Even Godard’s detractors must admit that he’s an astounding image maker. Godard has a way of filming people that cuts directly into their emotions. He sees through people, through their features and into their psychology. Godard’s ability to create spontaneous images of classical beauty is unsurpassed in cinema.

Note, I feel remiss talking about Godard’s images here without mentioning his sounds. While this is difficult to represent here, it’s crucial to the success of his films. Godard’s use of sound borders on the Eisensteinian idea of sound and image as disconnected, separate forces that form a cohesive but not direct whole.

Nouvelle Vague (1990) by Jean-Luc Godard

Women projecting away from the camera, also known as hiding.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by Chantal Akerman

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) by Hong Sang-Soo

The human, as seen by the mind in the past tense as opposed to the eyes in the present tense.

Berenice (1954) by Eric Rohmer

The redefinition of art and who it belongs to.

Colossal Youth (2006) by Pedro Costa

Fluctuating between myth and man, without the agency to choose which. This statue in Ford is afraid of the people, the crowds, that come visit him.

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) by John Ford

The final shot feels like a landscape shot, the pillar reminiscent of Ford’s Monument Valley. But there’s nothing grand about this landscape. People walk by lazily and dwarf it, yet it’s imbued with the sentimental power of Ford’s landscapes. While Vanda’s room hasn’t been destroyed, this small pillar symbolically shows its destruction, and with it the awakening of the viewer. We’re no longer sheltered in close company, we are in ruins, surrounded by strangers, as we always have been, but have forgotten. Like the ending of Ossos in meaning but completely different in method, this locks the world away from us emotionally.

In Vanda’s Room (2000) by Pedro Costa

Is there any other director for which violence between men is so unifying? Violence is an action which defines people in Hawks. The physical intimacy of violence, along with its expression of care is what brings men together. We might see violence in Hawks as a simple amplification of body language, a homoerotic expression of desire, lumped into an activity common in their social spheres. Knives become phallic extensions of violence, a more intimate level of violence. When Dewey gives Teal Eye a knife, he’s inviting her to his community, he’s turning her into a man, into a violent force. Men in Hawks only desire the partnership of other men. The women must assert themselves as males in order to communicate, in order to be loved by the men.

The Big Sky (1952) by Howard Hawks

Fuck U Byron

Sergeant Rutledge (1960) by John Ford

Rivette’s characters are like Lang’s, props guided by an unseen entity, humans without psychology and without autonomy. There are only two humans each in Paris Belongs to Us and Spies. They are the ones who field all of the impact of the machines, or rather the cogs. Though Lang’s film is filled with terror, tragedy, and sadness, it is Rivette’s film that is darker. Rivette suggests that those with autonomy lack the ability to assert their own will. The tragedy in Paris Belongs to Us, brought to fruition in its deus ex machina but illustrated throughout in its brilliant use of landscape, is thus both personal and existential.

Spies (1928) by Fritz Lang

Paris Belongs to Us (1960) by Jacques Rivette

Ford’s myths as dances of images.

Wagon Master (1950) by John Ford