The Mask begins with a quintessential maneuver of the mid-century, an opening address from a man in a suit whose minor-key smirk and mix of self-importance and ease puts him somewhere between expert and huckster. The film conjures a phalanx of mid-century signifiers. A simulacrum of William Castle introduces us to the film’s world, laundering exploitation through the language of psychoanalysis and unsettling that very modern science by exposing its occult pre-history. He speaks of, and the film moves in, the primitivist and modernist language of masks as a metaphor for the subcutaneous, explosive violence and metabolic intuition lingering beneath the even temper of modern science. Is this man a scientist, practical man of affairs, a trickster, or a channeler of something more demonic? What, the film ponders, separates any of these from the others?

Masks abound in the film to which they bequeath a title, suffusing us in the intellectual miasma of mid-century thought. While the speaker professionalizes the film, The Mask poeticizes his language almost immediately with a cut to a woman’s screaming visage, then to a violent man’s assaulting face, two very different sorts of masks, expressive images exposing two consciousnesses locked in impossible conflict. What masks do they wear, and are they doomed to repeat themselves in an eternal cycle of fear and desire? The Mask offers another sonic bridge to a telephone, tethering the irrational to the technological, and suddenly we’re away from primitive ritual and into a sterile modernity already beginning to decay. Within a few shots, the film has already blurred science and mysticism and then linked swamp and skyscraper, plunging into the masks that modernity wears and then exposing the difficulty of defining a true face.

In Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, the titular penitentiary is mental rather than only physical. Its protagonist Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), mostly called Matsu, is on the run with six other women, all of whom carry the history of institutional oppression on their psyches. The mean-spirited Hide Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi), who oscillates between victim and tormentor, is both an embodiment of that trauma and a reflecting mirror who casts the shadows of social violence back onto the world that circumscribed her in the first place. The first Female Prisoner Scorpion film was a comparatively uncomplicated slab of B-movie mischief, one of the more observant “women in prison” films of its era but broadly willing to color within the outline of its accepted genre. Ito’s sequel is a hallucinogenic waking nightmare, a follow-up that doesn’t so much expand as implode the original film’s exploration of carceral hierarchies and societal exploitation. In breaking down the confines of its genre, replacing a physically oppressive enclosure with a universe rendered almost completely ajar, Jailhouse cracks open the assumptions of its genre. While it is still superficially a revenge narrative, Ito frames it as a nasty-minded descent into psychic disfigurement, a long night of the soul in which imprisonment is an imagined space as much as a physical one. Where, the film asks, do you run when the prison is inside you?

The title doesn’t suffer any fools. This is a howl of cinematic nothingness, a pitilessly impotent roar. It’s a post-noir stripped to the wiry skeleton: no shadows, an open-air prison that hides things in plain sight. Allen Baron is the shaggiest of auteurs, a ramshackle one-man band who directs and writes a doom and then casts himself to wear it. He fashions himself as an icon figure of mid-century social disintegration that is nonetheless entirely integrated into himself, a man who is entirely cohesive, basically complete in himself, and yet essentially a void. He is a performer who is both a presence and an absence, a blank face that registers as an abyss moving through a land without shadows.

Contrast this with Orson Welles’ magisterial The Trial from the same year, the greatest Kafka adaptation in all of cinema. Welles may have been the surest hand and most preternatural eye ever to weaponize a movie camera, and his 1962 film is one of the great cinematic acts of abandonment, a brutal displacement of space-time in which reality folds in on itself as the modernist dream of productive experimentation and creative curiosity eat themselves alive. An amazing film, no doubt, one that formally turns the 20^th century’s Promethean vision of progressive order into its own death spasm. Baron’s much less famous film is, in some sense, more frightening, a hell that masquerades not as the good – with its pretensions of order and stability – but the neutral. Blast of Silence is a film for what Daniel Bell called “the end of ideology”: visions of a better world – visions of the world –  have been discharged, and the characters are all just tenants moving from store to store in the remnants of a world that functions but does nothing more.

There’s nothing grand about Blast of Silence. It promises no withdrawal in the form of utopia, and it promises no exodus in the form of an apocalypse. There’s only a now, a flatline. This is not Welles’s modernist promise interred in its own abstract Kafkaesque geometry – an architecturalization of Charles Foster Kane’s own morbid ego and elephantine charisma – but an essentially banal world. No one in Blast has any plans, least of all those in power. There are no totalitarian overseers enforcing and justifying a state vision. This is a city that needs no excuse to murder. It arrives like a train, “right on schedule.” Murder is a “business.” And Blast of Silence is business-like in its severe austerity, a corrosive and unsettling meditation on modern alienation and spiritual ennui that hits like a bullet. No one here is an ideologue. They’re professionals. That is an ideology, of course, but they don’t need to know that, and they don’t need someone to hide it from them. It feels like the open-casket funeral for the traditional film noir, deflating its romantic fatalism and sinister glamour and exposing an apathetic world, a planar space. There’s nothing in the dark.