hierarchy
14 films tagged with “hierarchy”
Snowpiercer
The train is a closed system, and Bong Joon-ho organises his film as a traversal of it. Curtis Everett starts in the tail section — dark, cramped, fed on gelatinous protein bars whose ingredients nobody asks about — and…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
George Smiley does almost nothing in this film, and the almost-nothing is the method. He sits in chairs and listens. He reads files. He asks questions that are one sentence long and then waits, sometimes for a very long…
The Shawshank Redemption
Andy Dufresne arrives at Shawshank with two life sentences and a skill set that is, from the institution's perspective, extraordinarily convenient. He is a banker. He understands taxes, investments, trusts, the internal…
Kin-dza-dza!
The civilisation of Plyuk speaks two words. Ku means everything; kyu is the single obscenity. Everything else — commerce, courtship, law, threat, apology — is carried by those two syllables plus tone, gesture and the col…
The Right Stuff
The first design decision an organisation makes is who it lets in. Everything else follows from that — the culture, the vocabulary, the fights, the things that never get built because nobody in the room knows to ask for…
9 to 5
The plot of 9 to 5 requires a kidnapping, three elaborate fantasy sequences, a near-poisoning, and a stolen corpse, but the management insight at its centre requires none of these. It is simply this: the three women who…
Norma Rae
The mill is the first thing you hear. Ritt opens the film inside the noise — the looms running, the shuttles hammering, the sound that fills the building for every shift and has already taken Norma Rae's mother's hearing…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy arrives at the institution expecting a system he can game. He is a convict, not a patient — he got himself transferred from a prison farm on the theory that a mental hospital would be softer — and he reads the w…
Three Days of the Condor
Joe Turner's job description is one of the most precise metaphors for knowledge work ever put on screen. He works for the CIA, but not in the way anyone imagines working for the CIA. His office is a brownstone in New Yor…
Z
The opening title card is the film's first structural claim, and it deserves to be read as one. Most films based on real events assure the audience that any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Z reverses the f…
The Battle of Algiers
The chalkboard scene is the one the Pentagon screened. Colonel Mathieu stands before his officers and draws a pyramid. At the top is the FLN's military command. Below it, zone leaders. Below them, sector leaders. Below t…
12 Angry Men
The remarkable thing about Juror #8 is how little he actually claims. He never says the boy is innocent; asked directly, he admits he does not know. He has no counter-evidence, no alternative theory, no witness of his ow…
Paths of Glory
The attack on the Anthill is ordered by General Mireau, who initially refuses the mission as impossible and then accepts it within sixty seconds of learning that a promotion accompanies success. This is not a scene about…
All Quiet on the Western Front
The schoolmaster Kantorek stands at the front of his classroom and delivers a speech about duty, honour, and the fatherland. His students — boys, essentially, seventeen and eighteen years old — are moved to volunteer for…