The first hour is an engaging thriller, the second, a slow-burn chamber drama about why the thrill of the first isn’t a sustainable lifestyle. This major shift is The Edukators’ secret weapon, or so it thinks. The Edukators riles its audience by exposing its sharp edges early on in the film – its opening sequence, opening credits, and first act explores the silent rage at the heart of the film and its protagonists, yet by its conclusion, the image we’re left with doesn’t seem to be the knife with which the so-called Edukators cuts into their victims of the 1% with, but the shaky hands holding the blade.

For all its talk of revolution and how the disenfranchised should learn to strike back against their oppressors in the realm of class warfare, The Edukators confronts its audience and leads with the dead end that awaits those who blindly ascribe to the tactics of The Edukators in its first half – You either become a person willing to cross out of morally grey territory to incite the change you want to see, or you become a person who compromises his way into a better life, away from the epicenter of class tension and social divide.

The latter person is manifested in the eyes of the film’s main characters as Hardenberg, former-hippie-turned-businessman and class traitor whose house was the center of action during the heist-gone-wrong at the film’s turning point. Hardenberg, while never coming off as antagonistic during his shared screentime with the Edukators, serves as an antagonist for the characters not simply because of what he does (in Jule’s case), but what he represents for all of them: the idea that youth, activism, and the fight against a corrupt system won’t last forever, and they will have to face the choice of which person in the dichotomy mentioned above they’re going to have to be when their fight ends.

In a fitting twist, the film ends with The Edukators, in the style of the many meddling kids that came before them, get away with it, despite Hardenberg, who in another twist, changes his mind about his experience with the Edukators and reverts to ascribing to the privilege and justice of the system that benefits him while disempowering them. But the same way Hardenberg’s encounter with them haunts him, his own story leaves their pursuit of a new adventure with the underlying question: For how long?

Timecrimes should be a film about a mid-life crisis. Its main character is a financially stable, pudgy man in his late 40s with an all-too stable and ideal marriage and home, and its plot points include an off-putting fixation with a younger woman, a number of stylish cars, and the ultimate souring of the main character as a response to the film’s central crisis. That’s what the film is, at its core, and it’s all the better for it. But this story happens underneath layers of horror, thriller, and sci-fi, in that order.

What I find is most sharp and affecting about the film is that in its blend of genres (Horror, Drama, Mystery, Sci-fi, Thriller), it chooses to focus on the drama of the situation the most. We follow the conflicted nature of Hector realizing he’s fated to make a series of downright immoral and unethical choices. This predates a TV series with a similar focus, Breaking Bad, considered by many to be one of the best TV series of all time. The focus on a man “breaking bad” instead of the more outlandish factors surrounding his transformation make the film as compelling as the series (at times, just as horrifying as the series when it wanted to be), and the film boasts the feat of pulling this transformation off in the concise time period of less than 6 hours in this man’s life. 6 hours repeated 3 times, each to its own devastating effect.

This kind of functional examination of time travel in relation to ethics and free will has been utilized in American films within reach of Timecrimes’ release, such as Primer or Looper. Where these films often tackle the larger implications of such time travel (often with plot lines that address some variation of the “What if you went back in time and killed Baby Hitler? Question), Timecrimes decides to keep things personal, and this opens the story up to becoming variations of itself, while sticking to the same skeletal structure of “The misuse of technology = Bad things” that defines the sci-fi genre.

As I mentioned earlier, the film is part-thriller and part-horror as well. While the overall implications of time travel mark the film as sci-fi in nature, each variation of Hector we see, seems to see the story in a different genre. The first, most naïve Hector sees his stretch of the 6 hours as a Horror story – Ogling a woman from afar leads to his stabbing, being chased by a malevolent figure, then having to trust a shady stranger. The 2^nd Hector, one now in the know about time travel and its implications, is caught up in a Thriller – tension mounts in his having to fulfill the sequence in the woods his former self had seen and become caught up in. The 3^rd and final Hector decides to change this twisty narrative by turning it into a revenge-driven Drama, determined to stop the madness and save his wife.

He succeeds, but the film, overall, is a tragedy with sci-fi elements. His mid-life crisis is one filled with despair, but at least it’s over in 6 hours. He saves his wife, but kills an innocent stranger he knew too well to do so. Timecrimes’ storytelling is effective in that it situates its audience directly with its protagonist – in the worst manifestation of the phrase “so much to do, so little time”, taking us to hell and back in the minimum amount of time it takes to radically change a person.

Trollhunter presents its protagonists with a set of problems larger than life in a literal sense. This is odd, considering that when one looks at a country’s problems as its defining factors in the modern context, nations in Eastern Europe are often the last which come to mind. These nations often have no pests to show underneath their First World veneer, but Trollhunter takes the visual of an idealistic East European countryside and gives it a supernatural bend to highlight the trouble buried underneath miles of snow.

The threat seen here is in the trolls mentioned by its title, whose presence evoke a small-scale Kaiju-like threat to its main characters, a group of inquisitive college students who are in over their head, but remain loyal to the pursuit of the truth behind the troll problem. The threat is kept a secret by multiple groups working together to perform a bureaucratic burial of the threat these monsters pose. These groups, which serve to be just as antagonistic as the trolls. Having these people serve as co-antagonist to the threat they’re out to reduce gives the film a better allusion to the threat of climate change and those working to bypass the issue rather than address it, as well as a morally ambiguous perspective that conflicts its audience as much as the people holding and in front of the camera we see it through – a feat that’s impressive for a film dominantly comedic in nature.

Trollhunter walks the line between dry & subtle comedy and dramatic undertones without thinking too hard. Yes, this is a story about a comically serious old man hunting fantastical creatures rendered with distracting CGI, but said man’s comically serious nature is rooted in something unspoken, and these fantastical creatures murder one main character and sentence another to a death by rabies, and the film makes these stakes clear. The film is known as a somewhat-parody of The Blair Witch Project, and instead of playing the visceral dramatic performances of the former as comedy, Trollhunter instead flips them into cold, repressed character beats one would characterize as “very East European”.

The film, while not one of my favorites, is distinct in its mix of approaches to the things it dwells on – Norway’s culture (both social and mythological), environment, and the parties that run it (or run it into the ground, as the film tonally implies). The mix of drama, comedy, found footage camera work, and CGI make for an uneven experience, but the film, like its protagonists, earns the right to broadcast the messages it wants to communicate to its audience.

Leos Carax often presents Paris as a geographical region defined by vast psychological diversity, which allows the surrealism of his film’s plots to suspend their audiences’ disbelief long enough to break them down into accepting the internal logic of the story, which is taken to the extreme here: every 10 to 15 minutes, a new story is being told. What links them all together, is the performance of one man portraying the protagonist of each segment, an eidetic actor known to the audience as Mr. Oskar.

Mr. Oskar, as portrayed by Denis Lavant, is the kind of actor dreamt of by Acting greats such as Stanislavski, Brecht, or Grotowski – his ability to become any one of the characters he portrays for a living, is the fruit of the methods they devised, and that’s without considering the supernatural aspects of his skill set. As an actor, Oskar displays the capacity to cut through and execute the immersive method of Stanislavski in seconds, create plausible, personal, almost-private interactions with co-actor and audience alike the way Adler stressed, and leave the unsettling, incisive effect Grotowski asks his actors to inflict on audiences with the aid of nothing but their ability as performers. Oskar is what any of these practitioners would consider a “holy actor”, the Übermensch each of their techniques could only hope to turn a man into.

The strongest aspect of Holy Motors, along with what makes it the most insane film in this class’s roster, is its complete devotion to the utter destruction of narrative logic. The film begins with a man’s transformation into an old beggar woman, makes a shift from an episode about a monstrous figure kidnapping a woman and using her as a doll into another about a man giving his daughter a scolding, has its lead character die then come back to life in under a minute, and ends with the revelation that the titular cars we’ve seen the leads ride about on one of can talk, and seem to have lives of their own. More than A Woman Is A Woman, or Persona (which is saying a lot), Holy Motors finds ecstasy in the act of breaking its audience’s logic and notions of linearity, forcing them to give in to the high stakes emotional provocation that the film dispenses consistently. This state of emotional susceptibility is something that an actor also ideally inoculates his audience with, early on in performance.

Denis Lavant is a long-time collaborator of Carax’s, and the real-life subtext of this film seems to be that it doubles as a tribute and showcase for the man who’s helped shape Carax’s body of work, in the same manner that Anna Karina served as Godard’s muse during his peak period, albeit in a more professional manner. Holy Motors’ originality, radically deconstructive narrative, and raw power is anchored by the collaboration between these two men, and the appreciation they have for the craft of filling a role to completion. Holy Motors has yet to be named as an iconic and subversive modern classic, but when that day comes, the people behind it will have most likely moved on to works just as strong, if not madder.

As the first “modern” film after a series of classics, Good Bye, Lenin!’s promise of a straightforward narrative and lack of rule-breaking cinematic trickery seemed like a sharp turn away from the image of European Cinema I, and the class, had been painting in our heads based on the edgy, rule-breaking, distinctly European films that came before. However, Good Bye, Lenin! is anchored by a nostalgic sentiment that makes the film a handy transition between the wildly inventive past and unusually stable present of European filmmaking.

Good Bye, Lenin! makes this nostalgic ideal the driving force of the story, which follows the siblings Alex & Ariane as they attempt to keep up the façade of East Germany’s Socialist rule in the bubble that their formerly-comatose mother, Christiane, now exists in due to her poor health, and keep the progressive, Capitalist-leaning image of the now-unifying Germany out. While the film eventually leads the failure of their attempts (something unbeknownst to the siblings), it highlights the fact that history is something that cannot be delineated and sectioned into eras marked by changes, at least to those experiencing it. Christiane’s acceptance of sociopolitical change, albeit short-lived, sews the divides between political situation and generational ideals together, things that were previously points of contention earlier in the film.

While the film takes a linear form of storytelling, with its quirks remaining within the realm of the film’s humour instead of technical form, what possibly makes the film fresh in the canon of modern European cinema is exactly its seeming divorce from the supposedly artsy craft of Europen filmmaking. By utilizing the form of a traditional mainstream narrative (as is often seen in American cinema) and placing it within the context of European history, with a specifically German humour and social awareness, Good Bye, Lenin! has subverted the shape of European cinema as prescribed by the 20^th century. The film is wholesome and tackles homely conflicts, but is painfully aware of this, and smarter in execution because of this awareness.

Like Christiane’s acceptance of social change at the end of it, Good Bye, Lenin! works as a signing off on the use of mainstream modes of storytelling in European cinema, at least within the purposes of this class. Had this film actually been more open-ended, internally self-aware, or fourth wall-breaking in execution, the end result would maybe have been a lesser film. What makes Good Bye, Lenin! a practical and straightforward film is its focus on something that previous films lack, something that threatens the intelligent, radical image of European cinema – Unabashed and unashamed empathy. This is a story about a family driven by love more than anything else, after all, and by embracing this raw sense of emotion and saying good bye to cinematic acts of toying with it, Good Bye, Lenin! proves to be a step forward in the canon of European cinema.

When discussing European Cinema, what is foregrounded is often the filmmaking techniques that mark the film as unique or experimental in lieu of traditional cinematic techniques. In The Five Obstructions, these so-called subversive filmmaking techniques not only mark the story as unique, but their execution and the choices behind them are the story.

A work of non-fiction (for the most part), The Five Obstructions frames the relationship between Von Trier and Leth as a positive reversal of the dynamic we see between the two female leads in Persona. Where the latter has its central duo break each other down through a reversal of power dynamics to a psychologically devastating end, The Five Obstructions uses its reversal of power dynamics to the end of inspiring and creating new art. Von Trier begins as a young presence inspired by Leth’s work, then becomes a manifestation of the trials of modern filmmaking with Leth as his long-suffering contender, and finally becomes both director and tribute maker to Leth’s champion of cinema.

Von Trier’s obstructions come off as misnomers, due to the cinematic potential that the quirks of each set of obstructions offers. Each work that Leth produces seems to be the creation of a different director, giving Leth a chance to display the range of his technical and storytelling ability, through having to create an entirely new body around the spine of what The Perfect Human is at its core. Von Trier implicitly gives himself his own set of obstructions – having to direct at a meta level, being a man directing a film about a man directing a set of films about the film he originally directed. Von Trier’s feat is making this mindboggling situation into an equal display of his and Leth’s capabilities.

Leth’s remakes of his original work are admirable, mostly because of the narrative of an aged auteur being able to once again revolutionize (by way of modernizing) his cinematic techniques, this time for a new audience, as part of a new wave of filmmaking. The creative drought Leth is in at the beginning of the film is an odd situation to find him in, due to the influential status Von Trier ascribes to him. Most directors of this status, by Leth’s age, have often found their niches long before, and have a comfortable but unique set of trademarks identified as a throughline in their body of work. The film traces Leth’s reawakening as a director discovering what makes him entirely distinct and adept as a filmmaker.

The film also traces a reawakening in Von Trier himself, from an artist known for his provocative works beforehand, into one with a surprisingly empathetic edge, capable of presenting his audience with twice the filmmaking prowess one can see in another film.

In retrospect, L’Avventura is clear from the beginning about its preoccupation with empty spaces. An empty space is where the heart of the film should be – specifically, the empty space left behind by its faux protagonist Anna after roughly 30 minutes. Upon first viewing, the rest of the film after her disappearance seems to work like a rush of cells hurrying up to fill and close a fresh wound. The end result, subsequently, evokes the despondency of scarring, with the bulk of the film following a long-winded process of healing, or lack of it.

For most of the film, we’re saddled with the two people who each held Anna as one of, if not the most significant part of their lives. Their “loss” of Anna is what becomes the shape of the narrative, instead of the actual search for her as it would in a mainstream film. However, L’avventura doesn’t seem to want to be identified as a Mystery film – almost all its plot points that seem to lead to an answer wind up becoming a dead end. While the film does dwell on the search for Anna for the bulk of its runtime, the film realistically delivers what the immediate situation around a person’s disappearance would look like – life doesn’t happen plot point to plot point until the missing party is found, it continues at its usual pace, sometimes dwelling for almost too long on captivating visuals, empty spaces, and smaller conflicts that arise. The film is unfiltered in this regard, presenting reality in a blunt fashion for all the mystery the film keeps teasing is under the surface.

The feminine mystique can be named as the scapegoat for all the film’s harsh turns – everyone’s fixation on one woman’s disappearance does jumpstart the film’s narrative, after all. The women in the film behave as if hiding a plot point pertinent to the central mystery of Anna’s disappearance. What makes Claudia distinct from the rest of the women in the cast is that her perspective is how most of the film unfolds, and her desires to find Anna and begin a relationship with Sandro drive the plot from her point of view. This makes Claudia the most vulnerable woman in the film, and the plot only proceeds to take advantage of how exposed she’s become. The treatment of women as either objects to seize or mysterious forces to understand is present throughout the film, and almost seems to make viewers conclude: “If this was the world Anna was dealing with, then no wonder she disappeared”.

L’avventura’s atmospheric use of accentuated settings and lingering takes on characters’ emotional experiences are what mark it as a classic of European Cinema, and its choice to tell a story mostly liberated from dramatic techniques has become influential in waves of independent cinema up until the 21^st century. While L’Avventura and its mysticism may require further reflection to appreciate, its radical but simple style of execution is something audiences see and appreciate, whether they know it or not.

You don’t have to understand Persona, on any level at all, to recognize that the film is a malevolent force. The film elicits fear, emptiness, anxiety, and despondency in its viewers – feelings that often stem from watching a horror film instead of a drama. While the film matches up to its classification as a drama, there remains a threat at its foundation – an existentialist one.

The film achieves this by locking two similar, but disparate existences together – that of Elsabet, an actress, and Alma, the nurse charged with caring for her. Both, professionally, deal with empathy in their trades, the former using it to elicit the respect and understanding of an audience, and the latter using it to reduce the pain and improve the wellbeing of another. By flipping the actions of these women in relation to their roles as professionals, the film seems to examine the ability for empathy to twist into something grotesque in the wake of trauma.

Elisabet responds to Alma’s attempts to defuse the tension between them and reach out to her as a friend rather than nurse by treating her as a subject, devoid of respect and understanding of her experiences and feelings, becoming an audience member complicit in the dehumanization of the character before her. In response to this, Alma inflicts escalating acts of violence, both physical and emotional on her former charge, hellbent on inciting pain in the woman she was sent to help heal.

At some point in the film, it becomes clear that what makes Alma so appealing to Elisabeth is not a need or desire for human companionship or empathy, but that in Alma, she finds a scene partner – the only kind of person she finds herself able to contend with anymore. Following the laws of scenework and spurred on by the need to fulfill the chamber drama the both of them are engaged in, 2 women initially cast in the roles of nurturer and nurtured to one another become locked in a surreal ratcheting of tension, the only breaks in their conflict being (maybe?) dream sequences, and constaft shifts between provoker and provoked, violator and victim.

Their relationship is performative until they reach a comfortable point, wherein they (or at least Alma) become expressive. They remain on equal footing, while their friendship’s defining trait is one-sided banter, but when Alma begins to talk about taboo life-changing sexual experiences, the scales are tipped, and the game changes. The relationship becomes a task of keeping said scales balanced, out of love or hate, by way of affection or pain. Elisabet and Anna play this game well, until all they have left to play against one another, as Elisabet is made to speak at the end of the film, is “Nothing.” The same can maybe be said of relationships and how they decay or grow over time, though Persona would never confirm it. All the film ever needed to do was show its audience the glimpse of what to fear from interpersonal dynamics – the Nothing that remains when your capacity for empathy reaches its end.

A Woman Is A Woman, like its title character, sets out to toy with her captivated audience, and break as many rules as she can and find the next best thing to a happy ending. The rest of the film is a series of detours, gags, and narrative butchery that have become key signifiers of the film’s now-iconic status. In this sense, the film is a con job on an audience thought to be well-versed, even jaded, when considering romantic comedies – A Woman Is A Woman, like a successful criminal, gets what it wants, and leaves its victims feeling more naïve than they thought was possible.

A Woman Is A Woman’s greatest trick lies in its ability to create and commit to the narrative contradictions it utilizes. Angela is the most empowered exotic dancer, at the most polite and carefree strip club, in cinematic history. She and her boyfriend argue, then decide to stop talking to eachother, yet continue the argument nonetheless via written text. The film includes a musical number, but divorces the music and the lyrics. “Is this a tragedy or a farce?”, one of the two leading men asks the other. A Woman has the audacity to attempt to be both, and is all   the better for it. “Either way, it’s a masterpiece.”, the other replies.

Where European films are allegedly known to subvert and avert Hollywood tropes of storytelling and traditional audiovisual technical work, A Woman Is A Woman instead inverts its every given trope, playing its plot for parody instead of criticism. Where a stylistically mainstream film would treat the scene where Angela tells Alfred to wait for her signal via awnings as straightforward, by having her send him a clear signal of her leaving Emile, or a subversive film would have her send no signal and leave Alfred waiting, or an aversive tactic that would do away with the sequence, considering its eventual outcome, the film plays with this dramatic tool, and toys with the audience the way Angela does, by sending Alfred mixed signals, and us a comedic situation out of a dramatic setup. The same can be said of the arc of the film’s love story – all the romantic drama set up falls on its own sword and becomes laughable. The film refuses to subject the tension between its 3 leads to tropes reserved for dramatic, all-consuming love triangles Romance genre-savvy audiences were accustomed to. The film’s most out-of-place scene is also its most typical: One where dramatic & diegetic music foregrounds Angela’s contemplation of the melodrama she’s currently embroiled in.

All these elements work towards an ending that flips off the conventions of romance as told by Hollywood – that love stories end with either a grand gesture and a comedic quip, or heartbreak and separation. A Woman Is A Woman chooses all these things, Angela turning a choice that would be simple in another, serious storyThe so-called resolution leaves its audience with the feeling that things are only going to get increasingly complicated for the characters and their relationships, but at least, for once, the story of a relationship, and the woman bringing it to hell and back, is allowed to be this complicated – the knot that the film twists itself into is what makes it remarkable.