Sightlines · a concept

discourse image

*3rd reflection* — the limit-figures where large and small form articulate unanswerable questions.

On screen: the image posing a discourse/problem it cannot resolve

Häxan (1922) — Like Intolerance's cross-cut thesis, the film poses a moral problem — that the asylum inherits the pyre — which it stages but cannot resolve
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) — An indictment aimed at 'a specific, real, still-operating practice,' with the state pointedly never named and the ending left 'unresolved': the image poses a problem it declines to resolve and hands…
Holiday (1938) — Barry's Shavian dramaturgy preserved by Stewart and Buchman: 'characters articulate positions, and the drama is the collision of articulated positions,' with no farcical machinery, no chase, no…
His Girl Friday (1940) — Earl Williams reduced to a 'football' in a corrupt election — the film poses the problem of justice, then subordinates it to the romance/scoop engine, the reprieve arriving mechanically
The Great Dictator (1940) — The final speech abandons comedy and addresses the audience directly, the image posing a plea for brotherhood it cannot resolve within its own fiction
49th Parallel (1941) — A chase film whose climaxes are speeches — Hirth addressing the meeting hall, after Lang's cornered killer in M — commissioned to move American opinion but unable to conclude its own argument; the US…
Sullivan's Travels (1941) — The film opens on a violent train-top struggle revealed as a clip from the grim 'significant' picture Sullivan admires — an embedded film stating the entertainment-vs-suffering debate the whole movie…
The Palm Beach Story (1942) — Developed as *Is Marriage Necessary?* until the Breen Office refused the title, the film keeps the question and ends on a card that retracts its own resolution: 'and they lived happily ever after…
Le Corbeau (1943) — The swinging-lamp shot during the speech on the inseparability of good and evil: 'a rare instance in which a film's thesis and its most striking visual device are the same idea rendered literal'…
Lifeboat (1944) — A wartime propaganda object that refuses to behave like one: it stages the problem of what a coalition of individualists does when it must agree on a direction and declines to resolve it — hence…
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) — The cosmic court transposes the drama into argument, staging a trial of two nations (with the first American killed by a British bullet prosecuting) whose problem it poses more fully than it resolves.
Brute Force (1947) — Dr. Walters as chorus, the voiceover and editorializing register carrying the thesis that no one truly escapes; the film frames prison brutality as a parable of authoritarian power it can demonstrate…
Monsieur Verdoux (1947) — 'One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify' — an indictment the film poses and cannot resolve; nobody refutes Verdoux and he is executed anyway.
Limelight (1952) — Calvero's extended aphoristic speeches on courage, desire, meaning and death ("Life is a desire, not a meaning") in the most word-driven film by the cinema's master of the silent body; the talk poses…
All That Heaven Allows (1955) — Sirk's mise-en-scene and ironic 'happy ending' pose a problem about postwar conformity that the sentimental genre has no power to resolve, leaving the unresolved ache later directors answered.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) — The final 'Madness,' spoken over deliberate silence as Clipton surveys the carnage, poses a problem about the film's own heroism that it refuses to resolve.
The Seventh Seal (1957) — the confessional scene poses the question of God's existence, His silence, and possible redemption — a problem the image holds open and cannot resolve
Nazarín (1959) — The film poses the problem of whether Christian charity can be lived literally and withholds any resolution, holding sanctity and social ruin indistinguishable — the same unresolved formal problem…
Psycho (1960) — The psychiatrist's final clinical explanation of Norman, a flat totalizing discourse the film then undercuts with Norman's face and Mother's voice — inherited from Caligari's framing psychiatric…
Sergeant Rutledge (1960) — The film makes American racial prejudice the true thing on trial, then discharges it through a withheld mystery solution; critics have found the resolution and the swings between courtroom comedy and…
The Devil's Eye (1960) — The film poses but cannot resolve the problem that 'pure seduction fails to pierce genuine innocence' — the technician of desire undone by feeling he cannot manufacture.
The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960) — The film's moral vertigo — daring you to sympathize with a murderer and then punishing you for it — poses a problem about your own judgment that it deliberately refuses to resolve.
The Virgin Spring (1960) — The miraculous spring breaking from the ground after the revenge, posing the theodicy question — forgiveness, mockery, or water — without resolving it.
The Young One (1960) — The film sits inside the postwar liberal race-issue cycle but refuses its consolations: it poses the problem the genre exists to resolve and withholds the resolution, leaving the viewer without…
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) — The film's 'dialectical rather than suspenseful' mode: the verdict is never in doubt, so the drama is a sustained, unresolved debate over the culpability of the conscientious professional, with the…
The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961) — 'The dramaturgy is essayistic and dialectical... characters argue positions, and the film thinks through them,' descending from Grand Illusion's critique-by-dialogue-and-camp and Potemkin's…
The Given Word (1962) — The debate-heavy dramaturgy inherited from the Dias Gomes play: the church square becomes an arena of successive interlocutors and speeches that pose the faith/orthodoxy/race problem without any…
The Birds (1963) — The film poses the problem 'why the birds?' and refuses to resolve it; the final shot of the car crossing a field of waiting birds, scoreless and without a title card, leaves the discourse…
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) — The War Room never acts, only argues; deterrence theory is staged as a problem the film poses fully and refuses to resolve
The Train (1964) — The final tableau: crates of paintings strewn beside a line of executed hostages, composed to force the film's moral arithmetic into one image without resolving it.
Red Beard (1965) — The film 'argues, again and again, that poverty and ignorance are the true diseases Red Beard fights and cannot cure'; there is 'no antagonist and no plot machine,' so the situation is posed as a…
The Secret Formula (1965) — A cinematographic essay staging provocative scenarios inside the intellectual debate about the Mexican national character, posing the problem without resolving it; the title promises a formula it…
In Cold Blood (1967) — Late in the film a reporter-observer voices skepticism about capital punishment, tipping the procedural toward open argument and posing a question — does the law's killing answer the killers' or…
La Chinoise (1967) — the train dialogue with real philosopher Francis Jeanson, whose genuine commitment complicates Véronique's positions without resolving them
Samurai Rebellion (1967) — A chamber drama closer to a courtroom of the household than an action picture — Hashimoto's morally exacting dialogue architecture poses the conflict of conscience against authority in argument that…
The Dirty Dozen (1967) — The script refuses to resolve the tension between the prisoners' redemption arc and the barbarity redemption requires; the finale is staged as a figure of institutional hypocrisy rather than an act…
Weekend (1967) — The refuse collectors' colonialism speeches, Saint-Just's oratory, and the pianist lecturing peasants pose discourses the film cannot resolve; action transposed into essayistic spectacle
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) — The intellectual round table on 'literature and underdevelopment' poses a problem the film openly cannot resolve, with Sergio a visitor wandering through it
The Lion in Winter (1968) — Closer to 'a Shavian debate play,' the film keeps posing the succession question it cannot resolve, since 'history has already answered' the outcome
Theorem (1968) — The title 'theorem' and the deliberate indeterminacy of the Visitor's identity pose a problem the film refuses to resolve; the B&W documentary brackets frame the color fiction as an unanswerable…
if.... (1968) — The eight named chapter title cards (a Godard/Brecht device) framing the film as an essay that poses a problem about England it refuses to resolve
My Night at Maud's (1969) — The film is built of debate on Pascal, grace, probability and love — an image that poses a moral problem (what fidelity to an unspoken vow requires) it cannot resolve, enacted in the ironic ending.
Catch-22 (1970) — The 'catch' itself — a sane man must fly because wanting out proves sanity — a self-sealing logic the film poses as a problem with no resolution
Death in Venice (1971) — The Alfried debates stage the spirit-vs-senses question about beauty and the artist, posing a problem the film deliberately leaves unresolved
The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) — The dramaturgy is frankly didactic and dialectical, staging arguments as much as events — union reformism against student maximalism — and Lulù is fired then reinstated, ending neither redeemed nor…
State of Siege (1972) — Opening on Santore's corpse forecloses suspense and converts the thriller into an investigation that poses the problem of counterinsurgency; it ends with a new official and the cycle continuing…
Murder on the Orient Express (1974) — Poirot's two solutions in the dining-car salon — decoy and truth — leaving the choice between law and collective justice unresolved
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) — The peasants lecturing Arthur on the illegitimacy of aquatic ceremonies as a basis for governance, and the Bridgekeeper defeated by trivia rather than combat — obstacles become problems posed and…
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) — The satire poses the problem of who may speak for the dead and never resolves it; the coexistence of the two endings leaves the question standing as a question, the 'happy' export version reading as…
Network (1976) — Arthur Jensen's cathedral-lit boardroom sermon on the 'primal forces of nature' poses a totalizing problem it never resolves in the plot; rhetoric held open for its own sake.
Equus (1977) — Dysart's long, frontal, monologue-driven scenes addressed to the camera pose the problem of worship versus normality that the film stages but cannot resolve
Camera Buff (1979) — A bildungsroman 'in which the education is chiefly an education in guilt'; the ending's turn inward converts the story into an unresolved meditation on the filmmaker's self-implication rather than…
Absence of Malice (1981) — The closing scene, where Wilford Brimley's official convenes the guilty and asks 'by what right they did what they did,' poses the legal-versus-ethical problem the film refuses to resolve and hands…
The Mission (1986) — The debate-play confrontations (Altamirano/Gabriel/Mendoza) and the Cardinal's framing letter to the Pope pose a moral problem the film refuses to resolve
Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) — The proverb epigraph 'Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis' frames the action as a demonstration, almost a proof; drama is entirely verbal, with no external obstacles, only self-deceptions and…
Nayakan (1987) — The recurring question the film poses through the child is never resolved into a comfortable answer; the drama holds the ambivalence rather than dissolving it.
RoboCop (1987) — The satirical media breaks (the 6000 SUX, 'I'd buy that for a dollar') pose a social problem and refuse to resolve it, edited as tonal interruption in the lineage of Network
Wall Street (1987) — Gekko's 'greed is good' shareholder speech — staging that figures capitalism's philosophy as spectacle rather than acting, posing a discourse the film can't resolve (its own complicity), modeled on…
A Short Film About Killing (1988) — The film is "better understood as a moral tragedy or philosophical polemic in narrative form," bracketing the story with "the question of whether the state's killing differs in kind from the…
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) — Judah relates the murder as if pitching a movie plot; Cliff insists the killer must confess for the story to mean anything, and Judah's reply that in life he goes on living comfortably is delivered…