Directed by Peter Greenaway | 115 mins | 1985
After a freak accident involving a swan leaves two women dead and a third—Andrea Ferréol’s Alba—with just one leg, the twin zoologist widowers of the deceased become obsessed with decomposition, experimenting on animals and crafting time-lapse films o...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Andreis Veil | 107 mins | 2017
A rich trove of never-before-seen archival footage shows how the charismatic and controversial German artist Joseph Beuys’s teachings, installations, happenings—such as covering himself in honey and gold leaf in How to Explain Paintin...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a...

Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

Directed by Mireille Dansereau | 85 mins | 1972
The first female-directed narrative fiction feature to come out of Quebec, Dansereau’s sensual and beguiling Dream Life centers on Isabelle and Virginie (Liliane Lemaître-Auger and Véronique Le Flaguais), two single young women who meet through thei...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 63 mins | 2009
In Oliveira’s rueful romantic tale, an accountant grows obsessed with a formidable young woman he spots in a window across the street, and tries to court her despite his uncle’s snobby disapproval. Ricardo Trepa, who was both Oliveira’s go-to lead a...

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s avant-garde and subcul...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 95 mins | 2012
Oliveira’s triumphant swansong turns a family dinner into a percolating drama of mortality and morality as a bookkeeper and his wife reckon with their estranged son’s thievery. The cast is a roster of arthouse legends: Michael Lonsdale as the aging ...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing...

Directed by Morris Engel | 81 mins | 1953
A pioneering influence on the French New Wave, this New York independent classic follows a seven-year-old boy through the hustle and bustle of Coney Island after he runs away from home, spooked by a cruel prank. It’s filmed with close-up immediacy thanks ...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 85 mins | 1985
“Discovering the work of filmmaker and the Film-Makers' Cooperative co-founder, Shirley Clarke made me aware of the wide range of cinema’s possibilities. This 1985 documentary shot in collaboration with the late Ornette Coleman, using a diverse array of...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Bill Gunn | 165 mins | 1980
Bill Gunn, actor, screenwriter, novelist, and the director of art-horror classic Ganja & Hess (1973), teamed with writer Ishmael Reed and producer Steve Cannon to produce what Reed has called a “meta-soap opera,” an exceptional, rough-ed...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Bill Gunn | 72 mins | 1980
Bill Gunn, actor, screenwriter, novelist, and director, teamed with writer Ishmael Reed and producer Steve Cannon to produce what Reed has called a “meta-soap opera,” an exceptional, rough-edged ensemble piece exploring Black working-clas...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Todd Haynes | 85 mins | 1991
With his first feature, Haynes took his influence from the patron saint of all queer outlaw art, the French writer and director Jean Genet. The result, a landmark of New Queer Cinema, was a trio of intercut, stylistically distinct stori...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 110 mins | 1961
“Shirley Clarke’s The Connection based on and adapted by Jack Gelber is a film way ahead of its time. Arguably the first film to use the “found footage” trope to tell a fictional story. This film blew my mind when I first saw it, the direction and the ...

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 104 mins | 1982
Greenaway’s 1982 arthouse breakthrough, a 17th-century murder mystery in which an aristocratic wife (Janet Suzman) commissions a young, cocksure draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to sketch her husband’s seemingly idyllic property while he is away—in excha...

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 239 mins | 1980
Greenaway’s first feature, an epic mock documentary in 92 parts that catalogs the aftermath of a mysterious “Violent Unknown Event” that has killed many people, and left survivors suffering from symptoms including strange dreams and mutations into bir...

Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina, and judged by a pa...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 97 mins | 2010
When a photographer is asked by a grieving family to shoot a funeral portrait of their deceased daughter, she miraculously appears to come alive. So begins a typically enchanting and richly detailed ghost story from Oliveira—one of his masterpieces,...

Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr...

Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t...