Sightlines · In conversation course
The Painted Shadow: A Century of the Poor Things Grotesque
Somewhere in Poor Things, a banister curves away as if the house were breathing, and a woman lurches down a staircase like a marionette still learning its own strings — and behind that single bulging frame stands a hundred years of cinema that refused to photograph the world as it is. This is the story of the grotesque not as monster-making but as world-making: the tradition of directors who understood that if you warp the room, the walls will confess what the people cannot. It begins with a shadow painted directly onto a floor in 1920, because no real light would fall the way a nightmare needed it to. From there the line runs through drawing rooms nobody can leave, war rooms lit like operating theaters, radiators with little stages inside them, offices grown through with ductwork, kitchens where a man's jacket changes color as he walks — until it arrives at Yorgos Lanthimos, who inherited all of it and bent it through a fisheye lens. Watch these twelve films in order and you can see a single idea being handed forward, argued with, and rebuilt: the idea that the built, false, exaggerated image tells the truth about power better than realism ever could.
Everything starts here, with the most radical decision in early cinema: the shadows are not photographed, they are painted — long black wedges brushed straight onto canvas floors, cast by nothing. Wiene and his designers built the town of Holstenwall as pure warped geometry, streets that taper, windows shaped like knife wounds, and then placed the actors inside it so that the architecture itself does the psychological talking. The camera barely interprets; it simply frames figures against the distortion, and the distortion carries the terror — a sleepwalker carrying a woman across angular rooftops needs no close-up to frighten you. The film's deeper obsession, a will utterly controlled by another, will echo down this entire course, from Buñuel's guests to Lanthimos's rule-bound households. The invention to hold onto: the set as a statement, the world as something authored rather than found.
Buñuel performs the opposite trick and gets the same result: instead of warping the room, he warps the physics of behavior inside a perfectly ordinary one. A dinner party ends, the guests move toward the drawing-room door — and simply do not leave, night after night, with no rope, no bolt, no explanation ever offered or even sought. Gabriel Figueroa, one of the great black-and-white cameramen of Mexican cinema, shoots this impossibility with elegant, realistic craft, and that deadpan is the whole invention: the grotesque delivered with a straight face, the outrageous treated as mundane. Where Caligari painted the cage onto the walls, Buñuel makes the cage invisible and internal — the manners themselves are the bars. Watch how long the film withholds any reason, and how the withholding becomes the meaning; Lanthimos will build three careers on this refusal.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) — dir. Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick industrializes Buñuel's straight face and aims it at the machinery of the state. Gilbert Taylor shoots the film's three worlds in three distinct styles — jittery newsreel realism at the army base, cramped instrument-panel glow in the bomber, and a War Room lit like a black lake with a ring of light floating on it — so that the movie's argument lives in its photography: every register of official seriousness, rendered perfectly, housing perfect madness. The comic method descends from silent deadpan (Keaton's calm against escalating machinery, the Marx Brothers' cabinet-as-vaudeville), but the innovation is tonal precision — nobody in the frame knows they're in a comedy. Where Buñuel's bourgeoisie couldn't act at all, Kubrick's generals and presidents act constantly, competently, procedurally, and the procedures are the trap. That inversion — systems as the grotesque, not creatures — flows straight into Brazil and The Lobster.
Lynch drags the tradition back to the body and the single haunted set — his production design of nameless industrial gloom is Caligari's direct descendant, a world with no geography outside the mind that generates it. Cardwell and Elmes photograph it in extreme contrast, figures half-dissolved in shadow, the hum of machinery never stopping, and the crucial move is one of equality: the little stage inside the radiator, where a round-cheeked woman sings that everything is fine, is given exactly the same photographic weight as the apartment and the factory floor. The film never marks anything as dream, so the question "is this real?" simply dies. Made at the American Film Institute over years of nights, it stands beside the first wave of graphic body horror while feeling handmade in a way none of its contemporaries do — a nightmare with a craftsman's fingerprints on every surface. It proves the Caligari proposition can survive sound, texture, and flesh.
Gilliam is the great synthesizer: German Expressionist architecture, Buñuelian dream logic, Kubrickian systems-satire, all fed into one retro-future where the computers are enormous, the screens are tiny, and ductwork has grown through every wall like a circulation the body can no longer switch off. Roger Pratt's wide lenses at low angles stretch the government corridors into oppressive geometry — the painted distortions of 1920 now achieved optically, with glass instead of brushes, a technique Lanthimos's cinematographer will push even further. The engine of the film is clerical: a fly drops into a machine, one letter of a name misprints, and an entire civilization's cruelty proceeds from the typo, politely, with paperwork. Note that the state hides nothing — the pipes are exposed, the grotesque is administrative and out in the open. The design principle, an internally coherent wrong world built from anachronistic technology, is one Poor Things borrows almost wholesale.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) — dir. Peter Greenaway
Greenaway turns the grotesque into a formal banquet. Sacha Vierny — the French cameraman who once glided through the frozen corridors of Last Year at Marienbad — sends the same slow, stately sideways tracking shots through a restaurant divided into color-coded rooms, and as a man walks from the blue loading bay into the green kitchen into the red dining room, his clothes change hue with no visible cut, no trick you can point to. The film treats eating, money, sex, and power as one appetite, staged in deep theatrical compositions lit like Dutch paintings, with obscenity delivered as ornately as verse. It is the missing link between the painted worlds of the 1920s and Lanthimos: the influence chain to The Favourite is documented and direct — deadpan grotesque staging, profanity as an instrument of rank, baroque period surfaces hiding animal behavior. Watch the thresholds; every doorway is a rule, and the color tells you which law of the house you're now under.
Here the tradition performs its most unsettling maneuver: it removes every visual signal of the grotesque and keeps the grotesque. Maryse Alberti lights suburban New Jersey with an even, household brightness that flatters nothing and conceals nothing, and Solondz frames his characters frontally, holds the shots past comfort, and — this is the invention — stages the film's most appalling conversations with exactly the same gentle domestic grammar as its tender ones. No shadow marks anyone as a monster; the sameness is the horror. Structurally it braids a dozen suburban lives in the mosaic manner of the great American ensemble films, so the diagnosis lands on the whole society rather than any one deviant. After Greenaway's velvet and gold, this flat fluorescence is a shock — proof that the grotesque is a matter of framing and tone, not decor — and it points straight at the drained interiors of Andersson and the Greek films to come.
Andersson fuses the two branches of the family tree: Caligari's built world (he constructed nearly everything, including a city traffic jam, inside his own Stockholm studio, with painted backdrops and forced perspective) and Solondz's merciless flatness. The camera never moves — not one pan, not one zoom in the whole film — and each scene is a single fixed wide shot, composed in deep focus like a painting, held until the discomfort becomes the subject. His people are powdered pale, stalled mid-gesture, apologizing into telephones while the world quietly ends around them; the comedy and the horror are the same shot. Against his countryman Bergman's searching close-ups, Andersson offers the opposite: no faces, no interiors of the soul, just the social animal pinned in its terrarium. Lanthimos's locked-off middle-distance stare owes this film an obvious debt — the tripod as an instrument of judgment.
The Greek arrival, and the tradition's most concentrated experiment: instead of building a set, Lanthimos builds a dictionary. In one sunlit suburban villa, parents have reassigned the words — the sea is an armchair, a zombie is a small yellow flower — and their grown children live inside the vocabulary without a reason to doubt it. Thimios Bakatakis shoots it by strict rule: static camera, middle distance, frames that casually crop heads at the shoulder, as if the camera itself had been raised in the house and taught not to look directly at things. The lineage is Buñuel's withheld explanations crossed with the cold household framings of European art-horror, but the compression is new — an entire authoritarian state, complete with propaganda, borders, and language policy, run out of a garden. Made on the eve of Greece's financial collapse, it founded what critics abroad called the Greek Weird Wave, and it established the Lanthimos method every later film in this course scales up.
The method goes international and the house becomes a hotel: single guests have forty-five days to find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choice, and the film delivers this rule in the tone of a check-in desk. The invention here is the voice — every character speaks in the same flat, oddly literal monotone, reciting feelings like inventory, and every posture is held a beat too long, so that bodies stop expressing emotion and start exposing the rules they live under. Bakatakis's symmetrical framings and slow creeping zooms give institutional cruelty the calm of a brochure, with swelling classical music laid ironically over the regimentation. Notice the structural rhyme with The Exterminating Angel and Dr. Strangelove: the rebels who flee the system build a mirror image of it, because the satire's target is the machinery of conformity itself, not any one team. This is Buñuel's deadpan, half a century on, running at feature scale in English.
Now the deadpan grotesque storms the costume drama — the genre of visual reverence — and turns its own grandeur into a weapon. Robbie Ryan's wide and fisheye lenses make Queen Anne's palace bow outward at the edges of the frame, candlelit galleries curving like the inside of a fishbowl, a tiny sovereign swallowed by her own architecture; the painted distortions of Caligari have become optical again, as in Brazil, but mounted now on whip-pans that snap across rooms to catch a flinch. The candlelight-and-natural-light look descends from the painterly eighteenth-century tradition, while the venomous formality — symmetrical rooms, verbal cruelty as sport, obscenity in brocade — comes straight down from The Draughtsman's Contract's director and above all from The Cook, the Thief. Power here flows through intimacy, nursing, and appetite, exactly the overlap Greenaway staged in his restaurant. It is the Greek Weird Wave arriving in the palace, and the palace bending to fit.
And so to the film that gives this course its name — the summation. A scientist, himself visibly stitched together, revives a drowned woman with an infant's brain, and the film's genius is to encode her rawness optically: fisheye lenses, circular peepholes, frames that bulge as if the house were breathing, all gradually relaxing into conventional compositions as her mind matures — the grotesque as a developmental stage of seeing. Around her, Lanthimos builds a fantastical, wrong-in-every-detail Victorian Europe in the Brazil manner: an internally coherent alternate world whose anachronisms are the satire. The inheritance list is this entire course: Buñuel's rituals that fail to complete themselves, the Frankenstein-tinted body strangeness Lynch made intimate, Greenaway's color-drunk theatrical rooms, the episodic chapter structure that lets one woman's education proceed encounter by encounter, each authority she meets exposed as interested and partial. A century after someone painted a shadow onto a floor, the trick is the same and the target is the same — only now the warped world is hers to walk out of, one lens at a time.
What holds these twelve films together is a single wager, made in Weimar Germany and never withdrawn: that distortion is a form of honesty. The tools changed hands and changed nature — painted flats became studio-built cities, became wide-angle glass, became a rulebook of flat voices and locked-off frames — but every filmmaker here refuses the realist contract, builds a deliberately false world, and lets the falseness diagnose the true one: the household, the dinner party, the ministry, the marriage market, the court. Two family lines braid through the course — the built world (Wiene, Lynch, Gilliam, Greenaway, Andersson) and the straight face (Buñuel, Kubrick, Solondz) — and Lanthimos is where they finally marry, first in a Greek living room, then in a palace, then in a stitched-together Europe seen through a fishbowl. The through-line ends, for now, with a lens that literally shows a mind learning to see. Watch them in order and you'll catch the baton passing — a painted shadow, handed forward for a hundred years, still falling where no light says it should.