Also deserving of much attention is the incomparable Woody Allen, arguably America’s greatest existentialist filmmaker. It is Allen’s thinking that his films come directly from his consciousness of the shockingly absurd condition of man’s existence, and that the only possible confrontation one might make against the absurd is laughter. Some of his films point more directly to their philosophical origin than others, but Allen has been known to attribute the bulk of his career to realizing this humorous confrontation with the existentially absurd. See Crimes and Misdemeanors or Love and Death (a satire of nineteenth-century Russian novels, themselves constitutive of early existentialism) for sound examples of that philosophical basis for his creative endeavor.
In a similar vein, one only need view Dr. Strangeglove, the genuinely hilarious satire of (of all things to be funny) nuclear holocaust, or Full Metal Jacket, a not dissimilar study of the Vietnam Conflict and its particular challenge to the twentieth century as a war that stands apart from all wars, or A Clockwork Orange, the quintessential disturbing cult favorite, to discover the absurd genius of Stanley Kubrick. These three representative pieces of his are comic and bothersome, with the purpose of turning the viewer’s mind to the true horror of what man has done, or is capable of doing, to himself. Their comic sense (as is often the case in Allen’s films) is intended to shock and repulse.
Turning our attention to Europe, we find a film which, although relatively minor, is one of the most plainly existential films to be treated in this essay. It is Toto le heros, a Belgian film that garnered several major European awards three years ago. It is the story of Thomas van Haesbroeck, a man who is at the end of his life and reflects back upon the events therein, interpreting them according to his unshakable conviction that he was switched at birth with his next door neighbor, Alfred Kant, in a hospital fire, and therefore, his life has been lived by someone else. In the technical language of existentialism, it is the story of a man who believes that his life has been utterly and completely defined by the other. It is only the realization that his life has been lived by this other person, however, that gives Thomas’ own life any meaning. Through that recognition Thomas is able to make sense of his strange attraction to his sister and her subsequent death, the “accidental” death of his father, his later affair with the wife of Alfred Kant, and above all, the angst that has finally driven him to the contemplation of the murder that will not only destroy Kant, his Other, his double, but by necessity will also destroy himself.
A less perfect portrayal of the same dichotomy is at work in an early piece of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s, The Double Life of Veronique. In this interpretation, the twin heroines are living the same life, even though miles separate them. Similar experimentation with existential themes haunts Kieslowski’s superior Three Colors trilogy, Blue, White, and Red, united by their respective treatment of the three slogans of the French Republic, overlapping subject matter and imagery, and an overall striking visual style that is uniquely accommodated to Kieslowski’s concern for the ordinary details of speech, of action and of physical surrounding that transcend their ordinariness by their repeated manifestation in varied circumstances.
He occasionally reminds one of Wim Wenders, a German filmmaker who likewise often takes great care to manage the composition of imagery with the purpose of manifesting to the senses what would otherwise remain highly conceptual, an objective most brilliantly realized in his greatest film, Wings of Desire, and its inferior sequel, Faraway, So Close! The films tell the story of two angelic beings that watch over the citizens of Berlin. They move in and out of their thoughts, influencing them with the message of God’s grace that always remains at the limitable edge of man’s awareness, or, even worse, is forced away from man’s consciousness by a self-erected protective barrier of distractions that take the form of commercial images, music, and detachment from other human beings. The divine always hovers so close to man, and yet so far because of man’s inability to perceive it directly and his out and out refusal to know it indirectly, through the intangible, namely, the love of others, art that penetrates more deeply the structure of reality rather than merely mimicking its surface, and meditation on the quiet and ordinary miracles of human life. The move of the angels themselves from their black and white, a temporal, non-spatial realm to the time cursed, space bound, noisy Technicolor world of humans illustrates the unique existential situation of man. He, unlike any other being, occupies the border of the finite and the infinite. These films of Wenders, as well as others from his vast +uvre (I would recommend Until the End of the World, Alice in the Cities, and Paris, Texas) explore various facets of this relationship. His ultimate message seems to be that despite, and even perhaps because of, man’s finitude, he is able to realize the infinite, or, in his particularly Christian metaphors, man alone is condemned, and thus man alone may be saved by God’s grace.
Again, what is provided here is simply a brief synopsis of some of my favorite films that give expression to philosophical and conceptual subject matter made possible by the far-reaching effects of existentialism. I could speak at length about Terry Gilliam’s hysterically dystopic Brazil, the dark and brooding tone of Zentropa, the bizarre and inhuman Delicatessen, the work of Jim Jarmusch in films like Night on Earth and Mystery Train, but the limitations of time and space confine me from saying as much as I would like. I trust, though, that what has been said will serve as a useful resource for your own pursuit of understanding film that challenges its viewers to move beyond what is ordinarily presented in the medium.