"One Upon a Time in the West" (1968)

Sweep, but also slowness. Landscape, but also proximity, clock-turn, and velocity. The slowness of knowing where your place is (nowhere); the speed that comes with knowing your death comes in threes (at a train station). The myth of the West, after it's passed through the requisite motions of law-making, constitution-forming; you are watching the West directly from the perspective of the Mythical, the time-elapsed, the time-enshrined. Not a western but the Western of westerns; an archetype whose volubility represents its irrepressible duration. A crossroads where men die because they choose to die the only way they know how: by evolutionary selection. To declare, wordlessly: I am faster than you. (Quickness is the state of grace which they call "keeping alive," or the force impressed in the figure of one who remains standing in the midst of gunsmoke; but quickness is also cleverness, sleight-of-hand, country wit.) All of Tarantino is in the final section, when we learn why Bronson seeks revenge, why he is selfish with his gunfire; why he protects Fonda from dying at the hands of his own men. Revenge, such as we understand it, in the mythos of the West, fuels an economy from the remnants of bad speculation; an economy of death that begets townships, train stations, mining prospects, the gold trade, and so forth. The harmonica and harmonica-playing is what you call a man's vigor when he's got no words to express his outgrown, overbearing virility.

"Amer" (2010)

Night.
Proximity, rapidity. To the body, of the face. Parted lips, secretive tongue, undisclosed sections of the skin. Limbs, fingers. Tense vein-impressed hands. Night, a rusty creaky villa on the coast. Moonlight; then shadow. (A man's black figure.) Then moonlight again. (A building up of rhythm which is also a building up of the Sensorium.) Glinting on the edge of a switchblade suddenly released from its dark enfolding. "A woman in danger." A beautiful woman (of course). Bath water, warm water. Naked, smooth legs. Running faucet. Candles, candlelight. Bare feet, leaf-littered linoleum floor. An unswept floor, chill to the touch. Footsteps.

Day.
The wind which plays on the heavy shutters; which plays on the loose flowing skirt; which flows up into her and opens her, carefully, analytically. In the car, in sunlight. Heat inside, passenger sidewindows that do not open. She asks to open them. He does not hear her. A driver wearing black leather gloves. Black leather jacket. Dark denim jeans. Dust-straddled crocodile boots. Toothpick in his mouth, his concealed teeth biting down. Hard. Hands pressed strongly on the steering wheel. "Open, please!" Sudden panic. His eyes in the rearview mirror, watching her. "Please..." Suffocation, as if hands were around her neck, warm rough hands. She shouts, unconsciously, fearfully, waking up from a dream. But she is still in the backseat of a car, her thighs burning. He opens the automatic window. A wind rushes again into her, her skirt rippling. His eyes in the rearview. Watching.

"71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (1994)

The atmospheric pressure of an environment presses from all sides the subtextual space of a single chronology. The chronology of chance, as Haneke calls it, but with sarcasm. Yes, chance events of a violent nature occur, alongside events of a decidedly nonviolent nature. But the mystery of a violent event ("A young student shoots and kills a group of people at a bank. No motive has been given.") resolves itself, or at least, produces a chronology, if we pay attention to the nonviolence of events. For instance, the news. The television. The television which is the primary actor in Haneke's tableaux. Even when it is absent, when it is turned off, it is playing in the background; it is speaking. But television isn't merely the medium, or the event, in question; it is an environment produced in and through its proliferation in all (necessarily postmodern) states. It is simultaneously the radio, the newspaper, the shopping mall, the advertisements you find on the streets while walking or driving your car. It is a way of life, and one which pervades western civilization: a society of the spectacle if you will, in which "spectacle" gradually becomes the absence of the bearable. Haneke selectively chooses to highlight events which occur in nonwestern states, nonwestern countries, that are in fact affected by the political and social malaise of the West. However differentiated and culturally insulated we feel we are from the rest of the world (the world which we access, sometimes unbearably, always helplessly, through media) we are actually deeply embedded in the problems of the Rest of the World, the Marginal, the Peripheral, the Subaltern (which, because we see so much of it on the news, we never outrightly see; suffering is so much in our face that it becomes invisible, an absence that suddenly encroaches on the ordinary.) The problem, Haneke theorizes, is the isolation, which we call, euphemistically, chance. But it is not chance, nor is it fate or fatalism; it is, rather, Environment. The environment of violence which we call the news, which we (along with Haneke) call indifference. And nothing is more violent, nothing is crueler, than indifference.

"The Castle" (1997)

A thought struck me while watching Haneke's version of Kafka's The Castle, a thought which passed through me with the strange clarity that K. received the import of Brugel's harangue, even on the verge of collapsing into sleep (K. I mean, but only barely myself, not out of boredom with the film, but out of a calm quiet satisfaction with the fidelity of the film's nearly word-for-word adaptation of K.'s text). The thought was this: a film that adapts K.'s novel in a major hollywoodish way, in a stylish, mega-budget production not dissimilar from De Palma's Mission: Impossible. The title would be: The Bureau. The adaptation would go as follows: a recently promoted covert ops agent (who works undercover as a "land surveyor" as a means of avoiding detection while still retaining the right of "surveying") arrives in a nondescript eastern european country for his new assignment. The agent, code-named K., has two months to infiltrate a mysterious counter-intelligence organization by the name of "the Bureau," suspected to have its head base of operations in a small provincial town (chosen by the Bureau specifically for its provincialism, for the zeal and superstitious fear of the residents, and for the unassuming, therefore unsuspicious, location). K. befriends and eventually seduces an agent rumored to have been recently ousted from a low rank position in the Bureau: her name is Frieda. As K. gets more intimate with Frieda, he wonders whether his cover will be blown, whether Frieda is not herself a mole. Other characters, some of them suspected to be agents sent in to spy on K., emerge from the woodwork (for instance, the sudden appearance of his incompetent "assistants.") K. is forced to perform guesswork in his pursuit of the firm's objective: he does not know who to trust, who to sleep with, who to pay off, who to snuff out. In the meantime, he performs land surveying, as a way of gathering intelligence. He takes long walks in the town; he studies the buildings, the architecture, the bizarrely designed tract homes that lie on the outskirts of the town; he attempts to single out the building or buildings where the Bureau could be located. Perhaps the Bureau is a combination of random buildings scattered all over town; perhaps it is hidden underground in a bunker; perhaps it is on a high level floor unreachable by elevator, for which expensive equipment would be necessary to access, technology that K. does not have at his disposal. He is temporarily placed on the Bureau's payroll, but he remains, secretly, on the payroll of the firm that employs him; soon enough, K. loses sense of which company he works for, the original firm, or the Bureau? Are they one and the same? Is he being tested for a secret, malicious purpose? When he finds a crack in the wall, a crack which, architecturally speaking, makes no sense in the surface structure of the building, he begins to hear the whirring of a camera, a camera he is unable to locate, but which has probably been watching him the entire time...

"The Kid with a Bike" (2011)

I've read a reviewer's somewhat glib comment that the Dardennes brothers have not strayed from the form/formula which has made their distinctive brand of filmmaking internationally renowned -- The Kid with a Bike is to be considered, in this respect, a continuation of this formula, and one in which the Dardennes "milk...the imperiled child premise and tough-love salvation trope for all the ruthlessly effective drama it can deliver." One cannot dispute this claim, but I am willing to deride this view as unintentionally dismissive (as if the failure, rather than the success, of the Dardennes' "tough-love salvation trope" sufficed to pigeonhole the efforts of the brother directors as aesthetically redundant and unadventurous). Watching The Kid with a Bike, I am compelled to believe that filmmaking must always be executed this way, generously, yet in punctuation; passionate, yet controlled and refined; emotionally raw, yet life-affirming and graceful. The Dardennes are at this moment peerless in their medium; The Kid with a Bike, yet another heartfelt and humane masterpiece by the Belgian masters, finds them at their most pitch-perfect, indeed as good and as great as they have always been. One cannot leave the theater without taking away the impression that life at its most miniature and severe bears up the contours of a Dardennes film -- life, that is, as one lives it now, without the blemishes of exaggeration, yet always imagining the worst of worst events at every occurrence, only to learn that what life offers is only the continuation of an arrested, flawed, yet ultimately inescapable ideal. The ideal of true suffering, and the ideal of true redemption. Forgiveness is all (a message which seems to be the note on which the Dardennes wish to exit each of their glimpses into the lives of the unfortunate, the abandoned, the unloved and the desperately loving alike).

Storywise, plotwise, mise-en-scene-wise, The Kid with a Bike joins the ranks of the cinema of troubled childhood (a cinema which the francophone world has particularly excelled at). One catches references to Pialat's L'enfance nue; but also, most importantly, to Truffaut's 400 Blows, specifically in an engrossing, lengthy tracking shot of the titular boy riding at hellspeed through a feverish night on his beloved black-and-chrome bicycle. The film's structural resonance brings to mind the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine; here, no longer neo- as such, but explicitly common; a realism which achieves its effects sans realisme. There are also touches of the Bressonian (the Dardennes have reached a level of editing which, I am willing to argue, finds near equivalency with the work of that immortal pastmaster) -- most notably in the elegant swells of  the beginning phrase of the adagio in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, a phrase always tastefully inserted at moments of pristine clarity, in the form of elegant punctuation. Yet for all this mastery and elegance I speak of, the film is rightfully and painfully brutal, and the lead actor, Thomas Doret, undergoes a grueling apprenticeship in the cinema of physical turmoil. The film begins with the boy, named Cyril, in frightful motion and anxiety; he is always, in the picture, moving, sometimes against his own volition, as it were, in search of an anchor that can stop or wreck him -- to him it is all the same, he hazards his life in every situation, because he cannot be stopped, he cannot stop himself, from accelerating forward, endlessly forward. And the film ends, indeed, with an image of young Cyril speeding onward, yet again, though in this case, reborn, or perhaps, unshaken by his karma, rebooted into a life filled with unseemly interruptions. Cyril's redemption comes, as is spiritually useful, through a silence, through a firm and solid "No" -- yet without the least complaint at having been stopped so violently in his progress into (and out of) childhood. He endures these manifestations of violence (themselves embedded in a lower-class social sphere that typifies the real Belgium in the eyes of the Dardennes, a sphere in which characters are forcefully brought into communion with other desperate souls, and often, with the better angels of their nature) -- because there is something in Cyril's acceleration that declares itself aware of the mental fact that only he can stop himself, choose where to stay, choose where to run. His is an apprenticeship of accelerated manhood.

"In the City of Sylvia" (2007)

Guerin's "city of women" is also an inherited city, one passed down from the nineteenth century -- it is not, in this respect, an invented city, and the film is not quite as original as it means to be. But "originality" is hardly the point: Guerin is exorcising -- or exercising -- the dominant aesthetic model that old world cities still tend to radiate, even a century after an era of prolonged, lingering high romanticism. Strasbourg, the actual and very real Strasbourg, stands in for this reconstructed City of Sylvia, an ancient medieval city, and one whose antiquity cannot be completely shed in the minor tragedies of european 21c fashion. A city of streets, if we look at Strasbourg with etymological lenses, streets which could replace any streets living and breathing in the old world now or long before, representative of a fixity of time and place, in which Baudelaire would have walked and written poems aux passantes and of which Benjamin would have collected for his arcades project. The realism of Strasbourg is swiftly converted into the surrealism of a generic highly literary european town, in which the beauty of strange women plays as the central protagonist, a supreme object of sight that is suddenly, imperceptibly, transformed into a subject of aesthetic, or rather, epistemological resistance.

What is realistic is the hesitation of the nameless poet-artist (let us imagine someone less attractive, less becoming, than this stand-in fashion model) because his hesitation has a basis in the personal experience of a great many men frustrated by catching beauty on the street or in the cafes and bars of the world: one doesn't simply follow and pursue women this way without expecting the perils of shame and castigation. Fortunately for our fashion model protagonist, his voyeurism only gets him a slap on the wrist, and hardly that: we can see that "Sylvie" is partly terrified, partly aroused, by the prospect of a handsome man pursuing her through the day-lit streets of Strasbourg. Only in a 19c literary world, one belonging to the White Nights of Dostoevsky or in the contes of Maupassant, would this story have continued in a believably literary manner, in which the characters would have submerged into an elaborate intimacy after the merest glance or word was exchanged. In a postliterary world, this is no longer the case: but Guerin is aware of this dearth in literary emotion, and he relies as much on cinematic myths as he does on literary ones. The "following" setpiece, in which the protag discovers his "Sylvie" while people-watching at a cafe and pursues her down circuitous streets and alleyways, makes obvious reference to similar setpieces in Vertigo, another fable in which a man consciously/unconsciously seeks out the form of a woman (as opposed to the actual woman herself) he remembered from years back, only to find that her form has gradually blurred into a doubling of vision, equally carnal and phantasmal, equally literary and cinematic (literary, if we consider the renewed attention Guerin gives to the sketches and outlines and poetic fragments that litter the protag's notebook, and cinematic, if we consider the light effects Guerin employs to disorient the spectator as he follows the path of Sylvie through progressively unreal avenues of pursuit). The woman may or may not correspond to the fragile, infinitely pliable memory that serves as his guide and itinerary, but the search for women past leaves a reconstructed city in its wake, a recalibration as cinematically adventurous as the dream-city setpiece on view in Inception. Guerin only has to remind us that "Sylvia" is the ghost of an idea, the flimsiest trace of an emotion lost, rather than a real person whose narrative is on the verge of being told, to get us to pursue his affections further.

"Killer of Sheep" (1977)

Neorealism is not particularly an Italian conception. We know this.

Boys who throw stones, play with dirt, make empty fortresses out of unused steel, then throw rocks at them. 

"I ain't got nothing but my good looks." Reification at its most basic level. He is broke but his brokeness
becomes his currency.

The slaughterhouse is also Watts in the 70s.

Not because of rampant criminality (though it is there but Burnett does not aggravate the obvious). 

Killing sheep. The packaging of the lamb meat never returns to the neighborhood that houses the factory.

You never, for instance, see the family eating their own product; they do not "feast on lamb."

Circulation is what is denied those who put things into circulation.

Boys who throw stones, play with dirt, make empty fortresses out of unused steel, then throw rocks at them.