American Gigolo is usually described as a key neo-noir text. It strikes me as a kind of anti-noir, not a text that skirts the shadows of a seemingly bright modernity but a film that has accepted how the shadows themselves aren’t as threatening when the light is so obviously hollow. American Gigolo treats noir as banal, unequipped for the violence of the modern world. This is a world that has made peace with its shadows and lacquered them in a façade of beauty.

The key moment, to me, is an encounter where protagonist Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) accosts a threatening conspirator in front of a movie theater, dwarfed by a poster of The Warriors. If that film was the apotheosis of the New York of Schrader’s most famous script, Taxi Driver, murder as a spontaneous, bodily, nocturnal emission, this film is L.A. warfare: cold, calculated, and all-too-mechanical. That 1979 film cavorts with denizens of a social netherworld, caged creatures of a modern void looking to escape it in ways they haven’t fully fathomed. They lived by the images they paint on, the masks they wear, second skins as authentic selves. They form entire sub-cultures, leaping into jeans and leather pants and each other’s personal spaces with the ramshackle, reaching energy of unbridled youth. The Warriors pounces on everything. American Gigolo is always knowingly keeping a distance from itself, aware that it lives in a world that is completely alienated from itself. It can only live in that gap, slowly stalking prey that gets trapped in the space between truth and fiction.

Kaye, too, is being stalked by this film. He is rendered background, wallpaper, a hastily-put-together man of disposable, posable parts sitting with leering torso images behind him. “You were frameable,” Bill Duke brutally intones near the end of the film, something the text wisely never underscores as double entendre, but it’s clearly the governing motif of the film’s mise-en-scene. A key image of him looking at himself in the reflection of a chic print writes his fate in an image. Gere’s Kaye is a walking specter of a person here, a mannequin violently controlling his self-image, manicuring every moment until he finds himself lost in an honest-to-God narrative outside his control. The trouble is that, while the narrative he steps into has its sights set on him, it is also very much the world he wants to inhabit.

Surfaces shape this narrative. They both bind it and unravel it. Kaye is a high-priced male escort for upper-class older women whose life funds and determines his lifestyle, a mode of being that he protects with a devotional fervor that borders on divine ardor. Yet he seems essentially opaque, a blank space whose zealotry is unthinking. It’s hard even to call it blind belief. He doesn’t seem to believe anything, and his reaction to being framed for a murder entangled in his work is less anger than robotic curiosity, as though saving his name is simply his automatic response to the machinery of his world being interrupted. Kaye is little more than a cog of the machine working to set itself right.

In a sense, it’s not much of a narrative then. There’s little contingency or chance. It’s a mood pretending to be a narrative, mocking us with how little is really going on in the story we’re being told to watch out for, and how much is being slipped in between the frames. The camera looms from above, something Schrader would metastasize in his next film, 1982’s Cat People. But here it evokes less a negligible line barely covering a nebulous depth – a thin strand holding a black hole at bay – than a flat, planar surface with no depth at all. It seems to watch, from above, as the world empties itself out of possible meaning. Light tries to peek in, but shutters, also from above, break up the illumination into violent black and white lines, silently fractalizing Kaye into light and shadow, deconstructing him into his component parts. The light through the blinds seems to be breaking the facade apart, fissioning the image of the man into pieces, and he either doesn’t know how to respond or can only cope with it by doubling-down on his alienated sangfroid.

The film is, in this respect, not unlike The Warriors after all. Walter Hill and Paul Schrader were two of the bastard children of the New Hollywood movement, birthed within it but in search of their other forebears, namely the chilly art-house ennui of European avant-garde cinema. The dominant texture of the ‘70s New Hollywood was spontaneous, cobbled-together, and live-wire, a vision of brutal and ragged reality tearing through the façade papering it over. Men like Hill and Schrader fold in a cryptic and impressionistic gaze that seems unsure of what breaking through the images that consume them might really mean. These directors engage modernity’s conundrums not with the ravenous, mischievous human vivacity of the ‘70s directors but with a near-apocalyptic loss of self. Where earlier films unleashed something vital and rotten underneath the surface of an apparently accepting, compassionate society, American Gigolo is all surface.

Thus, the film is all tone and texture, a collective act of stylistic theft in which the depth of the text, the possibility of a world with layers, is stolen by a cabal of conspirators insisting on the emptiness beneath their efforts. Giorgio Armani’s costumes are stark and warmly forbidding, inviting but entrapping like a Lycra straight-jacket. Ferdinado Scarfiotti’s cannily controlling production design is an open-air prison. Most devious of all is Giorgio Morodor, a man who would help redefine a decade of cinema music by turning to smooth, brittle sounds lost between analog pasts and digital futures. Here, they mark the film as a febrile commentary on modernity itself. Even the exquisite Greek Chorus of Blondie’s “Call Me” feels like an ambivalent, absolutely iridescent refrain: how much can the film do with so little, and is this a manifesto of artistic imagination or a statement of creative death?

Gigolo is too good a film to not make the case for imagination, but it requires serious moral rectitude, one that, Schrader suggests, isn’t going to come easy.  In the film’s final scene, one woman sacrifices everything that her life has been building to, her entire social and public image, for a moment of personal grace. Whether or not Julian has come to understand the value of this sacrifice, after all he’s been through, remains a question mark. Putting their hands on a glass protrusion between them, one surface that finally, explicitly literalizes their separation from one another, they try to transform a canvas of alienation into a forge of redemption, a zephyr of personal authenticity to cut through the surfaces that is nonetheless formed by those very surfaces. In a deliciously ambivalent frisson, Schrader asks whether the image itself can become a weapon of something that looks quite a lot like absolution, at least on the surface.

Score: 9/10

Whatever else can be said about Paul Schrader’s 1982 adaptation of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 shadow cat of the same name, it is a wonderfully interesting film of contradictory textures, a fiendish, feral text that is also a cold and mercurial thing. It feels like looking at fog condense on glass: a text of lustful energies clamped down on hard. Its director, Paul Schrader, so abstract and theoretical in his inclinations, is perhaps the worst man to take up the original’s suggestively cinematic mantle, but his discomfit benefits the material. He seems fundamentally alienated from this film. The camera floats around the humid streets of New Orleans like a disembodied spectre, or a trail of smoke. Ethereal and animalistic, the film feels like it could either diffuse into the atmosphere or lash out at our throats and splinter in our eyes at any moment, like it either wants to dissipate from this world or to seek revenge on us for bringing it into being. Much like its central protagonist, this Cat People seems unsure of its own ability to settle down in the world it depicts.

For a film so adrift and evanescent, to have a director so tortured by the limits of human freedom in the world, and perhaps so uncertain of his own capacity to exist in that world, ends up being an oddly perfect fit. Schrader’s points of ingress into the material are so esoteric. Here is a man who really never has anything to say about gender adapting a seminal text of feminist (or anti-feminist, depending on your analysis) horror. The screenplay by Alan Ormsby, the unsung, nefarious accomplice of horror director Bob Clark in the mid-‘70s, implies that the original was also a film about alienation more broadly (of obvious interest to Schrader), about one’s attempt to create oneself in the world and finding oneself occupying spaces with thick histories that one feels fundamentally disconnected from. Finally, the material becomes a folktale, an age-old fable about our un-fitness for a world we can’t refuse.

Cat People begins in America’s most exceptional – as in, abnormal –  city, New Orleans, essayed here as a sort of old-world summoning, a place out-of-time and, thus, the only space in which protagonist Irena (Natassja Kinski) might feel home. Recently transplanted to the U.S. in search of her estranged brother Paul (Malcolm McDowall), she finds herself in a phantasmagoria of thoroughly uncoupled spaces. Schrader sees the city as America’s closest linkage to European sensibilities but frames the tension between America and Europe as a subterranean pressure fissuring the film apart at the seams. Geography seems to break again and again. Within a cut, we’ve moved from seemingly antediluvian scaffolding barely holding chthonic forces at bay to a confrontation with a grotesque caricature of Marilyn Monroe. Another cut, and we’re in a thoroughly unclarifiable building that looks like a gaudy, iridescent Emerald City castaway (marking this film as a darker cousin to Coppola’s One From the Heart and beating Lynch’s Wild at Heart absurdist Wizard of Oz by nearly a decade), before finding ourselves hovering over a candy-coated floorboard, as though we’re witnessing a polymorphous Americana’s dreams of itself. John Bailey’s cinematography is phenomenally suggestive: lurid giallo colors washed out into hazy afterimages, like the fire of hell dulled but expanded by the passage of time into a smoky effusion forever suspended between states of being, drifting between kinds of matter. One of the most sensual sequences occurs in an airport, perhaps the most liminal of spaces, but this is always a film travelling from station to station.

The first two minutes of The Tall Target are more inventive than the entirety of any average Best Picture Oscar winner. The credits creep slowly but surely, with a stately, methodical gait evoking both a reportorial matter-of-factness – a ripped-from-the-headlines present-tense – and a fatalistic timelessness, as though whatever is about to happen is on an inexorable march to eternity. This credit crawl tells not of a galaxy long ago and far, far away that still feels like the future but, rather, a century of American history compressed into the tightest cloister and pushing, like a piston, right up against America’s present.

The train on which the film is set functions as a kind of metaphor for modernity itself: an intersection of inevitability and contingency that marks the vehicle as both a beacon of an imminent, impending, unavoidable modernity and, paradoxically, a herald of an uncertain world and a country whose obsession with national redemption and unearned consensus had been fissured and cracked open.

The Man from Planet X is certainly not the greatest work of director Edgar G. Ulmer, but it may be his greatest work. The Black Cat and Detour are stone-cold minimalist masterpieces. The former is an enigmatic, lacerating post-mortem of World War I’s phantasmagorical hold on the 20^th century, a past that was no past at all. The latter is a soul-crushing existential excavation of an aimless present, a portrait of mid-century Americana going around and around to nowhere. Man from Planet X turns the dial forward to a new decade and a new set of concerns: a ‘50s film about ’50s anxieties done up in ‘50s Poverty Row ramshackle-ness, a sci-fi potboiler about an alien creature lost amidst foreign souls. This being, the titular Man from Planet X, has nothing to survive on: he can’t even communicate with anyone around him, yet he manages to command dozens of people nonetheless. This abject outsider, working with nothing yet exercising unexpected power nonetheless, could be a melancholic echo of Ulmer himself, and his alienated entity of a film.

Perhaps the most primordial display of his talents, The Man from Planet X stands, literally, on only Ulmer’s skill and nothing more. This film barely exists, and its bareness is poetic, a mise en abyme of reality laid bare, an abyss with absolutely nothing up its sleeve. “Yet they have a grim beauty of their own,” a character remarks, and you can see Ulmer’s dejection about his career trajectory slowly etch into a grin at a description of his own oeuvre.

The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”

When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.

1968 was a year on the edge of eternity, a transformational vortex of social revolution and political stress. Hammer Horror was, to put it kindly, not a company fit to weather the storm. Their moral universe was mostly conservative (in the small “c” sense). Their films, skulking with fiendishly recalcitrant minor currents though they could be, were fundamentally about staving off the forces of darkness, typically equated with dissent. While their films drew new blood from old horror chestnuts, they were very much playing the classics. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, horror cinema became very much contemporary. Anxiety about nuclear catastrophe and new technologies of mass destruction produced modern-set horror films with distinctly present-tense fears. The late ‘60s, meanwhile, would thrash horror into the future: influenced by the post-modern fragments of shattered reality coming from Europe and the acid baths of ‘60s psychedelia, they erupted the social canvas rather than creeping in the background. Hammer Horror’s heyday was in between these channels, the late 1950s and early 1960s, racing against a tide of history that would wash the company into oblivion.

The company’s most adept conduit of that fear was director Terrence Fisher. One of his final films with the company, The Devil Rides Out, is perhaps the paradigmatic ideal of a mainstream British horror film negotiating the Apollonian pull of order and the Dionysian energies teeming underneath society. The film exhibits a brutal, stone-faced rigidity, the product of obvious fear about the world coming undone around it and its own attempts to straight-jacket those tremblings. In its fear, perhaps without intending to, it also gives voice to that uncertainty, becoming a herald of an unquiet society. That it can’t fully appreciate its own tensions, can’t quite admit to its own inner restlessness, is all the more potent a suggestion that it knows the complexities of the world around it, and needs to deny them to survive.