We begin in motion, a man in a self-consciously unconscious suit running into a subway station, as though late for work. He is late for work. He’s about to hold a subway car hostage, but he walks like a recently divorced dentist. He seems less like a man worried he will get caught for robbing several million than a guy concerned about whether his coworker will waste fifteen minutes of his time at the watercooler.  The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remarkably workaday vision of New York City, a schlub’s paradise. It feels trapped in a post-‘60s hangover, but what it sees isn’t a nihilistic failure but a run-of-the-mill existence. New York City, here, is a machine that hasn’t defaulted on a foregone promise but that was too busy to even recognize it when it was there. When the conductor first recognizes that his train is being stolen, he can only respond “you’re taking my train?,” and it’s more like he’s confused why anyone would want to bother with such a thing, or how it could be an interesting plot for a movie. When the police get involved, you half expect the hostage takers to respond “hey, I’m stealing here!”

Yet this is a hell of a movie, mostly because it doesn’t really treat any of this as a hell of thing. Nothing in Taking of Pelham 123 insists on its self-importance. It treats commandeering a subway train as another feature of the day, an incident roughly as interesting or as improbable as the nonchalant tour that Walter Mattheau’s Lt. Zachary Garber gives for Japanese businessmen at the beginning of the film. Everyone is a worker, and the film poeticizes what it means to be workmanlike. Director Joseph Sargent was avowedly not a great director, but his journeyman sensibility is amazingly appropriate in this context, a banal, quotidian vision for a monotonous world.

Sargent’s somewhat flat style thoroughly, elegantly deflates the entire film. He brings the kind of vulgar poetry that Don Siegel or Robert Aldrich would have brought to the proceedings, etching a semi-naturalist vision of crude, ragged world but distinctly not an expressionistic one. This is the city not as a crestfallen hellscape or a byzantine labyrinth of bureaucratic overreach or a carnivalesque playhouse but a simple fact, one that keeps you moving through it so expediently that you don’t bother to notice how it is limiting your consciousness. This is not a camera that accesses an inner life beneath the surface but one that observes how depleted inner life has become. When the pivotal moment comes and the strains of the story come together, Sargent frames the crisis not as an interruption but a continuum. In an exquisite panorama of a weathered transit station, Mattheau is giving his tour, mockingly bullshitting his temporary hostage audience, before he learns about the other, more severe hostage crisis perpetrated by the other, equally disgruntled, disaffected men. What, the film quietly posits, does it mean that these two things are less different than we want them to be, or that we no longer want them to be that different in the first place?

Arthur Penn’s name doesn’t linger in the cinematic imaginary like many of his New Hollywood co-conspirators. Like Robert Altman, he was an older man when the movement kicked into high-gear, which meant that he was not a product of the film school generation. Unlike Altman, however, he did have a background in commercial cinema and television. In other words, he didn’t cut his analytic teeth examining every nook and cranny of the ‘60s European interpretations of the American cinematic mavericks of the ‘40s and ‘50s. He developed his eye and hand by making those sturdy, silently subversive, culturally neurotic mid-century American films in the first place, which places him on a continuum with, say, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel, and Robert Aldrich rather than Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. He was less a student of the cinema of American waywardness than a traveler of American waywardness himself.

Befitting his journeyman sensibility, Penn’s films offered a more subliminal, less self-consciously auteurist perspective of what directing might mean. His sensibility was rooted in looking at reality through an odd angle in a mirror rather than, as his younger New Hollywood contemporaries would, shattering the mirror and holding up a serrated shard to reality’s throat. This scrappy, less avowedly personal stamp wasn’t necessarily a moral vision per-se, but the quiet compassion with which Penn contoured the emotional universes of his down-on-their-luck renegades reflected a serious empathy with the mundane nonetheless. One can think of him more as an extractor perceiving momentary realities than an artificer wholesale reconstructing that reality and conjuring meaning out of cinema’s defamiliarizing smoke and mirror show. His was a cinema of the silent tremor, not the sudden eruption.

Early in Winter Light, Max von Sydow’s Jonas Persoon gives voices to one of the major throughlines of director Ingmar Bergman’s career, a subcutaneous current that unites many otherwise ostensibly disparate films. When Jonas’s wife Karin (Gunnel Lindblom)asks to meet with pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Bjornstrand) to discuss her husband’s crippling depression, a neurotic aftershock of the nuclear armaments he is obsessed with, the couple – her ability to voice to terror and his ability to bespeak it through his reticence to speak  –  bring to life many of the abiding conundrums of Bergman’s cinema. What does it mean to speak for another person, and how are our capacities to find life emboldened and sabotaged by our entanglement with others and with the world? And what does this mean when we as a species have decided that the capacity to wipe ourselves out with nuclear weapons is the only way to pacify our existential uncertainty at having created them? How can we, knowing this, go on speaking in the first place?

The Persoons are only the most manifest evocation of Winter Light’s vision of the mid-century as an ambivalent netherworld salvaged from its slow, inexorable decline into the abyss only by those moments of human connection that ultimately come back to mock the idea that we believed they could save us. The largely disinterested way Tomas moves through his daily rituals suggests a weary soul who has become a wayward traveler of life. Real fatigue seeps through every inch of Bergman’s frame, and in his unshakable dread, Persoon only makes Bergman’s lingering spiritual disquiet manifest. His was a trepidatious cinema, one that, as Susan Sontag famously claimed, may be genuinely uninterpretable. That’s perhaps more poetic than, well, interpretive, but the man definitely made movies that beg the question of whether interpretation can do anything in the modern world, and why it would be worthwhile to even bother interpreting in the first place. Bergman’s anxiety about the certainty of meaning in a world where mutually assured destruction dwarfs any other kind of certainty suggests that terror has become its own sublime, seemingly worshipful God (as scholars of nuclear destruction have long argued), something that frightens and disturbs the search for truth, that induces an apprehension beyond the capacity to intellectualize. The austere severity of Bergman’s film seems to state its case so bluntly only because it is trembling with disquiet, with an unease that shudders so much, at such a low frequency, that it actually stills the film, and grants it a capacity to rend the soul.

Few faces linger in cinema history like Giulietta Masina’s. As Gelsomina, a woman sold to brutal, confused strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) to serve more as his assistant than his companion, Masina is an open void, a vision of sheer openness to the cosmos as vibrant, animated, complicated, and embattled as Renée Falconetti’s in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Gelsomina is unimaginably receptive to the world. She achieves a kind of pre-cognitive grace, the self as a pure canvas on which the world is written, and which, in her planetary vibrancy, rewrites the world. While she echoes Charlie Chaplin’s worldly attentiveness to flux, his need to follow the often confusing motions of an ungovernable world, as many have pointed out, her carnivalesque sensitivity to the mutable rhythms of the earth, the sheer multiplicity of life, is uniquely  guileless. Chaplin seems to wrestle with the world. Gelsomina becomes it, existing as a microcosm of its flows. She has no ulterior motive, not even a need to survive. She simply experiences. While she never quite finds a home in the world, it is only because she seems singularly able to find momentary homes in passing notes, in itinerant images, in local joys, and in temporary sadnesses. She is a performer of everyday life, capable of potentializing any moment, a completely versional person who becomes whatever she needs to be. Each moment she encounters is entirely itself, a murmur of radical otherness she finds, and accepts as part of her, as she vibrates to the lyrical indeterminacy of the world itself.

It is simply unimaginable how much trust Giuliata  and her husband, director Federico Fellini, must have put in one another to approach this character, to conjure a being who  exists in such a primordially open, childlike state. For him to invest so much, or to allow her to return so much to him, both resonates with and embodies the film’s sense of celestial synchrony, its appreciation of a world where the wondrous and the awful are warp and weave of one another. Within the contours of this film, this also marks Gelsomina as irremediably ajar, prey to a world which she has no faculties to respond to, which she does not erect psychological boundaries to avoid. Compared to nearly every other film protagonist, she reads as inextricably passive and essentially pre-liberal in her identity, not a self-contained and self-authorizing individual but an animate point in the world, a ward of the universe.

La Strada asks us to appreciate this openness with an attitude of diffuse directionlessness and supersensory epicureanism. The world is brutal and unforgiving, it says, and any honest reckoning with it requires a sense of beauty that is contingent and localized, that finds joy in the everyday, not in a final eternity or an ultimate meaning. While Gelsomina echoes Falconetti’s Joan in a shared attempt to breach the limits of our everyday modes of viewing and perceiving, her version of transcendence does not look beyond the world into a transcendental ether called God, as Falconetti did. Gelsomina discovers grace in the world, marking her as a pure immanence that is spiritually inflected and yet entirely un-transcendent. She seems essentially untouched by the accumulated cultural signifiers on the world around other, but she also does not turn the world into a mere surface hiding a deeper, truer, essential divinity. Rather, she accepts the world’s all-ness in its manifold multiplicity and ravenous uncertainty.