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.