In the 1950s, as censorship laws became more lax around the world, the direction of cinema was changing, some would say for the better no doubt. Gone was the pageantry of the golden age. It was replaced by the more personal. Filmmakers worldwide started to explore what it meant to be human. As we saw through their films, the foibles of humanity are the greatest gift that was bestowed upon us as a race. It spurs us and sends us shooting out the door in the morning.

Although, when you analyze this time and the filmmakers, you largely focus on European cinema. This is not to say that the Americans weren’t doing equally good work. It’s just, when you cast your net out, it returns a treasure trove of films that, for the most part, were made in Europe. They were films that explored the human condition, for better or worse, and truly spoke about the power of cinema.

The most obvious being, of course, Ingmar Bergman. In 1957 Bergman started to finally find his voice with the film The Seventh Seal. It was a metaphysical allegory set in medieval Europe and featured, most famously, a knight, who had just returned from the Crusades, playing chess with Death. Bergman liked to call himself an illusionist, that people built more into his work than was actually there. Whatever the case may be, he exposed a nerve that people identified with, that thye understood and most definitely could identify with.

In the 1966 film Persona, two traumatized women, an actress and a nurse, psychologically devour each other. The technical side, as brought off by cameraman Sven Nykist, made the decomposition of two psyches all the more powerful.

On the American side of the coin, Woody Allen stands far out above the rest. His films explore more than the inferiority complex of the “Woody Allen” character. People write his films off far too quickly, writing this off as the reason. Doing this, however, ignores a rich tapestry of experiences and emotions that Allen lays out, emotions about God, love, and the human experience that few other filmmakers touch, much less get right. Woody Allen is everyman and the character has more to do with the fight of the modern male surviving in a changing society than a little neurotic nut running around waiting for his next analyst visit.

Joseph Losey had to leave America in the 1950s because of his political beliefs. In the early 60s, he began a collaboration with British playwright Harold Pinter that would explore social structures of British society beyond the scope of anything Masterpiece Theater could ever hope to produce. Structures and spaces defined characters and their lot as much as the characters themselves did. The formal order, Losey told us, was the ultimate form of oppression. This was personal to Losey, as an outsider banned from his country because of his political beliefs.to

As well, Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel eyed the established structure with a great degree of skepticism. This didn’t just include the powers that be. In Bunuel’s eyes, the upper class shouldered as much, if not more, of the blame for the state of society. Nowhere is that more than in The Phantasm of Liberty. The loose amalgam of stories that comprise the plot are all damnations of what the class of people that have means but not total power. They are the deviants in Bunuel’s mind and that is how he portrays them. Clearly, his films are a catalog of his psychosis but Bunuel’s films are richer as a result..

When it comes down to it, I prefer the personal every time. It helps us to know we are not alone and not all that weird