Rare and privileged moments allow us to see within the usual restraints of conformity and experience how the privacy of imagination flows into public space. In the west, as occasion for manifestos and insurrection slipped within the shadows and light of capitalist life, the revolutionary spirit was largely abandoned, or its spark, at least, was largely deterred. Increasingly, hopes to transform society from within allow us to use the arts of entertainment to inspire change that was left incomplete by earlier generations.

Siegrid Alnoy’s recent film, She’s One of Us, shows the psychological landscape we inhabit when we exchange the actual living out of our personal freedoms for mere belief in the pursuit of enlightened forms of autonomy. This film is a reflection upon hybrid forms of suppression and rage in a familiar new environment: the rural corporate landscape.

This is a world that offers immediate recognition of how our lives, preserved from riot and rebellion, are staged amidst the ruins and resurrection of earlier collateral damage. Through Ms Alnoy’s cinematography we see a special visual narrative emerge, in which not a hint of the past is shown. Instead, our collective past is presented as an insistent feeling, drawn into exquisite focus by the heroine, Christine Blanc. While she remains entrapped in familiar forms of alienation, our attention to her unbearable struggle is diverted by recurrent and extremely subtle, supernatural movements of nature.

Director of photography Christophe Pollock allows the Alps to make metaphorical appearances, to suggest that climatic evolution and geological time can be suspended, just long enough, for us to notice that we had a past, and that the past was a theatre of different behaviours, now lost to the cultural epoch directly preceding our own.

The large, unspoken narrative is played out by series of contrasts between the Alps and sleek corporate zones in the Rhone Valley. Glass buildings shimmer to reflect how deftly their creators give material form its aesthetic power over the significance of human gestures. Views of the Alps alternate with psyche panoramas that reveal fault lines in Ms Blanc’s carefully constructed emotional adaptations.

Meanwhile, the cinematographer’s view of her progress through landscapes of enterprise lends further definition to how the absence of the past makes our progress in erasing worlds all the more recognisable, as a monument to the loss of cultural landscapes defined by anything other than commerce.

How we part with the features of our own content is a central theme in this new version of the standard alimentation film. The character of Ms. Blanc demonstrates an uncanny ability to watch the eclipse of her human potential recede. She observes herself as she inhabits a world lacking in definable contexts; and allows it to engulf her.

Her predicament assures us of how confidently we can send our imaginative powers, and the artfulness of communication, into a collision course with the failure to be simply human and caring.

A double narrative of animated actors and eloquence of silent environments intensifies familiar prohibitions against personal freedom with the realisation that many of us live with a mere trace of evidence that our present landscape of enterprise, including its suburbs, overlays any previous methods of handwork, manufacture or exchange. Ms Blanc wears a constant expression of doubt as if to wonder what kinds of knowledge we do possess.

She constructs her life in a world of fixed aims. She responds to the apparent lack of reason and intimacy by patterning her emotions on an unspoken plan of delayed fulfilment. She survives a relentless disquiet, to earn her place in a particularly local corporate vacuum. Along the way, she employs the simplest choices: modify the role of outsider with modest conduct and meet society each day in obedient conformity. The sequences of nature with unmistakably Asian stylisation insist that this individual’s dilemma is not only global but is also timeless.

Director and cinematographer show us how in this world of relentless elegance, in people and in things, the eloquence of banality encourages the rage of frustration born out of the view from a world that is entirely opaque. Then, suddenly, an unreasonable murder occurs through pressures of the awful intimacy of delayed and unresolved confrontation. We see the struggle for life in the victimisation and death of an innocent. But is the unreasonableness of rage such a necessary ingredient in this otherwise comfortable middle-class world, where the only apparent collateral damage of the twentieth century seems to be that of longing and estrangement?

Is the depiction of physical suffering too often used as an explanation of our failure to repel unwanted voices? A scene that should be considered shocking is easily mistaken as weirdly banal. It is only the fragile, vulnerability of nudity that saves the logic of this scene. The murder is a transformative moment in which the futility of psychotic associations is clearly expressed. In her madness, Christine mistakes intimacy with the strange utility present in the power of force. The scene reminds us that violence as social protest is all too often employed as the ironic messenger of discontent in safe, comfortable societies.

Like She’s One of Us and other recent feature films, The Return, directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev, is a film that demystifies the long shadows of empires over modernity with indelible clarity. In both, we are given a sudden shift of our familiar viewpoint from the centre of political power to locations that offer greater clarity concerning the legacies of power. At these locations on the human periphery, we may see that no individual consciousness is as isolated as political demarcations would have us believe.

Instead, films like I’m Not Afraid, by Gabriele Salvatores, and Since Otar Left, by Julie Bertuccelli (also a film with Mr Pollock as DOP), are showing how the lament over real sorrows in the impoverished peripheries, for example, or the radiant promise of new beginnings, can transform periods of isolation into the logic of new behaviour. And that logic, as we have seen, often rises out of distortions of reality. Terry Eagleton, in Ideology (Verso 1999) argues, “This impossibly elastic reasoning begs the question, if we all share the same ideological universe, then how do we escape it? What location is the most favourable place to take our leave?” I’m Not Afraid refers to the location as the transformation of Puglia by Milan. In Since Otar Left it is the locus of hope sustained by cultural relations between Paris and Tblisi, Georgia. In The Return, Finland’s landscape is left to an invisible, distant past. To those familiar with the landscapes of Karelia, the progress of this story of a father’s brutality, and the courage of his sons to address what they clearly see are the distortions of love, takes place in the Arctic summertime in a world that seldom thaws.

By refocusing familiar narratives of collective dissociation at the end of periods of isolation, life stories, that engage transitions between our present epoch and the next, explain the margins of existence as scenes for the next ideological climax.

The Return, speaks through elliptical visual spectacles to overlay a story about how the burden of guilt is displaced from father to his sons through the attrition of the spirit brought on by a remorseless conquest of an eroded ‘world power’. Like She’s One of Us, Since Otar Left and I’m Not Afraid, each visual revelation assures us that “the feelings and atmosphere on screen are not a direct expression of the spoken dialogue.”* Instead, these visual narratives support an enactment, or, actualisation, of increasingly unified ideas concerning the inadequacy of speech to express the transformative nature of unspeakable experience.

This is expressed in I’m Not Afraid by showing us the journey back to consciousness that is shared between a kidnapped Milanese boy whose isolation has made him feral, and, the love and courage of the Pugliese boy who saves him.

Each of these films co-opts the sensuous lens, takes its authoritative aesthetic powers, and penetrates the surface of dissociative behaviours that result from transformations that occur too rapidly around us. They show how other voices, that we are only recently accustomed to hearing, can speak for experience where the end of empires intersect. They are able to clarify, what was until recently, a mystifying journey that took place in worlds beyond our experience, at the centre of once familiar period ideologies, now in ruin.

However, the location has not shifted. Instead, it is evidence of a protohistoric period of modernity that is laid open to description, now that tales from beyond the historical borders of ideology, come home to us.

*Andrei Zvyagintsev. Interview, ‘Cinematographer, 1003’