A Film Canon

A sustained attempt to evoke the moment at which an embyronic face becomes a foetal face, The Virgin Spring translates Bergman's abstracted, supernatural topographies into a more specifically metamorphic register, and condenses his preoccupation with Christianity to the doctrine of transubstantiation, producing the continuum between human, animal and vegetable that sets the narrative in motion, and is consummated in its final miracle. To this end, screenwriter Ulla Isaksson significantly enhances the medieval Swedish ballad on which the film is based, replacing its three young virgins with a virgin (Birgitta Pettersson) and whore (Gunnel Lindblom), and prefacing the journey to church, which results in the rape and murder of the latter and disgrace of the former, and subsequent revenge of their parents (Max von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg), with a lengthy grace, meal of bread and wine, and discussion of food. Collapsing digestion and gestation, excretion and delivery, and, finally, whoredom and eating, this effectively reconfigures the virgin's largely ceremonial visit to church as the expiatory gesture proportionate to the consumption of a simple family meal; or, rather, finds the perverse conclusion of carrying a piece of Christ in one's belly in the implication that eating should only occur on consecrated ground, as the virgin's attempt to bring the bread in her stomach to church is not merely forestalled by her assailants, but stolen and returned to her home, where they add to it before inadvertently revealing their true identity. Yet any reproachful divinity is offset by the miraculous, 'virgin' spring that emerges on the site of the rape and murder, suggesting that Bergman's ultimate aim is to envisage immaculate conception as a kind of inconceivable, sublime threshold, continuous with the lurid, multicoloured phantasmagoria that preoccupy all the characters, and that Sven Nykvist's stark cinematography poetically fails to capture.

This elegant docudrama presents prison escape as the logical conclusion of the need for work, and the sense of collectivity and solidarity that it brings, eliding the genre's more conventional focus on a gradually collaborative homosociality with a collective that is already fully-formed when protagonist Michel (Geo Cassine, one of a handful of mostly non-professional actors) is relocated into its cell - a collectivity that is defined by eating and excreting together, clarifying both the prison's periodic inspection of food for weapons, and the opening hunger strike, as somewhat misguided. To this end, Becker provides an idiosyncratic equation of the prison itself with a cloyingly maternal state, completely continuous with the female entanglements responsible for most of the prisoners being housed there, and more comparable to a hospital, or even hotel, replete with doctors, hairdressers, and officials who are (apparently) prepared to go out of their way to help their charges. As a result, the fact that the prisoners effectively eat their way of this luxurious confinement ("here we do nothing but eat"), by way of a series of luxury items brought in from outside, signals a certain paradox at the core of Becker's vision, or perhaps just the intensity of his socialist-utopian vision, which envisages a world in which shared labour can produce foie gras, honey, strawberry jam, and chestnut spread for all. Similarly, Becker's preoccupations tend to subsume the genre's more conventional preoccupation with logistical ingenuity into extended depictions of hard physical labour, or at least ensure that whatever moments of ingenuity remain are imbued with a particularly corporeal collaboration - a man standing on another's shoulders, edging round a pole to avoid detection by a night watchman - as if to explicate the socialism inherent in Bresson's obsession with the hands, and their continuity with the tools reappropriated from the prison storeroom. The first space encountered by the prisoners' tunnel, this provides them with the equipment needed to elaborate the substructural topography that constitutes the centrepiece of the film, and largest respite from Becker's otherwise quite straightforward, unadorned direction - a series of engulfing darknesses that ultimately require the men to expand their strategy from two (the flattened boxes they receive from the prison guards) to three (the extended shafts they are supposed to construct from them) and eventually four dimensions, as their construction of a crude hourglass completes their re-embodiment.

Black Sunday fuses Universal theatrics with Lewton atmospherics, presenting vampirism as a thirst for sight, and vampiric violation as a gradual leeching of visual modularity from the mise-en-scene which, in turn, is increasingly identified with the demon's mask responsible for channelling witchcraft into the more specifically vampiric register that sets the narrative in motion. This produces a gradual disruption of any notion of mise-en-scene, as the central visual co-ordinates - fireplace, tapestry, painting, curtains - are gradually reduced to so many conduits for the ravenous gaze of the vampire (Barbara Steele) and her converts, leaving their victims with literally nowhere to look, or at least with little more than a collection of still, one-dimensional images to fall through. This wry reinvention of theatrical horror may explain Bava's striking reinvention of mentor Tourneur's trademark vision of inky, claustrophobic passage as a series of exquisite pans and tracks towards total darkness; or, rather, towards the moment between frames, tentatively identified as the most tangible trace of the vampires' destructive sight-lines, which defy any more direct apprehension. As a result, Bava's most innovative moments ultimately cluster around cuts - especially as the film progresses, and they effectively contain the import of previous tracks and pans - most beautifully in the transition from the vampire's re-emerging eyeballs to a short pan out of the mouth of a tuba, these sight-lines tending to be equated with an extra-sensory rumble best figured in terms of a barely tangible-audible sound-vibration. Ultimately, it is these sight-lines, and the crumbling, heavily made-up faces of the vampires themselves, that take on the architectural burden of the mise-en-scene, conceiving each new victim as a living gargoyle, and sculpting the gaze to a similarly hyperbolic extent as Fisher's Dracula, while drawing a more nuanced comparison with cinematic spectatorship, and the phenomenology of 'inhabiting' a succession of still images.

This extraordinary film collapses aesthetic, feminine and sexual pleasure into the provision of a surrogate body, ostensibly to provide a surface for the bourgeois need for 'rest' that opens the narrative, but actually to take on the burden of 'rest' itself; that is, to provide a rest from rest, replacing relaxation with self-annihilation, and opening up a world without surfaces, or in which everything has become a surface. To this end, Antonioni draws a common denominator between the various beds occupied by the protagonist, and the volcanic island where she disappears, condensing the latter to a mere, vaporous concatenation of sea, land and sky - a vertigo of frozen waves and molten water - and the former to the most exquisite instance of the film's attempt to reformulate the experience of submergence in the absence of a surface. Just as this combines an exquisite topographical sensibility with complete spatial indeterminacy, so Antonioni's extension of this burden of 'rest' to cinematic pleasure imbues time with the camera's own tendency to simultaneously objectify and subjectify, most iconically in his tendency to linger before and after scenes seem to have exhausted their narrative purpose, but most beautifully in his condensation of the general theory of relativity, and its most famous thought-experiment, into an attempt to shoot the same passage of time from a train and platform; a process that opens up the film's most striking curvature of space-time, in which the central bourgeois couple float between working-class action and pure cinematic spectacle, queasily enduring the slick of pure affect that culminates Rossellini's purgatorial, post-neorealist vision of the Italian sea and volcanic coastline, if only by reducing its Christian Humanist overtones to the slightest, barely hopeful fusion of church bells and radio waves, or whatever they might leave in their current, or wake: "I don't know why, but I hate all comparisons involving oil."

A radical departure from the sword-and-sandal blueprint pioneered by DeMille, Ben-Hur is indebted to Wyler's elaboration of the chamber drama as a cinematic genre, and subsequent ability to reclaim naturalism from the most potentially theatrical tableaux. Not only does this produce an unusually intimate epic, preoccupied with interiority and conversation, but it effectively structures the narrative around the attempt to escape a series of claustrophobic chambers - the dungeons, the galleys, the Valley of Lepers - culminating with the revenge ethic of the old dispensation and, finally, the constrictions and pathologies of the pre-Christian body itself. Concomitantly, Wyler generates tension through a series of uneasy identifications - between master and servant, friend and lover, imperialism and totalitarianism - that recall the semi-incestual proximities of his earlier films, and culminate with the syncretism of Jew and Roman, whose violent, expansive consequences requires one of the most distorted aspect ratios in classical Hollywood for proper expression. That said, this conservation of spectacle ensures that, when the latter occurs, it rivals the great silent epics in its visceral power - most iconically in the charioteering sequence which, in little more than fifteen minutes, stretches the screen to a curvaceous, almost three-dimensional immersion, in a similar manner to Around The World In Eighty Days; or, alternatively, draws upon Wyler's deep-focus heritage to envision a depth proportionate to widescreen. However, even this hyperbolic visuality is nuanced by the pervasive suggestion of a sublimity too great for a direct gaze - generally, in the life of Christ that frames the narrative, and gospel iconography that suffuses Judah Ben-Hur's (Charlton Heston) ancillary trajectory; specifically, in the identification of Christ's face with those of the lepers, and the resultant dialectic between horror and wonder, which culminates with one of the most grateful depictions of the crucifixion in all cinema, as well as explaining the peculiar attention given to Balthasar, and dependence upon Lukes gospel.

In his most pessimistic film to date, Ozu replaces the waning paternal authority of Equinox Flower with the television, and draws upon the visceral intensity of Tokyo Twilight to evoke the incursion of American capitalism that it represents. In the process, his marriage narrative is entirely infantilised and commodified, as two young boys go on a hunger and silence strike until their parents unite them with a set. Ironically, this silence brings them closer to the meditative sublimity of Ozu's earlier protagonists, thereby clarifying the extent to which conversational etiquette has been co-opted by business and advertising, reconfiguring his trademark 180-degree conversation around the increasingly omniscient screen, and replacing sublime deindividuation with voyeuristic anonymity: "For children, our greetings may seem like a waste of time." "I do it all the time to sell cars. I have to." "Yes, it acts as a lubricant in this world." Not only does this break down the distinctions between workplace and home, transplanting the banality of the former onto the latter and precluding any need to depict it literally, but it removes male autonomy to the transient spaces between the two - a bar, the railway station, the circuit of a travelling salesman - as well as transforming home itself into plastic, multicoloured American suburbia, with the burden of excretion placed squarely upon the two boys, and the flatulence that they substitute for, or identify with, consumption. The result is Ozu's most delicate interrogation of his own implication in the very modernity he is criticising, and motivation for the proportionately heightened self-discipline that will inform Floating Weeds and his last works.

If Night And Fog dealt with an historical event that eluded cinematic remembrance, Hiroshima, Mon Amour deals with an event that totally defies it. As a result, the slight, impressionistic narrative - a woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and man (Eiji Okada) have a brief, melancholy affair in post-war Hiroshima - feels like a mere extrapolation of, or allegory for, the documentary that Resnais failed to make. This occupies roughly the first third of the film, evoking Hiroshima as a zone where time no longer exists, memory is impossible, and representation has been exhausted and eviscerated by an unending present, in place of which Resnais proposes a ritualistic formalism, devoid of any claim to linearity, narrativity or temporality, and suggests cinema as its most appropriate vehicle, if only because it has the most mnemonic qualifications to jettison. Not only does this equate responding to Hiroshima with escaping classical cinema - the woman flees the film about Hiroshima she is working on, only to end up with the man in a replica of Harry's Bar - but it translates Night And Fog's staccato disjunctions into a relationship in which every utterance partakes of the disorienting obliterations of post-orgasmic conversation; or, alternatively, in which neither party can remember the other in their presence, let alone in the midst of consummation ("Your eyes are green, aren't they?"). This is enhanced by Marguerite Duras' hypnotic, repetitive and, above all, concrete script, as well as the woman's eventual identification of the affair with 'Nevers'; the fluid, shimmering, spectatorial cinemascape that first betrayed her belief in the coherence of time, to release her moments before the first bomb dropped.

With Road To Eternity, Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy turns from the political to the libidinal economy of war, as Kaji's (Tatsuya Nakadai) movement from labor supervisor to soldier produces a comprehensive denunciation of the Japanese military ethos ("Our real enemy...is the army"), and a delineation of it's peculiar delay and intensification of pleasure. Not only is the prostitution of No Greater Love subsumed into the barracks, which sings whoring songs to relax, and punishes 'cowards' by making them play the role of streetwalkers, but the narrative opens with the drastic consequences of a cigarette enjoyed outside army supervision - the first in a wave of violent slaps that come to form the most basic unit of military pleasure, enrhythmning the narrative, and gradually seguing into perverse, semi-sexual tortures as the shame of imminent defeat escalates. As a result, Kaji's most threatening, heterodox act is the evening that he spends alone with his wife (Michiyo Aratama), who comes to visit him at barracks, their sequestration in a storeroom completely disassociating love from domestic economy, and opening up the liberating romanticism glimpsed in the earlier film. Concomitantly, that film's lunar wastes are replaced by a more viscous widescreen landscape, as the Manchurian border, and the political possibilities that it represents, constantly coalesces and dissipates around the protagonists, seething into their rage, and precluding any conventional, geographical front.

This astonishing film attempts nothing less than a political economy of war, curving the Sino-Japanese theatre around the production of a single commodity, and collapsing soldier and citizen into labourer-prostitute, thereby presenting labour itself as a military front; a site of opposition, exploitation and violent national self-interest. In place of the documentary Marxism that this might be expected to generate, Kobayashi substitutes an eccentric combination of discursive melodrama and technological sublimity, fusing an emotive, rhetorical, exhortative script with a widescreen vision of Japan as a landscape of powdered, pulverised human bodies, just as capable of being reorganised into the replica of Rodin's Kiss that opens the narrative, as into the lunar masses that form it's most pervasive backdrop. Not only does this disparity encapsulate labour supervisor Kaji's (Tatsuya Nakadai) agonising struggle between theory and practice, but it provides for the most abject, visceral elaboration of the crowd in cinema to date ("you'll be rationing food, disposing of excrement from ten thousand men, handling menstrual cases..."), as well as clarifying that the most effective way to continue this abjection is by transforming it into it's own self-generating source of erotic frisson ("The way to make caged men work is to satisfy seventy percent of their bodily lust"), epitomised by the extraordinary, misty, romantic encounter between a horde of prostitutes and an electrified fence. As a result, the preoccupation with reclaiming individual action and autonomy - or, rather, of escaping the omniscient, competing imperatives of profit, which suggests a far more compelling dialectic than that between 'humanism' and 'brutality' - ultimately coincides with the regeneration of the crowd as a conscious, cognitive entity, and the recognition that 'escape' is both a structural condition and fantastic limit of exploitation, as much as a definable, concrete act.

The Bridge draws a common denominator between late war and adolescent sensibilities, elaborating a depleted German village in which paternity has been relegated to a purely symbolic significance ("What do you believe in?" "Everything Father told me"); or, alternatively, has been entirely subsumed into the Fatherland, and it's perverse surrogates, dwindling to the murky origin of letters, enlistment papers, and the abrasive bursts of sound that periodically disorient the mise-en-scene. As a result, the affective kernel of the film turns on maternal estrangement, locating the adolescent between mother and lover, and effeminising the indiscriminate romantic observation-networks that unite a group of schoolboys, and distract them from their language lessons. The result is a poignant characterisation of their subsequent military service as the attempt to reclaim and solidify signification, as the eponymous bridge around which the action revolves moves from a free-floating, umbilical signifier, to a ghostly reiteration of their imaginary childhood world and, eventually, an instance of the traumatic, abject reality of war, all of which clarifies the unknowability of the Fatherland's demand, and the only conceivable response as psychosis.

Suddenly, Last Summer generalises Cat On A Hot Tin Roof's paedophobia to a vision of life bounded by the "hot, ravenous mouths" of childbirth and death, both controlled by a cruel, perverse, libidinal Father, and only (temporarily) repressible through a supreme act of aesthetic detachment; that is, the homosexuality that results in protagonist Sebastian Venable's death, and matriarch Violet Venable's (Katherine Hepburn) subsequent institutionalisation of niece, cousin and only witness Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), at the hands of Dr. Cucrowicz (Montgomery Clift). This defensive aestheticism may explain the hyperbolic staginess of the adaptation, whose extreme insularity - the conclusion is little more than an extended exposition, while every statement exudes the epigrammatic ambition of Sebastian's poetic 'gestations' - segues into exactly the abject, amniotic constriction it seeks to preclude, while Violet's attempts to contain and lobotomise Simon's ghost simply clarifies the extent to which that ghost resulted from such a failed lobotomy, producing a more nuanced objection to emergent "psychosurgery" than the characters' endless discursions and observations. The result is Williams' most eloquent failure to contain trauma within theatrical language; or, inversely, the most direct - if not the most nuanced - connection between his inevitable return of the repressed and cinematic language; an uneasy disparity between the awareness and representation of transgression.

With Ride Lonesome, the formalistic tendencies of the Ranown cycle reach their logical conclusion, producing a stark, minimal aesthetic that is one-dimensional at it's weakest, and iconographic at it's strongest. As with earlier instalments, the narrative turns on an unlikely concatenation of types - a bounty hunter (Randolph Scott), his bounty (Billy John), his nemesis (Pernell Roberts) two gunslingers (James Coburn and Lee van Cleef) and a widow (Karen Steele) - gradually thrown together over the course of a journey - or, rather, whose gradual integration and conciliation with each other produces a journey - but with an unprecedented elision of interiority or introspection, as if simply elaborating the terms and processes in a mathematical equation. As a result, the strongest moments are highly imagistic, with iconography merely being the most marked instance of Boetticher's tendency to overwhelm these figures with Cinemascope's vast assaults upon the eye, as the narrative alternates between sieged constriction (and the ancillary preoccupation with imprisonment and amnesty) and seemingly interminable expanses of space, suffused with the alienating, objectifying gaze of the omnipresent Indians, until the final spectacle of the crucifix-like 'hanging-tree' exudes a holiness that almost defies a direct gaze: "It's been plain...so plain I couldn't see it." The result is something like how Bergman might have directed a Western, perhaps explaining the clumsy speechiness of the (admittedly spare) dialogue, which tends to be overdubbed, or disembodied during the inkier night interludes.

This astonishing film attempts to recoup the blow to homosocial integrity leveled by High Noon, identifying the idiosyncratic family that metonymises around Sheriff John P. Chance's (John Wayne) efforts to hold a notorious criminal prisoner in a unmanned border town, with that full spectrum between pathos and bathos that remains Hawks' most distinctive signature as a director of Westerns. While this tends to preclude the sublimity of Ford's countervailing vision, it compensates by it's amenability to comic relief and sympathetic expansion, with the result that the film never feels like a chamber western, despite being almost exclusively set inside or at night. This is enhanced by the near-absence of close-ups, as well as a tactical attention to the music of silence, culminating with the melancholy, Mexican "cut-throat song" that opens up "time for a cowboy to dream", ushering in a conclusion in which the villains are strangely elided, and almost incidental, the final showdown reduced to the standoff between a house and the posse's own sympathetic architecture. The result is a collapse of age, gender and race into an eccentric, heterogeneous communion that ultimately feels as heterodox, in its own way, as High Noon; Hawks' most democratic achievement, Wayne's most tender performance, and the charismatic panorama of Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson,  Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson.

Opening with bewildering streams of commuters, North By Northwest takes place almost exclusively in transitory public spaces, reconfiguring industrial co-ordinates around a series of nascent, post-industrial voids, and individual service around the radically disorienting demands of the Cold War, both of which are extrapolated from the sublime, towering perspectives of the United Nations building, and encapsulated in Hitchcock's first 'wrong man' narrative in which the 'right man' doesn't actually exist, merely reifying the increasing delimitations placed upon privacy, individualism and personal expression. The latter provokes an extraordinary resurgence of Cary Grant's screwball persona, as well as an application of the fundamental screwball conversation - in which the distinctions between speaking 'at' and 'to' are broken down, and every utterance aimed at a real or hypothetical third party - to the more sinister concerns of the psychological and political thriller, evoking a world in which cross-purposes have become constitutively necessary for public discourse, concealing the exploitative demands made upon its inhabitants. As a result, tropes of theatricality and artifice are both omnipresent and completely naturalised, while Roger Thornhill's (Grant) fantastic romance with Eve Kendell (Eve Marie-Saint) is effectively an extended performance, in which both reject their cutting-edge professions (advertising executive and CIA spy) for more antiquated, orienting, concrete identities (electronics manufacturer and industrial designer), proposing a locomotive, modernist curve away from the omniscient, surveilling grid-eye of air travel; that is, a reclamation of cinema in the face of some emergent, if not fully conceivable, entertainment and propaganda technology.

If 12 Angry Men insists upon the jury as subjects, then Anatomy Of A Murder insists upon them as objects, or at least spectators, translating Capra's democratic conversation-space into an observation-space, from which a "direct, simple action" and an "irresistible impulse" have to be reclaimed and contained. To this end, Preminger presents the courtroom as a spectral, echoed version of the events that it describes, resulting in an unprecedented elaboration - and eroticisation - of the relationship between attorneys, witnesses and suspects, as well as a diffusion of charisma into the most mundane, pedantic or ancillary elements of the procedural itself, conveniently bolstered by a "quaint liberalist" small-town backdrop. It also produces an unusual deflection of the parameters of the case, from the question of whether Frederic Manion (Ben Gazzara) killed Barney Quill in a state of temporary insanity, to whether Quill raped his wife (Lee Remick), as if Lee Biegler's (James Stewart) defence were required, by convention, to include a romantic or sexual angle, or at least to justify Manion's actions as those of a particular kind of spectator. In the process, Preminger identifies the 'twist' as compensating for a "dissociative reaction" increasingly endemic to cinema itself; an attempt to recover the slackening power of narrative, or at least imbue its increasing formalism with the visceral imperatives of Duke Ellington's score.

Beneath its exotic, even racist surface, Black Orpheus provides a compelling account of the structural necessity of Carnaval in Brazilian society, and carnivalesque in post-colonial societies: "The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnaval". Most generally, Camus presents the event as a mode of transportation, facilitating and guiding movement from one part of the city to another, while ensuring that this fluidity never lapses over into social mobility, insofar as each part of the accompanying bossa nova is identified with a different demographic - the foundational percussion with the working-class favelas, as if to emphasise their role in the samba communities from which the genre arose; the brass accompaniment with the middle-class and aristocratic heritage that populates the inner-city; and the nylon-string guitar - the most critical ingredient - with Orpheus' (Breno Mello) self-consciously fantastic journey between the two, and to the Underworld. The depictions of the latter are the most memorable part of the film, equating it with the inky, bureaucratic limits of the parade - or, more generally, with the parade itself, insofar as it descends from the airy, Olympus-like splendour of the central favela - culminating with an extraordinary elaboration of a Gothic hospital, in which bodies are reclaimed from the crowd, and, finally, the alien, indigenous ceremonies that these bureaucratic spaces are ultimately designed to repress. In fact, Camus' elaborations of the crowd effectively surpass the parade in terms of spectacle, gesturing towards a collectivity - or even Hellenism - that has become somehow unavailable in American and European cinema, and constituting the first systematic analogy between it and the bewildering flux of Technicolor. 

With Pickpocket, Bresson invents a physical language that stands in relation to (nascent) post-industrial space as classical slapstick does to industrial space, expanding the manual literacy that preoccupied A Man Escaped into a system of friendship, romance and, ultimately, political solidarity, and enlivening the hand to the extent that it not merely becomes a substitute for the face, but the purveyor of language and signification, whether in its various, tactical forays across printed surfaces (newspapers, train timetables, a classic study in pickpocketing), or in its production of the diary entries that effectively constitute the script. Narratively, this corresponds to Michel's (Martin LaSalle) recognition that his paranoid need for physical and intellectual privacy can only be achieved by immersing himself in the anonymity of rapidly moving crowds; or, alternatively, his recognition that post-industrial life somehow precludes the physical abstraction represented by his cell-like room (and the jail cell with which it becomes continuous), such that the only opportunity for escape becomes a radical identification with it's spaces and processes - an attempt to deindividuate himself to the point where he eludes reflection in the spirals of glass and mirrors that constitute those spaces, which the camera poetically embodies in a series of extravagant (for Bresson) tracking-shots - until he finally manages to identify himself with the very demographic he is pickpocketing. The result is a distant, catholic socialism, and the most perfect vehicle for Bresson's replacement of actors with "models", insofar as the near-inanimate, luminous physicality of the latter represents another form of this radical identification: "These walls, these bars, I don't care...I don't even see them..."

This magnificent comedy identifies prohibition culture as the genesis of sexual subculture, collapsing the eve of the Great Depression into the dawn of the 1960s, and reducing the intervening period to those cinematic genres - screwball comedy, the gangster film, and even noir - whose syncretic rehearsal paves the way for Wilder's most exquisite mastery of carnivalesque, reducing every object, value and utterance to an incongruous contiguity and immediacy: "Which side's port and which side's starboard?" "That depends on whether you're coming or going". Given the narrative premise - a duo of musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) forced to disguise themselves in a women's band to avoid detection by gangsters, during which they encounter the voluptuous 'Sugar' (Marilyn Monroe, in her most delightfully innocent, credulous incarnation) - this finds most memorable expression as an almost surrealist identification of the sexualised human body with so many musical instruments, in which the points of visual, or ostensible focus, are subordinated to a fetishistic fascination with the integral role that even the most peripheral, or unconventional, organs can have in 'playing' it. The result is a hyperbolic circulation - or alcoholic transfusion, given the repeated references to blood groups - of affect, whose economic corollary is the fantastic circulation of capital around which the narrative revolves (allowing the down-and-out protagonists to co-opt the two most coveted American subject positions - the industrialist and the celebrity), and whose most glorious moment comes with 'Daphne''s (Jack Lemmon) whole-hearted, jouissance-fueled subscription to her disguise, as her whole body experiences the awakening that 'Josephine' (Curtis) fakes to gain Sugar's trust, contorting with unbearable, indescribable pleasure into an enormous pair of maracas.

Despite it's criminal and homosocial overtones, this astonishing film departs from both American and Italian forbears in presenting the emergent adolescent as a disembodied, abstracted gaze, and that disembodiment as a defence mechanism against the abortion of the hierarchical nuclear family, itself condensed into the traumatic bodily conjunctions that it's conventions and traditions regulate, contain and, ultimately, repress. These conventions are poetically connected to the written word, which Truffaut repeatedly devalues as a mode of resistance, whether in the form of young Antoine's (Jean-Pierre Leaud) mantra that "I deface the classroom walls", his shelter in a collapsed printing factory and subsequent theft of a typewriter from his father's office, or his attempt to plagiarise Balzac for a school assignment. That said, the latter simultaneously gestures towards a new mode of resistance, as Antoine's choice of a passage emphasising the sublimity of a "piercing look" places Balzac's realism in a proto-cinematic lineage, and reconfigures plagiarism as cinematic embodiment, producing a fusion of sight and action that lubricates Paris, allowing Antoine to wheel through it as rapidly as the eye - and camera - can track him, and condensing institutionalision into an over-compensatory 'Observation Centre' - as well as the high-angle aesthetic of surveillance that anticipates it - whose impact is nevertheless counter-productive, insofar as the the restriction of Antoine's body simply sharpens his eyesight to the preternatural pitch required for his final escape. This counts as one of the greatest conclusions in all cinema, commencing with a running sequence and tracking-shot sufficiently extended to reconfigure the world around Antoine's immobile gaze, and concluding with the debilitating flipside of this conflation of sight and sound - an image that is sufficiently plastic and autonomous to prevent further physical movement, leaving nothing but an isolated, alienated, frozen gaze, imploring the viewer for a body to assist it.

Centring on a sustained testimony and the composition of a crucial letter, Dostoyevsky's iconic novella makes for an unusual translation into cinematic language, as Visconti uses it both as a convenient transition between his earlier, testimonial neorealism, and the aristocratic, melodramatic formalism of his subsequent works, and, more strikingly, as the pretext for elaborating a nexus between speech and sight - the word 'ciao' traced on a foggy window - that corresponds to the characters' persistent effort to inhabit a nexus between public and private space, insofar as publicity is equated with the panoptic, mobile, camera that opens the narrative, and privacy with the written and verbal exchanges around which its two confidences emerge - between a woman (Maria Schell) and man (Jean Marais) that agree to renew their love in a year's time, and between the same woman and the man (Marcello Mastroianni) that she meets after that period has elapsed, and to whom she confesses all her doubts and fears. To this end, Visconti simultaneously compresses and distends space, suffusing the evocative streetscapes with an inky blackness that flattens everything outside of the lover's faces, and expanding even the most shallow interior spaces (most poetically a series of shop displays), until the most panoramic vantage point is gained by gazing in at the lovers through a foggy window - at least in realistic terms, since the correspondence between this impossible spatial requirement and the anamorphic world of fairy tales is explicated in the final sequence, in which the couple's desire to remain just at the cusp of visibility is satisfied by a windy oscillation between light and darkness that settles, gradually, into an exquisite median of shadow and, finally, a fall of snow that carpets the city with a hush that both brightens and renders it irreducibly private; a child's fantasy of a white night, that ceaseless wandering can have a destination.