Medium Cool begins with an out-of-focus image, a dark harbinger of unclarified forces from an apparently chaotic future. When the image centers itself, it reveals not a clear screen but a broken window, not a crystal clarifying the truth but a sudden lurch into an even deeper oblivion shattering it further. A car has run off its tracks, as surely as a world has tilted off its hinges. Truth may suddenly be nothing more than an illusion, cinema a fractured gaze, a stalled vehicle like the nation that thought it was going smoothly in one direction before it crashed into a ditch. The two men presently viewing the crack don’t have any moral investment in fixing it either. They’re just here to inspect the wreckage.

Modern viewers might think of 2014’s Nightcrawler, another film about midnight wraiths wielding cameras as death masks (to quote André Bazin) and channeling demonic forces converging on a wounded world. But Medium Cool is a film almost preternaturally attuned to its time-period. The vehicle crash was and would continue to be a prominent metaphor in the late ‘60s, from Bonnie and Clyde through Easy Rider, not to mention the opening rubble of Godard’s laconically apocalyptic Weekend. So too would the camera: Rear Window and Peeping Tom and Blow-Up and even Targets (which shares this film’s soon-to-be epochal editor Verna Fields, serrating the screen here like an unseen-shark’s tooth) all understand the camera to be an affirmation of life and an omen of death. However, while those films all figure the wielders as adepts of demonic or even metaphysical forces, Medium Cool is furiously naturalistic, not icily composed like Antonioni or menacingly controlling like Hitchcock but deviously documentarian. If anything, the film’s verité style evokes Bob Dylan’s opaque sunglass act in Don’t Look Back: transfiguring our gaze, subtly manipulating our interpretation, while claiming it isn’t doing anything at all.

When artist Victor (Bill Gunn) convinces his wife Sara (Seret Scott) to adjourn to an upstate idyll for the summer, he has in mind a pastoral image of personal rejuvenation. While Sara agrees, this form of escape is far different from the hermetic, principled solitude she seeks to work on her summer research while on sabbatical from her yearly teaching engagements as a New York City philosophy professor. The contrast between Sara’s Apollonian formalism and Victor’s Dionysian overflow is immediately apparent in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground, but it is as quickly foiled. While Sara initially appears standoffish and aloof in the manner of an impartial academic, her self-governed demeanor soon reveals a roving spirit, a mind as unquiet as it is carefully controlled, and as passionate, in as many registers, as her husband, even though she works overtime to transpose her irritations into a more analytic idiom. She is presently researching an essay or two on the philosophical discourse of “ecstatic experience,” which obviously disappoints her actress mother Leila (Billie Allen), who resonates more with Victor’s emotional vision-quest. But Collins’s screenplay is supple enough to offer the characters as both abstract typologies and living humans, already a category-confounding suggestion that the modes of experience the couple seem to live by are, in fact, fluid guidelines for organizing everyday experience rather than strict regimens that must be upheld. Without denying Victor’s interest in ecstasy, Collins also catches Victor’s subtle arrogance and dismissive celebration of emotion over philosophy, recognizing that his impatience with Sara’s analytical abstraction is also its own conceptual flattening, just as Sara’s mental enclosure, despite her skepticism about emotion, attempts its own mode of ecstatic transcendence.

Neither character finds their attempts consummatory. Each encounters another than troubles their assumptions. Victor becomes infatuated with Celia Cruz (Maritza Rivera), an ostensible muse whose bodily presence disrupts his stated desire to search for “pure” abstract form and escape the prison of representational art. Gunn understands that Victor’s elated demeanor is tinged with frustration and confusion about the kind of art that channels the hypostasized idea of “purity” he is suddenly so invested in, just as Scott intuits that Sara’s ostensibly analytic demeanor belies her searching curiosity and disappointment. While she flirts with fellow academic Duke (Duane Jones), whose enigmatic demeanor seems to combine academia and bohemia, his capacity to fulfill her seems equally up in the air.

Kathleen Collins’ script, among the first written and directed by an African American for commercial release in the United States, is framed via frustrated attempts at communication, both apparent connections that give way to difference and presumed discrepancies that imply similitude. Celia, despite her burgeoning friendship with Victor, understands everyday existence in a way that he doesn’t, and she speaks with what she calls an “American” rhythm of speech that he seems aloof to. Despite Victor’s interest in her, he still exerts a self-conscious superiority of his own explanatory ability: “if she doesn’t know Wedgewood, there’s no way I can explain it,” he remarks, signaling a gap between them that figures him as the arbiter of something like intuitive human knowledge who seems to reduce her to an object, to count himself as part of an artistic elect. This is a declaration of intuition on his part, but it’s also a judgement about the anointed of which he wishes to be a part.

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki is a vicious humanist of a film. It vandalizes its inherited cinematic styles, but it does so out of affection as much as frustration, care as much as critique. It trades classical cinematic storytelling for a French New Wave-inflected openness to disorientation and disarray, importing violent cuts, repeated imagery, and anachronistic sound cues from the French cinema of the 1960s. Stylistically, these techniques come from a Senegalese dream-time of integration with the metropole, embodying formally the inheritance of French thinking and culture on Senegal while meditating on the desire to smooth these connections, to render them natural rather than constructed through histories of violence and subjugation. These techniques destabilize the viewer, forcing us to confront the artificiality of both cinematic form – very much in the spirit of the New Wave’s critique of its own inherited and borrowed cinematic tropes – and the constructed nature of the colonial fantasies this cinema often sustains. If Touki Bouki utilizes its inspirations, it does so because it recognizes that it cannot escape them, and that engagement is the precondition for critique. While the techniques are in part borrowed from French New Wave cinema, Mambéty’s film makes them self-conscious of their own mimicry and, perhaps only in this capacity, able to escape it. There’s a self-conscious recognition of un-originality here, the brutal and curious intermixtures and impurities of colonial lineages, and an attentiveness to the fact that only in diving into these contradictions, rather than overlooking them, can African cinema become truly original. In the act of becoming itself through its interrogation of French cinematic norms, in appreciating those norms through its questioning of them, Touki Bouki may ultimately save them, and affirm itself.

The French New Wave was certainly self-conscious of its unoriginal originality in its own way. There was no long-term liberation in Godard’s image of French youth infatuated with American gangsters. Nonetheless, Breathless is infused with a romantic image of vagabond individualism as dissent, a rebellious rhythm in which youthful spontaneity could preserve a residuum of resistance, even if it took the form of a libertine death-drive, in spite of its limits as a form of collective challenge. The two lovers on the run in Godard’s first film were doomed, but there was poetry in the film’s exuberant vision of demise, a weak refusal of the status quo that retains the pure potency of its own energy. The protagonists were not long for this world, but their chosen idiom made their shortness amazing while it lasted.

Touki Bouki takes the same narrative structure – young people in search of a framework to hang their inchoate dreams on – but dislocates the joints beyond the point where it might read as even superficially libratory. Associative and allusive (courtesy of the elliptical editing from Siro Asteni and Emma Menneti), the film follows two young lovers, Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Mareme Niang), as they dream of escaping Senegal’s capital of Dakar for a mythologized Paris they’ve imported from decades of colonial fantasia. They can’t, but Mambéty knows that he can’t get out of relation with that vision of escape. The film creatively dislocates this impossible aspiration, the violence of mental colonialism, through an act of formal disfigurement, ravaging itself in recognition of its own inability to conjure a genuine alternative. This isn’t a failure of imagination so much as a poetic acknowledgement of reality’s unfitness for itself, a formal gap in which our recognition of modernity’s wrongness – its control over the terms on which we might begin to imagine otherwise in the first place – demands to be recognized.

There’s a photo of JFK in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute that you can easily miss. It’s never mentioned in dialogue, nor bestowed with a glorifying or demonizing close-up. It’s a specter, a phantasm looming in the chiaroscuro of history. I couldn’t help thinking of Paul Schrader’s 1978 classic Blue Collar, where an old JFK campaign poster lingers like the vaguely comforting detritus of a dimly nostalgic history. It was just hopeless there, a half-forgotten remnant of the mid-century New Deal coalition that once signaled the hope of a connected, compassionate America. In Klute, seven years earlier, the demise of this vision is still fresh, and JFK looks like a malevolent specter, a doomed ghost from the past spying on everyone who appears in the frame, the angel of early ‘60s hope now perverted into a wraith dormant in the background. That one will likely miss the image is the point. It’s a model for the film’s moral universe, and its ethical question: are you – citizens, humans – paying attention?

Of course, the JFK image is also the first masterwork of cinematographer Gordon Willis, one of the few men who can be genuinely said to have redefined cinematography in the history of the medium. Achieving a kind of naturalistic symbolism, a fusion of old noir expressionism and ‘70s realism, Klute glowers with an aura of casual malevolence that is all Willis’s, asking us to see into the murky shadows of ambivalent morality without any crystalline lines of light and darkness to hide in, or hide from. This is an architectonic shift in cinematic style, framing immorality not as a question of brilliance and shadow but a morose, unforgiving brown. For Willis, everything can become potential background – everything in the world is waiting to be enshrouded by something else  – and the film registers this entirely as a question of form. These are ambiguities that we won’t catch if we aren’t listening to how the film wants to be heard, if we aren’t attentive to the crimes the film is examining.

In the opening minutes of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, justice transforms from a towering obelisk of American might into an embattled and deeply fragile conundrum. In the opening shot, the courthouse pillars leer, imposing edifices that might suggest a beatific monument to a concept solidified for eternity or, conversely, corroded into a hollow stillness. But what makes the building matter? The lawyers, who we do not see in the film, get a uniformly bad wrap, and the judge we temporarily witness seems more interested in playing with his pencil than in the conceptual, ethical, or logistical questions he doesn’t recognize are on trial (or, perhaps, he has already resigned to their assumed guilt). This seems like an evacuated justice, distorted by an unnamed McCarthyism and the daily inertia of boredom and limitation, a vaporous principle without a sturdy enough form to channel it.

12 Angry Men wants to save democracy though, or at least to argue that it is worthy of being saved, but it presents no legal armor worth a salt. This is a film in the unenviable position of mounting a battle for a principle that, it admits up front, has no army to fight for it. No formal army, that is. It is not the building, 12 Angry Men suggests, or those employed in it or by it, that form the cornerstone of American morality, but that most humble arm of democratic reasoning, the titular figures who assume they know before learning to appreciate that things might be otherwise. This, the film claims, is the soul of America, a dozen lost soldiers of democracy heretofore unknown to one another: “the people.”

Indeed, they become “the people” throughout the film. The opening tracking shot glides us through the courthouse and into the jury room, a gathering ground of difference communicated and contested, a town hall meeting in miniature. Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) marks himself as a redoubtable icon of justice by staring out the window of the room, reflection upon the wider world while preserving his own individuality, not yet fully, or only, participating in this temporary local community. When everyone sits at the table, the film christens the creation of a space of democratic give-and-take and competitive collaboration where friction produces, in theory, a truth as ragged and unfinished as it is steadfast and eternal.

It is embarrassing how much better Kingdom of Heaven is than the trivial, banal Gladiator, the film that did more than anything to kickstart the historic epic cinema trend at the turn of the 21^st century and ensure director Ridley Scott financial solvency for eternity. I would only be being kind of hurtful if I were to say that this is the only one of Scott’s 21^st century efforts that remembers that films think, rather than only represent things, visually. Scott works with real images in Kingdom of Heaven, visions that reward patient viewing, that express ideas that aren’t always fully worked out in a screenplay, that demand an attentiveness to conflict and polyphony on the screen, reminders of tension and multiplicity in real life.  The man’s historical epics haven’t all been worthless. The Last Duel is at times amusingly rambunctious, raffishly brutal in its deconstruction of male idioms of medieval prowess. Napoleon is an ironist’s camp taxidermy exhibit of dead history, a complete evacuation of heroic power played as impudent impotence. But these are also misshapen things, and the kernels of value in them are often more intermittent amusements than the full-throated, painterly attention Kingdom of Heaven brings to a world that hasn’t changed as much as we’d hope. “Historical epics transmuting past idioms into timely political themes” is close to the least interesting film genre in the world to me, but I admired the combination of Old Hollywood earnestness and austere modern chilliness here, the David Lean-esque belief in the hope that well-observed compositions by observant and curious people can aspire to world historical importance and that, if they do fail, even because of their failures, they might mean something to the world.

I also admire how thoroughly this film manages to be both inspiring and deflating, often at the same time. This is a Hollywood blockbuster in which the final battle is a futile, grueling war of attrition, a vicious and unholy slog in which humans are physically saved, but not necessarily spiritually absolved, by an act of humility rather than might. Kingdom of Heaven is also a Hollywood blockbuster with an awareness of political economy, a genuine appreciation for the limits, but also the necessity, of human agency within impossibly wide systems of control and imperial conflict. There’s a fantastic sense of humans making their own future in a world not under conditions of their choosing, finding their way through a murk of conflict and confronting the forces of history that thrum far beyond their capacity to grasp them. Kingdom of Heaven manages to mark the characters as circumstantial antagonists in a tragic world, saved from mutual destruction by an act of strength through compromise and negotiation.

Writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise feels revelatory in its banality. It exhibits a kind of dim-witted defiance that celebrates America by deflating it entirely, elevating it by turning it into nothing. The spaces are ratty and bare but wonderfully populated, the people are basically hollow and yet so teeming with phenomenal microbes of energy and uncertainty. It’s like a Bresson film if Bresson was a day-drinker interested in a way to pass the time instead of a monk in search of transcendence. Stranger than Paradise, like its title, finds salvation in the profane and the mundane. If it is in search of deliverance from destruction, it is nonetheless profane in a way, exhibiting ambling, quizzical assurance that things might not really be okay, but what matters is that they’ll certainly be interesting if we let it.

That’s an interesting thought, much like America is an interesting country, even if it’s nothing else. Jarmusch’s film is a lot like a particular vision of America: wonderfully inelegant, somehow both spare and excessive, spartan yet teeming with secret multitudes and plain-spoken eccentricities. It’s like America’s vision of itself when it cuts away all the stifling excess, when it reveals, termite-like, the multitudes that be contained in the seemingly minimal, the great depth in the apparently microscopic.

Consider protagonist Willie’s apartment. We gloss over it initially: how under-designed, how ill-equipped it is for a fulfilling life, for anything we would want to consider “humanity.” Thirty minutes in, though the cracks are our old friends, marks of a home that only remains alienated because we haven’t properly attuned to it. But they are also marks of our real alienation, of a society that doesn’t know what to do with us, or how to house its masses. Each corner of the apartment is a minor artistic masterpiece, secretly impressing itself in our brain with its everyday strangeness, and its reminder of our strangeness to ourselves, that which we overlook in the comings and goings of our existence. Forced to confront what filmmaker Jean Epstein would call the “horrible underbelly of things,” the film becomes oddly anarchic in its capacity to open the viewer to sheer existence.

In Chungking Express, even the shadowiest corridor of the modern condition feels like a vast expanse of possibility. Writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s unfathomably effervescent romanticism knows no boundaries other than the limits of his audience’s perception, which he also takes to be his film’s primary concern: how we see the world, and whether we can see it all at once. His film’s vigorous curiosity, a measure of our poise and flexibility, our readiness to open ourselves to uncertainty, is also a testament to a world wonderfully and unmanageably beyond our complete grasp.

With Chungking Express, Kar-wai fashioned the masterpiece of his early style, an exquisite fable of modern human friction that adopts the exploratory texture of magical realism but not its sometimes abstracting gaze. His text is not lacquered in the same kind of candy-coated wax that would go on to petrify something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, so obviously indebted to this film in other ways. While I’ve always found that film to feel like a penitentiary, a cinematic prison-house designed with directorial despotism, Chungking Express is feverishly alive, attentive to momentary shifts in rhythm and tempo, feeling like it could explode into something new at any moment. Its closest predecessor may be Fellini’s mid-period, still alive to the observational particularities of his neorealist era but beginning to breathe, to newly expand and contract, into fantastical realms of a world more wonderful.

An amorous fairy-tale of frisky humanity that is also an arduous trek through the swampy terrain of maintaining, and failing to maintain, moment-to-moment human connection, Chungking Express tethers two stories with a phantom thread. It links them through a form of chance and circumstance that feels both molecule-thin and like the latchkey for some secret of the universe. This is not “hyperlink” cinema. They have no narrative connection, nor do they even occupy the same emotional temperature, but they do embody a shared hope, a vision of the world in which the everyday is a kind of delirium, a carefully controlled entropy as a kind of bliss. Their linkages are atmospheric, each second of the film implying a nebula of bubbly energy that happens to have coalesced at this very moment.

Woman in the Dunes is the story of matter’s murmur, how it promises and then profanes. An unnamed entomologist (Eji Okada) opens the film wandering the coastal desert dunes of a seemingly out-of-the-way corner of Japan, far from his daily life in the doldrums of Tokyo’s burgeoning modernity. For the entomologist, the dunes promise relief from the workaday banality of modern city life, promising challenges to pursue, forces to explore, submit to, and command. He hopes they will unsettle him, that the romantic pull of the sublime otherness of these forbidding desert dunes will sink into his soul, that they will bring him outside himself and thereby return him to himself after communing with the world. But the film slowly impresses on us that his quest is a dangerously abstract escapade, one that takes him away from modernity’s tensions rather than into their conundrums. The titular dunes, with their eerie, eons-long omnipresence, their mixture of grace and gloom, lay his solipsism bare, drowning his ego in forces he wants to both dwarf and that he wants to dwarf him. The titular dunes are iridescence embodied, warping any meaning imposed on them. Alternately confessional stall, open-air penitentiary, and vast abundance, they can stand for seemingly anything and thus, perhaps, afford nothing other than a cosmic trick. The dunes offer this man his soul renewed before holding a mirror up to his inner cravings that he would rather not see. Woman in the Dunes understands that the line between spiritual purgative – hope for cosmic salvation –  and menacing infinity – adriftness in a void of your own making  –  is gossamer thin.