Rigorous composition and a sense of ribaldry pervades Peter Greenaway’s breakout hit The Draughtsman’s Contract, a metatextual murder mystery. Greenaway details the manoeuvring of the British gentry with a script that stings with put-downs and complex, elaborate frames, creating a film that is in large part about the deception involved in creating images.

Mr Neville, played by character actor Anthony Higgins, is an artist commissioned by Mrs Virginia Herbert (a biting Janet Suzman) to create twelve drawings of her country manor as a gift to her absent husband. Neville, vain and governed by his lustful impulses, embarks on a calculated seduction of the Herbert women while fulfilling his commission. However, what begins as a game of seduction and power quickly unravels into a far more sinister conspiracy, as Neville becomes entangled in a web of manipulation and intrigue far beyond his control.

Greenaway’s films are often marked by an Apollonian-Dionysian tension, a delicate balance between exacting formalism and often disturbing themes. In The Draughtsman’s Contract, this dialectic is on full display: the film’s precise compositions serve as a counterpoint to the carnivorous, diabolical subject matter contained within. If The Draughtsman’s Contract is not quite at the ferocious tenor of his later films like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the 17th-century period setting, all ghastly powdered faces and elaborate wigs, is as unctuous and nauseating as you might hope. A richly layered examination of art, power, and deception, The Draughtsman’s Contract sits alongside The Prince and Leviathan as one of the great artworks about statecraft.

Claire Denis’ Chocolat depicts the strange friendship between France, a young girl living in Cameroon in its final years as a French colony, and Protée, the family houseboy, who lives a life of quiet resentment. A tone poem of exchanged glances and covert understandings, Denis’ semi-autobiographical debut feature remains a key work of postcolonial cinema and a film of remarkable visual beauty.

Denis had worked as assistant director on Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas several years before and found herself impressed but unmoved by the arid emptiness of the West Texas landscape. Inspired by a book by Raymond Depardon narrating his childhood spent in Algeria, she chose to set her debut feature in her childhood home of Cameroon, where she lived with her colonial administrator father. Yet this is no rose-tinted spectacle: Denis' intimate, familiar gaze upon the red clay earth and expansive vistas of Cameroon only sharpens the viewer's awareness of the racial injustice at the heart of the film.

As Protée, Isaach de Bankolé holds a world of suffering behind dignified silence. Identified by critic Vincent Canby as possessing the disposition of “a prince, someone taken hostage in war, waiting to be ransomed”, he is as much an icon of self-determination and resolve as a colonial subject. A more sentimental filmmaker might have framed the bond between Protée and France as a cutesy tale of cross-cultural friendship, but Cécile Ducasse’s portrayal of young France is imbued with a quiet steeliness, a sense that the child is observing the end of an era, subtly testing the fading authority of the colonial world she is a part of.

Denis credited a teenage reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a transformative moment in her politics; as she said later, “I understood that humiliation was the important feeling that people had in this relationship, both black and white.” Recognising the limits of her own perspective as a white European filmmaker depicting colonial Africa, she avoids attempting to portray Protée’s experience from within, rather choosing to observe it from a distance, as a witness to an unjust system. The film’s final, haunting scene underscores this sense of detachment and loss: while France may have left Cameroon, it’s the land and the people who remain on it that carries the memory of the past, not her.

At the opening of Truffaut’s 1960 tragicomedy Édouard Saroyan, a pianist played by real-life musical icon Charles Aznavour, is on the receiving end of a blast of bad news when Édouard’s wife Thérèse confesses that his entire career as a concert pianist is due to her having slept with a top agent. Shattered, he changes his name to Charlie Koller and settles for despondent key-stroking in a small Parisian bar, where he gets tangled up in the activity of some low-level gangsters.

The film blends the motifs of French New Wave cinema – extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence shots, and sudden jump cuts – with shifting, grainy cinematography by Raoul Coutard, making a film that blends introspection with the dynamism of the crime caper. The film’s production was loose: the script was frequently changed on set, with Truffat directing scenes according to taste rather than in strict adherence to the pre-agreed programming: “I wanted to [...] make a film where all the scenes would please me. I shot without any criteria”.

A scene where Charlie plays in isolation, with the piano illuminated against the otherwise dim surroundings, captures his status as the man upon the stage, grappling with where his free will clashes with the plans of the gods. Truffaut’s use of noir-inspired, minimalist aesthetics speaks to Charlie’s status as a man in self-imposed exile, grappling with the limits of self-determination. Yet Charlie is no hero but an everyman, somewhere between hero and victim, never in full possession of the facts. As Truffaut explained: “the idea [...] was to make a film without a subject, to express all I wanted to say about glory, success, downfall, failure, women and love – by means of a detective story.”

In Kamikaze Hearts (1986), Juliet Bashore takes the pornographic industry’s own existential ambivalence – its prevarication between the real and the fake – and explodes it. Originally named Fact or Fiction, Bashore’s quasi-documentary was conceived after Bashore, a filmmaking student working on a documentary on the porn industry in San Francisco, met Tigr Mennett, an assistant director, in a relationship with actress Sharon Mitchell. The film follows Mitchell as she travels to San Francisco to shoot a porn parody of the opera Carmen, directed by Mennett. Over the course of the next few hours, we follow Mitchell as she goes to a strip club, speaks to other performers, takes drugs, and spends a night in jail.

By blurring pornography’s already-blurry boundary between reality and performance, Bashore asks the audience to question what is authentic and what is staged, both in the film and in life. Several aspects of Kamikaze Hearts are fictional, including many of the couple’s arguments, and while real people from the adult film industry feature in the movie, they improvised their roles and play alternate versions of themselves. The Carmen porn parody, too, is made up. Yet the fact that the couple at its heart are real makes this film a profound commentary on the nature of reality itself, especially when it comes to romance.

Does desire complicate or sharpen what we think of as our free will? The raw, unpolished look – reminiscent of cinéma vérité – mirrors the disintegration of the self that happens in porn, in love, in sex, and at work. All these are contexts in which people perform identities to survive systems of power; and, perhaps, to get closer to the slippery essence of themselves.

Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s classic of 1960s surrealism, deserves its place in the canon as a landmark in film storytelling and one of the greatest films of all time. Every interpretation can and has been thrown at the 84-minute classic of experimental cinema, from Jung’s collective unconscious to the Stanislavski method to the lingering trauma of World War Two, yet Persona always emerges still wholly mysterious and strange.

Liv Ullmann stars as Elisabet, an actress who has become selectively mute after a mental health breakdown, and who is sent to a remote seaside cottage with her nurse Alma, played by Bibi Andersson. As Alma attempts in vain to awaken Elisabet from her predicament, a creeping sense of psychological danger grows. The two women, shot in tight array by cinematographer Sven Nyqvist, begin to blur and morph until one cannot be sure where one starts and the other ends.

The question of why Elisabet chooses silence haunts the film. Is it a symptom of depressive withdrawal, a rejection of the trivial chatter that fills much of human existence? Or perhaps a radical attempt to shed the societal constructs of womanhood? No definitive answer is given. The film's disorienting opening sequence – a montage of seemingly unrelated, disturbing images like film reels flickering, a spider crawling, and a nail being hammered into a hand – serves as a warning not to trust what follows, a signal that Persona operates on a level beyond conventional narrative logic.

This refusal to explain itself is what gives Persona its enduring power. It is less about a specific narrative than about existential themes: the dissolution of identity, the masks we wear, and the void that lies beneath them when they are stripped away. The film’s final moments, where the a projector reel runs out of film, meditates on the nature of cinema itself: the impossibility of capturing a “real” image, and the futility of art as a tool for uncovering absolute truth.

The movement of money between hands, pockets and global systems was always a preoccupation of Robert Bresson, that most austere and solemn of the European arthouse. L’argent, based off Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon, follows the movement of one forged 500-franc note across Paris, ruining the lives of everyone it touches. Realised with Bresson’s signature directorial sobriety, L’argent is the culmination of his career-long preoccupation with spiritual crisis and the fading promise of redemption.

Non-professional actor Christian Patey stars as Yvon, a delivery boy who is given a note forged by a couple of opportunistic schoolboys. Yvon’s attempts to use the counterfeit money lose him his job, his personal freedom and eventually, his moral grounding. Descending into a life of crime, Bresson illustrates not only the corrupting influence of financial systems on the individual, but also the fragility with which morality is based on. All it takes for Yvon to eventually commit murder is being at the wrong place at the wrong time. In this way, L’argent argues for the necessity of compassion to sustain the moral fabric of society. Bresson was held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis during World War Two, and the ease with which normal people commit terrible crimes was a spectre that haunted his filmography.

Scenes of cruelty and violence erupt with shocking intensity, their impact heightened by the actors' subdued, almost emotionless delivery – Bresson’s technique to strip away theatricality and lay bare the moral realities at the core of his films. By the film's end, Yvon is a convicted murderer, destined to live out his days in prison. Yet L’argent is not simply about the consequences of one man’s actions; it’s an indictment of a world where systems of greed and indifference undermine human kindness, leading even the most ordinary of individuals down a path of destruction. Through his uncompromising vision, Bresson presents L’argent as a final, devastating commentary on the human condition, where redemption is all but out of reach.

Stroszek (1977), directed by Werner Herzog, is a bleak but darkly funny portrait of isolation and disillusionment, following the journey of Bruno Stroszek, a squashed-looking Berliner who has spent much of his life in institutions. Disillusioned with urban Germany, he migrates along with his new partner, a sex worker, to the US, where he discovers another profound abyss in the form of the American Dream.

The film adopts a raw, documentary-like realism, which captures everyday life through a detached, observational lens. Long, unbroken takes and minimalist dialogue increase a sense of eddying pointlessness, the durational experience of nothing-ness inhabited by Stroszek. Once again Herzog’s fascination with the figure of the outsider and their tragic, often absurd quests for meaning leads to a film which undoes the very assumptions on which cinema is based: that narrative has essential meaning, that the protagonist is a hero.

Through its unpolished, unglamorous aesthetic and quiet attention to the banal, Stroszek invites viewers to reflect on the crushing weight of isolation in a disconnected world. Last year, Far Out called it Herzog’s “most profound cinematic exploration” and his “greatest movie”; Roger Ebert called it “one of the oddest films ever made”. Absurd, tragic, heartbreaking, funny: it’s a film that describes, through the life of a profound outsider, the kind of story we all might find ourselves in.

“There's something terrible about reality and I don't know what it is. No one will tell me.” laments Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Red Desert. Antonioni’s first film in colour, Red Desert is a puzzle box of a film, a whodunit where the villain is modernity itself. Giuliana embodies the film’s central conflict: the "red desert" is as much a barren internal wasteland as it is an environmental one. In our blind pursuit of technological progress, Antonioni warns, we not only render the earth uninhabitable but lose our connection to the psychic landscapes within ourselves.

The city of Ravenna, a rapidly industrialised pocket on the northeastern coast of Italy, is as much a character in Red Desert as Guiliana. The constant, oppressive drone of factory noise seems louder than any of the film’s muted, emotionally stifled characters. Though this was Antonioni’s first film in colour, he employs a muted palette – lingering shots of featureless grey apartment blocks, the thick plumes of smoke rising from factory towers, and rivers stained brown with pollution. Guiliana’s auburn hair is the only source of vitality in her dull surroundings. 

For this mannered miserablism, Antonioni was dismissed by his contemporaries: critic Robin Wood scorned his films as a “retreat into a fundamentally complacent despair”. In contrast to the radicalism of peers like Pasolini and Godard, whose films engaged Marxist or psychoanalytic frameworks, Antonioni’s focus on the existential ennui of his well-dressed, emotionally stunted characters appeared somewhat demodé. The director’s politics were less programmatic: late in the film, Guiliana asks her lover Corrado whether he is a leftist. “One believes in socialism... perhaps. What matters is to act as one thinks right – right for oneself and for others,” he says, hedging his bets. Guiliana’s denouement is withering. “That's some bunch of words you strung together.” Political rhetoric is cold comfort when faced with existential crisis of such scale.

Above all, Red Desert is about the struggle to see. The billowing smog and industrial detritus that cloud Giuliana’s vision are symbolic of a larger, collective blindness – the indifference of a society enthralled by Italy’s "economic miracle," while ignoring the toll it takes on their humanity. Yet there is a perverse kind of pleasure in the enormity of the modern, the awe-inspiring scale of industrial development. For all its doomy handwringing, the pleasure of Red Desert is in how even the detritus of modernity can become hypnotically, scarily beautiful.

Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), which he co-wrote with Derek Saldaan McClintock and Paul Hallam, opens in London, June 1977: as the screen tells us, the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The London she oversees, and presumably knows next to nothing about, is multicultural and often not happily so. London’s status as home to people from over the world, melded together, is expressed in the motif of the radio station, which spits out a rich blend of punk, funk, and soul.

The film consists of several narratives, including the relationship between Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and his girlfriend Tracy (Sophie Okonedo, in her first film role), and gay punk Billibud (Jason Durr) and Caz (Mo Sesay). Racism and homophobia criss-cross the lives of the characters, each subject to harassment from skinheads as well as from inside marginalised communities, but at the film’s heart is an insistence on solidarity between races, classes and genders.

The film’s use of music and colour is central, with the soundtrack not only underscoring the era but also highlighting the characters’ search for identity and resistance against societal pressures. Young Soul Rebels creates a layered, textured representation of a moment in history, offering an unapologetic look at race, sexuality, and subculture against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile socio-political climate. The ironic framing of the Jubilee gives voice to the analogue between the characters’ statuses both as film and royal subjects, both absurd framings, which offer only a glimpse of the complexity and richness of late 20th-century life.