Most literary films/tv shows thread

If you're greentexting
>muh spooky atmosphere!
, then I genuinely think you don't get it.
What films do you like?

Most literary coffee

Right now my top 5 (in no particular order) looks probably something like

Unforgiven
Through a Glass Darkly
Kanal
Gate of Hell
Lawrence of Arabia

I'm very willing to hear defenses of Lynch but I have yet to come across someone who tries to inform me instead of just saying I don't get it

What are your thoughts on Buñuel? Chytilova?

You might just not like surrealism, going by your favorites. Glass Darkly is probably Bergman's least abstract piece.

He is very skilled at utilizing unconventional shots in creating tense/disjointed atmosphere. He also is interesting for his use of cultural symbols as catalysts for generating and altering atmosphere; some of his movies like Wild At Heart are better watched for the emotions it generates rather than strictly for the plot or characters. I also enjoy his overarching theme of sinister - often also supernatural - evil hiding under the veneer of an idyllic American town. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks both deal with this pretty well. It is fine if you don't like experimentation, but the disjointed dream-narrative of Mulholland Drive was genius.

I went through a big Bunuel phase probably 3-4 years ago but admittedly I haven't seen any of his since then. Simon of the Desert was my favorite of his, then maybe Exterminating Angel. I know that as far as surrealism goes they're pretty tame but that doesn't bar me from enjoying other surrealist movies. I haven't seen Daisies or anything by Chytilova but I've seen and enjoyed stuff by Has and some of the more fluid and experimental stuff by Parajanov, which I enjoyed and from what I've heard are somewhat comparable
Thank you for the refreshing response. I guess I can see what you mean about the conventional shots but at the same time Spielberg was doing similar things earlier (like the shot in Close Encounters when he is building the model of the mountain on his table and it appears on the television) and Hitchcock even before him. It's a different kind of suspense but it makes more sense to me.

I realized the other day that Twin Peaks is free to watch with amazon prime so I started, three episodes in and it's already the best shit I've ever seen. Make fun of me

Rectify

so does "literary" basically just mean "metaphors that are meant to express someone's distressed psychological state?" Because it seems like whenever a film is praised for being high-brow, that's what it means, just boring, pretentious arty scenes that are just metaphors for a character's psychosis.

I see your comparison to Spielberg and Hitchcock, but Lynch uses the shots to create surrealist anxiety, as opposed to traditional suspense in story. I appreciate both. It also seems to me that Lynch's use of jarring angles in wide-shots is particularly distinctive. While many people find his inclusion of bizarre and unexplained characters as unnecessary or shoe-horned, I find that most of the time they are crucial to constructing the atmosphere of surrealism that allows him to blend the supposed reality of the setting with something of myth or fantasy.
I am not saying you have to like him, but that's why I enjoy his films.

Twin Peaks is trash. I'm not even going to deign to explain why.

The most literary show is Scenes from a Marriage. There are too many films to name.

"Literary" seems like an odd way to describe a highly visual filmmaker like Lynch. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't see anything particularly literary about his work. This isn't a slight, by the way. Films shouldn't be literary.

I think Steven Spielberg's Munich is one of the most underrated films of all time. It's the story of assassins going to take out their targets, and each assassination scene is staged so dramatically where you can feel all of their moral deliberation. It doesn't really make use of cheap metaphor or irony either, it stays in the realm of realism but is shot in a way that their inner feelings are the focus of almost every shot. There's one scene where he has to turn off a lamp to detonate a bomb, and he just stares at it for several seconds; you can see the moral struggle all the way through.