One always gets the sense that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was entirely sincere in his affection for Douglas Sirk and mid-century Hollywood melodrama. His was a self-reflective cinema, but not a self-excoriating one. Melodrama, for him, is not just a manipulative fallacy or an ideological construct so much as a tragic mode of narrating the tensions between internal desire and external conditions. Fassbinder’s gaze, which seems to breach the prison of the skin and pull forth the evanescence of desire itself, seems genuinely descended from the expressionist tradition. His films aren’t deconstructions of his inspirations so much as meditations on them, ones that, because they actualize and then shatter the characters’ wildest fantasies and most disturbing dreams, expose the cracks in their hopes and articulate the jaggedness of their imaginations.

Veronika Voss was perhaps Fassbinder’s most obvious reflection on his cinematic origins, and that comes with enough baggage to risk turning the film into an obvious allegory of his love for classic cinema rather than a genuine interrogation of it. Veronika Voss is a relatively apparent variation on Sunset Boulevard: a titular former celebrity (played by Rosel Zech), desperate to reengage her career after the point where mainstream German cinema has cast her aside, increasingly confronts the limits of her drug addiction and the conflicting demands of an abusive doctor (Annemarie Duringer) who derives satisfaction from keeping Voss under her thumb. His final film released during his life time, the relative straightforwardness of Veronika Voss’s situation implies the consummatory quality of a director knowingly at the end of his time on earth, offering a final effigy for the inspirations that fueled him.

Yet this is no honorary replaying of an old standby, nor a mere post-modern ode to his fascinations. Veronika Voss is not Norma Desmond. Rather than a toxic statue striving to fully absorb Old Hollywood ghoulishness and exaggeration for her own malformed, abused ego, Voss is a drifting angel caught in modernity’s moonlight. Demond’s needs were gravitational, coaxing the entire film into her orbit. Voss’s are electromagnetic, loosely centering a field of particles, each character compromised by each other, everyone working a disruptive but also often empathetic malice upon each other as they harness one another for various ends. Fassbinder’s film isn’t the story of a lone, maddened, monomaniacal soul exerting force on others but a nebula in which everyone trying to fulfill their self-lacerating needs and hopes causes each other to come undone, in which individuals emit, radiate, and dissipate together for better or worse. Near the end of his career, perhaps because it sees him fading into the netherworld of cinematic afterlife, the liminal space where the dream factory goes to play afterhours, Veronika Voss feels like a ghostly transmission from another world, laying bare a dream Fassbinder has of artistic rapture – film fulfilling your dream life, allowing you to transcend into an artistic ether – that he can’t believe even as it lingers in his mind and shivers into his soul.

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.

The ‘60s music movie, in its many permutations, was an attempt to diagnose the manifold mutations of a shifting sociocultural landscape. D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal Don’t Look Back figures Bob Dylan as an almost malevolent blank void courting and interrupting power, a clown prince puppeteering every inch of his relationship to the audience’s desire and his prismatic manipulation of it with Warholian ineffability and Keatonesque implacability. Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night frames The Beatles as impish vagabonds harnessing the recalcitrant energies of an unreconstructed, uncontained modernity. Bob Rafelson’s Head, not to be outdone, mounts a vision of The Monkees as tortured poets of a world gone awry and unable to put itself together again. In these films, without always stating it, pop culture becomes a battleground for the fate of the future and an exploration of the limits of authenticity. In rock and folk music, the cinema of this era discovered a way of interrogating film’s very capacity to index reality itself. What, finally, did it mean to “document” truth when truth itself was a maelstrom, in which the method of inquiry itself – the visual representation of reality – confronted a subject that made visuality itself an unstable ground.

Gimme Shelter, a searingly banal documentary by direct cinema auteurs Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, seems, at first glance, to exhibit no such complication. Nor does the film’s subject, The Rolling Stones. Unlike Dylan, they do not thrum with calculated incalculability. They exhibit none of The Beatles’ self-aware, rakish charisma or peripatetic malice. When they are off-stage, they seem neither prey to nor predators of the forces that the Monkees found themselves wound up in. For the most part, they seem entirely unaware of the world around them, abstract ciphers approached by unknowing cameras.

The aforementioned movies and the aforementioned musicians all project a sense of interdependence and estrangement from the cultures that produce them. They are complex arrays of personal and social complexes, reflecting the ambiguities of gazes and desires that are offered, given, rescinded, and contested. Gimme Shelter, conversely, more or less depicts The Rolling Stones, who seem so happy to characterize themselves as willful collaborators with dark forces in songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Paint it Black,” as entirely helpless. Gimme Shelter punctures the air out of countercultural acts of self-mythologization and optimistic social liberation not, as is usually written, by freighting these aspirations with self-inflated import and forcing them to confront a demonic ground labelled “the end of the 1960s.” What the film offers is more frightening and more thoroughly deflationary. Gimme Shelter implies that it may have meant nothing at all in the first place, that its most shining surfaces may have had much less going on underneath.

In Black Girl, his 1966 cinematic debut, writer-director Ousmane Sembène casts himself as a local Senegalese schoolmaster, a figure who shares and spreads knowledge but, crucially, does not limit or control it. In his silent, accommodating, generous spirit, as a man who seems to see and explore more than know and dominate, he embodies the non-dogmatic mode of storytelling practiced by the film itself. In contrast to the typical characterization of the Hollywood director as a master-storyteller and moral jurist underlining every gesture, Sembène’s film is a cinema of non-tendentiousness, an act of poetic witness. It embodies the spirit of post-colonial “Third Cinema,” a cinema of righteous indignation that achieves moral clarity through paradoxical diffuseness, that wanders perambulates with its meaning rather than arbitrating it. Black Girl is an elliptical, exploratory text, one that slowly accumulates a deep and abiding frustration with the ghostly after-image of European colonialism but asks us to actively probe its recesses and shift with its resonances rather than passively accept a meaning that has been handed down and foreclosed for us.

When his protagonist Gomis Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) accepts employment as a childcare specialist for a white family in Senegal, eventually moving with them to France, she gives them a mask from her community as an act of compassion for the employment. Intended as a gift, a continuation of an active tradition of mutual generosity and togetherness, it has to survive becoming a mere totem. To her employer Madame (Anne-Marie Jelienk), it’s a predetermined object to fasten to her wall, an “authentic” marker of a stable and unmoving African culture. It is Madame who embodies the characteristic administrative authority of the dominating director, turning life into a symbolic abstraction, displacing the contingencies of an experientially abundant existence by congealing them into markers of assumed and unquestioned meanings. A mask that signifies so much, that refuses to be prematurely settled, for Diouana and her community becomes, for Madame, an essentialized indicator of an “authenticity” which can decorate without complicating her apartment and anoint without troubling her soul with indicators of her liberality and cultural awareness. Her desire to adorn it on her wall emblematizes her desire to pin its meaning down, to turn it from a living cultural object into an anthropological artifact.

However, the mask, which is so fecund and meaningful in Sembène’s film, always remains deliriously, deviously polysemic. It moves through the film, but it is not, and cannot be, ever summative of it or of any single meaning in particular. In one beautiful shot, Diouana stares at the mask on the wall, only to turn the top half of her body around to look at us. She becomes both the mask’s mirror, a repetition of its objectified silence, and its conduit, quietly implicating us in our own acceptance of inequality as it radiates a kind of resonant stillness. In moving her body toward it but turning back to us, she becomes its conversational partner in an intimate encounter teeming with unresolved suggestion. As a figuration of passage, the mask is a reflection of both oppression and resistance, a mute witness to violence that is also a beckoning social critic.

The mask’s constitutive ambiguity trembles throughout the entire film, especially in Christian Lacoste’s lustrous cinematography, which figures whiteness itself as a kind of luminescent longing that inspires and entraps Diouana, who early on speaks of France as an object of desire, and as the blinding, abyssal emptiness it eventually becomes to her. When she first enters the apartment in France, the shot figures Diouana’s face and the mask as two lonesome black dots on a forbidding white plane. The colonial buildings in Senegal too are viciously white slabs pricked by what we initially think of as black voids, towering edifices of colonial austerity and monolithic banality that trap the dark windows, manifold through they may be. But color remains cinematically multivalent and ambiguous throughout the film, a restless evocation of the fluctuations of identity and home. In Paris, a trapped Diouana looks outside her window and sees a pitch-black apparent nothingness pock-marked by white lights. While it emblematizes her loneliness, the reversal of color also prophecizes a potential refuge in the very darkness, the legion manifestations of a complex blackness, that she sees maneuvering throughout the world, even though whiteness seems to be in control. Like the mask, the darkness itself comes to signify not acquiescence or emptiness but the proliferating possibility of an object that remains impenetrable to the knowing or controlling eye.

Force of Evil opens on a god’s eye view of downtown New York, a promise of access to the totality of the city from a harmonious, analytical distance. Within minutes, Abraham Polonsky’s film will explore every nook and cranny of that promise as it descends into a labyrinth of ambiguous relations and inconclusive aspirations. Yet Polonsky never gives up on the ideal of his vision: to confront an amoral miasma with bracing moral clarity. Unlike many other film noirs, Force of Evil is not an equivocal descent into a swamp of unclarifiable social engagements. Polonsky’s moral point, that capitalism is a fundamentally inhuman mode of existence, is strikingly clear. The interesting thing, in fact, is how transparent it all is, how very much the on-location shooting, like the prior year’s The Naked City, presents us with a city that is all too aware of its own comings and goings, its accepted moral calculus, the quiet viciousness it has come to call home. Force of Evil, pace most noirs, is surprising for how unshadowy it all feels. It presents a city that has come to terms with its inner rot and legitimized it.

When we return to the streets much later in the film, Polonsky treats the city as an unforgiving social system but also an opaque region of the mind that might, just might, achieve transcendent clarity. In a mid-film excursion to a city park, a Church leers less as a sinister evocation of muddled ethical allegiance than a moral reminder of the limits of this way of living. When a series of birds fly away behind two characters talking, it’s as though they wish to escape the contours of this film. They float free, and the fact of their freeness implicates the characters in the illusory notion of capitalist freedom they live by. They are the only ones who escape a film about the exorbitant violence of America’s promise, a film in which everyone is trying to save everyone else via a system that kills everyone else, and almost always not knowing which is which, or how they came to become one and the same.

Largely overlooked for the films that flank it in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, 1956’s The Wrong Man is a deviously minimalist minor masterpiece, a slowly encroaching fog of existential despair in between more obviously conspicuous crests of cinematic ability. If his other, more obviously masterful films from the same era constitute apexes of formal control and metacritical acumen, The Wrong Man is striking for how thoroughly unadorned it is, how barrenly it lays itself before us. 1954’s Rear Window dissected voyeuristic masculinity. 1958’s Vertigo analyzed the desire to find patterns in a world of chaos, to bind an unwound world with illusions of control and continuity, even to shape others to fit your prefabricated mold of them. 1960’s Psycho recognized that we are all our own protagonist in our story, and that recognizing this fact might suddenly dismember someone else’s story. The Wrong Man shares imaginative territory with all these films, but it also totally evacuates them. It is not a vortex, magnetically collecting particles of cinematic skill into a violently-wound whole, but a nebula, a dispersed array of images and sounds that collectively expel our expectations for a sophisticated potboiler or a sudden shock. Unusually for this master cinematic magician, it seems to have nothing up its sleeve. It only has itself, and it lays itself bare for us.

The Wrong Man, which nominally traverses Hitch’s most thrilling, most recurrent territory of misidentified protagonists, is not a masterful thriller but a self-consciously master-less one, a film that is absolutely and finally prey to the vagaries of the world around it. Here, and only here, did Hitch suggest that the modern world itself is so chaotically unmoored and so distorted with the vagaries of chance and suspicion, that his capacity to carefully fabricate and painstakingly demarcate complex stories of control and blame can’t match up. Hitchcock’s ability to craft ingenious episodes of spellbinding confusion have nothing, he suggests, on life’s everyday ability to make us enemies of ourselves.

Blue Collar boasts one of the great, self-implicating opening credits in cinema history. As workers at a car factory in Detroit negotiate the everyday mundaneness of life under late capitalism, the film repeatedly freeze-frames their tasks, chopping into their rhythms as the names of the filmmakers themselves seem to terminate their motion, to lock them into a cinematic-industrial prison. These men are busy minting and assembling the very apparatus that controls them, as not only the machinery of capitalism but the hardware of cinema atomizes and exsanguinates these men. The music, a swirl of blues lamentation and industrial punishment, seems at once to keep them alive and to keep them in place, to pulverize them in frames that stop and pause every time you think they’re going to get going. A mordant metaphor for the perils of the modern world, the credits prefigure and anticipate the violence that the world, and the film, will later do to these men as they go about their lives. Pressed in between machines and tools, they no longer even need to be swallowed by the anthropomorphized machine, a la Chaplin’s Modern Times, which at least took on a corporeal form that we could see and name. Here, the style of the film itself is against them. It melds with the very machinery of manufacturing, the two fulcrums of the ambivalent and often abyssal modernity that Michigan-born writer-director Paul Schrader cut his teeth on. It is only when the corrupt union representative struts through the frame that the film is able to smoothly compose itself, to run in full motion, to visualize a supple art in a stable world designed for him, not for them.

Watching (and listening to) this intro, I could not help but think of William Attaway’s classic 1941 proletarian novel Blood on the Forge, the story of three Southern African American brothers who travel to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills in the early 1900s. Throughout the novel, the protagonist Melody emerges as a chronicler of the soul who inhabits the world openly and evocatively. His endless capacity for music transmutes the sensuous currents of existence into a vagabond poetics of protean presences, channeling the world itself into human energy. At the novel’s end, however, Melody hears a sound “too heavy a load to be carried on the wind,” described as “like a big drum.” He must imagine an instrument of culture, the very thing that has protected him, to avoid the implications of the forces capital has brought to bear on a vast landscape that seems beyond engagement. Music, here, no longer marks his creativity but his delusion, the failure of sound to offer a mode of escape from a system that can produce a far more booming, far more penetrating music than he, alone, ever could. His playful, peripatetic consciousness finally becomes not a redemptive enlivener of stray energies but a wayward monument to capitalism’s ability to render the environment, and the capacity to sense it, into a tool for its own purposes. The blues of his soul finally merges with the very oppressive industry that produces it. He becomes not an enlivened poet of the American laboratory, but, rather, a husk evacuated of his own self.

For Paul Schrader, the film scholar turned writer-director whose most famous academic text is an analysis of cinematic transcendence, Blue Collar is, much like Blood on the Forge, a defiantly un-transcendental work. In this world, everything is arrayed against your perseverance, and even your mechanisms of inhabiting the world creatively and aspirationally are accomplices in your own subjection. The coca cola machines steal your money. In a bar scene, pinball machines in the background echo jackhammers, a momentary reprieve turned into one more background jostler of the brain. One of Schrader’s heroes was Robert Bresson, a filmmaker who turned individualized action into an art of ethereal serenity, an exalted realm of allegiance with the cosmos where individual commitment becomes a devotional act. In many ways, Blue Collar is a vision of a world where that spiritual singularity is not only monumentally threatened but channeled into new methods of control, the protestant ethic metastasized into, as Max Weber wrote, the spirit of capitalism. The rambunctious vibe of their interpersonal camaraderie illuminates a space of potential resistance and momentary disruption, but in no way of real purpose. Compare Blue Collar to Michael Mann’s deeply Bressonian Thief, with its opening depicting bank robbery and safe welding as poetic abstractions of austere masculine determination, of arraying your energies against the world’s forces. Conversely, in Schrader’s film, a cinematic poem of pyrrhic victories, perseverance is not a temporary communication and battle with the cosmos but an inert illusion of escaping from a labyrinth in which the characters are fatally enmeshed.