Famously the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), watching La jetée today feels just as remarkable as it would have done when it was first screened in the early 1960s – and few films can truly claim this as strongly as this can. A 28-minute black-and-white film composed of a series of still photographs, accompanied by a narrator who weaves the images together into a narrative, it is slow to start but leaves you breathless by the end.

The story is in the realm of science-fiction; we are in a post-World War III Paris, where a underground (literally) group of scientists are researching into making a time travel device in order to recover vital supplies for their survival. Their experiments are conducted on an unnamed man, being held prisoner and likely to be killed afterwards, but whose fixation on one particular event in his life seems to override all others: a strange event from his childhood occuring at the jetty at Orly airport, where a man is killed, though his memory focuses on a woman observing the events rather that the dead man.

This much may well sound familiar to those who have seen Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, and the ending will come as no great surprise, though is still profoundly affecting. What is extraordinary about the film, and what makes it such a singular experience, it that in its form – still images, no real dialogue – the viewer must fill in the gaps themselves, and in doing so they become as much as an experiment as the unnamed man in the film. While the rate of frame changing does give some indication of pacing and scene dynamics, it is left to us to imagine the full picture, beyond the limited information being shown to us.

La jetée may be watched in its entirety on Youtube here.

Les Diaboliques is littered with visual symbols, but perhaps its most telling imagery is that which is shown as early as the very first frame – though the first-time viewer will be unable to identify exactly what it is. The film’s titles are presented over algae infested water, water which will eventually become key to the film’s central mystery, but also more generally a metaphor for some of the film’s many levels of meaning, about what we see on the surface of things, and what is really lying beneath them.

On the murky surface of the story lie the three main characters: Michel, the headmaster of a run-down boarding school for boys, is a short-tempered, abusive womanizer; his wife Christina, a teacher at the school but also its owner, and whose family money her husband is all too keen to exploit; and finally Nicole, also a teacher at the school, and with whom Michel has been conducting a very public affair with for a long time. How French.

From the outset, we can see that the women have a common resentment of the cruel headmaster; Christina knows she is being exploited as well as being publicly humiliated by his continuing affair with another woman, while early on Nicole is shown sporting dark sunglasses which are to hide the black eye that Michel had administered the night before. The two women, led by the domineering Nicole, hatch a plan to rid themselves of this man: lure him to a lodging house, drug him with sedatives and drown him in the bath, returning the body later to the school swimming pool to give the appearance of his having died by accident.

The plan succeeds, but the weaker Christina, unable to wait for her dead husband to be discovered, panics and hurriedly orders the swimming pool to be drained, since the water is so dirty that the body has yet to be seen. This is duly done, but there is no sign of Michel’s body. And when there are reports of him being seen around the school and town, coupled with his suit being returned by the dry-cleaners, both the mystery and dramatic tension begin to thicken further.

If the viewer thinks they know where they are, then they are in for more than a few surprises. Much has been made of Clouzot being ‘the French Hitchcock’, and not without reason; indeed, the British auteur himself wanted to film this story, but narrowly missed out on the rights to it, going on to adapt authors Boileau and Narcejac’s Sueurs froides: d’entre les morts as Vertigo (1958) instead. Much like Vertigo, as well as Psycho (1960) which would follow, the suspense of Les Diaboliques gently creeps up on the viewer rather than going straight for the jugular. Director Clouzot keeps the film deliberately slow-paced; while most thrillers are quick to establish the mystery element, in Les Diaboliques the murder plot takes nearly half of the film to come to fruition.

The deliberately slow pacing, at the expense of narrative velocity, allows much greater character development. While Michel is generally seen to be a shallow, one-dimensional monster, the two women provide an interesting dichotomy: the sturdily-built, almost macho Nicole is a stark contrast to the angelic almost girl-like daintiness of Christina, and there is a strange air of sexual tension between the two women, predating the similar dynamic found in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). With her cropped platinum blonde hair and sharply cut suits, Nicole cuts an angular screen presence, dominating the screen whenever present, as she dominates control over the women’s murderous plan.

While the character of Nicole is a fascinating masculine femme fatale, Christina, played by Clouzot’s wife, Vera. represents many different things: feminity, but also Latin American exoticism, as well as chaste Roman Catholicism – her lodgings are somewhat akin to a cross between a religious shrine and a confessional booth, once again in contrast to Nicole and her more functionally decorated house. There are some strictly autobiographical details here: Vera Clouzot was originally from Brazil, and her health problems are replicated in her character here (tragically, she would die from a heart-attack five years after the release of Les Diaboliques).

The boarding-school setting may seem fairly insubstantial to the plot, but the film’s final scene gives away something of its relevance; a schoolboy, who throughout the film has been chastised for telling lies and drawing on the school walls, claims to have seen a ghost. When this is dismissed by the adults, he walks off wearily. His creative impulses have been stifled at every turn by the grown-up world, the supposedly more mature and respectable adults, but who are actually the more childish, petulant and unruly – the ‘diaboliques’ of the film’s title. The dirty swimming pool is illustrative of the general neglect of the school and of its pupils, which begs the comparison to François Truffaut’s soon-to-be-made Les quatres cents coups (1959).

If the film’s famous penultimate scene has a feeling of over-familiarity, then it is illustrative of how iconic it has become; not as famous as ‘that’ shower scene, but nearly. And there is one other famous legacy that the film has left: two-thirds of the way through, a clumsy, unassuming, seemingly absent-minded police detective named Inspector Fichet shuffles onto the scene, and susses everything out before anyone else does. The shabby raincoat, the cigar, the battered car, the inane non-sequitur questions – i think all Peter Falk needed to add was the line ‘just one more thing’ in order to make his Columbo.

Rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all films, the power of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves lies in its simplicity, and as such perfectly embodies the spirit of the Italian postwar neorealism movement which, though shortlived, was hugely influential in the development of modern cinema.

Cinemas are often born out of revolutions and historical circumstance: the Soviet Montage movement of 1920s Russia derived from the Bolshevik Revolution, German Expressionism from its slow post-First World War economic recovery, the Spanish New Wave would emerge from the ashes of the Franco regime; filmmaking cannot lie outside of its social and political context.

In Italy, a country with a long history of filmmaking, the Depression of the early 1930s had led to a slump in its cinematic output, and the Fascist government decided that the medium was of such importance to the national culture that it should be resuscitated and propped up financially. The film school Centro Sperimentale was founded in 1935, and a new studio complex known as Cinecittà was built on the outskirts of Rome. The Mussolini regime kept the industry afloat through subsidy, allowing both grand epics as well as smaller, regional dialect-based films to be made, with less worry towards financing.

Italy, unlike Nazi Germany, did not necessarily strive to foster a distinctly propagandist national cinema. Hitler and Goebbels were both keen cinema-goers, and though the work of the likes of Leni Riefenstahl, tried to glamorize Fascist ideology on the big screen (though her Triumph of the Will and Olympia can be considered interesting films, it is a touch ironic that some of the greatest filmmakers in Germany, among them Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, moved into exile during the Hitler regime). But while there was limited artistic freedom in Germany, Italian directors enjoyed considerably more autonomy over their output; Mussolini did view nearly every film produced, but almost never banned one outright.

It is under these conditions that the group of directors grouped under the Neorealism umbrella developed, including Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis, and a man from Lazio named Vittorio De Sica. De Sica came from a theatre background, but had made the transition to filmmaking through light comedies such as Maddalena, zero in condotta (1940) and Teresa Venerdì (1941). His first foray into more serious work was I Bambini ci guardano [The Children are Watching Us] (1944), a story of familial disintegration seen through the eyes of a young boy.

The film was a collaboration with writer Cesare Zavattini, who would go on to write nearly all of De Sica’s screenplays, including his next film, Sciuscià [Shoeshine] (1946), a story about two young boys who stumble into a life of crime. Borrowing its visual aesthetic from Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (1945), and a pacing influenced by Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), it was De Sica’s first truly great film, winning him critical acclaim, and even an honorary Academy Award. For their next project, the writer-director team wanted to examine more closely the destruction and upheaval in post-war Italy.

What they produced was Bicycle Thieves, based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini. Set in postwar Rome, it centres on Ricci, an unemployed man desperately seeking work in order to feed his wife and young son Bruno. He finds a job, putting up posters around the city, but the job requires him to have a bicycle as transport; he has already had to pawn his bicycle, so he and his wife decide to sell their wedding sheets in order to buy it back.

It is implicit in the title what is going to happen, and Ricci must scour the streets of the city in order to try to find the bicycle he so needs. The film suffered from the unfortunate American mis-translation of its title to The Bicycle Thief; this is to undermine the elegance of both the title and the film itself. The thieves concept is important; Ricci, in his desparation, attempts to steal another bicycle himself, only to be caught and set upon by an angry mob. Seeing both the fear and shock on his young son’s face, he realises that he himself has been reduced to the level of the film’s supposed villain; and the original thief himself is perhaps cast in a new light – was he stealing the bicycle for similarly desperate but honorable intentions?

The setup of the film elegantly poses these questions, as well as showing the humiliation, despair and rapacity of life in postwar Italy. What is significant is that during his search, Ricci’s constant encounters with ambivalent authority figures, whether the police, his labour union or the Church itself. And as he is seen resorting to more and more desperate measures, the father-son bond between Ricci and Bruno can be seen to be eroded, paternal authority also breaking down in the situation, though the film ends with Bruno’s moving acceptance of his father’s imperfections, as they walk hand in hand down the road back home.

One striking aspect of the film, and in the best neorealist films in general, is the use of non-professional actors. One of the tenets of the movement was that actors should be chosen whose lives were similar to those being portrayed on screen; witness the casting of real local Sicilian fishermen in Visconti’s La Terra trema (1948). In Bicycle Thieves, the casting of Lamberto Maggiorani in the lead role was a masterstroke; Maggiorani was a factory worker from Rome who had unsuccesfully dabbled in acting, but his believable, pathos-filled performance here shows the benefit of using actors who can relate to the circumstances of the film.

Bicycle Thieves was very much a product of its time, and De Sica would soon find himself moving away from strict neorealism towards different aesthetics; his Miracolo a Milano (1951), Umberto D. (1952), L’oro di Napoli (1954) and La Ciociara (1960) all stand as abiding classics of Italian cinema, and he would venture back into popularist comedy with the Sophia Loren vehicles Ieri, oggi, domani (1963) and Matrimonio all’italiana (1964). But Bicycle Thieves is his most consistently highly praised film, because of the universality of its simple theme: how society strips the dignity and self-respect of a man just trying to do his best to look after his family.

Director Jack Clayton is by no means a household name, and is perhaps most familiar to audiences as director of Room At The Top (1959), the film which ushered in the British New Wave, later to be followed by classics from the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. But his masterpiece is unquestionably The Innocents, a truly terrifying psychological thriller whose capacity to disturb has only increased in the nearly fifty years since its release.

One first thing to say about The Innocents: it is one of the most stunningly shot films ever committed to celluloid. Cinematographer Freddie Francis, later to shoot the likes of The Elephant Man (1982) and Glory (1989), demonstrated a complete mastery of the camera and lighting, employing deep focus brilliant enough to rival Welles’ Citizen Kane or Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939). The sheer aesthetic beauty of some of the shots brings to mind elegant horror classics Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960), and in terms of suspenseful composition, the film can easily hold its own against anything Hitchcock produced, not least Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958), which are both referenced here.

Style on its own is virtually worthless, but the technical brilliance of the film is the key to this film’s dramatic tension and its questioning of narrative perspective. Based on Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, the film stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, the daughter of a country priest, who is hired to be the governess of two young children, Miles and Flora, who are in need of care after the death of their parents. They live on an expansive Victorian country estate, at the centre of which is the intimidating gothic Bly House, and are attended to by a number of servants, including housekeeper Mrs. Grose.

The children themselves are precocious, especially Miles, who despite his meagre years already appears to carry himself in the gentlemanly fashion of that of his uncle, the suave socialite who is briefly glimpsed hiring Miss Giddens at the start of the film. The two children are also both quite secretive, and seem to enjoy playing games with their somewhat stuffy new governess. Her reaction to their games is at first jovial, but a letter explaining that Miles was expelled from his school seems to trouble her – is his tomfoolery illustrative of his disruptive personality which led to his expulsion?

Miss Giddens’ somewhat exaggerated response to the letter appears to stem from her sheltered upbringing; when the children ask her if she used to play games when she was their age, she alludes to the strict discipline of her family home, at odds with the apparent freedom enjoyed at Bly House. So when Miss Giddens soon learns more disturbing secrets, and begins to see apparitions resembling former employees at Bly, we have to question whether what she is seeing is real or just a product of her fevered imagination.

The screenplay borrows more from William Archibald’s stage production The Innocents as opposed to directly from the James novella, this being more suitable for transition to the screen; the book is a much more literary piece, questioning not only the governess’ account of events, but also the narrator telling her tale’s knowledge and motivations. What screenwriters John Mortimer and Truman Capote do to the story is to allow it to have more of a sense of visual ambiguity, allowing both director and cinematographer to use their talents to make the audience question what they are seeing, along with the increasingly frantic governess.

There are some very dark undertones beneath the surface. Freudian imagery abounds, whether intentionally or not, and there is the constant presence of decay and death around the house – witness the flower and insect symbolism throughout the screen duration. There is also a very clear suggestion of misplaced paedophillic feelings that Giddens has for the young Miles, the boy in many ways acting as a surrogate for her feelings towards the dashingly suave Uncle in the film’s first reel; her repressed sexual desires seem to emerge inappropriately during two overly passionate kisses between herself and her charge.

There are so many facets to The Innocents‘ brilliance that it can almost be forgotten just how succesfully the film functions at a basic haunted house horror level. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) is perhaps better remembered in the popular consciousness for pure jump-value, but Clayton’s film is at worst its equal on the scare front, and in terms of its ability to disturb is virtually unparallelled in all of horror cinema. Many films since have tried to better it, most notably Alejandro Amenábar’s tributary The Others (2001), but nothing is ever likely to come anywhere near close.

Wim Wenders’ best films are populated by itinerant loners, roaming around territories foreign to them with a keen eye for observing the curiosities of a different culture and landscape to their own. Though his earlier films had, to varying extents, exhibited a debt towards the American road movie, it was his 1974 film Alice in the Cities which fully betrayed the director’s love for that type of film, as well as signalling his intent to reinvent it in a European setting and context.

Shot in a choppy, improvisational style belying a debt to Truffaut, the film first follows German writer Philip Winter trawling around the United States, on an assignment to complete a piece of reportage about its culture, from the standpoint of this steadfast European cynic. Mesmerised by its neon-lit boulevards and cheap roadside motels, he takes copious polaroid photographs of everything, but the stifling atmosphere of tacky television and the ever-blaring radio has choked his creative mojo, and he finds himself unable to actually write anything, to the consternation of his agent and publisher.

He decides to return home, but at the airport befriends a woman who proceeds enigmatically to disappear in order to sort out some personal issues, leaving Philip in charge of escorting her precocious nine-year-old daughter Alice back to Europe. It is here that the real journey of discovery begins; Philip, so jaded from his unfulfilling trip to the States, suddenly finds himself responsible for something other than himself, and while initially the relationship between them is frosty, the man and the girl strike up an unusual bond in their search across Germany for her grandmother’s house. He stops taking pictures of everything, and is able to write again. Alice, on the other hand, loses some of her coldness and comes to relish her new found freedom with her newly-found chaperone. For all of her precociousness, we are reminded that she is still a naive young girl – unable to understand why Philip sets his watch back six hours on arrival in Amsterdam.

It is unusual for a ‘road movie’, in that there are no real great revelations, no big surprises, no grand changes in the characters’ outlooks on life; neither is the film a picture-postcard advertisement for travelling around Germany, although there are some wonderfully captured moments – the windmill designs on the Amsterdam hotel room window shutters, the brief monorail trip from Wüppertal, the factories of the Ruhr valley, the pair performing physical jerks in a car park before sunbathing. In their search for Alice’s grandmother’s house, Wenders’ camera scans passing houses, so elegant and provincial compared to the skyscapers and seedy motels we had seen in America earlier.

At times, the film seems almost monotonous, capturing moments where nothing is actually happening – in one extended scene, they order ice-cream in a small cafe whilst watching a boy humming along to a rock and roll song on an old fashioned jukebox; in another the camera lingers for a noticeably long time on a young girl following the pair’s car along a residential side-street on her bike. But these moments in the film give breathing space – an effect similar to the ‘pillow shots’ employed by Wenders’ forefather Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu – and it is the fact that the two of them are increasingly able to do nothing together so easily which illustrates their strengthening bond.

There is little in the way of sentimentality, and unusually for a road movie, it is at times difficult to see exactly where everything is heading. Yet by the end, one cannot help but feel saddened by the pair’s inevitable parting, and moved by the way that they have enriched each others lives in such a simple but unlikely way. Wenders himself cannot bear to split the two, so he finishes with the two of them on the train taking Alice back to her mother, before sweeping away into a panorama of the German countryside, the backdrop to their voyage of self-rediscovery. A similar journey will be undertook in Wenders’ Palme D’Or-winning masterpiece Paris, Texas, though Travis’ and Hunter’s journey will be more about forgiveness and redemption; Alice in the Cities reminds us of the infinite capacity to rediscover ourselves through other people.