1967: Koroshi na rakuin (Branded to Kill)

One hears this film got director Seijun Suzuki's carreer into trouble, and it's not hard to see why. The studio were probably hoping for just another film about a yakuza killer; what they got was something in a style somewhere between experiment and insanity. The film has lots of nice little ideas, but in my view, sometimes Suzuki is directing too much (instead of going for the simple solution), there is too little narrative glue to hold the whole thing together and it feels chopped up. Recommended for fans of David Lynch. (6.5)

1942: Listen to Britain

Mashup of sounds and moving pictures recorded in wartime Britain. Meant as uplifting in a patriotic way and considered a classic, but strikes me as pointless. (3.5)

1943: Meshes of the Afternoon

Mirrors, knives, waves - this experimental short has the whole psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. It's easy to see how someone could call this "meaningless experimental crap", but I quite like its Latin feel - the grainy b/w recording of the sunlight -, the music (not that I'd buy it on CD) and the crude surrealism. (7)

1929: Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera)

Dziga Vertov's silent experimental/documentary film about life in The Modern Russian City attempts to cover all central aspects of life - work and play, birth and death - and time and again puts the filmmakers themselves into the frame, perhaps in an attempt to alert the audience to the subjective nature of the seemingly objective medium, perhaps out of vanity. Despite an undeniable stylishness of the whole movie and quite a feeling for rhythm in particular, the film could still be somewhat boring with the wrong music, I guess, but Michael Nyman's 2002 soundtrack is not only cool music in and by itself, but fits perfectly with the pictures. (7.5)

1983: Sans soleil

Situated on the border between fictional and nonfictional film, Chris Marker's second-best known film features a woman reading the letters sent to her by a cameraman who travels the world, while we see the footage he has shot. The somewhat experimental book of moving pictures emphasizes the strangeness of foreign continents, or at least that's what I felt it's doing. (7)

1966: Persona

Ingmar Bergman's film about two women in a country house, one of them talking, the other shutting up, probably looked modern and daring in 1966; in 2010 it's dated and pretentious, more like. At least no one's playing chess with Death. It does have strong bits, but I found my mind wandering. (4.5)

1961: L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)

Alain Resnais' follow-up to the magnificent Hiroshima mon amour is set in a castle now functioning as a hotel: a man is telling a woman about what they did when they met last year, while she keeps telling him she doesn't remember. Situated on the line between conventional narrative cinema and the pure surrealism of films like L'age d'or and possibly the best-photographed b/w film I've ever seen, the picture seems to be aimed not so much at being understood intellectually as at putting the audience in a trance-like state. Alternatively, you might dismiss it as pretentious artsy-fartsy crap (AFM 5!).

Is it going too far to say that in his less accessible films David Lynch did nothing but take Marienbad, add violence and put American pop culture references where Resnais' film uses European high culture? Yes, probably. (8.5)

(How to win the game in the film explained in German and French)

1962: La jetée (The Pier)

Is this even a film? Well, it's a 27-minute sequence of nonmoving b/w pictures with an omniscient narrator's voiceover and a little classical music, dealing with a man that, after the nuclear war is over, is a prisoner in a POW camp and is sent back and forth in time by the Germans, who finally managed to win a world war.

Does it work? I'll quote someone else: "This is experimentalism how it should be done, not as a chore for the viewer but as something that the viewer can enjoy at least as much as its creator. So the visual style is challenging? Put some interesting plot in it. The plot is strange, mundane or cryptic? Do it in a visually interesting way."

Though a critic's favourite, today La jetée is probably best known as the film that inspired 12 Monkeys. Both films are about equally good (8) and would make a nice double feature.

1930: L'age d'Or

The follow-up to Chien Andalou is four times as long, has some sound (apparently added in postproduction) and doesn't seem quite as fresh as its predecessor to me. Also, you can't shock anyone nowadays with allusions to masturbation and fellatio. Fun fact (if it is a fact): "The film cost a million francs to produce and was financed by the nobleman Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who beginning in 1928 commissioned a film every year for the birthday of his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles." (6)

1928: Un Chien Andalou

Seventeen minutes of well-photographed nonsense from Bunuel and Dali. Why not? (7) (Everybody always talks about the eye-slicing scene, but I like the doorbell much better.)