One of the darlings of the European art cinema scene, Bernardo Bertolucci’s esteemed reputation rests more popularly with two very different films: Ultimo Tango a Parigi [Last Tango in Paris] (1973) and The Last Emperor (1987). If these two seem a little disparate, then it is perhaps his earlier masterpiece, Il Conformista, which can be seen to unite the two: a lush, visually stunning character study of sexual dysfunction, its causes and its disastrous effects.

At its core, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), one of cinema’s great monsters of passivity, a man so desperate for an everyday life that he ends up embroiling himself in Fascism, and ultimately murder. The setting is the Europe of the 1930s – where political battlelines are being drawn up from country to country, and loyalties tested to their fullest extents. But Clerici does not represent one of Mussolini’s partisans, he is something much more dangerous, and common; someone willing to go along with Il Duce and his acolytes simply to fit in with what is considered normal.

His marriage speaks volumes about his character; his soon-to-be wife, the beautiful Giulia (a never more alluring Stephania Sandrelli) is dull, needy, brainless, in many ways his perfect match. In a series of bizarre scenes we are introduced to the other significant figures in his life: his morphine-addicted mother, as decaying as the old family villa she resides in, and his father, now incarcerated in an eerie, garish lunatic asylum. But there is one figure that looms larger in Clerici’s consciousness; in flashback, we see the young Clerici saved from bullying at the hands of his schoolmates by a chauffeur, Lino, who then makes sexual advances towards him. The boy responds by taking the older man’s gun, shooting wildly around before realising that he has shot him.

Alberto Moravia’s source novel Il conformista (1951) makes more of the psycho-sexual problems arising from Clerici’s early life, but Bertolucci’s film wisely simplifies them for clarity’s sake. On the narrative plane, the film shows how his childhood trauma leads to his later dysfunctionality, from which springs a somewhat skewed desire to live what he perceives to be a normal existence, fascist or otherwise. So when, back in between-the-wars Italy, a colleague asks him for help in assassinating his former teacher, an anti-fascist who is now living in exile in Paris, he finds himself torn between his rather lacking sense of morality and his social ambition.

The strong themes explored here, coupled with the exceptional performances from its leads, would be more than enough to make Il Conformista a worthwhile film to watch. That the ambiguity of the central character would serve as a template for later conflicted screen villains, most notably Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972) and more especially The Godfather Part II (1974) is of particular interest. But what raises it to the heights of critical praise is its stunning use of cinematography to create its unsettling, seedy tone. Director of photography Vittorio Storaro here created a maelstrom of colour coding – the icy coldness of the whitewashed asylum where his father lives compared with the rich autumnal colours of his mother’s house a somewhat oedipal signpost, the cool parma violets of Paris (a punning reference to the director’s home town) contrasting with the hot reds found elsewhere. The full gamut of camera-trickery too: odd angles (a la The Third Man), expressionist-like shadows, pans, zooms – maybe this is what Martin Scorsese is always trying to out-do.

To complement this cinematography, there is the magnificently lush production design, created by Ferdinando Scarfiotti. The Fascist period in Italy was one of uniquely bold designs in terms of architecture, fashion and decor, and these modes are beautifully rendered: the beautiful costumes worn by Guilia and Anna, the lavish houses of the urban bourgeoisie, contrasting with the large, imposing, cold offices of the bureaucratic machine. There are cinematic echoes of Leni Riefenstahl, but also visual nods to earlier styles: the film draws to a close under the arches of the Colosseum – a symbol of the imperial past that Mussolini aspired to recreate. Bertolucci’s film is a visually-striking masterpiece not easily forgotten.

To those not overly familiar with his work, the name of director Ingmar Bergman can be a bit off-putting when selecting a film to watch of an evening; isn’t he the dour Swede whose films are about existential isolation, death and religious guilt? Well, yes. A cheery viewing of the likes of Winter Light (1962), The Silence (1963), or Persona (1966) is not likely to uplift one’s spirits on a cold evening with a bag of Doritos and bottle of Chardonnay, but not all of his output should be considered to be so gloomy. His breakthrough film, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was a light farce and comedy of sexual manners, and his two early masterpieces, The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957) are notable for their moments of bawdy humour as much as their more philosophical passages. No such guffaws with those other two ‘heavy’ religious directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson.

So for those looking to penetrate his oeuvre, there is perhaps no better starting point than what is easily his most accessible film, Fanny and Alexander. Firstly, it is important to point out that the 188-minunte film is actually a condensed version of a four-part five-hour-plus TV movie made for Swedish television, later shortened for theatrical release. This, i suppose, in part explains its relative ease of viewing in comparison to his strictly cinematic output, though detractors may well accuse it of being Bergman-lite because of this.

Bergman’s more sombre pieces centre on adults in very adult situations, so what makes Fanny and Alexander different is that the two eponymous protagonists of the film are children. They are members of the Ekdahl family, well-to-do aristocrats in an anonymous Swedish town at the turn of the twentieth century. The film takes its time introducing us to the main components of this extended family at their large Christmas gathering, and we quickly warm to their quirky idiosyncrasies: Helena the charismatic matriarch, Gustav Adolf the flirtatious uncle whose wife Alma serendipitously turns a blind eye to his mistress-taking, Maj the nursemaid whom Gustav is eyeing up, another uncle Carl who farts on the staircase for the childrens’ (and his own) amusement. The children’s father Oscar is an emotional man, early on seen tearfully giving a speech to the staff at the family theatre he runs, more from enthusiasm than talent. Their lavish surroundings, in the opulence of their large family house, are so warmly captured on film by Bergman’s long-time DP Sven Nykvist.

It is over an hour into the film before the first major plot point; in a production of Hamlet several days later, Oscar is taken ill and soon dies. His wife Emilie can be heard at night howling with sorrow at his coffin-side, Alexander listening on in fear and incomprehension. In grief, she soon accepts the hand in marriage of the local Lutheran bishop, Edvard Vergerus, a stern-looking but handsome figure who seems to be kindly enough to take on the lonely widow and her two young children. But the regime in the bishop’s house is a strict, puritan one. Where the Ekdahl house was bathed in colour and lavish decor, the Vergerus household is cold, sparse, ascetic. Alexander feels opressed by this environment, his imaginative flights of fancy brutally punished by his remorselessly violent new step-father.

The film offers up the interpretation of it being at least semi-autobiographical; Bergman himself grew up in a Lutheran household, his father Erik a minister whose strict disciplinarianism meant the young Ingmar was frequently subject to terrible punishments for seemingly minor infractions. In the film, Edvard is shown to act less from a dogmatic standpoint, but out of fear and insecurity, clearly reflecting Bergman’s own views about his father – a man he sees as more despised than respected. But autobiography only explains so much; the Hamlet leitmotif is unmistakeable, explicitly referenced by Emilie at one stage, and the various visual references and allusions to the artifice, the theatre, puppetry and tricks of the light are enough to discourage too literal a reading of the story. Bergman, after all, was a man of the stage, interested not so much in realism but in dramatics.

The film opens with a piece of pure magic: Alexander, hiding underneath a table in one of the Ekdahl mansion’s spacious and well-filled rooms, spies a large statue in the corner of the room, which seems to somehow come to life, albeit briefly. Later, shortly after Oscar dies, the children are playing with a slide projector, magically displaying its colourful images on a white screen, when they see their dead father playing on the family piano in the next room. They stand agape, and the scene ends, unresolved, unexplained. Oscar’s ghost will reappear, and his presence will be felt throughout through the film’s clever repetition of his piano playing in the subtle, low-key score. Magic and mystery, as an escape both literal and metaphorical from repression, comes to be the key theme of the film. If the scenes in the film’s final third, which show the childrens’ flight from their captor, confuses the viewer, then perhaps they too, like bishop Edvard, are lacking in the ability to believe in the supernatural, and the importance of imagination.

The final scenes appear to tie everything up neatly, but as is only fitting for such a richly complex film we finish on more of a question mark than a full stop. Fanny and Alexander may be physically free from their religious captivity, but one sinister scene makes clear that they, like Bergman himself, will never be able to shake off mentally those shackles. If there is hope, though, it is in the closing lines read to him by his grandmother, from August Strindberg, summing up not only this beautiful film but much of Bergman’s attitude towards life, and his chosen craft:

“Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and Space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.”

“That is the musical equivalent of Che Guevara… take it all in”.

So says Tony Wilson, ‘Mr Manchester’ and subject of Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, as he stands over the open coffin of the recently deceased Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. If one scene can sum up this film, then perhaps this is it, for two reasons. Firstly, it illustrates the character of the man whose career we spend the film following: the statement managing to be utterly pretentious, if arguably in part true, and a grossly inappropriate thing to say at a funeral wake. But more importantly, the scene is illustrative because it didn’t actually happen in real life; the film explicitly deals in hearsay, rumour and blatantly false legend, and is all the better for it.

Wilson, for the uninitiated, was a true curio: a regional television presenter for Granada Television in Manchester, he fronted the short-lived music programme So It Goes between 1976 and 1979. This happened to place him at the birth (and death) of British Punk, his baptism of fire coming when he attended the Sex Pistols’ infamous first Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. That night would change the Manchester music scene forever inspiring the likes of Joy Division, Buzzcocks, The Smiths and The Fall amongst countless others. Wilson himself too would be changed: in the presence of a broadcasting ban on the Pistols, his small regional show would be the only place punk bands could be seen, thrusting him into the national spotlight.

Wilson would go on to form a record label, Factory, and later open a nightclub, The Haçienda, and find himself at the centre of the music scene of that great northern English city, and the film charts the ups and downs, successes and catastrophic failures, moments of inspiration and utter foolishness which seemed to go hand-in-hand with his artistic business decisions. But in the background of the sex and drugs, he continued to broadcast for Granada Television, and the film neatly juxtaposes moments of rock n’ roll excess with his day-to-day job, being sent around the city to interview farmers, town criers and dwarves washing elephants. “I went to Cambridge University” he protests to his producers, albeit in vain.

Wilson is played by Steve Coogan, a Manchester institution himself, though primarily famous for his Alan Partridge character, a failing and somewhat pathetically self-important regional broadcaster. The parallels are obvious. But while Partridge is a monster, driven by self-interest and a hateful misanthropy, Wilson is more of a Don Quixote character, driven by mad art-school situationist-inspired ideals, unwilling to compromise in the face of commercial realities (like selling records at a profit, or signing contracts with artists). But for all the bad decisions, there is a kind of self-awareness. “I protected myself from the dilemma of selling out by having nothing to sell” a typical quote. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rolled into one.

Critics of the film have accused it of being too episodic, and it is true that in the biopic tradition its construction is consigned to a loosely-strung together sequence of events and supposed happenings in the life of the protagonist. But just as Tony Wilson is no ordinary cinematic subject, so director Michael Winterbottom is no ordinary director, and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce certainly no ordinary hack. Their later collaboration, A Cock and Bull Story (2006) is their masterpiece of self-reflexivity, and here too there is the sense that the film is operating on planes significantly detached from traditional filmic forms. As much as this film is based on established facts of Wilson’s life, there are numerous diversions which suggest exaggeration or urban myth; one scene, where Wilson’s then wife Lindsay is seen having sex with Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto, the real Howard Devoto appears as a toilet attendant, denying that this event ever took place.

Who really knows if Shaun Ryder dropped two months worth of methadone across an airport passenger lounge, or if every 12″ copy of Blue Monday sold actually cost Factory money? Or if producer Martin Hannett did actually go to remote hillsides to record ‘silence’? No-one really cares too much, least of all Wilson himself; “if one has to choose between legend and the truth, choose the legend”, he offers. In giving us the myths, 24 Hour Party People gives us a truth about the Manchester music scene much more profoundly than the mere facts would. Oh, and did I mention it is hysterically funny, too?

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is introduced to an alien race called the Tralfamadorians, who are able to see in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Consequently, they are able to see time not as a linear progression but, as the novel puts it, like a mountain range, with all of its peaks and troughs eternally visible to them. As non-Tralfamadorians, we of course are limited to exist in the present, but viewing the past through the lens of memory never produces linearity – memories of one moment will often trigger others from an entirely different time, united perhaps by location or something as simple as smell or taste.

Terence Davies’ enduring classic Distant Voices, Still Lives is a poetic, visually sumptuous attempt to present the nature of memory in a cinematic terms. A portrait of his own life growing up in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, it is at least in part a Truffautian examination of individual experience a la The 400 Blows (1959), but the film’s insistence on capturing a mood above straightforward narrative places it more alongside Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973) as an impressionistic portrait of a time and a place.

The film is separated into a two parts. The first, Distant Voices, introduces us to the central family, and looks at the influence the domineering and violent patriarch has on its members; the second, set some years later, looks at the same family after the father’s death, slowly emerging from the post-war years towards the prosperity and liberalism of the 1960s. By dint of its structure, the first segment feels episodic, and it sometimes feels like we are looking at a photograph album, flicking back and forth through the leaves. Indeed, the formal composition of the film’s many group shots are very much akin to family portraits, and much of the diegesis centres on times when such photos would be taken: christenings, funerals, weddings, the rituals of Catholic Liverpool.

Films about childhood or adolescence often fall into over-sentimentality, and there are certainly moments of directorial reminiscence here: a wonderful moment where we witness the mother of the family washing the outside of a first floor window, perched perilously on the window ledge, with the children watching on, half in awe but half in fear that she may fall. Like its cinematic forefather The 400 Blows, though, the film does not gloss over the pain, both emotional and at times very physical, experienced when growing up. Though we are spared graphic displays of the father’s brutal beatings of his wilt and children, We are left in no doubt of their severity: one particularly savage attack in the hallway of the house is especially hard to watch, more so for what you are not seeing than actually seeing.

If the first half is physically traumatic. then the second half, Still Lives, is more melancholy. The patriarch gone, the family would seem to be free of its tormentor; but now the girls have married off to equally dislikeable husbands, and the mother is left alone in a large empty house. Britain is emerging into a new age, of prosperity, libertarianism and prosperity, yet this family seems unable to let go of its past.

While Davies’ film has this plane of personal experience, what makes it a true triumph is its depiction of a Liverpool, and an England, now long gone. I cannot think of another recent British film which has so vividly portrayed just how much the past is another country: the England of Round the Horne and shipping forecasts, of singsongs down the pub, and where a bottle of Chanel No. 5 is an exotic foreign luxury and not just another high-street product. Visually, we have a treasure trove of mises-en-scene, allowing the frame to linger on such period details as large fireplace or as insignificant as a light switch, or for us to marvel at the wonderful dresses young ladies would wear to go dancing in: an obvious subject of the director’s fascination. Such levels of detail give a sense of authenticity, though the soft, warm palette reminds us this is artifice, not realism.

Terence Davies is now something of a pariah, struggling to get his films made from outside of the British film establishment. What a shame that such a true auteur, so seldom seen on these shores, is unable to get funding, and who knows what body of work we as cinema-goers have been denied. Still, we have been granted this, a most poetic, beautiful melancholy masterpiece.

Douglas Trumbull was one of the special effects supervisors who worked on Stanley Kubrick’s bloated sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), helping to give that film its visionary and prophetic set design and futuristic visuals. He would later go on to work on such cinematic stunners as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982), but before those he directed Silent Running, a criminally underlooked masterpiece of science fiction filmmaking, and one whose understated warmth tinged with melancholy lingers in the mind for a considerable time.

From a script co-written by Mike Deer Hunter Cimino and Steven NYPD Blue Bochco, Silent Running is set aboard the Valley Forge, one of four large space freighters orbiting around Saturn, in an unnamed year in the future. Back on Earth, all plant life has been made extinct, and the only remaining specimens are being kept alive onboard large greenhouse-like domes attached to the spaceships, tended to by a crew of four, whose number includes botanist Freeman Lowell. He is shown to be much more concerned with the importance of their mission than the others, who are too used to their sterile, bland existences back on Earth to care about their endangered cargo.

Orders arrive from Earth; the cargo is to be jettisoned and destroyed in order for the ships to be returned to commercial duty. The rest of the crew is keen to follow orders, but Lowell the botanist finds himself unable to abandon the last plant life known to humanity and instead contrives to hijack the ship and the domes, thus saving the precious cargo from extinction. In doing so, though, he finds that he has to kill the other crew members, leaving him alone aside from three small robotic drones.

The film obviously carries an ecological message; Lowell is able to kill his fellow crew members for he feels that saving plant-life for future generations of people is much more important. The use of slow folksy Joan Baez songs on the soundtrack emphasises the rather hippyish outlook on display here, completely opposite to Kubrick’s use of grand orchestral music in 2001. Indeed, although Silent Running is in many respects just as visually impressive as 2001, the grandstanding is for an altogether different effect: Kubrick emphasised the poetry and beauty of technology, but Trumbull, like Tarkovsky would do the following year in his Solyaris (1972), uses it to juxtapose the beauty of the natural world on top of it. It is also tempting to draw parallels to Werner Herzog here too, though I don’t want to push my luck too far.

Another comparison point with 2001 is the difference between the interactions between humans and machines in the two films. The drones in Silent Running have a certain cuteness and fallibility to them, making them feel somewhat human. In one of the film’s best scenes, the now solitary Lowell reprograms the drones to be able to play poker with him, with some difficulty at first but they soon begin to cotton on. With no family of his own, they almost become his children, beautifully underlined in the film’s final scenes where one of the drones uses a child’s watering can to tend to the dome’s plants. Contrast that human-like warmth to the icy coldness of HAL 9000.

At the centre of the film is a truly remarkable performance by Bruce Dern, a career-best for the seasoned actor. His painstaking care for ‘his’ gardens is contrasted to his general disdain for his fellow crew, in particular his fierce arguments with them over the importance of preserving their attatched floating paradises. The crew of course are swiftly dealt with, and from this point onwards it is a one-man show, and his slow descent into a kind of derangement from solitude, saved only by his attatchment to the mute drones which he knows cannot be mutual, is a wonder to behold.

Danny Boyle’s recent film Sunshine (2007) undoubtedly used Silent Running as an inspiration, in particular the large tree-lined oxygen gardens found aboard the Icarus spacecraft. In that film, the stakes are high – the very survival of life on Earth, faced with the death of the sun. In Silent Running, it may appear that Lowell’s actions are of less significance; after all, the other crew members are perfectly happy to return to an Earth without plants, trees and flowers. But for Lowell, as well as for Trumbull, his self-appointed mission is just as important; to enable future generations of children to be able to stare at a leaf from a tree, in amazement at the beautiful simplicity of nature.