“What happens to the world without the sound of children’s voices?”

So asks one character, a former midwife, now living in a sterile world where women are unable to bear children, in this, Alfonso Cuarón’s superb imagining of P.D. James’ novel. The film takes this central premise of the book and runs with it, in doing so asking many questions about the nature of existence: what happens if man is denied a future? Are religions, political ideologies and dogmas strengthened or weakened by this? And if there is hope, how do we react to its possibility?

The film posits this premise from shot one: our protagonist Theo walks into a cafe and is surrounded by people transfixed by a television news report, which is stating that the ‘youngest human’, the last to be born before the entire world went infertile some eighteen years ago, has died. This device neatly presents us with a wealth of information about the dystopia we are entering. Similarly, the London street that Theo walks onto afterwards informs us about this future world, one not too dissimilar to the present. The year is 2027, and while technology has advanced somewhat, this is closer to the present than the likes of Blade Runner.

Ridley Scott’s future noir is an interesting reference point, as there are echoes of the jaded, washed-up blade-runner Deckard in Clive Owen’s Theo; he seems to a large extent to have given up on life and happiness, and is now just a rather aimless alcoholic, overly cynical and sarcastic. A politically active past is alluded to, in particular when he goes to visit his friend Jasper, an ageing pot-smoking hippy now retired in the countryside, but he now seems to have abandoned that for a boring pen-pushing desk job. Even nearly being caught up in a terrorist bomb blast seems not to traumatise him overly. Has this childless world brought this nihilistic state of being upon him?

Although the source P.D. James novel was written in the early 1990s, this is very clearly a post-9/11, post-Iraq film in much the same way as Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later was; after a mass influx of refugees, Britain has now become a police state, with the powers-that-be now systematically rounding-up and deporting all immigrants. Bexhill, in reality a quaint seaside resort on the south coast, has now been tranformed into a nightmarish refugee camp, quarantined off from the rest of the country. Echoes of the Holocaust and Guantanemo Bay are all pervasive, and there is one haunting shot which is a clear visual reference to the US Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

The bomb blast which Theo narrowly avoids is officially attributed to a terrorist group named ‘the Fishes’, which is opposed to this policy of explusion. Theo is soon contacted by this group, who it turns out are led by his estranged wife Julian, who want him to use his position to procure a travel permit for a young refugee. It soon transpires why this refugee is so important: she is pregnant, and the group want to transport her to ‘the Human Project’, an anonymous offshore group of scientists who are apparently working on curing the infertility problem. The film then essentially becomes a road movie cum chase movie, with Theo quickly realising that no-one else can be trusted with this precious cargo, and must attempt to safely escort the refugee Kee to their mysterious destination.

Director Cuarón has frequently stated that he considers this a sister piece to his earlier breakthough hit Y tu mamá también (2001). On a superficial level, this almost seems absurd: what can a low-key road movie about two young friends travelling across Mexico and discovering their sexuality possibly have in common with this futuristic dystopian fantasy? But look beyond the genre stereotypes, and the commonality is surprising. Both films show intially jaded protagonists embark on journeys of self-discovery, against backdrops of social upheaval, ultimately ending in a combination of tragedy and hope, however small. The journeys themselves are what is important, not the rather open-ended denouements.

While the London of 2027 is perhaps not much of a fully-realised world as compared with other celluloid imaginings of the future, this is utimately because it doesn’t need to be; there is none of the hollow flashiness of the likes of A.I. or I, Robot because the focus of the film is the human drama at its centre, not necessarily the context, giving the film more of a feel of universality. Where context is more obvious, it is when its post-9/11 commentary is more explicitly being made, and here the viewer will decide either to go with its politics or be alienated from it. Personally, I was happy with the anti-anti-immigration message, but it will be troublesome for some.

Three of the central characters, Julian, Theo and Jasper, appear to be three variants of the same personality. The former husband-and-wife pairing Julian and Theo share a common past, and at one stage shared political ideals – Jasper explains they met at a demonstration – but their lives at one unnamed point diverged, Julian’s to underground activism, Theo’s to resigned acquiescence and passivity. Jasper too was politically aware, a product of the heady revolutionary days of 1968; but just as that near-revolution was defeated and eventually fizzled out, deprived of hope, so too was the revolutionary instinct in Theo. The students of ’68 wanted to change the world, but that impulse is ultimately dependent on there being a future, creating a better world for a following generation. Remove this hope, and what is the point of political idealism?

If politics is rendered neutered, then so too is history, if history is the prism through which looking at the past allows us to envision and, to an extent, shape our future. One scene in particular neatly expresses this idea. When Theo attempts to procure transit papers for Kee, he goes to visit his cousin Nigel, in his ivory tower at Battersea power station. There we see he has procured some of mankinds greatest artworks: Michelangelo’s David adorns the entrance, while on one huge wall of the dining room hangs Picasso’s Guernica. But deprived of a context, and denied a future, these great works are rendered meaningless – one, a marvel at human beauty, and the other a howl against human brutality, will be nothing without anyone to observe them.

There are many, many possible readings of this film; i have not even mentioned the possible religious interpretations and symbols. But ultimately one takes from the film what one brings to it, and whether one sees it as a pessimistic view of the natural decline of human values when faced with utter despair, or as showing the triumph of hope in the face of almost inevitable doom, will depend on ones own personal outlook on life. But what a remarkable piece of mainstream filmmaking, how rare that a piece of cinema this bold, intelligent and rich can come successfully to fruition.

Cinema as a medium is able to inspire a wide variety of emotional responses in the viewer, whether it be making us laugh or cry, to make us reflect on our own lives or to consider the lives of others, to meditate on the nature of the world or to whisk us away to a world other than ours. Wings of Desire is a uniquely moving film which somehow seems to encapsulate all of these, a sublimely beautiful, sometimes sad, but ultimately uplifting meditation on the human, and super-human, condition.

Much of the screenplay was written in collaboration with the German playwright Peter Handke, and the film opens with a short piece of his poetry, which describes the state of childhood – full of fun, play, innocence, the child having no knowledge of being “a child”. We then have an aerial shot of central Berlin, followed by a brief image of the protagonist Damiel stood atop a tall building with superimposed angel wings atop his back. Only children appear to be able to notice him. Then a few more shots of some other people, including one played by Peter Falk as a passenger in an aircraft, all the time the soundtrack of the relentless chatter of what we assume are their thoughts.

From this early sequence onwards, the internal logic of the film is quickly established; Damiel, and later his friend Cassiel, are angels in late 1980s West Berlin, able to travel wherever they like and eavesdrop on the mundane, everyday thoughts of the population. They are invisible to all but children, who seem to greet their presence with an amused curiousity. Their presence seems to be able to have an effect on the people they encounter – those that are worrying about something appear to be in some way comforted by the presence of the angels, temporarily soothing their fears. The central library seems to be the place where most of the angels congregate, listening in to the discoveries and learnings of those reading – there is no small irony in the film illustrating that the loudest place for peoples thoughts is the library.

The fact we can hear people’s internal thoughts is a neat device, almost a subversive to the cinema medium; actors go to great lengths to attempt to convey us such information physically or facially, yet here we are presented with a pure distillation of their thoughts, fears and anxieties, without the need for ‘acting’ it out. Yet most of the information we receive is mundane – everyday musings, personal worries which have no relevance to the film’s narrative. But this gives the film its universality; all of us have our own personal worries that are not part of some big picture, but they are nonetheless important to us. The film treats everyone as being just as important as the characters we are focusing on here.

When we first encounter Cassiel, a fellow angel, he and Damiel are comparing notes about what they have witnessed on that day – simple acts, some tragic, some hopeful, others seemingly meaningless. It seems that the angels’ purpose is to observe and record everyday happenings, in a sense to preserve ‘reality’ for the divine. Damiel here confides that he wishes that he were a mortal, to live in terms of ‘now’ as opposed to the ‘eternity’ or ‘forever’ of the angelic existence, as well as to experience simple things like having his fingers blackened by the newspaper. When he chances upon a circus troupe, he falls in love with a beautiful but lonely trapeze artist, Marion, dressed when we first see her in an angel-like costume. She is mortal, but attempts to albeit temporarily transcend this state through her ‘flying’ act, of course in polar opposition to Damiel who aspires to the opposite.

Damiel is played by Bruno Ganz, the Swiss who is generally regarded as the greatest German-speaking actor of his generation, possibly most famous for his recent portrayal of Hitler in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s excellent Downfall (2004). He has one of the most warm, inviting faces in all of cinema, providing us with an inquisitive, endearing protagonist, but also a melancholy one, yearning to be able to experience life, warts and all. The chemistry between he and fellow angel Cassiel, played by Ganz’s real-life friend Otto Sander, is wonderfully jovial, giving the impression that they really had known each other for eternity.

The film is mostly shot in monochrome, not exactly black-and-white but more of a sepia tone, by legendary cinematographer Henri Alekan, who had previously worked with such luminaries as Jean Cocteau and René Clément, and his visual style in the film is one of the keys to its power; in particular, some of the interior shots are technical marvels – an early sequence starts with a view from out of a window, dollying back quickly to reveal the interior of the room and its inhabitants, a pan to a medium close-up of a woman is handled with such mastery that it seems almost balletically graceful. By way of contrast, the scenes from human perspective are shot in full colour, at times an overly-hued colour, reminiscent of the use of Technicolour famously employed by Michael Powell, whose A Matter of Life and Death is a key touchstone here. Alekan’s camera glides smoothly, effortlessly as it it were flying. There is also the matter of the extraordinary score, most of the time resembling a choir of angels – sometimes barely audible, sometimes deafening, but an almost constant presence.

Although the film would appear to have a religious theme, this is not a Christian film, and does not seek to either promote or criticize belief. So what, ultimately, is the central theme of Wings of Desire? In the early scene with Damiel and Cassiel sitting in a car, one of the things Damiel wishes he were able to do would be ‘at last to guess, instead of always knowing’. Coming from a position of all-knowing, the one thing the angel wants to be able to do is not to know, to have the possibility of being wrong. Humans may be fallible and unable to know everything, but the mystery of not knowing, and trying to find out what you can, is what makes life worth living. Men may wish to be an immortal angels, but the angels wish equally to be men.

The trouble with remakes and/or ‘updates’ of classic and not-so-classic films is that many of the subtleties and complexities of the original are lost somewhere along the line, presumably to pander to modern Hollywood’s desire for box-office-friendly fodder. Imagine, if you will, how a grand, ambiguous film such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey would be different if it had to have been produced today: presumably feedback from test-screenings would demand more narrative coherence, or indeed any. One only needs to watch Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001), a rather confused remake of Alejandro Amenabar’s superior Abre Los Ojos (1997) for a more recent example. And let’s not even think about The Vanishing, though strangely the remake was ruined by the same director as the original, George Sluizer.

One of the wonderful things about Steven Soderbergh’s reimagining of Solaris, then, is the fact it could be made at all. Here is a film which does not patronise the patient viewer, instead allowing the complex and mysterious ideas of the Stanislaw Lem source novel to swirl around the audience’s consciousness. Soderbergh is able to do this because of his immense commercial clout; nobody will say no to a director who pulls in the big bucks, and with the success of his Ocean’s Eleven franchise, Soderbergh is one such big-hitter. He is renowned for being extremely cost-efficient, delivering wildly successful films on-time and on-budget, an executive producer’s dream. This gives him a great degree of artistic freedom to pursue more personal, lower budget projects, most recently his adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s The Good German (2006). Solaris is clearly another such project: an existential meditation on the nature of memory and feeling is box-office poison, and so it proved, grossing little over $6 million in its first weekend on a budget of nearly $50 million, despite the superstar draw of la Clooney.

There was, of course, a previous attempt to adapt Lem’s novel to the big screen: Andrei Tarkovsky’s overlong 1972 Solyaris divides opinion between those who think it is a slowly delicate, melancholy masterpiece and those who feel the urge to fall asleep roughly 5 minutes in. I certainly think it is a masterpiece of mood and style, though at 165 minutes it does get snore-worthy. Brevity is so often a cinematic virtue, and thankfully Soderbergh restricts his adaptation to a trim 99 minutes, befitting of a novel of little over 200 pages (in the English translation). Tarkovsky fans would probably baulk at this relatively short running time, but I feel that the film still manages to cover the important ideas in the Lem novel; the Soviet’s version is too ponderous at times, and adds external elements not in the novel, such as the scenes in the datcha which bookend the main events on the space station.

Credit too should go to George Clooney, who in recent years has quite nobly attempted to branch out into varied material, mostly with positive results. His film collaborations with Soderbergh now number six in total, and to an extent he seems to be the director’s current muse. In Solaris, Clooney pitches it just right – never too respectful of Donatas Banionis’ original performance as psychologist Kris Kelvin. What is similarly impressive is the casting of the striking Natascha McElhone in the pivotal role of Rheya, whose ghostlike-beauty is a suitable tribute to Natalya Bondarchuk’s original Hari. A hard act to follow, but tastefully done.

Soderbergh did such a great job with Solaris that when I first saw it I was completely taken aback at what a grand piece of work it was. So taken aback, in fact, that I nearly forgot that this was remake of a classic, and that I was planning to be indignant that the director had the audacity to tinker with what seemed an untouchably great film. On balance, and given time to reflect on both versions, I think Tarkovsky’s original was a landmark piece of cinema, but that this reimagining of the great novel does its ideas more justice, and is one of the rare occasions that a remake actually ‘dumbs-up’ on the original. And full marks to Soderbergh both for doing so, as well as simply being able to do so.

The strange coincidence of two of post-war Europe’s great film makers, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, dying within 24 hours of each other appears to have instantly inspired a wave of revisionism of their relative importance to cinema history by the critical mass. In particular, New York Times critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a particularly scathing assessment of the great Swede’s legacy, entitled “Scenes from an Overrated Career”, arguing that Bergman’s body of work is no longer relevant or indeed loved by audiences any more, in comparison to the enduringly popular likes of Hitchcock, Godard and Welles.

I would argue that Rosenbaum’s aim is a little shy of the mark; if the legacy of any filmmaker is on the wane, then surely it is Antonioni’s? While his films may still be considered masterpieces by an oligarchy of critical opinion, who actually watches the likes of L’Avventura or L’Eclisse these days apart from film students? Notably, flicking through the obituaries of the two filmmakers, Bergman’s oeuvre is always described in more hushed, reverent tones, while Antonioni seems to be more frequently described as merely ‘the director of Blowup‘. No-one would ever dare reduce the Swede to simply ‘the director of The Seventh Seal‘.

Of all of his great films, I find the most rewarding to be Smultronstället, roughly translated into English as Wild Strawberries. In many ways it is one of this more straightforward films, but the elegance with which it presents us with its themes and subject matter render it also one of his most profound, and most deeply moving. For a director accused of being morbid, even by many of his admirers, here is a film about the fear of death, but from which a man can reclaim his love of life. At the centre of the film is the elderly Dr. Isak Borg, a highly regarded professor who is about to travel across Sweden to accept an honorary degree from Lund University. The night before he travels, he has a strange, vivid dream full of Jungian symbolism: clocks with no hands, a strange man-like dummy, a driverless horse-drawn carriage containing his own coffin. The nightmare troubles the waking Borg, surely a reminder to him of the ever-nearing inevitability of his own death, given his advancing years. Regardless, he is in good spirits on embarking on his journey, and we see glimpses of him as a charming, avuncular old man.

Accompanying him on the journey is his daughter-in-law Marianne, who initially seems a little cold towards him. As they set off, we begin to see why; Borg, while a distinguished man of intellect has a rather brusque, unfriendly manner about him. The confines of the car prove to be too much, Marianne finally has enough and admits she doesn’t particularly like him. This proves a surprise to the old man, clearly too contained in his own academically smug bubble to realise how emotionally distant he is from others. As the film and the journey progress, further characters join and then leave our travelling party, and Borg has a further series of dreams which hark back to his youth which force him to confront the emotional and personal failures in his life, and attempt to find some kind of reconciliation with them.

Bergman made Wild Strawberries on the back of the extraordinary success of both Smiles of a Summers Night (1955) and The Seventh Seal (1957). The success of these films in a sense allowed Bergman the creative and artistic freedom to explore more personal issues, and there is no denying that the film is intensely so. Borg’s emotional failings and his lack of interpersonal skills are autobiographical of the director himself, and many have interpreted the film as an attempt to apologise and to an extent justify himself to his parents. There is a clear thread of generational conflict throughout the film; Borg’s son casually disregards his father, implicitly as a result of years of the same reversed. Yet Borg himself also has a strained relationship with one of his parents, his cold, emotionless mother who appears to treat all with the same disdain. This contextualisation, midway through the film, allows us more sympathy with the ageing professor, as much sinned against as sinner.

Wild Strawberries is one of only a handful of films that movingly portrays a man’s reflections on his own life, in particular his youth, both with a melancholy wistfulness but also a determination to try to atone for his misguided ways. The obvious parallel is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), in which an ageing bureaucrat conforonted with death comes to realise how he has lived his life so unthinkingly, and tries to find some meaning in his final months. More recently, Theo Angelopoulos has broached the subject in the wonderful Eternity and a Day (1998), starring the incomparable Bruno Ganz. But there is something unique about what Bergman does in Wild Strawberries. It almost seems a cousin of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), particularly with its overtones of redemption, rebirth almost. The central idea of both films is that life is best appreciated when shared with others, not solely for one’s self.

The harsh Swedish winters meant Bergman had only limited time to shoot exterior shots for his films during the year, and often worked on theatre productions during the off-season with his ‘Bergman’ troupe of actors, which numbered the likes of Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, and Ingrid Thulin, all of whom feature in Wild Strawberries. Being regular collaborators allowed Bergman to extract the best out of this group; Thulin, in particular, puts in a wonderfully elegant performance as Borg’s thoughtful but rather haunted daughter-in-law Marianne. Von Sydow, off the back of his career-defining performance as Block in The Seventh Seal, is confined to a cameo here, but Bibi Andersson stands out in her unusual double role as Sara both in the past and in a new incarnation in the present.

But the film belongs to ageing Swedish actor Victor Sjöström. Once considered the most handsome man in all of Sweden, he was practically a living legend, having been one of the most significant European directors of the silent era, most famously making the Lon Chaney classic He Who Gets Slapped. Bergman had to coax the great man out of semi-retirement in order to get him onboard the project, but what a reward! One can watch the film examining just his range of facial expressions alone, and one can still feel the depth of the character completely; at first self-satisfied and content in his self-constructed bubble, then a complex mixture of horror and melancholy as he reflects on his failures in life, before finally achieving a kind of peace with himself in the films final scenes. Astonishing. As much as this is Bergman’s film, it is unimaginable without Sjöström’s central performance.

Although this is primarily a spiritual journey, there is also the road movie dimension to proceedings offering a backdrop for the existential angst on display. The beautiful Swedish countryside is constantly present, almost a character in itself, serenely observing the problems of men. As mentioned above, Wild Strawberries is an elegant but not exact translation of the original title, Smultronstället, which actually refers to the patch where said strawberries are found growing. And this presents a neat metaphor for the film, and indeed life itself; one of Borg’s early flashbacks shows him in his youth observing as his brother courts a girl whom Borg himself has taken a fancy to, as her to him. As he watches in dismay as his more suave, if rather over-the-top brother succeeds in having his wicked way with her, a liason which later leads to their marriage, Borg remembers the intense smell of the fruits he is surrounded by. His recall of this, years later, is initiated by the same smell, by the same patch of strawberries, still there after all of the intervening years. The field has seen life come and go every year just the same, observing with the same knowledge that life is brief; beautiful yet transitory.

At the core of Citizen Kane is a mystery, but it is not that within the film’s plot, the identity of Rosebud, now the worst-kept secret in cinema. The real mystery is just how did a 25-year-old first-time director, an alcoholic screenwriter and a group of untried actors come to make what is commonly regarded as the greatest 119 minutes in film history? And does it live up to this tag?

Like any highly regarded work of art, whether it be the Raphael Stanze, Ulysses, Revolver or The Waste Land, it is impossible for a newcomer to appreciate Citizen Kane for the first time without some prior knowledge of the high regard it is held in. Indeed, like The Rules of the Game, The Seventh Seal or The Third Man, it is likely to disappoint the casual viewer coming to the film on the back of its reputation. I note that, although it has regularly topped the Sight and Sound decennial greatest film poll, it lingers in a lowly 23rd place on the IMDB chart, behind the populist likes of The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, and even The Usual Suspects.

This may be a result of the very technical nature of the film’s aesthetic perfection, which the untrained eye is unlikely to pick up on on a first viewing. The technical innovation employed in the film has been a subject worthy of entire books, so it is rather foolish to scantily sketch the details about what Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland managed to achieve here; just watch and marvel at the incredible deep focus shots, the odd camera positionings, and the quite frankly iconoclastic use of lighting and shade in some scenes. Similarly notice the interesting experiments with sound, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the mastery of spatial positioning, camerawork, and some truly astonishing dissolves between scenes. All of this is purely technical, and demands a certain knowledge of the methods and processes of film production. If we could disregard all of this, would Citizen Kane still be a great film?

This, in a sense, is like trying to look at a Rembrandt and trying to assess its artistic value beyond the artists’ mastery of brushstoke: almost an irrelevance. Nevertheless, if one extracts the films other constituent parts, there are certainly other noteworthy aspects. The acting is terrific, not least by Welles himself, but also from Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane, the latter two previously untried on the big screen. Welles had previously worked with this troupe of actors as part of his Mercury Theatre company, but it is to his great credit that he extracts screen-worthy performances from all of them; never do we feel that their acting is stagey, or overly dramatic. Many would go on to great Hollywood careers, most notably Cotten who later would star in the likes of The Third Man, Shadow of a Doubt and Welles’ later masterpiece, Touch of Evil.

There is also the daring screenplay; for this, Welles enlisted Herman J. Mankiewicz, an experienced screenwriter who had previously worked on, amongst other films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Wizard of Oz, as well as acting as a producer on the Marx Brothers films Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. He was also, however, a persistent alcoholic and gambler, and had been fired from a succession of jobs before striking up with Welles’ Mercury Theatre company. Despite Welles’ later protestations, Citizen Kane would not have been possible without Mankiewitz; he was a friend of both William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, the clear inspiration for Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander, close enough to be avle to satirise the corruption and bitterness underlying their existences. He was also the clear inspiration for Cotten’s character Jedediah Leland, the alcoholic theatre critic who feels both his friendship with Kane, and Kane’s moral fibre, have been betrayed by power: Mankiewicz was a theatre critic before turning to screenwriting. For years, his important contribution to the film’s core was neglected, but in recent decades this has been revised.

The film unfolds like Shakespearian tragedy; here we have a man thrust unwillingly into a world of wealth and status, and whose ideals are ultimately eroded by power and love. Everybody knows that the film is an attack on megalomaniacal newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, not least Hearst himself, who after hearing of the film’s subject tried to buy and destroy all of the prints of the picture. But there is also the subtext of the corruption at the heart of the American Dream at work, and this is for me the true genius of the film; as Kane is dazzled and eventually ruined by money, we can see the young United States of America too slowly lose its ideals and morals in favour of material gain, at the cost of increasing emotional isolation. That Kane ends up solely desiring his ‘Rosebud’ – a time of innocence and simple pleasures – but can only spend his final years filling his house with Rennaisance statues – culturally valuable in their own context, but ultimately worthless to a nouveau riche like himself – underlines this level of meaning. There has perhaps been no more elegant illustration of the need for Americans to plunder other histories to invent their own than in Citizen Kane.

It is impossible to detail every aspect of Citizen Kane that makes it such a rich and deeply meaningful film, one simply has to watch it over and over again, absorbing every image, every moment, every smooth gliding dissolve and let one’s self become engrossed in its world all over again. I think that only then can the viewer separate ‘Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made’, and Citizen Kane the great film.