Cinema in its early days was intended, mostly, to please. Its spectacular mix of sound and images was considered the most radical invention in the field of entertainment. Yes, early filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein took it upon themselves to craft films that were not only depictions of real-life pain and joy, making the cinematic endeavour look more artistic with their unimpeachable filmmaking instincts.
But as its imaginative powers expanded, cinema became touchstone form of expression, one that invited all and excluded none. Films became more about the vision of the filmmaker than the expectation of an audience, let alone their comfort. And thus, as a consequence of that path-breaking norm, we were given some of the best films that are truly a discomfort to watch and here are 10 of the greatest ones.
10. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
David Lynch’s long-forgotten masterpiece which he unveiled to an unforgiving, resolutely harsh Cannes Film Festival in 1992 has become something of a mystery in the last few months which saw Lynch return to the world of Peaks for the third instalment of his television show after he had himself called the fictional universe dead post the release of “Fire Walk With Me”, calling himself the accused in that murder.
It is harder to understand why the film drew such intense, voluble criticism at the time of its release looking back. Vincent Canby of The New York Times said in his scathing review, “It’s not the worst movie ever made, it just seems to be.” For what is a rapturous visual, acoustic and tonal work of art it is hard to know why the complaining was so universal and persistent. It was primarily because not many wanted to inhabit its dark, viciously cruel tragedy and others were weary of anything related to “Peaks” at the time.
No one took it for what it was – a horror masterpiece that was so relentless in its examination of the secrets festering the calm of the American suburbia through the horrendous anguish of its heroine, brilliantly played by Sheryl Lee. At times, “Fire Walk With Me” will make you want to move your gaze away, but the inevitable fate of Laura Palmer is made so haunting and harrowing by Lynch that you cannot but watch with awe.
9. Safe
Just as terrifying today as it was in 1995, Todd Haynes’s impeccably layered horror-satire gets so uncomfortable in your skin it has a hard time leaving. As subtle and delicate as it is harrowing and harsh, “Safe” walks the tightrope of cynical distance and increasingly piercing emotional fear with such ease and sophistication, you almost don’t notice it creeping up on you.
Julianne Moore’s Carol White is a wounded good-wife for the ages – one who is not only a tempered, cultured socialite who cannot explain her condition, but also one who has subconsciously always desired escape from her banal, quotidian life. She screams and howls and begins to destabilize as if this has been destined to happen to her forever. But there is also a vast, unvarnished sense of loss that carves a permanent hole into her being and holds you gasping for breath as you begin to comprehend its enormity.
Haynes has always been good at the double-whammy of being an outsider who can harness his singular perception to create work that seems very much from someone who is undeniably an auteur and that has hardly ever been more sharply visible than in this haunting tone poem. Whether Carol’s condition is an allegory for AIDS is debatable and ultimately inconsequential, because its atmosphere shrouding the film that becomes the cause of her plight and in certain ways, ours.
8. Salό or 120 Days of Sodom
Fascism, abuse – both physical and sexual, mind games, coprophagia – the many delights of Salό, if that is even the right word, are far too extreme in their hostility for anyone to declare that they “like” the film. You can admire it, respect it, even find it funny, but it is impossible to warm up to Salό’s incessant, unflinching tendency to scar.
About three fascist men who find themselves with immense power and even greater wealth, Salό finds the cruelty, the inhumanity of their heinous circle, or circles, of abuse of that power utterly human. We read history in newspapers and books and imagine the worst. Salό, quite simply, realizes it in all its believable glory.
Most people find the film unnecessarily gratuitous, hollow even, devoid of all sense of hope and optimism. Pasolini isn’t on a quest to find them in these characters’ perversions and animalistic desires anyway. What he’s looking for is a demise of community and society at the hands of the worst predilections humans could possess when their fulfilment became accessible to them. He stretches the vulgarity and the garishness of their activities to the very extreme, turning thoughts we have temporarily and constantly shirk from into cinematic reality. It’s sickening to say the least, but also indubitably essential.
7. Eraserhead
Variety called Lynch’s surrealistic horror film a “sickening, bad-taste exercise” and like most of the negative reviews received by the film, focused solely on the film’s literary aspects – plot, script, characters. What they, and many others who still denounce the film’s spectacularly atmospheric vision as perverted film-school tactics intended purely to shock, fail to see is how cinematic the film is.
It doesn’t rely on a plot, script or even a single character – even though Jack Nance’s central performance deserves praise – it strips everything down to pure, experiential dread and repulsion, causing heart-stopping bouts of fear and nausea.
Logic and coherence are of as much importance here as they are in most Lynch films, which is to say they are better left bid farewell to at the door. “Eraserhead” spins uncontrollably and is free of all the bondages of mainstream horror, plummeting straight into the calm of sovereign, tonally experimental cinema.
It seems to be curling blood from the very edges of its black and white frames, twitching and shaking to both seduce and cause discomfort. Its masterful blend of visual surrealism and a gritty soundscape that nearly engulfs you proves to be more hypnotic than most of its free-reign instincts might suggest.
6. Straw Dogs
Sam Peckinpah’s eclectic masterpiece draws attention with such awesome finesse there is not one doubt as to how it transfixes you to its imaginative, tragic reality. This is not the work of a novice, this is a filmmaker operating at the height of his powers and exploiting his refined instincts to craft something so excitingly bold, it is a miracle it even exists.
Yes, controversy has always shrouded Peckinpah’s hyper-violent, incessantly brutal film and rightly so – anyone who experiences his hysterical, conflicted, yet pristine vision for the first time will be taken aback by its sheer recklessness. But if observed with respect to its delicate deconstruction of how fragile our morality really is, it’s hard not to come out the other side humbled by a masterful reflection of life’s many deviations into the disastrous.
Conscious of this in every breathing moment of this brilliantly composed film, Peckinpah carves such a hollow tempest in the wake of his characters’ illiteracy of good and bad that all you can do is stare at his unpretentious, accomplished painting with awe
5. Irreversible
Gaspar Noé’s dizzying spin on the most B-movie of all narratives – a rape revenge tale – is the most electrifying film of the century so far. It’s so unabashedly tragic, it’s as if a wormhole opens in the middle of the film’s densely structured thematic landscape and you would drown in it were it not for the unflinching realism simultaneously amplifying and undercutting your misery.
Noé manages to perplex you, with the film’s impossibly elegant back flip that offers a piercing look into time’s construction of a tragedy. He travels through blackened streets and seedy bars, offers comfort in the warmly lit house of our romantic leads, and trauma in the white light of the subway leading to catastrophe.
“It’s safer” a woman tells Monica Belucci’s Alex about the path that would cause irreparable destruction in Alex’s life. Nothing is as it seems, and there is no closure – only a serene simplicity wrapped in a genius narrative gimmick. Yes, someone was killed and someone was raped and beaten with the intent to kill. We read that in newspapers every day. Irreversible cares to tell the tale of lives behind those headlines, hence the discomfort.
4. Come and See
As inviting as that title is, the film’s increasingly infuriated visual prowess is hardly so. Ambulances had to be called in to take viewers for whom the film proved too graphic to the hospital. The history behind Klimov’s classic is vital and harsh, and all that can be said about the film is the same. Its significance not only as a harbinger of wartime truth but as a cinematic milestone handily trumps its insistence on not shielding its audience from the cruelties of the darkest time in human history seen through the eyes of a teenage boy.
Speaking of Aleksei Kravchenko’s immersive, swan-like central performance, it is the beating heart of a film that without it would have simply been the cinematic equivalent of a brick thrown in your face. With it, it’s beautiful, compassionate and consoling. His silence is louder than blood-churning screams, and is perhaps closest to Meryl Streep’s earth-shattering work in Sophie’s Choice than any other performance both in impact and miraculously, in technique.
Come and See is not forgiving. It punishes us for the crimes of our societal flaws, still so deeply entrenched their stains splash on the surface now and then as we try to bury them. It never aims to be perfect, but its visual beauty – an amalgamation of the glorious and the jarring – is some of the most honestly haunting work ever put to screen.
3. A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick’s filmography is as absurdly brilliant if taken chronologically as it would be any other way. Placed between “2001: A Space Odyssey” – his grand, elliptical, concerto to the universe, and “Barry Lyndon” – a glacial, reflection of the meaninglessness born out of the impermanence of human life, “A Clockwork Orange” is rather akin to a good boy turning naughty to prove a point.
Alex DeLarge, Kubrick’s endlessly quotable and fascinating protagonist is fond of raping, drugs and Beethoven’s Ninth, as described in Anthony Burgess’s monumental book. And while the adaptation is a glorious recounting of those predilections, among others, it’s also a cautionary tale about the perils of a society where choice is not afforded – not just to the innocent, but to the criminal as well.
You punish them, it concurs, but you do not manufacture purity in them. Kubrick’s images are riddled, as always, with great ambiguity and thus the lacing of that violence and inhumanity with a singular visual beauty and swoon-worthy classical music might cause some, as it did Roger Ebert, to confuse it with endorsement. But looking closer, you see the ridiculously inane methods employed by the administration to turn Alex into a good man in the film fail, obviously, but their failure is so spectacularly filmed, it wouldn’t matter what Kubrick was alluding to. We’d be eating off of his hands either way.
2. The Holy Mountain
Is Jodorowsky’s masterpiece a big, puffed-up joke? Well, if you’re laughing, you’re either too oblivious to its apathy towards our species and its mindless, aimless quest for realizations bigger than its grasp, or willing to shrug off its hardened reflections of politics, morals, industry and society as too abstract to mean anything. Either way, you need to re-examine its vulgar poetry and its shameless political incorrectness.
In all its squishy, swampy, frankly disgusting mannerisms and movements, The Holy Mountain is such an effortlessly transportive and devil-may-care artistic experiment, you spend days unravelling its many mysteries, musing about its dangerously coherent themes and its ridiculously flamboyant grandiloquence. You trust the filmmaker to safely deliver his heightened vision to you, but it’s not in Jodorowsky’s nature to do it in a platter with sections divided for categories of nutrition.
Instead, his film is a plague. It sinks its teeth into you and begins biting until you concede to its demands and let it toy with your emotions and your palate for the, to put it bluntly, radically gross. You will survive and come out of it given so much to think about the way we lead our mundane lives that all those images seem almost necessary, if not entirely hospitable.
1. Sátántangό
If it were told to a cinephile today who wasn’t aware of it, that a seven-hour long Russian film shot entirely in black and white was the most starkly modern and relevant film of the last 30 years, he or she would probably mock the claimant for being out-of-touch. But if Béla Tarr’s mammoth creation is allowed to linger in your consciousness as it does every time you consume it in all its witty, bleak and desperate glory, it’s all too clear what sway it would hold in the court of film.
Aside from its relentless, unfettered tonal darkness, Tarr’s epic is mostly about a small town and the people that inhabit it. It details their lives in the most considered of brush strokes, each lingering, impeccably paced moment allowing you to breathe in their reality and constantly question their existence as an objective viewer.
Is it God’s view Mr Tarr is claiming to possess here? No, simply a man’s. A view so humble in its opinion of administration, power and community as well as harmony, freedom and aimlessness that it might as well be God’s. Any other, more generous or less harsh, could hardly be truer.
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