Sightlines · a concept

people are missing

no unified present people; the people are absent, to be invented.

On screen: the political passing through the absence/impossibility of "a people."

The Great Dictator (1940) — The barber's closing plea calls toward a human brotherhood that, in October 1940 with France fallen and Britain alone, did not yet exist — summoning a people rather than depicting one
Le Corbeau (1943) — The opening title's 'a small town, here or elsewhere,' and the film's condemnation by the collaborationist press on release and the Resistance and Communist press after 1944 — attacked from both…
La Terra Trema (1949) — 'Ntoni's neighbors refuse to stand with him; the film argues for solidarity by showing it fail to arrive — the political passing through the absence of a people
Night and Fog (1956) — The Nacht und Nebel decree that made prisoners vanish without trace; the depopulated site and annihilated victims, with Cayrol's closing address turning responsibility onto the still-present viewer.
Street of Shame (1956) — The Diet legislates a category while the film shows five incompatible lives (Yasumi's capital accumulation, Yumeko's maternal humiliation, others bound by family debt) that never assemble into a…
Pyaasa (1957) — "Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par" over the red-light district — the song locates the poor and sold whom newly independent India has failed to include
Rio, Northern Zone (1957) — Cooperative financing, deferred payments, small crew and location shooting, made against both Vera Cruz's collapsed prestige model and Atlântida's chanchada, in a market with no domestic distribution…
Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) — Post-synchronized sound lets Monicelli build the gang as a Babel of vernaculars — Roman patter, Capannelle's near-incomprehensible Emilian, Ferribbotte's Sicilian — an Italy of mismatched internal…
The Great War (1959) — Post-synchronized dialect used as a structuring device: Sordi's Roman inflection against Gassman's northern bluster encoding 'a whole geography of Italian regional character,' plus the nationalist…
Cruel Story of Youth (1960) — Newsreel footage of the Anpo demonstrations and of the South Korean uprising against Syngman Rhee appears inside the film while the couple pass through such events without engagement; the older pair…
The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) — The refugee family displaced from East Bengal by Partition; the domestic tragedy carries the trauma of a homeland and a people torn in half — the first panel of the Partition trilogy
Accattone (1961) — The subproletariat of the borgate, excluded from the postwar miracle, filmed typologically and 'sacralised' — a people given iconic form by the film because they have none in the nation's image of…
Chronicle of a Summer (1961) — Paris under the Algerian War and decolonization; African students who don't recognize Marceline's camp tattoo — no unified 'people' exists for the happiness question to address
The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961) — Kaji 'discovers that the socialist state he had idealized reproduces the same cruelties he had resisted under Japanese command,' while the crowd he leads is 'both Kaji's responsibility and his…
Salvatore Giuliano (1962) — The film passes through the absence of a unified people fractured by state power, speaking through testimony and mourning rather than a hero.
The Given Word (1962) — Priest, press, leftists, capoeiristas, the devout and Zé's wife each claim the meaning of the cross and none constitutes a people; the collective only coheres in the act of inventing a saint at the…
Barren Lives (1963) — Fabiano's inability to fully command language is itself a theme; conflict is with an impersonal machinery of drought, landowners and the state, and the aesthetics of hunger makes deprivation the form…
The House Is Black (1963) — Made in 1963, the year of the White Revolution's modernization program, the film names no policy and makes no argument; it films the walled-off community the state's self-narration doesn't count, and…
Black God, White Devil (1964) — A pilgrim's progress through successive false messiahs where none offers deliverance: Manuel is played as 'more vessel than agent,' buffeted between Sebastião's messianism and Corisco's banditry…
I Am Cuba (1964) — Four unconnected sufferers (prostitute, cane farmer, student, peasant) who never meet, bound into a single 'I' only by the narration — the film inventing the people it claims to represent
Loves of a Blonde (1965) — The state's official 'solution' to the factory town's gender imbalance — posting reservists — and the film's portrait of a state-managed society in which official optimism never meets private…
São Paulo, Incorporated (1965) — The title's double sense: sociedade anônima as both joint-stock company and 'anonymous society,' with Carlos's crisis presented as 'the subjective residue of an economic process' rather than a…
The Secret Formula (1965) — The Golden Age's manufactured national image (the ennobled peasant under the monumental sky) is shot impeccably and then shown being fed from outside — bodies present, the people they were made to…
Black Girl (1966) — Widely held to be the first feature by a sub-Saharan African director to reach international audiences — made for an African cinema public that did not yet exist, and which Sembène's next four…
King of Hearts (1966) — the only warm community the film can imagine is a court of the certified mad, set against masses marching mechanically to mutual slaughter
Masculin Féminin (1966) — the scattered youth, suspended between revolutionary rhetoric and consumer desire, never cohere into a collective; the politics registers as the absence of 'a people'
The Brick and the Mirror (1966) — A portrait of Tehran as a city of unfinished construction, blocked institutions and people who talk past one another; every assembly the protagonist faces can comment but cannot constitute itself as…
The War Game (1966) — The film pauses to ask ordinary Britons what strontium-90 or carbon-14 is and exposes that they cannot say — the public capable of deciding about this does not yet exist — and the BBC then withheld…
La Chinoise (1967) — Yvonne's unresolved class question and the cell's fantasy of a vanguard for a 'people' that does not exist
The Firemen's Ball (1967) — A collective that cannot constitute itself: the committee's dignified intentions against the self-interested behavior of everyone present, in a film banned 'permanently' after the August 1968…
The Red and the White (1967) — A film commissioned for the October jubilee about Hungarian internationalists that constitutes no people: the Hungarians are foreigners in someone else's civil war, two languages grind under one…
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) — The political passes through Sergio's exile from the revolutionary people forming below him — a collective still to be brought into being that he cannot join
Night of the Living Dead (1968) — the Black protagonist survives only to be shot by a white posse; the political works through the absence of any community that coheres into rescue
Shame (1968) — The protagonists are violinists from an orchestra disbanded by the fighting, and the film has essentially no score: music is invoked in dialogue as the ordered thing the war took, and no collective…
Easy Rider (1969) — The commune that may not survive and George's campfire speech about freedom Americans can't tolerate; the counterculture "we" that never coheres, sealed by "we blew it."
Invasion (1969) — A defense with no nation, ideology or cause named and no population behind it, made in Buenos Aires the year after Solanas and Getino's clandestine La hora de los hornos; the negative later stolen…
Medea (1969) — Pasolini eliminates the chorus as a speaking body, removing the collective that in Greek tragedy receives and interprets the act; Colchis stands for the Third World and the Italian peasant world…
Duck, You Sucker (1971) — Juan's central tirade about the educated men who read the books and give the speeches, set against a film in which 'revolution is presented not as liberation but as a machine that consumes the…
The Decameron (1971) — The 1975 Abiura, in which Pasolini disowned the trilogy on the grounds that the innocent bodies he had filmed no longer existed and the sexual freedom since had been a false tolerance granted by…
The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) — Made at the high tide of the Hot Autumn with the shop floors of Turin and Milan in open revolt, the film refuses to flatter any faction — institutional union or ultra-left students — and its…
Silent Running (1972) — The last forest is kept for a denuded Earth's absent future humanity who never appear; Lowell finally entrusts it to a machine because no one else remains
State of Siege (1972) — The film offers no individualized protagonist on the guerrilla side; the political passes through a collective constituting itself, answered only by organization, not a hero.
Belladonna of Sadness (1973) — A political film whose peasantry betrays its heroine: the dossier's note that the film is 'anti-feudal without being sentimental about the peasantry,' and a closing gesture that must leap forward to…
Fantastic Planet (1973) — "Character interiority is minimal by design — figures function as representatives of species and positions rather than as rounded individuals"; the Oms must be organized and narrated into existence…
Sambizanga (1973) — Filmed in 1961 Angola still a colony; the nation does not yet exist and must be summoned through the hunted movement
Soleil O (1973) — The assimilated Black professional who declines fraternity, doubled by the production reality: Hondo refused the Bureau du Cinéma, self-financed the film, and had no distribution route to African…
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) — A shtetl conjured in loving, mournful detail as elegy for the Polish-Jewish world the war erased, from stories by Bruno Schulz, murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942.
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) — 1940 Spain figured only through absence — the unnamed fugitive, the estranged parents, letters to an unseen figure — and the glass beehive of anonymous drones standing in for the vanished collective
Touki Bouki (1973) — A postcolonial future that can be vividly dreamed and physically reached yet never entered — the political passing through an unrealizable collective.
Blazing Saddles (1974) — "The frontier was built by Black cowboys, Chinese railroad labor, and Indigenous people whose land it was; the Western as Hollywood practiced it had largely erased all three." Brooks casts himself as…
Lenny (1974) — The audience track is the film's index of collapse: full and rolling early, thinner as the material turns, near-absent at the end, leaving Bruce reading legal documents to a room that has stopped…
The Parallax View (1974) — The final long-held shot of the blue-ribbon commission declaring the assassin acted alone — the apparatus reaffirming its lie into the dark with no public left to receive the truth.
We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974) — The partisan collective of the Liberation dispersing into three isolated private failures; the film's argument that the emancipatory hopes of 1945 were betrayed by careerism, consumerism and…
Dersu Uzala (1975) — A solitary Nanai hunter with no community behind him, whose unmarked grave is erased by clearing and construction carried out by the same state that commissioned the survey.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — The crowd's chant conjures a solidarity that flickers into being for its duration and then dissolves — the political appearing precisely as something borrowed and unable to hold.
Fox and His Friends (1975) — The film insists 'against the grain of gay-liberation optimism' that homosexuality confers no exemption from capitalism's predations: the rich exploit the poor especially among the marginalized, so…
Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) — Made under martial law and 'burning with everything the regime's official culture denied' — Brocka films the population the state's manufactured image of the nation erased.
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) — Every faction claims to speak for the working class while the actual worker's widow is passed hand to hand; the bourgeois Communist couple receive Emma in a comfortable home whose décor silently…
Nashville (1975) — Hal Philip Walker's populist 'we,' broadcast from a circling van, invokes a public the film never finds; in a post-Watergate America there are only crowds, not yet an assembled people.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) — A 1975 flop that had no constituted audience; it found one only at Greenwich Village midnights a year later, summoning into being the public the film needed and its moment had no room for.