Film

In 1920, the figure of Hercule Poirot arrived, fully formed – from the top of his egg-shaped head to the tip of his toes – when Agatha Christie published her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She introduced her detective in the words of an admiring narrator who was to function as a kind of Dr Watson to her Great Detective. Poirot, we are told ‘was an extraordinary looking little man, hardly more than five feet four inches, but he carried himself with great dignity’.

Some tropes in the film business are entirely divorced from the contents of any given film. One of these, oft-repeated, concerns the bright young débutante who is lavished with praise. In this narrative, the first-time director emerges from the soil in full bloom. They have made a competent movie, perhaps even a good one – though certainly not the epochal effort the adulation would have you believe.

Veteran filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, widely considered the pre-eminent documentarian to emerge from the 1960s, has always said he considers his approach closer to that of a novelist rather than a director.

In three films by Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason, there is a moment of rupture in which the narrative is held up and we see instead a montage of various characters standing still and looking directly at the camera – an example of what has been called a planimetric shot. This particular type of shot, in which the camera is positioned directly perpendicular to its subject, appears to flatten characters against backgrounds on screen, in much the same way that a portrait photograph might.

Wes Anderson’s films divide audiences; not so much because of their content (rarely does he openly court controversy) but because of their style. When the trailer for Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, first appeared online, those eager to dismiss it on social media wrote: ‘Wes Anderson has made his film again.’ It is a comment that cuts both ways.

Writer–director Christopher Nolan is locked in an ongoing, well-documented wrestling match with linear time. With each new film, he attempts to find some unique way of slicing, dicing, and interrogating it. Memento (2000) gave us a crime thriller told entirely out of order; Inception (2010) used an ingenious nesting-doll conceit for its thrilling dream heists; Interstellar (2014) dabbled in relativity; Dunkirk (2017) juggled three parallel timelines.

In January 1957, Salvador Dalí appeared on American television in What’s My Line, a game show featuring a segment in which blindfolded panellists tried to work out the identity of a mystery guest by asking only yes-no questions. Dalí did not make it easy for the panel or the host: he answered ‘yes’ every time, not only to ‘Are you a performer?’ and ‘Would you be considered a leading man?’ but also to ‘Do you have anything to do with sports?’ In his mind, he was famous for absolutely anything and everything.

Given how commonplace it is in today’s economy, where are our great films about solar power? I’m not thinking here of those countless disaster and science fiction films that feature a dying sun or volatile solar winds as catalysts for global catastrophe, but simply movies that would give life to the otherwise unremarkable solar panels tilted skyward on roofs and farms around the world.

In a documentary landscape populated by all manner of personalities, styles, and political commitments, there is still something singular about the verbatim approach. While re-enactments in documentaries can often overdramatise a sequence of events, or can play fast and loose with history, verbatim filmmaking involves the exact reproduction of words spoken or written down at some point in the past.

A sense of dread permeates Australian director Daina Reid’s (The Handmaid’s Tale) début feature film, Run Rabbit Run, which had its première at Sundance earlier this year.