleeping on a train, watching TV, moseying around empty towns, driving and fiddling with FM radio). This is the extent of what happens in Richard Linklater's debut, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (I'll call it It's Impossible from here on out for obvious reasons), and now that I look at in writing, it sounds more eventful than it really is.

Linklater's early work is marked by its meditative attention to the humdrum, its careful observation of Generation X, and its general flavor of early 90's nostalgia (high-rise acid wash jeans, retro Nike's, tall striped socks, sleeveless shirts). It's Impossible was handled entirely by Linklater on Super-8 film, including the casting of himself as the primary drifter. He describes the project as a visual experiment and a diaristic study on the boredom of everyday life, the transience of emotions, and the mindset of travel. Here's where it gets tricky; to be sure, creating a film that evokes the "boredom of everyday life" can perhaps be the laziest way to make an "experimental film". Indeed, it could just take planting the camera lackadaisically and observing the most mundane events life can offer, most of which are, quite frankly, on display in It's Impossible. It's tough to decide at face value whether the film is the work of a pretentious hack or of a modest, zen-like observer. It could be a bit of both, but thankfully, keeping in mind the similarly attentive, undeniably tremendous work that followed from Linklater, I choose the latter.

The film unfolds entirely in long, static takes, a style he maintained with his next feature, Slacker, with the exception of the lack of camera movement. Slacker glides ceaselessly with its characters, whereas It's Impossible sits like a dead duck, reminding us bluntly of the directionless state of the inhabitants (the camera rarely breaks the barrier of ten feet from its subjects). It is a vacuous film about sad and lonely people who hide their disconnectedness with cordiality and useless, time-passing behaviors. Linklater's screen persona has no dignified purpose for his travel; rather, he is surveying the suburbs and countrysides in an attempt to discover something that will substantiate his transitory nature and lift him from his alienation. In a train lobby at one point, he brushes against connection, sitting silently beside another seemingly listless young woman and eventually drawing a picture (or is he writing a note?) for her while she sleeps. One can sense the desperate need for the protagonist to release his inner feelings, but he remains locked in the dreamy, drifting state that is most keenly evoked by the shots of him transitioning from one train cabin to the next, bumping around precariously while the camera remains static.

There's no doubting that Linklater achieved his goal - the film feels like you've entered another person's dull life and are seized by the lack of accomplishment during every fleeting moment - but the question is whether or not the film is good cinema. Technically, It's Impossible is ragged, with poor sound quality and relentless grain (although, this is something I see as raw beauty). However, the film utilizes the two most essential ingredients of cinema (image and sound) with clarity and purpose, so the entertainment value is on a whole different level. It's Impossible is at least a comfortable preamble to Linklater's later work, and the distinct mood it builds assures it's a success given its humble ambitions.

Antonio Gaudí (1984) A Film by Hiroshi Teshigahara

In the late 1950's, Hiroshi Teshigahara took his first trip away from his Japanese homeland with his father Sofu, visiting Europe and the United States. In Spain, he witnessed the architecture of Antonio Gaudí and was awestruck. Twenty-five years later he revisited the sites of Gaudí's work, substantially updated his footage, and completed one of his finest late career documentaries, Antonio Gaudí. The film is a rousing, predominantly visual smorgasbord of Gaudí's breathtaking structures, married mellifluously to long-time collaborator Tôru Takemitsu's ambient score which alternates between peaceful organ music and eerie chugs and whistles. It's a wonderful opportunity to see one great artist paying tribute to another, the late Catalan architect from the same region of Spain as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso.

Teshigahara treats his camera as a newcomer, first scanning the community and capturing the spirit of the Barcelona streets, then closing in on Gaudí's several accomplishments. He takes us from a bizarre apartment complex to a magisterial building to a bustling outdoor park and eventually to the Templo de La Sagrada Familia, a towering church Gaudí was unable to finish before his death. The work completed by Gaudí in his lifetime is truly astounding; each organically curvaceous wall contains microscopic detail, whether shards of colored ceramics or sculpted symbols. His designs are primarily naturalistic, incorporating numerous motifs of the Earth such as seashells or trees. At the same time, his architecture touches upon Medieval, Victorian, and Modern elements simultaneously.

Teshigahara lovingly embraces every inch of it in dazzling color cinematography, recording through close-ups, obtuse angles, and a mobile camera the fantastical interiors and exteriors. Eventually, the film achieves a wonderful rhythm, until a momentary narration intrudes towards the end for a minute or two. It doesn't seem necessary given that the architecture speaks for itself, and the narrated information is rather dull - nothing that one couldn't have known from scanning the back cover of the Criterion DVD. Nonetheless, Antonio Gaudí is the ultimate tourist video, a gorgeous combination of sights and sounds that will have one checking the rates for a vacation to Spain.

And the Ship Sails On (E la nave va) A Film by Federico Fellini (1984)

Many have said Federico Fellini approached lunacy in the latter half of his career, but these have often been self-defensive critical stabs that result from Fellini's journey into more unconscionably personal works. The elements that peppered the films he received acclaim for (8 1/2, La Strada, La Dolce Vita) do not differ greatly from those present in his more festive late films; rather, they are exemplified - frequently overblown, but always striking. In a way, 1984's And the Ship Sails On feels like a nutty cross between 8 1/2's high culture and Amarcord's fantastic incoherence.

The film is set in 1914 on the brink of World War I - which becomes evident in its finale - on a cruise ship titled Gloria N. On board there is an eclectic horde of Italy's intelligentsia: wealthy aristocrats, musicians known for their abnormally high or low registers rather than their genuine musical merit, painters, political thinkers, hopeless romantics, and even a stenchy rhinoceros. They are headed to the island of Edmea Tetua's birth (a sublime opera singer whose death has left the artistic world in mourning), where they will scatter her ashes according to her wishes. A frizzy-haired journalist, who resembles both palpably and thematically the tour guide in Sokurov's Russian Ark, introduces himself to the camera as an outsider on a mission to document the monumental funeral. When he breaks the third wall in a number of silly scenes, Fellini is suggesting him as the viewer, equally new to the unusual circumstances.

The initial half of the film is rife with lightweight, quietly affecting moments that play like a satire on snobby, highbrow culture. The camera stops by several of the ship's peculiarly lavish interiors to capture scenes that range from delightfully surreal to softly touching. Some highlights include a symphony of silverware in the kitchen, an tacit battle of singing voices in the depths of the ship between a multitude of aristocrats, a basso stoning a chicken to sleep with his bellow, and a stroll on the deck at dusk to a gentle piano accompaniment. This somewhat inchoate rhythm is hindered by the arrival of a group of Serbian refugees, rescued from a shipwreck by Gloria N's captain. Many of the passengers are wrongfully discomforted by the refugees, thinking of them as possible threats, so they are ordered to stay behind an expanse of rope. What results is the eventual acceptance of the Serbs, translated vivaciously into a mutual celebration on the ship deck beside a glistening cellophane sea in one of Fellini's trademark motifs (the setting aside of woes for the genuine excitement of hoopla).

The film also invites political significance into its repertoire with the coming of the Serbs. Eventually an Austro-Hungarian battleship is spotted making threatening requests to the Gloria N to hand over their refugees. Deliberately stagy spectacle begins to overwhelm the carefree charm of the first half of the film. It's an opportunity for Fellini to showcase his creative bravura but it feels slightly uncharacteristic in relation to the rest of the film. There is an even more overt acknowledgment of the artifice towards the end when the camera reveals the vast film set and its busy crew; it feels gratuitous when given the number of times this ground is covered less directly. There are a multitude of moments in And the Ship Sails On however, especially when Fellini's sympathies lie with his jaded central bunch, that feel like a very fond farewell to Edmea Tetua, a symbol of shimmering humanity and perhaps even of fine art itself; interestingly, the film may have been Fellini's final work of art.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) A Film by Peter Greenaway

One can't help but wonder what makes people come back to Le Hollandais gourmet restaurant. The answer can perhaps be lent to the overall fantasy quality of The Cook, Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and certainly not to the malicious tendencies of its owner. Michael Gambon plays one of the most relentlessly vile antagonists in screen history with his portrayal of Albert, the thief. One of the inherent questions in the film is: can a person who seemingly has no love to give, genuinely love? Director Peter Greenaway explores this question and a few others in his provocative theatrical imagining of the scummy tidings of a gourmet restaurant.

When the thief's wife becomes fed up with the way he treats her, she begins a relationship with one of the regulars of the restaurant, an act which is at first out of lust but transforms into deep passion. Her lover, as described by the film's title, is named Michael. He sits alone at his table with his nose in books while enjoying the splendid tastes of the eatery. Albert simultaneously parses him into the characteristic of a Jewish book freak, ("This is not a library, this is a restaurant!"). He is an intelligent, forward-thinking man, a stark contrast to Albert, who is immature, outrageous, and violent. Albert's wife Georgie, played by Helen Mirren, inevitably partakes in mischievous sex with Michael. The act arouses suspicion from many of the denizens of the kitchen and imminently so; they do it right in the general proximity of others. Such audacity deserves attention on the part of Greenaway. He demonstrates continually the limits of what he can bring to this fable: sexual blasphemy and snide social commentary, and its all the more fun because of it.

The vision of the film is as impressively focused as anything by Wes Anderson, and its staging and photography are as fascinatingly deliberate and spacious as any of the later films of Stanley Kubrick. The settings are established extremely well in the film-the camera stays with its recognizable distances and angles, respecting the audience's positioning. Each room is distinct, a feature that harbors accolades for the art director. The bathroom, with its white walls and sleek design, has Kubrickian symmetry to it. The kitchen (where an angelic dishwasher boy sings piercing opera), with its pistachio tones and spewing steam, looks like the underbelly of some industrial uprising. The rooms even own there own musical pieces! Kudos to the score by the way, which is fantastic. The point is, there is something aesthetically glorious for every movie fan to latch on to. If an interest can be established there, then indeed the plot will offer great excitement too. It's extraordinarily stimulating while also being idiosyncratic. Greenaway's a real talent.

Landscape in the Mist (Topio Stin Omichli) A Film by Theodoros Angelopoulos (1988)

If there's ever a Greek director worth looking into, it's Theo Angelopoulos. Upon my first viewing of his 1988 film Landscape in the Mist, I was thoroughly mesmerized. It's a shame that he seems under-seen and under-appreciated, outside of some dedicated niches of film critics. Perhaps Ulysses Gaze is his most well-known piece, but there's no denying that Landscape in the Mist is a shattering masterpiece. Michalis Zeke and Tania Palaiologou, who carry the film with leaps and bounds, portray two young children traversing a war-torn Greek landscape in search of an indistinct father figure. Their main goal, which as the film progresses becomes shrouded in (as the title suggests) mist, is to find the father whom their mother told them about but they've never seen. When they do escape from their home by catching a train early on in the film, they inevitably begin a downward slope towards disillusionment.

What keeps them going is faith, although it is not clear in the viewer's mind what they're really searching for, and judging by Voula's (Palaiologou's character) requests to the people who drive her and her young brother Alexandros, "far away" means they don't know either. A lack of a proper parental figure for these two children results in the heavy handedness of life that they are propelled into. Hitchhiking on the side of a soaked and windy highway, it is evident that these two vagabonds have been forced into adulthood far too quickly. Like the donkey in Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, Voula and Alexandros are witness to the cruelties of man. In two of the most harrowing scenes of the film, the two must encounter a horse being dragged across the snowy ground of a market square and a greedy malicious truck driver. There is no doubt in my mind that Palaiologou and Zeke handled these performances with incredible professionalism, something that's unheard of at their ages.

The film holds certain parallels to a Fellini film, specifically La Strada, in its continuous use of travel and underbelly accordion and violin performers amidst chaotic times. However, it's stylization is not far off from a Tarkovsky or Tarr film. Georgia Brown of The Village Voice noted that the film had "some of the most exquisite compositions you'll ever see..." - I wouldn't disagree. The imagery ranges from majestically beautiful to powerfully absurd, and the long, expertly choreographed takes are breathtaking. You can never tear your eyes away from the magic that is on the screen. An intriguing aspect of this film is its frequent exposes of heartbreak or turmoil and casual or celebratory moments. During the two scenes I already cited as being heartbreaking, the camera slowly moves upward to reveal events in the near background that seem oblivious to the terrors of the story. As Angelopoulos sees it, this is the inevitable sadness of life. People will play out their own hopes and dreams at the expense or disinterest of others. In Voula and Alexandros' case, they may still being playing out their hopes and dreams, even if the ending of the film perhaps suggests otherwise. With this, Angelopoulos shows he is interested in what is not seen on screen, or what's in the mist. Landscape in the Mist is a staggering work of art.