‘Go on! Run your balls off!’ shouts Sister Agatha, when her village-men turn in fear as the Turkish military fleet approach the Italian shores of Otranto. She is María Casares, best known as Death in Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), bellowing insults at the men who have tortured women from her convent as a wonderful, naughty nun in Flavia the Heretic (1974), directed by Gianfranco Mingozzi. She’s looking forward to their comeuppance. We’ve also seen her enjoying a baptismal release of her bladder en plein air on the hillside and introduce Sister Flavia to the pleasures of holy swaying on your haunches while kneeling in prayer. ‘How many rude things can we make nuns do?’ ask the producers of exploitation sub-genre nunsploitation. Arguably, any exploitation-style efforts to engage our social consciousness are dumped, despite the producers’ claims that the films are based on ‘actual’ historical events. Flavia the Heretic is loosely based on the slaughter of the Catholic martyrs by the Ottoman Turks in Otranto in the late 15th century. But this simply provides a historical backdrop for a whole lot of sleaze. The central characters are revenge-driven, misandrous women. In Killer Nun (1978), directed by Giulio Berruti, with a nod to giallo, the anonymous antagonist snarls to her priest at confessional that she is haunted by traumatic abuse and wants to avenge herself on all men; Flavia too wants revenge for the patriarchal limitations placed on her – her only options are marriage, either to the church or to a man. These films became famous in the 70s when they were shredded and banned for their overt extreme violence and sexual deviance. They currently enjoy a reprieve as recently uncut versions have become available on DVD by distributors such as Shameless Screen Entertainment.

As an excuse for porn, the unleashed repression of nuns is a good one. There are scenes upon scenes of nuns jumping at the chance to indulge their passions: ‘no woman could berate sex completely!’ is the subtext. It is a delicious moment when Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude in Killer Nun changes her clothes en route into town and transforms to familiar on-screen Amazonian siren – she sits in a bar, black-stockinged and smoking an impossibly long cigarette to twangy lounge music. She eyes up a wooden but fairly good-looking man at the bar and so the taboo-busting money shot ensues when we see Ekberg enjoy carnal gratification after what we can assume has been some time. Not just that, but the old man she’s going to sneak home to later is, in the eyes of the Catholic church, somewhat important. In (Flavia the Heretic, medieval Italian nuns loosen up after they give shelter to female members of the Cult of the Tarantula who are on their annual bender. The nuns are influenced by the women’s hyper-sexual trance state and reel around, shedding their garments and rubbing themselves against columns and each other – and so on to the whole wealth of cheeky spectacles to be had in women-only convents.

Within this fairly formulaic titillation are some imaginative sequences. Nuns dealing with the seepage of their desires is an opportunity for some vibrant visions where their uncensored hankerings come to the surface. The success of these scenes is mainly due to some good pairings of cinematographer and soundtrack composer. In Flavia the Heretic, Alfio Contini (The Night Porter, 1974) teams up with composer Nicola Piovani. After everything goes wrong in the bedroom (Flavia wants to go on top but her new Turkish lover does not want to be dominated), Flavia gets high on mind-bending incense and the vision that follows is a montage complemented by a haunting electronic occult-folk soundtrack: Sister Agatha rises from the dead grinning insanely, blood pours from stigmata, a nun bound to a cross is juxtaposed with a suspended disemboweled cow, a nude gamine woman crawls into the carcass, another sister is outstretched on a table, mock-devoured by more naked people. All this could suggest female subjugation – woman as meat, if the actors/characters didn’t look like they were having so much fun. Play-biting and tousled hair flowing from wimples is not sinister. Rather more, this is a stylised stirring flesh feast.

In Killer Nun, Sister Gertrude believes herself to be the possible killer of patients in the psychiatric hospital she is stationed at. Her headaches from post-brain surgery have led to morphine addiction and unsettling blackouts. Her hallucinations are pieced together over a psychedelic score by Alessandro Alessandroni, who worked closely with Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone on Italian Western scores, and cinematographer Antonio Maccoppi. His soundtrack is what spotlights Killer Nun among other giallo fare. He uses a range of instruments including 12-string guitar, banjo, classical guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, early drum machine and others (Cinema Suicide blog interview with Tim Fife, Aug 2008) to produce an uncanny discordance suitable for a scene that reflects Gertrude’s drug-induced state. The sequence moves between Gertrude’s vision, a close-up of a unconvincing but gory brain operation, her overbearing mother, a nude man laid out in a morgue, who Gertrude bends down to kiss, and stoned Gertrude in her own bedroom in the hospital being resuscitated by one of the patients. The intercutting of realities to the giallo guitars peaks when the patient is bludgeoned to death and pushed out of a window, seemingly by ‘diminished responsibility’ Gertrude.

My reading of these films, then, is about an enjoyment of the sheer daftness of saucy nuns and the manner in which their over-spilling ardor is manifested in such bizarre ways. I think this is the way into the films, as opposed to tracing the closed misogyny in the narratives. I haven’t gone into the sprawl of gender issues here – where revenge plots experiment with women exerting their right to freedom without mapping out the society where it could exist: Flavia eventually punishes her father, but only with the protection of the Turkish soldiers, who in turn persecute her. Also, at one remove from this, arguably the Italian male filmmakers use the nun milieu as a framing device for their male gaze. But when Anita Ekberg sways beatifically across the screen it is difficult to imagine her being oppressed by anything.

Nicola Woodham

‘Bittersweet’ – a word often applied to Billy Wilder, and one with associations with his home city, Vienna. The idea of a movie script as recipe, with ingredients to be perfectly measured and the chef to follow the instructions closely and skilfully, is one that Wilder might have approved of. The word also implies a certain necessary balance, with the bitter never allowed to overpower the sweet, or vice versa. It might seem, looking at Wilder’s work, that when the bitter predominated in a drama (Sunset Blvd, 1950, Ace in the Hole, 1951), the effect could be highly stimulating, but when it took over in a comedy, the result was at the very least unappealing to the mass audience (Kiss Me Stupid, 1964), and at worst hard to stomach for anybody (Buddy, Buddy, 1981).

Wilder liked to say that he made dramas when he was feeling happy, and comedies when he was depressed, to cheer himself up. If so, his last years as director must have been grim ones: after The Spirit of St Louis (1957), all his films are comedies, apart from Fedora (1978), although many of them are so tempered with tragedy or bile as to sometimes transcend, subvert, or simply trash the genre.

In this amnesiac age, it’s both striking and strange that Wilder’s late work is mostly easy to see, despite the fact that nearly everything he made after the career peak of The Apartment (1960) flopped on first release, and often received harsh critical notices. But Wilder, though he certainly set himself up against the Cahiers school and the auteur theory, always lived up to one of the unofficial prerequisites for an auteur filmmaker: his unsuccessful films are often as interesting, and nearly as enjoyable, as the ones where everything comes together. Nearly everybody admits that Bogart’s casting in Sabrina (1954) is an error, but nearly everybody loves the film anyway. Likewise, Gary Cooper is too old in Love in the Afternoon (1957), but the discomfort is fleeting and the appeal is lasting. Fedora creaks in places, and seems peculiarly drawn-out for a rapid-fire mind like Wilder’s, but in its rephrasing of ideas from Sunset Blvd, filtered through Wilder’s autumnal sensibility, it still seduces. Only Buddy, Buddy remains beyond the pale, a downright painful farce, with some of the desperate mugging of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B., but none of the desperate sincerity.

For me, the charming Avanti! (1972) aside, the late movie where it all, mostly, comes together, is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), the biggest flop of them all. An expensive attempt to serve up several new Holmes adventures, detailing the detective’s amorous escapades, the movie is characterised by a respect for Doyle’s creation that may have seemed anachronistic when the film first appeared. Wilder’s attempts to cast Peter Sellers as Holmes and Peter O’Toole as Watson foundered: the superstitious Sellers no doubt remembered the massive heart attack that forced Wilder to recast Kiss Me Stupid. Instead of stars, Wilder ended up with Robert Stephens, an up-and-comer who never arrived as a box office star, and character man Colin Blakely.

In Wilder’s Ten Commandments of Filmmaking, ‘The first nine are, Thou Shalt Not Bore. The tenth is, Thou Shalt Have the Right of Final Cut’. On Sherlock Holmes, Wilder had that right, but was told when the film was finished that unless he savagely cut down its running time, it wouldn’t get a release. The movie had aimed at the ‘roadshow’ market, expensive, long movies that toured the world in a blaze of ballyhoo, with the public charged extra for the honour of seeing the super-epics. But several of these had just flopped, and Wilder was forced to cut his movie from five stories to two, resulting in a rather ungainly structure.

Fans of this movie, a small but dedicated bunch, have long learned to overlook the troubled production history (Stephens attempted suicide partway through the shoot, a victim of alcoholism, marital break-up and Wilder’s exacting direction) and focus on the very real pleasures provided. On the surface, there’s Christopher Challis’s widescreen photography, glazed and graceful, and Alexander Trauner’s production design, featuring a recreation of Baker Street in forced perspective. Going deeper, there’s the film’s daring mix of bitchy comedy (a slight Jewish-American quality in the writing casts Holmes and Watson as a Victorian odd couple) and melancholy romance: Miklos Rosza’s score, his best for years, brings out every throb of the heartache underlying the hi-jinks. It’s derived from a violin concerto by the composer, which Wilder played while writing the script with regular collaborator I.A.L. Diamond.

The first of Wilder’s tales is a puckish yarn in which an ageing ballerina attempts to hire Holmes to father a ‘brilliant and beautiful child’ – Holmes escapes the assignation by pretending to be Watson’s gay lover. Stephens’s performance at times appears to be an audition for the role of Oscar Wilde, so his thespian fruitiness is well-used here. Blakely is painfully straight, and so the imposture is all the funnier in his case.

In the second story (connected to the first by a slender plot thread involving vanished circus dwarfs), Holmes comes to the aid of a Belgian amnesiac (Genevieve Page) and is soon embroiled in a plot involving German spies and the Loch Ness Monster. It all makes sense eventually, with cameos by Mycroft Holmes and Queen Victoria, but what’s most effective is the love story between Holmes and his client, which occurs under false pretences: she’s a spy posing as a helpless widow, and his emotional attachment causes him to fail as a detective. What’s more, when he realises the extent to which she’s fooled him, his respect and love for her grow even more: only when he’s turned her in to the authorities does he quite apprehend how he’s outsmarted himself.

Holmes, the mastermind, misogynist and fool for love, seems like one of Wilder’s most autobiographical heroes: smart, cynical, a man who lives by his wits, working with a male associate. While Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow appears to have invented a tale of youthful disillusion – Wilder in love with a woman who turned out to be a prostitute – nevertheless the character resonates with the filmmaker’s persona and Zolotow’s invention finds its echo both in a deleted scene of young Sherlock Holmes at Oxford, and in the main plotline where the woman Holmes loves proves to be a spy. The crucial difference is that Billy had Audrey, an ideal life partner with a matching wit. Holmes can be seen as, in part, an attempt by Wilder to imagine life without his wife, dealing with the struggle of a workaholic ‘thinking machine’ in the realm of emotion.

Whatever the reason, this seems an unusually deeply felt film for Wilder, peppered with cheap jokes though it may be. They’re mostly very good cheap jokes. It’s been suggested by filmmaker and comedy specialist Richard Lester that Wilder’s problem, in his later films, stemmed from the fact that he had, like his mentor Lubitsch, evolved a delicate style whose purpose was to slip indiscrete nuances past the censor, to make adult films within a system that aimed at infantilism. And thus, when the censorship was, largely, removed, Wilder found himself without the (admittedly restrictive) framework within which he had flourished. Free to have his characters swear or take of their clothes, Wilder faced a challenge of tone and taste of a kind he simply never had to deal with before. One of Sherlock Holmes‘s deleted scenes, included as a soundless extra on the DVD, features a naked woman surprised in bed by strangers. She sits bolt upright, making no attempt to cover herself, although MGM have thoughtfully blurred her bosoms, since the actress could not be located to sign a release form for the nudity. This is inconceivable behaviour for a Victorian newlywed: it makes no sense in character terms. Somehow, the ability, or commercial requirement, to ‘move with the times’ short-circuited something in Wilder’s brilliant mind. The new freedom of expression affected the director the way love affected the detective.

But for the most part, the tone is supremely well-judged, with the period setting keeping Wilder out of trouble, the way it mostly does in his rambunctious remake of The Front Page (1974). For the ageing director, the past offers a handy bolthole. And in the broadly farcical sequence where Holmes must pretend to be gay in order to escape the amorous attentions of a Russian prima ballerina, Wilder indulges in the kind of winking innuendo he excelled at back when Joe Breen perused screenplays with blue pencil a-twitching.

David Cairns

A young woman is harassed on the metro by a young man and his friend. Having verbally bullied and menaced her, her tormentor spits in her face.

A family are taken prisoner by two young men and are subjected to sadistic games that end in murder. There will be no revenge and no justice. The victims will be despatched with a flippant glee and the murderers will continue their escapades.

An apparently good and respected man, a pillar of the community, tells his lover that she is ugly and he has no feelings for her beyond using her for his own gratification. In the same idyllic village, the son of the landowner is tied up and beaten and a young disabled boy is almost blinded.

After an unspecified apocalyptic event, society breaks down into a bunch of savagely competing groups. It is a world of cruelty, violence, despair and hatred.

People do terrible things to people. Michael Haneke’s films are all essentially hate stories. His corpus of work is an anatomy of hatred: hate fuelled by post-colonial racism (Hidden, 2005), hate caused by racism pure and simple (Code Unknown, 2000), misogyny or class jealousies, misunderstandings, paranoia and anxiety. It can be provincial (The White Ribbon, 2009) or urban (Code Unknown); personal, political, familial (The Seventh Continent, 1989, and The Piano Teacher, 2002), intimate or partake of an epic historical sweep (Time of the Wolf, 2003, and The White Ribbon). It can even be a kind of hatred without hate; the unfeeling hatefulness of Funny Games (1997) and Benny’s Video (1992).

As well as showing hatred, Haneke, in his turn, has been hated. His films are uncomfortable viewing experiences to say the least. In The Guardian, Jonathan Romney accused his films of being ‘a terrorist attack on the audience’ and in a Sight & Sound review, Mark Kermode writes of Haneke’s ‘unbridled contempt’ for the audience. At first glance, Haneke might look like he belongs in the pantheon of contemporary provocateurs, such as Gaspar Noé and Lars von Trier, whose films seek to cause outright outrage in their audiences, but Haneke is much subtler than that. His films rely less on schlock, the in-your-face, taboo-breaking shot (although he can provide that as well) than on a creeping, insidious manipulation. While garnering critical praise and festival awards, Haneke’s project has often been greeted by an ambivalent critical reception. His acceptance of the best director’s award at Cannes in 2005 was emblematic as the audience responded with boos and applause in equal measure. Some of his films, such as Funny Games and its US remake, have been met with outrage: ‘a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism’ (A.O. Scott). And even his critical successes have been decried as cold, cynical and manipulative: ‘an exercise in pain’ as Mike LaSalle noted of Hidden. Haneke’s public utterances often stoke reaction rather than placating it. His famous argument that if you left during a showing of Funny Games you didn’t need the film, annoyed the hell out of everybody for its presumptuous circumscribing of all possible reactions, i.e. if you left hating the film, that’s exactly what he wanted and if you stayed then you definitely need the film (also what he wanted).

For Catherine Wheatley in her new book Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, Haneke’s films are ‘irritating’ in a very real and intentional sense. Wheatley argues that Haneke doggedly produces an uncomfortable watching experience as each film probes and wrong-steps our own ethical presumptions. This is done in different ways. In Funny Games, our expectation of a conventional horror movie calculus (capture, torment, turning point, revenge) is consistently foiled as one of the attackers takes over the film, breaks the fourth wall (winking at the audience) and even rewinds a scene when things go wrong, the little Brechtian bastard. In Code Unknown, the audience is given privileged information (the Code Unknown of the title?) which is denied the characters. As in classical Greek tragedy, we watch helplessly as terrible events unfold, unable to intervene, our knowledge no use to anyone, helping only to make us feel worse. In both The White Ribbon and Hidden, this imbalance is reversed and it is we as the audience who lack information that the characters might be withholding, suppressing or might even themselves not know.

Although the bad things that happen in Haneke’s films often appear random, they occur within a framework of overarching moral judgement. Haneke’s films seem hell-bent on punishment of one kind or another. Although Anna’s attacker on the metro in Code Unknown cannot possibly know this, we know that she has participated in an injustice towards a beggar and the son of an immigrant earlier in the film. We also have seen her as an actress starring in an exploitative thriller about a misogynistic killer (at least this is as much as we glean). In this sense, her random attacker becomes a kind of karmic agent, a version of Jean, the thuggish relative she defended earlier in the film. By blindly defending him and not listening to the accusations against him, she is allowing a world to exist that also includes someone like her own attacker.

Likewise in The White Ribbon, the original crime that begins the film, the placing of a tripwire that brings down the doctor’s horse, giving the doctor a broken arm, is retrospectively justified by the doctor’s vile abuse of his housekeeper. The moral equivocations of the entire village, the hypocrisy of the pastor who punishes his children for impure thoughts but then refuses to act when they are implicated in a series of more serious violent crimes, foreshadows the punishment of the film’s historical aftermath: the First World War and the disastrous slide into Nazism and near annihilation.

Haneke’s films punish people with a moral rigour few would survive, and poetic justice allows for no legal defence, no humming and harring. Our discomfort as viewers is that we are rarely just viewers: we are the jury and Haneke is the executioner in a process that feels as rigged and unfair as the sadistic bet of Funny Games. Although Haneke’s films vary in language, technique, location, genre and historical period, the accused are frequently the usual suspects: a middle-class, privileged couple called Ann(a/e) and Georg(e/i/es). Anna and George retreat to their house by the lake in Funny Games with disastrous consequences. Likewise, at the beginning of Time of the Wolf, Anna and George retreat to their holiday home (with disastrous consequences). In Code Unknown and Hidden, Anne and George’s lives and assumptions are rattled /disturbed /destroyed by events that they are somehow complicit in. But do Anna and George ‘deserve’ their punishment? Or is this an Old Testament punishment, which punishes you for the presumption of expecting fairness, of expecting God to act with humanity? Is it perhaps paradoxically through witnessing hate and its consequences that we see love and feel pity?

Anna is tormented on the train by a stranger, a young Arab, but it is also a stranger, an old Arab, who, at great risk to himself, stands up and defends her. In Funny Games, despite their smugness, their yacht and their ridiculous opera guessing game, we feel pity and despair for Anna and George. There is no scene more moving than when George asks Anna’s forgiveness. Love and pity do exist, and are (perhaps) more valued and more valuable for existing in a world of punishment and hate. Even the bleak end-of-days final judgement that is Time of the Wolf ends, remarkably, with a ray of hope, and hints at salvation.

John Bleasdale