A Film Canon

This sublime parody of ergonomic futurism presents a world in which bodies have been tailored to fit objects, rather than vice versa, and thereby become objects themselves, fragmented and atomised into so many compositional ingredients, to be carefully slotted into a mise-en-scene that shines with plastic artificiality; that is, a world which has completely structured itself around an omniscient camera, with the result that this fragmentation remains irreversible, and collectivity doesn't consist in cohering the human body so much as redirecting its various limbs and organs towards other limbs and organs, rather than inanimate or mechanical objects, producing the gentle physical ambience - a buzz of subtle causes and effects - that remains Tati's most enduring aesthetic signature. As a result, a great deal of the humour stems from the disparity between functional and compositional imperatives, as the steel-and-glass efficiency of office, street and school are offset by the circuitousness that validates domestic architecture, as if the population had been streamlined merely to be forced through a series of ridiculous diversions and tributaries, all of which are explicated by Hulot's own wandering gait - most memorably when it bursts a water main, producing a fountain that, several feet over, would have been applauded as the height of taste and culture, but most chillingly in his brief employment at a plastics factory, where the sinister autonomy of this curve of capital manifests itself as a coil of hose that comes to life, and can only be subdued by the children and dogs - especially the eponymous nephew (Alain Becourt) - that act as his surrogates and students.

This beautiful film fuses sight and sound into a single, preternatural act of aristocratic labour; or, alternatively, presents aristocratic decline as a gradual disentanglement and demystification of sight and sound, as deteriorating landlord Huzur Roy (Chabbi Biswas) finds himself physically unable to hear the surrounding landscape - especially the river and its embankments, which form the pretext for both his personal and financial debilitation - and economically unable to sustain the kind of musical spectacle that defined his earlier years. To this end, Ray structures the film around a single, extended musical performance, accompanied by dancer Roshan Kamuri, from which the ceremonial characterisation, intricately choreographed blocking and, above all, the constant, geometric panning is extrapolated, the latter simultaneously tracing sight-lines, delineating musical phrases, and elaborating the parameters of Roy's mansion. The result is an extraordinary, crystalline mise-en-scene, in which every object seems to ripple with the sheer intensity of sensory currents passing across it, and Roy's elegaic tears are transubstantiated straight into glass, whether in the form of his quivering mirror - a wall of sorrow, deeper than any other space in the film - or the chandelier that proffers the music's most immediate, sensitive audience.

The Hidden Fortress translates Seven Samurai's basic preoccupation - the delimitation and transgression of three contested zones - into widescreen, thereby rendering it's centrifugal condensations largely redundant, and expanding the zones from components of a village, to the three regions through which General Rokurota (Toshiro Mifune) and two peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) have to pass, in order to restore disguised Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and her fortune to their rightful throne. By foregrounding the peasants, and their experience of the world as a perpetual low-angle shot, Kurosawa elevates their backdrop to galactic proportions - especially the various fluidities that shape their largely passive trajectory. Encompassing hordes of samurai, masses of slaves, and the river where they first discover the gold, wrapped in bark, these all flow cosmically down from the horizon and, in the process, fuse the horizon with the sky, as if to take the increased remoteness of the widescreen horizon to it's logical conclusion; a waterfall of space. As a result, tension tends to be generated from figures descending from the air, rather than from the more kinetic, polarising action of Seven Samurai, with the result that the audience ultimately finds their most appropriate surrogate in the princess who, forced into muteness to disguise her aristocratic accent and vocabulary, is forced to confront the inherently visceral, debilitating, pursuant power of images themselves. Even the iconic duel - the prototype for Star Wars' jedi fights - occurs as a series of pauses and stases textured by movement, rather than vice versa, while the spectacular Fire Festival rituals provide the vortex that Seven Samurai's frenetic, climactic whirlpools couldn't quite contain or describe.

Equinox Flower retains the sensory and sensual intensity of Tokyo Twilight, but inverts it's pessimistic, noir-inflected darknesses into Ozu's first, riotous use of colour, as well as translating its particular fascination with female viscera from a melodramatic to comic register - most memorably in a medical examination that reduces a character's body to a mere conduit for a series of vividly coloured concoctions, but most pervasively in Ozu's use of wayward daughter Setsuko's (Ineko Arima) defiant lipstick as a colour anchor, from which the most lurid, Westernised - and yet indelibly romantic - depictions of Tokyo in his late work seem to be extrapolated, and which offsets the extended, silent gazes around which his trademark conversations tend to be edited, precluding the sublime, melancholy serenity of the older generation in a similar manner to the earlier film. In fact, Equinox Flower goes even further than Tokyo Twilight in its infantilisation of the parental generation, presenting the most contradictory, confused father in Ozu's career (Shin Saburi), and compounding his nostalgia for submissive children with a nostalgia for effective parents; or, alternatively, transforming the war from the ultimate occasion of nostalgia to the object of it: "Remember...we would rush to the shelters...I reminisce about those times...we were together as a family then." Combined with the added compositional nuances of colour, this may explain the film's particular preoccupation with ceremony - whether in the form of Ozu's (uncharacteristic) decision to not merely display a wedding ceremony, but open with one, or the pervasive structural and fantastic investment in the traditional figure of the 'go-between' and the reconcilation - and differentiation - of generations he fleetingly embodies.

With The Magician, Bergman achieves the first fully-fledged incarnation of the chamber that haunts his subsequent work, as well as his most satisfactory fusion of cinema and sideshow, in the form of the "nerve stimulation and mind animation" that a group of travelling players perform with the aid of "devices, mirrors, projections". At the same time, he exhibits his most concentrated fascination with the moment of death, and most sustained horror at the face's continuity with the rest of the body to date, such that the players' claim to offer a disembodied, otherworldy spectacle - against the claustrophobic embodiment of the scientific determinism insisted upon by their sceptical audience - ultimately becomes a promise to detach the face from the body, or, at least, to chart the passage of death with sufficient precision to identify the moment at which the face is cut off from the body that has withered beneath it: "You wish to record the actual moment. Look carefully, I will keep my face open. Now death has reached my hands...my arms...my feet...belly...I can no longer see." From this perspective, the trick played upon the hosts - the lead player inexplicably 'dying', allowing a full autopsy to be performed on him, and then haunting the doctor from beyond the grave, entrapping him in the mirrored chamber that culminates his performance, and forcing him to accept the supernatural through attacks on his visual literacy, credulity and orientation - is less significant than his own latent desire to be present at his own autopsy; or, alternatively, to designify and detach himself from his own face, as evinced in his renunciation of speech, and his partner's renunciation of gender, prompting one of the audience members to observe that "there's something unusual about conjurors...their faces irritate you...it's special, a face like that..."

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof plays like a weaker version of Baby Doll, largely because Brooks lacks Kazan's peculiar affinity for Williams' plastic realism, with the result that the action, which takes place in three rooms, over a single evening, feels unbearably stagebound, while hysteria is never raised to the hallucinatory, claustrophobic, and perhaps ideally black-and-white pitch that it finds in Kazan's adaptations. This foregrounds everything potentially banal, predictable and pretentious about Williams' trademark elaboration of a trauma to be confronted and closed - a one-dimensionality that is even more grating for omitting the homosexual overtones of the stage version - while ensuring that, with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, each member of the cast feels like a mere repetition of a few stock mannerisms. From this perspective, the most interesting dimension is the continuity drawn between Brick (Paul Newman) and Maggie's (Taylor) sexual dysfunction - most notably their inability, or unwillingness to procreate - and the children that suffuse the household in which the narrative unfolds. Not only do these form the pretext for the most memorable moments of southern grotesque, but they condense and reiterate the infantilism of that household, transforming it into the object of a pervasive, paedophobic - and, in the original, presumably homosexual - gaze that reduces them, with horror, to so much garbage, or excrement; "little no-necked" lumps of flesh, indiscernible from the ice-cream scoops that their most volatile representative insists on hurling at Maggie - an abject presence that Kazan would have presumably more elegantly collapsed into 'Big Daddy's (Burl Ives) haunting experience of 'the most thorough examination of a colon ever given'. 

Despite satirising Japan's transition from monopoly to collective capitalism, this extraordinary film  feels like a prophecy of late capitalism, elaborating a media ecology in which everyday life is on the verge of being systematically and mercilessly commodified, 'stars' are being replaced by 'spectacles' (since "fans look at the star, not at the goods they promote"), and advertising, marketing and 'spin' are becoming refined enough to thrive on catastrophe, subsuming it into the 'buzz' that pervades Masumura's hyperbolic, hyperactive mise-en-scenes. These all glitter with a Technicolor palette extrapolated from the competing graphs of the three caramel companies around which the narrative hangs, are so cluttered with capital that advertisements and commodities are frequently all that deepen the distinction between foreground and background, and, above all, are haunted by visual, verbal and atmospheric Americanisms that relegate any more traditional ethos of business to the remoteness of a bushido code: "You're out of date. Japan is America." The result is a pervasive substitute for - or, perhaps, more unnervingly, an instance of - capitalism's false carnivalesque, culminating with the final showdown in a kamikaze fairground. Similarly, Masumura provides a foundational deflection of the inscrutability and intangibility of the market into science fiction - or, more accurately, the language of science fiction, as the dominant caramel company realises an astronomy expo is the most effective way to engage with consumers; a purely simulcral, spectral contribution to the space-race.

The first installment in Munk's war trilogy, Eroica is divided into two sections - Scherzo Alla Polacca, which describes how a desertee of the Warsaw Uprising's (Edward Dziewonski) mercenary opportunism results in his military decoration, and Ostinato Lugubre, which elaborates the operations of a POW camp set up to detain Polish insurgents. Although the first section tends towards metonymy and picaresque, and the second towards metaphor and social realism, both are suffused with a heterodox absurdism that finds its epitome in the concentration camp inmates' double response to one of their comrades' attempts to escape - firstly, as the best kind of joke, in which "he made fun of the enemy...a glorious entry to the chronicles of our camp"; and secondly, upon his refusal of his reward of cigarettes, and the whole economy of honour that they represent, as a joke that has gone too far, and turned against itself; or, alternatively, as a joke that has been enjoyed too much, and so passed from pleasure to jouissance - an overdetermination that recalls Ashes And Diamonds in its poetic evocation of the sheer ideological chaos suffusing Poland throughout and after the war, as if the struggle between fascism, communism and nationalism were so pervasive as to revive the language of slapstick, with its dual compulsion to translate competing ideological demands into a brutally physical register, and elaborate the nexus between disorientation and oblivion, both encapsulated in the sublime conclusion to the first section, in which the protagonist stumbles with an abject, inviolable fluidity - washing, drinking, urinating - through a explosive, terrifying battle zone.

Even in its restored version, the ingenuity of Touch Of Evil lies primarily in Welles' ability to strike a compromise between his baroque aestheticism and the pedestrian demands of a B-picture. On the one hand, he finds the perfect pretext for his fluid cinematography in the elastic, abstracted, hallucinatory parameters of the US-Mexican borderland, opening with a three and a half minute tracking shot, and following with a variety of extended takes, as well as a lurid, neon jazzscape whose menacing, windy ambience gradually segues out of the diegesis to choreograph the most pivotal, brutal sequence. On the other hand, the stilted talkiness endemic to the B-picture - here enhanced by several unconvincing performances, most notably Charlton Heston's as Mexican policeman Ramon Vargas - is offset by a subsidiary, ambient proliferation of ethnically and sexually ambiguous voices and, more strikingly, used as the pretext for Welles' most radical detachment of body and voice to date, as the 'horseless carriages' of The Magnificent Ambersons morph into the playerless pianola that punctuates the narrative, and the genius of Welles' own delivery, as corrupt US policeman Hank Quinlan, is clarified in terms of his radical, or perhaps merely directorial, alienation from that delivery - an alienation that is only explicated by the astonishing final sequence, in which, trailed and bugged by Vargas, Quinlan hears his voice emerging from the recording device, and speaks back to Vargas - and himself - through it.

The greatest achievement of classical Hollywood, this extraordinary study in "acute melancholia" fuses the spectator and wanderer's shared fascination with the elusive moment at which the present vanishes, only to diffuse it into the vertiginous cusps of the San Francisco cityscape; a series of "portals to the past" that gradually spiral out to encompass familial, local, national, and biological history, all of which possess private detective 'Scotty' (James Stewart), as he investigates 'Madeleine's (Kim Novak) possession by 'Carlotta', an apocryphal historical figure, and distant relative. Where Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much equated looking with watching and surveilling, Vertigo equates it with remembering - most beautifully in the two silent sequences, scored by Bernard Herrmann, in which Scotty first trails Madeleine and her surrogate, Judy - producing a pervasive, hyperbolic nostalgia that lays the foundation for neo-noir, as well as clarifying that genre as a sustained, fetishistic eulogy for Technicolor, and the studio system itself; a mnemosexual manifesto, its object of desire the vanishing, isolated frame.

A Night To Remember departs from the melodramatic flourishes of previous cinematic depictions of the Titanic disaster, approximating a Mass Observation aesthetic in its designation of character individuation as a limit to be infinitesimally approached, as well as its focus on an ambient, collaborative murmur, both within the ship, and between ships, synonymous with the omnipresent morse code receivers, and the 'code of the sea' for which they stand. Yet the class stratification and antagonism inherent in the very structure of the ship tends to undermine this collaboration; or, rather, collapses the two into a dialectic that becomes unavoidable at the very moment of sinking, in which a false calm, serenity, and even sublimity is built upon a volatile, catastrophic substrate. To this end, Baker suffuses the film with an astonishing, poetic alternation between stillness and chaos, translating the looming appearance of the iceberg into a pervasive pan that ensures that, for the first half at least, the main indice of sinking is a gradual tilt and slide of various domestic accoutrements towards the camera, culminating with the extraordinary moment at which the horde of steerage passengers bursts into a silent first-class dining room, to be greeted by a solitary, rolling trolley. Although various half-hearted efforts are made to contain this antagonism - whether religiously, in the form of the prayer and song that accompany the sinking, or ideologically, in the residual insistence that the ship is a well-oiled city, or even an organism - the result retains a latent socialist impulse, as evinced in the final reassurance that "their sacrifice was not in vain...today we have lifeboats for all".

The Defiant Ones establishes Stanley Kramer as the voice of liberal Hollywood, and his aesthetic signature as a slightly disingenuous 'topicality'; an ability to appear ahead of his time while remaining just behind it. As a result, it's difficult to decide whether the film's premise - two escaped convicts, one black (Sidney Poitier), one white (Tony Curtis), chained together and attempting to elude an ever-expanding search party - is visionary or regressive, an explication of the ultimately comforting, symbiotic proximity threatened by desegregation, or a reassurance that the civil rights movement can be satisfied simply by extending the most basic provisions of humanity to African-Americans. In the same way, Poitier's role as Kramer's mouthpiece brings him uncomfortably close to noble savagery, culminating with his final self-sacrifice - which, despite being anticipated by Curtis', is far more iconographic and dehumanising - as if to confirm suspicions of the tribal atavism lurking beneath ostensibly nonviolent protest. Combined with the discursive script, which imbues every utterance with a self-congratulatory, theatrical 'significance', this ensures that the strongest moments tend to be those that are free of dialogue - whether in the form of the extended, silent sequences in which Poitier and Curtis balletically negotiate the parameters enforced by the chain - in both its real and imaginary incarnations - or, most memorably, Kramer's elaboration of the carnivalesque search party, whose jazzy, Afro-Cuban score (the only music in the diegesis, with the exception of Poitier's unbearable spirituals, which open and close the narrative) exoticises everything that they are pursuing, collapsing the searchers into an unsettling surrogate for the credulous, apolitical spectator. 

Like the rough trilogy of films based on James Hilton's novels (Lost Horizon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Random Harvest), A Time To Love And A Time To Die is suffused with the inter-war desire to escape time - an escape that Sirk equates with his own characteristically intoxicating cinematography, with the result that Sgt Ernest Graeber's (John Gavin) search for his parents during the two-week long furlough that relieves him from the black-and-white monotony of the Russian Front is effectively the search for Technicolour; or, alternatively, the desire to immerse himself in a fantastic distance from the ravages of war that becomes continuous with cinema itself, as evinced in one of its surrogates - a wedding night in which his new wife, Elizabeth (Lilo Pulver) throws glasses against a wall because she "saw it done in a movie once", as well as the final, glassy screen, which beautifully combines his reflection with a confirmation that this intoxication is still just out of reach. As a result, all its surrogates - 'no such places', culminating with a suburban kitchen that has miraculously escaped desecration - fall short of the lurid aestheticism expected of Sirk by this stage - with the possible exception of the violent, periodic incursions of fire, whether literally or as an object of conversation, which tend to suggest that Technicolor can now only exist as an index of sheer horror - as if his irrealistic proclivities were so strong as to only admit of being indefinitely and tortuously postponed, rather than categorically excised.

If the Universal horror cycle aestheticised the collision of analytic and continental traditions, through interminable, self-defeating discursion, then the Hammer cycle aestheticises their reconciliation, through the strongest - and most literal - cinematic vision of English Gothic to date. Hence Fisher's Dracula, which not only restricts Stoker's narrative to Germany and Transylvania, but suffuses both with an exaggerated, almost camp Englishness, revealing the Anglo-Saxon within as an object of both operatic horror and broad comedy, and tracing its lineage to the hypothetical remoteness of period drama. The result is sufficiently anti-discursive to represent a break from most sound horror traditions, returning to the imagism of the silent era - or, alternatively, imbuing sound itself (and especially screams) with a plasticity that renders it almost visible - but bolstering it with an unprecedented prescience for the erotic appeal of blood, which is progressively abstracted from its various narrative functions to become a cipher for the fetishistic appeal of Technicolor itself, and transfused to the viewer through a panorama of rich, red surrogates, all centring on the increasing proximity of Dracula's bulging eyes to the lipstick of his victims. As this might suggest, it is not merely horror, but spectacle, and the sheer act of watching, that are eroticised, with Christopher Lee's iconic performance reducing Dracula to a disembodied, objectified, almost sculptural gaze - a cipher for the ravenous, ravishing eye of the viewer - as if he had finally located his reflection in the audience, and were violently embracing it.

The Big Country resists the emergent neo-western's co-option of Cold War hysteria, fusing vigilantism and brinkmanship, and offering a diplomatic alternative to both in the calm, gentlemanly demeanor of Jim McKay (Gregory Peck), who, upon becoming engaged to the daughter of a prominent landowner, finds himself at the epicentre of a vicious local feud. This culminates with a dispute over 'Big Muddy', the local water supply - and, as a retired sea captain, McKay imbues the west with an oceanic fluidity, tactility and malleability, transforming it into a rhizomatic, or metonymic surface - starkly opposed to the overdetermined, metaphorical co-ordinates of the feud, which are what ultimately sustains it, rather than any real sense of how it originated - and tacking across it at any angle, in defiance of its established, roads, byways and ethos. This opens up an infinitesimal number of potential trajectories, embodied in Wyler's combination of widescreen and deep-focus, which, with the aid of cinematographer Franz Planer's taste for crystalline, blue-mauve hues, transforms the landscape into a hushed, lunar beach, or an ante-diluvian uniformity, beautifully enrythmned by the tidal undulations of cattle heads and horses' hooves. That said, Wyler's earlier taste for chamber drama - and the increasingly chambered tendencies of the western itself - re-emerges as a symptom of the sickly proximity induced by the feud ("If there's anything I admire more than a devoted friend, it's a dedicated enemy"), both in terms of the dialectic between home invasion and hostage taking that set the claustrophobic climax in play ("...a coyote couldn't slip through that canyon"), as well as a pervasive, unsettling sense that rape and murder are the logical conclusion of being inside.

The third - and strongest - installment in Wajda's war trilogy, this extraordinary film continues Kanal's project of describing the face in the attempt to register depth-of-field, while translating the latter's inherent indeterminacy into explicitly ideological terms, in the form of the hotel around which the narrative hangs. This labyrinthine repository of challenges to the camera - which, in the hands of cinematographer Jerzy Wojcik, tends to hug the floor, extrapolating an extreme low-angle sensibility from the diagonal slant of the bar - becomes, on the final day of the war, a space of ideologically-bracketed play - embodied by the continual dancing that seems to constitute its main activity - in which assassin Maciek Chelminki (Zbigniew Cybulski) finds himself caught between the claims of Stalinist Communism and Polish Nationalism, both of which exhibit nuances and ambiguities previously held in check by the simplifications of the war. It feels as if Wajda's ultimate aim is to capture the cusp of ideological conversion - or hesitation - through the topography of the face; or, alternatively, to shear the face of those ideological overdeterminations that are ciphered into Cybulski's one-dimensional, poster-boy status as the 'James Dean of Eastern European cinema', and their synecdoche - the  dark glasses that are only removed for the film's central, extreme close-up scene, and are narrativised in terms of Maciek's supposedly irreversible adaptation to the sewers where he spent most of the Warsaw Uprising. In the process, the camera is itself facefied, as its astonishingly agile movements culminate in two sequences that allow it to blink and cry, and its departure from the hotel forces it - like all the characters - back to the reality-principle, as evinced in the final, homogeneous, desecration,  which leaves it - and Maciek - with nothing further to observe. 

Gigi draws the 1950s musical cycle to a close, distilling its regressive tendencies into a full-blown nostalgia for European class differences, and its Technicolor fetishism into a pornography of aristocratic bodies, spaces, and pursuits. Like most pornography, this makes for a relatively uninteresting artistic experience, with Minnelli's proclivity for the wide-eyed, wondrous gaze of girlhood curbed by Gigi's pragmatism, Lerner and Loewe's score largely rehearsing My Fair Lady, and the actors fairly uninspired - including Maurice Chevalier, who doesn't quite manage to elevate his role as the Ophuls-inspired narrator to the theatrical omniscience required. Even the small idiosyncrasies are left largely undeveloped, including Lerner and Loewe's conversational compositional style, which only rarely settles on Hermione Gingold's peculiar ability to fuse speech and song, the deep reds of Gigi's home, which cry out for the kind of lurid contrast more typical of Minnelli, and the preoccupation with shooting on location, which is generally wasted on texturing the most kitsch moments, culminating with the title song (which also departs from the conversational distance mentioned, as the central couple's - and the viewer's - wry detachment from the aristocratic world is clarified in voyeuristic, rather than critical, terms). As a result, it ultimately works best as an extended piece of production design, rather than a film per se, to which end designer Cecil Beaton ensures that every space is cluttered with precious, fetishistic objects; or, alternatively, as a sheer, efficient, ingenious product, less than the sum of its potentially interesting parts, as if Gigi's objections to marital commodification were the mere counterpoint to that product's charming, irresistible courtship of the Oscars.

If The Searchers feels like an amalgam of three films, then Man Of The West feels like a progression of three films, with the critical difference that each film is outstanding on its own terms, and contributes to a gradual intensification, rather than a rhythmic deflation, of brutality. The first act is a train western, in which various attempts to reclaim manual agency from machinery constellate around the robbery - or, rather, the personification - of a steam train by a small group of outlaws; an extension of the aggressive burst of smoke that affronts protagonist Link Jones (Gary Cooper) on the platform shortly beforehand. The second act is a chamber western, in which Jones and two other survivors unwittingly seek refuge with the same gang of outlaws, and takes place mainly inside, or at night, while the few outdoor scenes feel bounded by the small number of outlaws, as well as the claustrophobia of their prisoners - especially singer Billie Ellis (Julie London), who is constantly on the verge of being raped, and experiences a gaze that is sufficiently concentrated, obsessive and predatory to preclude the widescreen aesthetic of the first act; or, rather, to ensure that its disavowal of a traditional, mythological "West" - in its choice of the surrogate, mobile horizon of the locomotive - intensifies to the point where everything immediately outside this chamber becomes so much void, and mythology can only exist at the extreme, almost hypothetical distance of Link's small, wholesome home town. Finally, the third act is a sublime western in the tradition of My Darling Clementine, but substitutes Greek tragedy for Shakespearean tragedy, such that the distinction between immediate and mythical distance is translated into that between the amphitheatrical mountain against which Link's forced robbery of a ghost town bank takes place, and the disinterested, deified loftiness of Mann's spectacular vertical cranes and pans. At this point brutality, having reached its polymorphously perverse conclusion in the spectacular fist fight of the second act - the strongest of its kind in cinema to date - is forced into a purely ceremonial, extrinsic register, continuous with Cooper's self-effacing delivery, whose slightly contrived, almost theatrical curtness provides a compelling evocation of the struggle to reform and redeem himself that propels the narrative; or, alternatively, clarifies that his mind is the most agile thing about him, explaining the extraordinarily cerebral, logical tone of the final confrontation: "This is the moment...it's finally here, just like you knew it always would be."

This exquisite film translates The Seventh Seal's elevation of imagism over discursion into one of Bergman's warmest registers, elaborating the dreams, visions and memories that present themselves to aging professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom), over the course of a cross-country car trip to collect an honorary degree. Despite their heterogeneity - which could make them feel too self-contained, were the narrative itself not relatively episodic - they all represent some variation on one of Bergman's prototypical depictions of the individual's encounter with mortality: the face caught in the uncanny light of its own reflection, almost blinded by its imminent convergence with the inanimate world. To this end, Bergman suffuses the visionary moments with a bright, unearthly light (most spectacularly by painting an entire set white), populates them with various motifs of duplication and replication (most memorably the twins in the flashback sequence) and, finally, structures them around a series of translucent interfaces (most poetically the distinction between past rooms and present corridors), all of which coalesce into the windscreen separating Borg from the viewer; or, rather the cinematic screen, as if to encourage the viewer to identify more with the actors than the parts they play, or at least with the anguish that this contemplation of their cinematic selves must bring them at the brink of death. Not only does this explain the peculiar appropriateness of Sjostrom's casting, as well as the sense that the actors (many of whom are already regulars for Bergman) are meant to supervene their occasionally trite parts, but it clarifies The Seventh Seal's anti-cinema as the attempt to reclaim the ontological shock of even earlier reproductive technologies, represented now by sepia photography and the light microscope, and offsets the warmth with a residual, glassy coldness, which becomes most palpable at precisely the moment it seems to abate; that is, when it moves from Borg to the atmosphere he breathes, as if his change in sensibility were simply death's harbinger.

The most striking cinematic elaboration of the crowd since The Crowd, The Cranes Are Flying reinvents the tracking-shot in a manner that will prove more suited to the panoramic, documentary Marxism of I Am Cuba, than Viktor Rozov's residually Stalinist war melodrama. As a result, the extended, hand-held sequences, in which the camera becomes sufficiently mobile and nimble to dodge tongues of flame, feel like relatively self-contained blueprints for that film, as the vast number of people required to pass the camera from hand to hand become a kind of collaborative surrogate for the crowd they depict, and even a compensation for its threatening, chaotic, apolitical potential. That said, Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky's spectacular tug-of-war between extreme high and low angle shots, culminating with the transformation of protagonist Veronika's (Tatyana Samojlova) face into a work of sublime, modernist architecture, draws a common denominator between these passages (which tend to culminate with an astonishing vertical trajectory) and her own awakening, while the crowd's frenzy informs an almost operatic intensification of key moments in the romantic narrative, usually centring on her second lover's musical pretensions. It's also worth mentioning the extent to which the cinematography plays on the ambiguity enabled by the Krushchev Thaw, drawing a sinister common denominator between parade and production-line, factory and front, as well as blurring fences, gates and bars into an ominous translucency that only becomes visible once the camera tracks in tandem with an engine, along Veronika's hyperactive sight-lines.