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arrays of personal and social complexes, reflecting the ambiguities of gazes and desires that are offered, given, rescinded, and contested.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.