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Pickpocket (1959)
Bresson's Magnum Opus
A masterwork not only because it questions the nature of justice and crime, the method society uses to deal with criminals which is far more barbaric than the criminals themselves, and the way it studies the central preoccupation of its character as an art, displaying the rythm,movement,synchrony it involves and the constant thrill it gives, but because it has a vision of daily life as constituted by a series of meaningless routines, of constant boredom and repetition which finally gives way to a such heavy burden on the soul that it mechanises the human spirit to the extent that its protagonist literally expresses disbelief at notion of redemptive love the fact he earnestly cannot believe his love for the woman, which is perfectly matched by Bresson's minimalist style, detail and cinematic language composed of repetition and use of unprofessional actors that removed any excess display of emotion through which Bresson rendered a situation or event completely pure and unbiased in nature and also displayed an increasingly inhuman and inexpressive world. Pickpocket is one of cinema's greatest documents of how people live their daily lives and pass time, Bresson displays Michel's life as a series of activities that are not only immoral but wasteful and useless, such as merely sitting in a room, which slowly corrodes and drains his soul from the inside, making him like a machine, complementing the world view of the director.
Éloge de l'amour (2001)
The crowning achievement of the past 30 years of cinema
Godard's exploration of the role history plays in determining the modern world, how it is a basis for defining what we are and how both collective memory and individual memory shape a person's psyche because what is memory if not a history of one's personal experience. It suggests the past and present are indistinguishable because of one's severe influence on the other and imperfections of human memory
Godard's color strategy was a director response to Spielbergs use of black and white evoke the past, but Godard doesn't merely want to react to the way color is used in that film. In his film, the protagonist sees differences in the past and modern world, pickpocket and The Matrix, but gradually realises in the end that it is near impossible to distinguish between two different time planes or periods, because of one's impact on the other both in the case of history and memory.
Godard analyses the modern world with cold precision, analysing capitalism and state of art nowadays, and later rebuilds the past from the present to build his argument, in which he is not merely scoffing at the modern world, but attempting to form a relation between it and the past and contrast both the worlds. Godard's contempt at Americans is not merely because of the American film industry's commercial interests but because according to Godard Americans don't have any common basis like a history or a common identity to define themselves since most of the American people are actually of American descent, and actual natives to America were ruthlessly slaughtered by them in purpose of serving their capitalist interests.
It is also an exceptionally sensitive love story in the sense that it talks about love itself in a extraordinary tender and personal manner and against this personal story Godard refracts the a larger historical narrative to play this individual memory against suggesting that it is both a basis for definition for people individually and for a community as a whole and about history's continuous inhabitance in the present, as a presence in modern ideas and concepts.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Infinity inside one's inner world
The Tree of Life
Rather than a rumination on the history of existence on the planet, The Tree of Life contemplates existence as seen through the prism of the collective memories and individual experiences of some people. Malick is so inspired and overwhelmed by his memories and day to day experiences, that for him the beginning of memory is the birth of the universe, the end of one's life is the death of all existence, beyond which lies a barren landscape populated by the people and places we know, and between this lies a vast expanse of space and time, which is simultaneously the part of a bigger continuum. The forces which shape us are the same forces acting as metaphysical agents and the invisible catalysts which shape the world around us. The wreckage of a house and its contents below a river and a child's rising above this bridges the gap between life and death, in a manner which can be described as cinematic poetry of the highest order.
There are as many profoundly affecting moments in the film which one could almost miss, if not paying concentration. The tender way a father looks at his son, playing music like him, the dismay and sadness of the eldest son at this, the way the youngest son quietly recedes away from the frame in the beginning montage of the film, the manner in which a boy dances up and down the stairs, and the anger and despair in a boy's head at his fathers tough nature( in an instance in the film, the boy whispers in his head for his father to be dead) all suggest vast undercurrents of emotions which direct us towards our own relationships and bore their way into our personal experiences. Like great masters before him, Malick invents a new filmic language to convey astonishingly personal emotions and invisible threads of experience, previously not communicable by a movie.
What Malick suggests is perhaps that the huge reservoir of memories and relations, the stream of thoughts and experiences, and the constant cascade of emotions that define a person's inner world are an infinite expanse of space and time i.e an eternity in themselves.
Shoah (1985)
A monumental masterwork-Memories placed over images
Jonathan Rosenbaum describes Shoah's ideology as a cross between existentialism(present) and Judaism(past). This leads to an important strategy present at the very heart of Shoah.The director never shows us any casualties or atrocities, but images of camps and locations as they are today and layers them over with a sea memories of both survivors and perpetrators. He is reducing the locations to their very physical presence and nothing more and simultaneously plays over the intimate memories of various people, thus recreating the Holocaust from infinite perspectives and rebuilding the very idea of Holocaust in the modern world. It's a very elemental film in the sense that it is composed of ghostly spaces,crematoriums,landscapes,infinitely long horizons.It creates nothing less than a endless sea of memories,horrors and pain. It's sprawling locations and infinitely long horizons are almost metaphorical for the endless corridors of memory that the film wanders through. An astonishing and unparalleled combination of beauty and sheer horror.
Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
One of the great artistic achievements
One of Bresson's greatest masterpieces, it takes on the very aspect of an emotional experience. The character of Balthazar is perfect for a Bresson film since due to its inability to act, the donkey simply observes the world around it through an unbiased lens. Through the eyes of Balthazar Bresson views the joys and the despairs, acts of kindness and acts of cruelty, religion and delinquent behaviour in society. Bresson was constantly developing a vision of world which runs without anyone's wishes and in exploring the tragic lives of his characters, he developed a style which did away with exploring their despair through excess emotion or acting. For Bresson acting corrupted the purity of a situation or an idea. By not evoking any sorrow or pity for Balthazar, Bresson evokes the true nature of his condition. Further, in an extensively discussed scene, at a circus, he evokes deep empathy for Balthazar in a typical Bresson like but extraordinary manner, through plain observation on the way the animals look at each other to display their collective despair and mutual empathy among themselves . But what's truly astonishing here is the level of purity the director seeks to achieve, which leads to a perfect combination of style and theme(present in all great Bresson films), and this is especially evident in Bresson's decision to pair Balthazar's birth and death with particular sounds rather than music, rendering the most discussed of subjects in cinema a greater richness and purity.
As with Bresson always, there is sublime use of minimalism, the best scenes are beautifully understated in nature, Balthazar observing a game of sexual advances between Gerard and Marie, which rapidly mutates into a dangerous relationship that ends in tragedy. Balthazar observes her coming of age, sexual development and eventual fall from grace. Similarly memorable are moments where the village idiot Arnold looks upward, then simply falls off and dies, later paralleled in Balthazar's death at the end, in which Bresson At his most poetic ruminates on death in its most primal and pure form, as a void from which there is no return and a necessary and inevitable feature of existence.
Nema-ye Nazdik (1990)
Perhaps the impossibly dense film I' ever seen
Kiarostami asks questions about what is identity,the fluidic nature of identity(I'm tired of being me,is it something rigidly defined),ruminates on a certain collective identity of artistic minds in Iran(such as Kiarostami),thus peering into the culture of Iran,asks complex questions about justice(Sazbian's deeds are morally wrong, but are they heinous crimes,how do you justify his actions unless you share his enthusiasm for cinema) and peers into Sazbian's mind understanding his failed marriage and inability(psyche of a complicated man)to provide,thus peering into Iran as a society as well, about the complex interplay of reality and illusion and how it depends on the one's state of mind,and also it's about art,how art affects the mind of people,whether art is an illusion that helps us to escape from reality,the interpersonal relationship between a person and art(I feel reborn after seeing every good movie),and dissects the very nature of cinema,the difference between films and documentary,the very process of filming and how it affects the nature and form of what is being filmed,the ability of film to communicate absolute truth,perhaps his film is a hybrid, a medium that joins film and documentary,self reflexivity of Novelle Vague and truth of Italian Neorealism. His film is not only a masterpiece is terms of technique and form,but also in mood and tone,it is sad,mysterious,has deadpan humour,and is also deliberately dry(at least on the first viewing),and the real genius of the film is how Kiarostami manages to beautifully evoke compassion and empathy towards Sazbian.