Премия ФКП: Топ 250 лучших европейских фильмов

Horror films typically isolate and dramatize that moment when the taken-for-granted stability of “civilized” society crumbles into chaos. The challenge in conveying a sensation of real violation in a horror film resides in the fact that audiences flock to the genre specifically to feel it, which is to say that instability ironically represents stability in this context, as you’re getting what you pay for in a brokered, preordained fashion. The most shocking thing a horror film could really do, then, would be to simply have nothing happen—and this is the key to The Vanishing’s weird, fairy-tale power. Director George Sluizer devises a mystery that very purposefully collapses in on itself, as the terror of The Vanishing resides in its ultimate revelation that there isn’t any mystery at all, a development that carries obviously existential notes of despair. There’s no guiding motivation behind the disappearance that drives the film, and no cathartic purging of guilt or triumph of good; there isn’t even really a triumph of evil. A few things randomly happen, then a few more things, then nothing. The end. That non-ending, though, is one of the greatest in all of cinema and the source of many a nightmare. Bowen

The grand theme of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s fantasy of overcoat-clad angels in Berlin as the Cold War’s end drew near, is storytelling in all its forms as a coping mechanism of the human race. Kindly Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and his more objective but similarly empathetic cohort, Cassiel (Otto Sander), whose wings are only fleetingly glimpsed throughout the film, swap tales of the small behaviors and interactions they’ve witnessed after traversing the skies and streets to hear “only what is spiritual in people’s minds.” Cinematographer Henri Alekan’s mostly monochrome images match the beauty of their grays and blacks with the mood of a city’s historical weight, and the music ranges from classical evocation of the past in J252;rgen Knieper’s score, heavy with strings and choral parts, to the theatrical aggression of Australian postpunk. Wenders’s elevation of the everyday—whether it’s a tour-de-force spatial fugue through a modernist public library, Peter Falk’s ode to the joy of coffee and cigarettes, or the riotously ghastly jacket a metamorphosed angel buys in a pawnshop—makes the heavenly agents’ obsession with the material and finite an unquestionable attraction. So long a presence in the area that he can recall the emergence of the first Berliner from its primeval savannah, Damiel decisively gripes to Cassiel, “Enough of the world behind the world!” Bill Weber

In Elevator to the Gallows, Julien’s (Maurice Ronet) entrapment inside an elevator is a Hitchcockian flourish, a delicious twist of fate that essentially cuts the man, a French veteran of the Indochina and Algerian wars who’s working for an influential arms dealer (Jean Wall’s Simon Carala), out of his own story while giving him a symbolic preview of the prison sentence his murder has earned him. Some of the film’s most evocative images see Julien sitting in the elevator smoking cigarette after cigarette while trying to concoct an escape plan. Louis Malle lingers on physical details with a painstaking intimacy that recalls the films of Robert Bresson. Nowadays, it’s impossible to watch Vеronique (Yori Bertin) and Louis’s (Georges Poujouly) doomed rebellion and not think of Breathless. Godard fetishized youthful self-intoxication as a rebuttal to the self-absorption of a government wracked by upheaval—refining a more self-conscious (and marketable) form of hypocrisy in the process. By contrast, Malle prefers Julien and Simon’s young wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), to Louis and Vеronique, as the former have at least earned their disenchantment—and, implicitly, even their immoral trespasses—via actual life experience, while the younger couple is frequently made sport of, leading to violence that’s shocking and as wasteful of human life as anything Louis thinks he’s protesting. This commendably unfashionable perspective offers a glimpse of the challenging empathy that would guide Malle’s career. Bowen

Julien Duvivier’s Panique informs small-town life with rich menace, suggesting a correlation can exist between vicious gossip and physical violence, as people seek to assert dominion over the reputations of their neighbors out of boredom and resentment. Throughout the film, a doubling motif links classism with atrocity, and rumor-mongering with the tragedy it incites—such as linked images of two funerals, one of the murder victim that drives the film’s plot, the other of a person framed for the murder, essentially for being an eccentric outcast. As in many a film noir, Panique has, at its center, the structural rigidness of a mathematical equation, which it fleshes out with macabre comedy, piercing pathos, and a mad blend of realism and rococo expressionism. A beautiful and merciless film, Panique has been read as an allegory for Vichy France’s complicity with Nazis, which is apparent in the way the conspiring villagers are shown to unify against a diseased cause that’s been engineered by a third party. And such an association is complicated further by the controversy of Duvivier leaving his country for Hollywood during WWII. But humankind has so often betrayed itself—honoring its irrational base instincts above issues of morality or common sense—that the film now operates as a free-floating nightmare of persecution, one which offers a vividly haunting victim. As Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) ascends a building to his doom, fleeing his vengeful neighbors, one may think of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong, only in this case there’s no mythical creature to offer one the distancing assurance of the fantastic. Bowen