Sightlines · Mood course
Alone Together: Ten Films About the Loneliness You Can See From the Street
There is a particular kind of solitude that only exists in company — the cab driver surrounded by fares he can't talk to, the widow whose apartment is never empty and never shared, the two strangers awake at 4 a.m. in the same hotel bar. For fifty years, filmmakers have been inventing ways to put that feeling on screen, and this course follows the invention itself: how cinema learned to film a person who sees everything and can reach nothing. The arc runs from the driver's seat of a New York taxi to a voice inside an earpiece — from loneliness you could still blame on the city to loneliness that lives in the very tools we built to cure it. Along the way, these ten films trade techniques like contraband across borders and decades: a lab trick invented in New York resurfaces in Hong Kong; a fixed camera in a Brussels kitchen reappears in a vacant Taipei apartment; a pair of watching angels in Berlin become, a generation later, an operating system that listens. Watch them in order and you can see one idea being passed hand to hand.
Start behind the windshield, because that's where the whole tradition starts: a pane of glass between one man and everyone else. Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman build the film almost entirely from inside Travis Bickle's cab — neon smeared across wet glass, pedestrians caught in the wipers' arc — so that the city is always visible and never touchable, and we're locked in there with him. The trick to watch is how close the camera gets to Travis's way of seeing without ever quite agreeing with it; you're infected by his view of the streets and simultaneously invited to worry about the man doing the viewing. The film borrows its confessional spine from an older European tradition — a written diary read aloud over images that don't always cooperate with it — and grafts it onto the American loner picture, producing something new: a character who perceives the whole city in obsessive detail but can't convert any of it into ordinary human contact. He drives, and drives, and the driving is the loneliness. Every film in this course inherits that discovery.
Made the same year as Taxi Driver, on the other side of the Atlantic, by a 25-year-old — and it's the perfect inversion. Where Scorsese's camera prowls, Akerman's refuses to move at all: cinematographer Babette Mangolte sets it low, at roughly the height of a seated person, square-on to the kitchen, and holds each shot for as long as the task takes. A widow peels potatoes, and the film simply keeps her company, in full, without music or close-ups to tell you what to feel. The gamble — and it's one of the boldest in movie history — is that duration itself can do what melodrama does: watch how, by the second day of her three-day routine, the tiniest slip in her schedule lands like a thunderclap, because the film has taught you her rhythms so completely that you feel the wobble before you can name it. Travis Bickle's isolation roams a whole city; Jeanne's fits inside four rooms, and Akerman proves the apartment can be just as vast. Hold onto this fixed, patient frame — it travels directly to Taipei, two stations from now.
A German director takes the American loner out of the car entirely and sets him walking: a man in a red cap comes out of the desert, and for the first twenty minutes he won't say a word. (He's called Travis, too — whether homage or coincidence, the rhyme with Bickle is impossible to unhear: two men estranged from everyone, ten years apart, on opposite ends of the American landscape.) Robby Müller shoots the Southwest in long lenses and available light, so that the huge horizontals of Texas do the talking his hero can't — the emptiness outside the man standing in for the emptiness inside him. Wenders's invention is to run the road movie in reverse: the genre promises escape, and this film patiently walks its wanderer back toward everything he ran from, obligation by obligation. The technique to watch is how often people in this film talk through things — car windows, doorframes, and finally a single pane of glass — as if direct contact were a frequency they've lost; the film's most intimate conversation is staged as its most physically separated one.
Three years later Wenders distills the whole theme into a premise: beings who can see and hear everything — every private thought in a Berlin library, every grief on a U-Bahn platform — and can change none of it. His masterstroke was hiring Henri Alekan, the 76-year-old cinematographer of French cinema's most famous fairy tale, who films the angels' world in silvery black-and-white using the same handmade diffusion trick (a stocking stretched over the lens) he'd invented four decades earlier, while the mortal world gets color. Watch the long, gliding camera moves through the state library: the camera floats the way the angels do, frictionless, passing through a room full of people without disturbing the air — companionship without contact, made literal. It's the tenderest version of the condition Travis Bickle suffered as a sickness: perfect perception, zero touch. And notice the direction of desire — where every other film here shows a human being wishing for connection, this one shows an immortal wishing for coffee, cold hands, the weight of a body. Twenty-six years later, Her will pick up that exact longing and give it a new voice.
Now the theme hits the densest city on earth and speeds up. Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle take a lab technique Scorsese and Chapman had used for a single subjective jolt — step-printing, where frames are repeated so motion smears into ghost-trails — and stretch it into a whole visual language: a heartbroken cop stands frozen at a snack counter while all of Hong Kong liquefies around him. The man is still; the world moves. That's the film's great image of being alone together — not empty rooms but a crowd flowing past at a speed you're no longer part of. Wong's other invention is structural: two love stories that share little more than a snack bar and a few seconds of screen time, strangers brushing past each other in a city where proximity and intimacy have almost nothing to do with each other. After the fixed frames of Akerman and the stately glides of Wenders, this is the same loneliness shot handheld, at a run, in smeared neon — proof the theme doesn't need silence and stillness; it can be jubilant, pop-scored, and still ache.
One year later in Taipei, Tsai Ming-liang stages the theme's most audacious premise: strangers secretly occupying the same vacant luxury apartment, orbiting one another in rooms built for a life nobody is living. Tsai openly inherits Akerman's method — the fixed frame, the real-time duration, the single figure alone in domestic space performing routines the camera refuses to abbreviate — and marries it to the Taiwan New Wave's way of dwarfing people against glass-and-concrete modernity. Watch how he uses the unsold apartment itself as a character: real estate as the perfect emblem of alone-togetherness, space designed for family life standing empty in a city of millions. Where Wong Kar-Wai's near-misses fizz with romantic possibility, Tsai's are almost geological — long, wordless takes in which two people can share a wall, a bed, an entire home, and never quite register in each other's lives. He also borrows an older Italian idea: holding on empty urban corners after the people have left, letting architecture carry the feeling. It's Jeanne Dielman's discipline applied to Chungking Express's city, and it's devastating.
Here the theme migrates onto the screen-within-the-screen. Iwai's teenagers live in provincial Japan and commune almost entirely through an online fan forum devoted to a pop singer — and Iwai floats their typed messages across the image, so the film toggles between two worlds: rice fields shot in vast, overexposed magic-hour light (adolescents tiny against the crops, a composition learned from the great American landscape films) and the glowing text of kids who can confess anything to strangers and nothing to the person at the next desk. Iwai had already invented a fictional pop star whose songs charted in the real world, and here he perfects the device: Lily's ambient music is the one shared space these isolated kids inhabit, a cathedral made of sound. Watch for the essential inversion of Chungking Express — Wong's strangers occupy the same physical space and stay separate, while Iwai's are physically scattered and intimately, anonymously fused online. It's 2001, and cinema has just noticed that the crowd has moved indoors, into the wires. The next film asks what's waiting in there.
The same year, the same country, the same wires — reimagined as a horror film, and arguably the theme's darkest hour. Kurosawa and cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi (who shot the defining Japanese ghost films of the era) work in underexposed greys and greens, wide static shots where the corners of ordinary rooms seem to be losing their grip on visibility; the signature image is a dark smudge on a wall where a person used to be, absence given a stain. Kurosawa's radical proposal is that the loneliness the previous seven films observed is contagious — that the everyday solitude of wired urban life and some ultimate, endless isolation are separated by a boundary worn dangerously thin, and the internet is where the boundary leaks. The technique to watch is his refusal of the usual horror grammar: no stingers, no whip-cuts, just figures at the wrong distance in the frame, moving at the wrong speed, dread staged in long shot. Where Lily Chou-Chou found melancholy refuge in connectivity, Pulse finds the same screens and asks the question the whole course has been circling: what if being reachable and being reached are not the same thing at all?
After the apocalyptic register of Pulse, Coppola returns the theme to its gentlest form: two Americans, decades apart in age, marooned in a Tokyo hotel, each married to someone who has stopped seeing them. Lance Acord's photography does the quiet heavy lifting — soft warm interiors against the cool wash of the night city, telephoto lenses that flatten Tokyo into a reef of unreadable neon behind the characters' faces, and the recurring composition this whole course has been collecting: a small figure at a big window, looking out at a world that goes on past the limit of looking. Coppola's inheritance runs straight back through this programme — the brief-encounter restraint of two people who will not act on what they feel, and the Italian art-film patience with "dead time," letting jet-lagged 4 a.m. hours carry the emotion a plot would normally deliver. Watch what the film does with language itself: Tokyo's untranslated speech isn't a joke at Japan's expense so much as an externalization — the whole world sounds the way their marriages have started to sound. And notice the ending's most famous gesture is a piece of withheld sound: the film's answer to loneliness is a privacy it lets the characters keep.
The destination. Jonze takes every strand in this course — the watcher who can't touch (Wings of Desire), the beloved who exists only as a voice, the city as a warm blur behind an isolated face — and builds a near-future romance between a lonely man and an operating system. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots it in ochres and desaturated pinks, a palette he openly borrowed from Christopher Doyle's Hong Kong films, and the camera follows Theodore through crowds with the same moving-with-him intimacy Wong pioneered — a man perpetually in transit, perpetually in conversation, perpetually alone. The film's boldest formal move is an act of refusal: in its most exposed scene, the screen simply goes dark, leaving only two voices and breath — intimacy staged as pure sound, the logical endpoint of a course that began with a man watching a city through glass. And note what the movie mostly consists of: a face, in close-up, listening to someone who isn't there — the angels' predicament from Berlin, reversed and requited. Fifty years earlier the barrier was a windshield; now it's an earpiece, worn by choice, and the film refuses to tell you whether that's progress.
Run the course end to end and the through-line is unmistakable: cinema kept inventing new ways to film the gap between seeing and touching. The windshield became the fixed frame, the fixed frame became the pane of glass, the glass became the monitor, the monitor became the earpiece — each era building its loneliness out of its own architecture, and each filmmaker stealing the last one's tools. Chapman's smeared subjective camera resurfaces as Doyle's step-printed ghost-trails; Akerman's patient kitchen becomes Tsai's empty apartment; Wenders's listening angels are reborn as a voice in a shirt pocket. What stuck, above all, is the wager Akerman made in 1976: that an audience will sit with a solitary person in real time, without music or plot to protect them, and that the sitting itself becomes a form of company — the one connection these films reliably achieve is the one between the person on screen and you. That may be the secret of the theme. Every one of these films is about failing to reach someone, and every one of them reaches us. Alone, together: it's not just the subject. It's what watching movies is.