Fledging director Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali create this ultimate surrealist film, which is essentially a barrage of striking and irrational images designed to shock and provoke. During the course of the film, we witness a close-up of a woman's eye being slashed open with a razor; a man dragging a piano, two bishops, and a pair of ...
A post-apocalyptic future becomes the setting for pitch black humor in this visually intricate French comedy. The action takes place within a single apartment complex, which is owned by the same man that operates the downstairs butcher shop. It's a particularly popular place to live, thanks to the butcher's uncanny ability to find excellent cuts ...
A extended conversation between two old friends over dinner proves an unexpectedly fascinating subject for a film in the critically acclaimed My Dinner with André. The talkers in question are André Gregory, a renowned experimental theater director, and playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, both of whom play themselves. The film is not a documentary, ...
A "metaphysical splatter film" that was praised by Susan Sontag as "one of the 10 most important films of modern times," Begotten is a very grainy, often powerful work of experimental cinema which seems to land somewhere between David Lynch's surreal Eraserhead and James Broughton's heavily symbolic Dreamwood. The film opens with God Killing ...
Five years after the critical and commercial disappointment of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, director David Lynch returned to the big screen with this cryptic thriller about confused identities and erotic obsession. Fred (Bill Pullman) is an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who shares a luxurious but fashionably barren house with his wife Renee ...
Circus horrors cross over into the mundane world in this terrifying, psychedelic film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man who brought you the infamous El Topo. Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky, the director's son) is the son of a circus strongman (Guy Stockwell) and an aerialist (Blanca Guerra). One night, the mother sees from her high perspective that her ...
David Lynch's prequel to his cult television series "Twin Peaks" concerns the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), whose plastic-wrapped corpse, found floating in a river, was the fulcrum for the television series. During the day in the town of Twin Peaks, Laura is a top honors student at the local high school. By night, she ...
This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs ...
This twisted black comedy is obsessed in turn with swans, twins, and decay. Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol) is involved in a swan-related car accident near the zoo. The accident kills two other women, the wives of two twin zoologists, Oliver and Oswald Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon). Alba is lucky enough to escape with one leg. Eventually her doctor ...
Jean Genet, the novelist, playwright, political activist and gadfly who became a (literal) outlaw literary hero in France, directed his first and only film in this notorious silent short subject. Set in a French prison, Un Chant D'amour explores the crushing loneliness and thwarted desires of men behind bars, as well as the sadistic impulses of ...
Forty minutes is more than enough screen time for Spanish director Luis Buñuel to state his case in Simon of the Desert. Claudio Brook portrays fifth-century Christian Simon (later St. Simon Stylites) who dispenses religious sagacity while standing on a tall column in the middle of the desert. Typical of Buñuel's hatred of the Church, the Devil ...
A film that screams "product of its time," The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky's dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- a suitably bizarre follow-up to his El Topo (1971). Fascinating although it only fitfully makes sense, The Holy Mountain is beautifully shot and designed, and it ...
This twisted, surreal monster story is related in flashback by an asylum inmate, who tells of his horrific experiences as one of several castaways on a mist-shrouded tropical island. While the crew affect repairs to their yacht, the stranded passengers take refuge in a derelict ship overgrown with a strange variety of mushroom -- which seems to be ...
Careful takes place in the remote Alpine village of Tolzbad, where everyone speaks in whispers for fear of starting an avalanche. This self-inflicted noise control to the overall suppression of emotions and impulses. Entering this rarefied atmosphere is aspiring butler Brent Neale. Remaining as silent as his companions, Neale bears witness to all ...
L'Âge d'Or begins as a documentary about the habits of scorpions, utilizing library footage and silent-style intertitles. Amid the rocks of an inlet, archbishops are seen chanting by a beggar-soldier (Max Ernst), who then makes a long journey back to his hideout. He informs his fellow beggar-soldiers that the "Mallorcans" have arrived and it is ...
This French film has a plot that sounds like an expansion of an urban legend. Walter (Daniel Mesguich) and Sara (Cyrielle Claire) are a married couple who have just moved into a new home together. Everything seems to be going well, despite Walter's fascination with a mysterious woman named Marie-Ange (Gabrielle Lazure) in a nightclub. Then one ...
The wildly idiosyncratic Canadian auteur Guy Maddin created this exercise in semi-autobiographical impressionism. Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr) is a gifted but weak-willed hockey player who has helped drive the Winnipeg Maroons to a championship season. However, Maddin's sense of triumph is dashed when his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) informs him ...
Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 compiles works from a variety of directors. These films, many of which have been unseen since their original exhibitions, were provided by a variety of film archives. The films showcase the many techniques developed in the earliest days of not only avant-garde cinema but in cinema itself. ~ ...
San Francisco-based director Craig Baldwin creates this rough-hewn experimental sci-fi tale. Set in 2007, father and daughter scientific team Yogi and Boo-Boo try to discover why the planet has ended up as a polluted cesspool of toxic, corrupting transmissions where its citizens expend terrific energy pursuing the most base rewards of a vacuous ...
In this classically surreal fantasy, a sailor, known for telling tales, sees a student killing his teacher and decides to spin a few yarns for him. He tells the boy of his many adventures in exotic South American ports where he visited opium dens and stayed in cathouses. In such dark, dreamlike places, the sailor meets many strange, mystical ...
A man who fears he's edging into madness gets a fresh perspective on what insanity really means in this frantic, visually inventive black comedy from Czech auteur Jan Svankmajer. Jean (Pavel Liska) is a deeply troubled man who has been haunted by violent hallucinations since the death of his mother, who was committed to a mental institution when ...
One of Luis Buñuel's most episodic films, The Phantom of Liberty focuses on no one particular narrative. In the beginning, a man sells postcards of French tourist attractions, calling them "pornographic." A sniper in Montparnasse is hailed as a hero for killing passersby. A "missing" child helps the police fill out the report on her. A group of ...
Music video director Steven Hanft makes his feature debut with the digital video project Southlander, an absurd independent film starring various beloved indie pop musicians. Rory Cochrane stars as Chance, a musician who loses his extremely rare magical synthesizer which takes the form of a white 1969 Moletron keyboard. He looks for it by ...
Cult filmmaker Damon Packard wrote, directed, and stars in this bizarre independent feature about a sugar addict obese watch seller. Packard plays Bob, a man whose penchant for sweets is threatening to send him to an early grave. His dead sister's ghost attempts to help him while he seeks out a mysterious woman he saw in a vision. The legendary ...
Conceptual artist Iannis Xenakis (who died in 2001) composed La Legende d'Eer , an electroacoustic work for seven-track tape, to commemorate the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1978. It featured scattered shards of orchestral sound and cacophonous noises. Xenakis ran the tape continuously for several months straight (in a loop) as an ...
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