This was a bit of a hotchpotch, connected only by their “fringe” geography, but interesting nonetheless.

The Travelling Players, Theo Angelopoulos, 1975

Slow cinema. Very slow cinema. I see that The Travelling Players is almost four hours long. I’ll give it a go; I should know enough Greek history to grasp something of it, but the style – elliptical, demanding, non-linear – may defeat me. It’s about WWII, the civil war and its aftermath. Like la Movida Madrileña, this came from a fractured country at the end of military repression, but it had none of the obvious energy of, say, Almodóvar.

Black Cat, White Cat, Emir Kusturica, 1998

Chaotic and exuberant. It’s set amongst a Roma community on the banks of the Danube and is the polar opposite of slow cinema. This did remind me of Almodóvar in its all-embracing acceptance of all human behaviour.

Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014

Hmm. Visually it gripped: poor dwellings in Cappadocia looking like half-eaten gingerbread houses. It’s about a hotel owner and landlord, but I’m guessing that it’s also about Turkey itself.

Danish films this week. The Dogme 95 manifesto, the “Vow of Chastity” is dogmatic and downright puritanical:

• Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
• The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
• The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
• The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
• Optical work and filters are forbidden.
• The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
• Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
• Genre movies are not acceptable.
• The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
• The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

For me, the hand-held camera stricture made the clips we saw feel claustrophobic. I wasn’t too bothered that Dogme 95 films had passed me by; with their limitations and purity, I feel little inclination to try to catch them up.

Festen, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998

I knew about this film even though I’ve never seen it so its big reveal wasn’t a surprise, and I can see that the style – close-ups, overlapping voices, uncertainty and confusion – worked well for the plot.

Open Hearts, Susanne Bier, 2002

Young couple, happy, he is badly injured in a car crash, the aftermath. Yes, well filmed.

The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998

I couldn’t get past the tacky premise: a group of agitators pose as people with learning difficulties/neurodivergence as some kind of anti-bourgeois action. I really couldn’t see how this was sticking it to the privileged and it alienated me completely.

An explosion of countercultural output following the death of Franco in 1975 and decades of repression. The collective id escaped its box, and forbidden feelings spilled out into all forms of culture. There wasn’t much of a Spanish film industry before this – perhaps it was seen as a chink through which ideas could enter Franco’s Spain.

I don’t like Pedro Almodóvar’s films. I was totally alienated by the last one I saw years ago – a rape scene played for laughs – but, given the context, his films make some kind of sense. You could rage against the Catholic Church and patriarchy or you could poke cartoonish, bad-taste fun at it.

We saw clips from Dark Habits (1983) and What Have I Done To Deserve This? (1984). Nuns shooting up and a taxi driver claiming proudly to have forged letters from Hitler. As I said, bad taste. Also non-judgemental and sympathetic – qualities perhaps lacking in the Spain Almodóvar grew up in. But still . . . no.

The other film was Jamon Jamon (1992) by Bigas Luna (Life of Brian immediately sprang to mind), which looked like an extended advert or pop video with its great images.

As an aside, it was amusing to think of doing this lesson over Zoom about Spanish films, speaking English and sitting in a Dutch hotel room.

Director Thorold Dickinson with Mervyn Johns, Nova Pilbeam, Jack Hawkins

Originally commissioned by the War Office but released commercially by Ealing Studios. Its message was the familiar “careless talk costs lives” one. Context was important: the knowledge that this was life and death stuff, that some of the actors had been given leave from the forces to make the film, and that it would have been watched by real wives, parents and siblings of people risking their lives in the armed forces. In other respects, it was a film that rattled along to its doomed conclusion (although successful as a destructive mission) and presented its crucial message very effectively. Mervyn Johns was perfectly cast as the unassuming little man who hears everything and passes it on to the Nazis: never overplaying his part but always there as a reminder to the wartime audience to be discreet. Interestingly being a blabbermouth crossed social lines: the upper-class officer and the regular private were each as foolish as each other, and the worst offender was a wing commmander.

Like “Went The Day Well?”, its occasional violence is quite shocking because it seemed so unexpected for a film of its time. It’s as if these films tried to jolt the British public into an acceptance that violence and brutality were a means of defence as well as aggression. I can only be glad that I’ve never been in a position to test that proposition.

Like Poland, post-war Czech cinema was state sanctioned and funded. There was a liberalisation in attitude in the early 1960s with the Prague Spring, squashed again after the 1968 Soviet invasion. The FAMU school in Prague, like the Łódź film school, was the training ground for a generation of film-makers. Czech films drew on theatrical and folk traditions like puppetry; the films that we viewed had a much lighter touch than the Polish films from the previous lesson.

Closely Observed Trains, Jiri Menzel, 1966

The sly humour is there from the beginning: martial music as we watch a pigeon strutting its stuff. My fellow students noted sexism and brutality where I saw only a leering male’s point of view (watching the countess ride off) and a comment (the rabbit for the pot) on the ever-present threat of death beneath the “Railway Children” vibe. I guess that makes me analytical rather than sensitive.

The Firemen’s Ball, Milos Forman, 1967

A more obviously comic film, still undermining authority in uniform. (Similarities with Ealing comedies in that regard.) It seems harmless from the short clip we saw, yet it was banned after 1968 and Forman left for the US.

Daisies, Vera Chytilova, 1966

Definitely not mainstream. As surreal as “Last Year in Marienbad” but it looked rather more fun. Two young women, both named Marie, decide to make the most of life in a world gone bad. It looks quirky, with nods to puppetry, robotics, animation. Lots of flowers and girl power, made with non-professional actors.