Tamara Anderson

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (Les Blank, 1980) 20 mins

This film is legendary in its way: it shows Werner Herzog fulfilling a promise he'd made to Errol Morris if the latter ever finished and screened his first film. More than just a record of this event, it also offers a thrilling glimpse of legendary Californian restaurant Chez Panisse, tips for enhancing a shoe's flavour, and lashings of the usual Herzog wisdom, delivered in his own inimitable style. “A grown-up man should not go a week without cooking a big meal.” Cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking, besides “walking on foot.” And: “We have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television” (specifically Bonanza and Rawhide).

Fry Day (Laura Moss, 2017) 15 mins

This film opens in the midst of the 'Bundy barbecue', a party that took place across the road from the prison where Ted Bundy was executed in January 1989. (This actually happened). Teenager Lauryn has turned up to make a few dollars selling Polariods of the people who are camped out at the celebration. It all starts innocently enough, then a boy from school offers to take her for a ride. A perfectly-judged scene In the back of the car shows the moment she realises she's in over her head with a boy she doesn't know as well as she thought...

Stopforbud (Jorgen Leth and Ole John, 1963) 12 mins

This poetic portrait of jazz pianist Bud Powell pairs images of the musician wandering the different spaces of Copenhagen - shipyards, parks, piers, a rubbish dump - with music by the man himself and narration from fellow jazzman Dexter Gordon. Dressed in a dark, double-breasted coat, skinny black tie and black beret, Powell is a stylish but melancholy figure; two of the most arresting images show him stepping from a dark staircase onto a bright street, then in silhouette on an escalator.

Rejected (Don Hertzfeldt, 2000) 9 mins

After the popular success of Don Hertzfeldt’s early stick-figure shorts, various corporations and ad agencies approached him to produce commercials. Always rigorously independent, he turned them down, and made this short - still perhaps his most famous work - as a kind of rebuke. It’s set up as a series of animations he sent to (fake) companies and had sent back to him… for obvious reasons.

The Perfect Human (Jørgen Leth , 1967) 12 mins

This short presents as a kind of educational film, only a deeply weird one. In a plain white room a man and a woman perform various mundane tasks for the camera. A nasal, vaguely upper-crust voiceover informs us that these two are exemplars of the ‘perfect human’; watch, he instructs us, a perfect human lie, fall, clip their nails. But why? And what’s it all about?

In 2003 Lars von Trier challenged director Jørgen Leth to remake this famous short five times, each with different constraints, ever more alarming and bizarre. The resulting film was The Five Obstructions.

The Thaw (Kei Oyama, 2004) 7 mins

Peering out of his bedroom window, a young boy spots the body of a dog lying out in the snow, entrails spilling out. After that, everything looks a bit strange: the hair he plucks out his head, his pet goldfish, even his chicken dinner.

A student work, this film combines line drawing and - for the mouths, eyes, and so on - photographic elements. The director went on to become a founding member of the CALF animation collective.

Black Panther, aka Off the Pig (Third World Newsreel, 1968) 15 mins

Made by the San Francisco chapter of the radical media collective Newsreel, this film offers a glimpse of the Black Panther Party in 1968. We see recruits, dressed in the distinctive black berets and black leather jackets, performing military drills in a public park, and hear from party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton (from Alameda County Jail). Bobby Seale reads the party’s Ten Point Program of cultural reforms over images of black neighbourhoods, and close-ups of artwork by Emory Douglas.

A Visit with Truman Capote (Maysles Brothers, 1966) 20 mins

In Cold Blood had just been published when the Maysles Brothers interviewed its author for this film. We drop in on Capote at a signing, then follow him in the car on the drive to his Long Island beach house, where he shows us around, and chats amiably with a Newsweek interviewer. He reads from the book, and describes its aims and methods, and his relationship with the two young killers featured in it - all fascinating stuff. But more intriguing still is his own person, that high raspy voice, energy, and startling sense of humour.

Emotion (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1967) 39 mins

This early experimental short from the future director of House (1977) opens with a dedication to Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1960). Though lesbians and vampires there are, tonally it is much closer to early John-Luc Godard and, especially, Richard Lester. There’s barely any story - or any emotion - to speak of; instead, the film is carried forward by a kind of madcap energy, hopping wildly between genres, jump-cutting copiously, even throwing in an animated segment featuring Count Masoch.

Day of the Dead (Ray and Charles Eames, 1957) 14 mins

Known primarily for their midcentury modern architecture and furniture designs, the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were also prolific filmmakers

Composed mainly of beautiful, colour-saturated images, this film explores the annual Mexican celebration of All Souls’ Day through the special objects - painted sculptures, sugar skulls - made each year to celebrate it.

Oh Willy (Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, 2012) 17 mins

When his mother falls seriously ill, a middle-aged man returns to the nudist colony where he grew up and where she still lives to nurse and finally to bury her. Thereafter, the film becomes about his grieving, told with flash-backs and elements of fantasy.

The story is given an extra charge by its manner of telling, with puppets and back-drops made entirely of felt, wool or other textiles. It’s a technique we associate with cheerful children’s animation, so to find it here, in a serious story, and one so heavy on nude bodies and bodily functions, is disconcerting.

La Premiere Nuit (Georges Franju, 1958) 19 mins

Well, you’d had to have a pretty special reason to venture into Châtelet Metro station after hours…

In this early short by the future director of Eyes Without a Face (1960), a young boy spends a night, a ‘first’ night, alone in the Metro after venturing down there in pursuit of a pretty girl in his class. The boy is chauffeured to school by car, so it’s with a sense of wonder that he discovers this new underground universe, a feeling the fillm underlines by presenting the Metro as a fascinating labyrinth of escalators, platforms and endless tiled corridors.

Catalog (John Whitney, 1961) 7 mins

The trippy-ness of this film made it a classic of the psychedelia subculture of the 1960s, but actually it was made as a promotional reel for John Whitney’s new company Motion Graphics.

Since 1957 Whitney had been building drawing machines from outmoded analogue military computers, seeking to create a correspondence between animated imagery and music. He produced hundreds of animation cells with the device, some of which Saul Bass re-purposed to create the spiral effects in the title sequence of Vertigo (1958).

A Lover’s Quarrel with the World (Shirley Clarke, 1963) 53 mins

American poet Robert Frost was 88 and in the last months of his life when Shirley Clarke directed this portrait of him.

Clarke intersperses footage of Frost at different public events, speaking before audiences of schoolchildren, with other sequences of him at home in Vermont, making a hot drink in the kitchen, or outside pruning and shovelling earth. As well as these glimpses of him pottering at home, it’s a pleasure to hear him reading aloud from his own poems in his low, gruff voice.

The film concludes here.

Junkopia (Chris Marker, 1981) 6 mins

Chris Marker shot this wordless six-minute short while he was making Sans soleil.

The set-up implies we are somewhere very remote, identifiable only by coordinates. In their barrenness, the landscapes seem to confirm this. Only gradually is it revealed that this ‘junkopia’ of assorted debris assembled into primitive, enigmatic sculptures is just on the outskirts of… San Francisco!

Elsa la rose (Agnes Varda, 1966) 19 mins

A little-known entry in Varda’s filmography is this, tender portrait of French writer Louis Aragon and his wife, and long-term muse, Elsa Triolet. When she films them at home in 1966, and out walking arm-in-arm, they are an elderly couple. In their own words, they describe their meeting and early courtship, and reenact significant moments for her camera.

Aragon reads aloud, and at breathless high-speed, from his poems about Elsa; in interview, he reminisces wistfully about his life-long passion. Elsa herself is less misty-eyed, insisting that it’s not being showered with love poetry that makes you feel loved, and on the difficulty of ageing as the subject of poems readers imagine forever young and beautiful.

A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano, 2014) 16 mins

This low-key, slice-of-life drama won its director the Discovery Prize at Cannes; a feature-length version premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight this year.

Pio is a young Roma boy in a rush to grow up. Cigarettes are a much-desired token of manhood; Pio is forever cadging them off other people. Then a new opportunity arises to prove himself: given a tip-off to pass along to his older brother, Pio decides to show up himself for a job stealing from the empty hotel rooms of a wedding party…

The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad , 1962) 22 mins

“There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.”

Forough Farrokhzad is one of Iran’s most venerated modern poets. This, her first and only film, is at once a ‘poetic’ treatment of leprosy, and a factual account of the daily routines inside a leper colony. The gaze is sensitive, but unflinching; the hushed, compassionate narration is by the poet herself.

Hi Stranger (Kirsten Lepore, 2017) 2 mins

This two-minute animation began life as a doodle on the back of a post-it note and was inspired, in part, by the year the animator spent in therapy.

A nude figure lying face-down on their belly speaks lovingly, intimately, direct to camera. In a gender-ambiguous voice, and without ever breaking eye contact, they tell you they’ve missed you. They feel they can be vulnerable around you. You’re beautiful. They love looking at you… It’s transfixing and unnerving all at once.

A Whistle (Atsushi Wada, 2002) 5 mins

The director’s website’s not giving much away: as a synopsis it offers ‘A child and an adult have different worries.’ Hmmmm.

This film comes from the early part of Wada’s career, when his drawings were still - or appear to be - in graphite pencil. I hesitate to say definitively what’s going on, but here’s my take: a child - who desperately wants a whistle - peeks through the door at a morose adult whose black mood is visualised as dark clouds that emerge from his head.

Jackson Pollock, ‘51 (Hans Namuth, 1951) 10 mins

Hans Namuth’s photos of Pollock energetically applying paint to a large canvas spread on the floor of his studio were the first the general public had seen of the unorthodox method behind the artist’s radically new paintings. They captured the public imagination, and made him a star.

The legend of this film - which Namuth returned to make with Pollock in November 1950 - is the reverse: that it may have hastened the painter’s demise. Coming in from outside where they’d been shooting, it’s said that Pollock poured himself a bourbon, his first drink in two years. It was downhill from there...

Two Solutions to One Problem (Abbas Kiarostami, 1975) 5 mins

Between 1970 and 1982, Kiarostami made a series of short educational films for the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Iran. It’s not what you think: they are all pretty wonderful, but this one’s flat-out hilarious.

The set-up: Doran borrows a book from Nadar and returns it with its cover torn. In retaliation, Nadar tears the cover of Doran's book, Doran break Nadar’s pencil, Nadar rips Doran's shirt, Doran breaks Nadar's ruler, and so on. An animated two-column chart on a blackboard chalks up the damage on either side. But does it have to be like this?

On the Road with Duke Ellington (Robert Drew, 1974) 58 mins

On the comments thread beneath this video, one person wonders what it’d be like to have a recording like this of Mozart on a tour of Europe. That’s about right: this is a remarkable record of a genius pianist and composer captured in performance, at recording sessions, and quietly by himself at the piano while the sound technicians pack up around him at the end of the night. But almost more rewarding are the glimpses of Ellington the person, backstage, in the back of a car, or just woken up in bed and calling for hot water (he doesn’t drink coffee! or tea!) and tucking into the heartiest breakfast I’ve ever seen (of baked potato! and steak!),

There are some nice lines, too. “A man who writes music has got to hear it,” Ellington says. “Music is very regenerating when performed… a profit in joy.”

The Untangled Routine (Orit Oged, 2016) 5 mins

A deeply weird film this one, divided into different segments, each introduced by a line drawing, white-out-of-black, of mysterious symbols – a three-headed peacock, a Spanish galleon, an earthworm sliced in two. Each segment introduces a new character, all (except one nasty maggoty pair) assembled from bits and bobs – offcuts of wood, scraps of duct tape, nuts and bolts. Picked out in a harsh spotlight against a black back-drop, they each perform a short dance. It’s like peeking into a creepy music box.

This is the director’s graduation film from Bezalel Academy, Israel’s top art school.

Train Stop (Sergei Loznitsa, 2000) 25 mins

The first film by the future director of Maidan (2014) and My Joy (2010) was shot over the course of a year at a train station deep in the Russian countryside. It’s nighttime, and inside everyone’s asleep. The camera fixes the sleepers in a series of static shots, capturing them in all manner of postures, to a soundtrack of light snores and steady breathing. There’s no narration, and just the very occasional intrusion from without - the howling wind, or the rumble of a passing train.

Strange to report, the film is - in its own serene way - absolutely gripping. Why is everyone asleep? And what are they waiting for?

Le père Noël a les yeux bleus (Jean Eustache, 1966) 47 mins

Jean-Luc Godard liked Jean Eustache’s first short, Les mauvaises fréquentations (1963), so much he gave Eustache the leftover 35mm film stock from his own film, Masculin Féminin (1966), to make this follow-up.

If you’ve seen Mes petites amoreuses (1974), then you’ll recognise the setting, Narbonne, and the protagonist, Daniel, though by now a few years older and played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. A young-man-about-town, he lusts after this season’s must-have fashion item – a duffel coat – but must save up for it. In the run-up to Christmas, he reluctantly takes a job with a photographer who needs someone to pose on street corners in a Santa outfit and be snapped with passers-by.

Judgement (Park Chan-wook, 1999) 26 mins

A department store building has collapsed, killing over 500 people. The cause is gross negligence; victims’ families are entitled to a large pay-out. One body remains unclaimed in the morgue, a young woman who’d been hard to identify so badly damaged was she in the accident. But now, finally, the government believes they’ve found her parents, a middle-aged couple whose daughter ran away from home years earlier. Just as everything appears to be settled, suddenly the morgue attendant claims that the body is that of his daughter, who had also disappeared. Who to believe?

Created before his famous vengeance-trilogy, this short is Park Chan-wook in miniature – an unpleasant subject, moments of outlandish comedy, and a surprise twist ending.

Flesh Nest (Andrew Thomas Huang, 2017) 9 mins

The latest short by video artist and long-time Björk collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang is this (in its creator’s words) “sci-fi Fraggle Rock-inspired trash opera.”

Divided into nine sections, the film depicts the internet as some kind of post-apocalyptic digital purgatory – a weird cybernetic wasteland inhabited by hordes of mutant avatars. I won’t pretend I know what’s going on – only that Huang has talked of being influenced by Flemish painters Bosch and Bruegel, the “single scrolling tapestry-like space” of their canvases filled with a multiplicity of characters and edifices that build up and crumble down.

How They Get There (Spike Jonze, 1997) 2 mins

The ‘they’ in the title of this early short by director Spike Jonze (Her, Where the Wild Things Are) are some forlorn shoes, and ‘there’ is the gutter. The plot is simple: a guy opens a fresh carton of milk, then catches the eye of a passing girl. They flirt, walking across the street from each other copying the other’s movements. So far, so cute, and then…

Lights Out (David Sandberg, 2013) 3 mins

A woman is alone in her flat. When she turns off the light in the corridor, a small silhouetted figure appears at the far end. Like all self-respecting bogey-men, the figure disappears when the lights are on - but our heroine needs to go to bed. This simple premise, expertly executed, leads in the final moments to some serious scares.

An internet hit, this short came to the attention of director James Wan (he of Saw, and The Conjuring); in 2016 it was remade and extended into a full-length feature, with Wan producing.

Interview with Clarice Lispector (1977) 24 mins

As a film it barely qualifies – blurry, poorly framed, further squished out of shape by whoever uploaded it to YouTube. But it is precious nonetheless: the first and only filmed interview with Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. She died later the same year.

Known as ‘the great witch of Brazilian literature’, she had a reputation as an eccentric genius – withdrawn, introspective, beautiful. In the film, she is restless, a little curt, as if she really doesn’t want to be there. But her answers, some of them, are quite fascinating, if only the interviewer would pause a second to unpack them more thoroughly. “What, in your opinion, is the role of the Brazilian writer today?”, he asks. “To speak as little as possible,” she replies.

Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus (John Musilli, 1972) 29 mins

This talking heads in this documentary, made just a year after the photographer’s death, include Arbus’ daughter, Doon, and her former teacher, Lisette Model. Far more insightful, though, are the segments which pair selected photos with Diane’s own words - recorded during a public lecture, but spoken here by an actor.

The thrill of setting out on a shoot, she says, can be like setting out on a date, but then sometimes she has to really drag herself out. She’s interested in the gap between the image of ourselves we want to present to the world, and how we actually look. She is, she says, “kind of two-faced, very ingratiating,” and “a little too nice” to her subjects. And she has never taken the photo she intended to. It’s fascinating stuff.

Mt. Head (Koji Yamamura, 2002) 10 mins

A contemporary rendering of a 200-year-old Japanese fable about the pitfalls of excessive greed, this film is weird from the off, but in its final sequence takes a properly psychedelic turn.

It’s the story of an elderly miser who, unable to abide waste of any sort, decides to swallow the stones from the cherries he picked that morning, with terrible consequences: a small tree starts sprouting from the top of his head. Before he knows it, it’s spring-time and - this is Japan, after all - a gaggle of office workers, families and school kids are laying out picnic blankets to sit and admire the blossom, all with no consideration for the man below…

The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, 2000) 7 mins

This film will tickle you most if you’ve had heavy exposure to early silent films - I’m thinking of Metropolis, but also Aelita: Queen of Mars, Vampyr, Nosferatu… The story concerns the rivalry of two brothers - Nikolai, an engineer, and Osip, who’s playing Jesus in a passion play - for one woman, Anna, a beautiful scientist who has built a device enabling her to gaze into the Earth’s core, literally the heart of the world.

From the inter-titles to the acting style to the emphatic montage, the film is an expert and affectionate pastiche of silent-era cinema, and contains lots of sly humour, too.

Hexentanz (feat. Mary Wigman, 1930) 2 mins

The footage here is the only surviving visual record of Mary Wigman’s celebrated Hexentanz; danced in changing forms over many years, this is the version premiered in 1926 (but filmed in 1930). Wigman choreographed for herself, and her work stands in contrast to the ballet tradition: she focussed on bodily movement itself, independent of scenarios and deploying little or no stage furniture. Her compositions were developed through improvisation, the music added afterwards. For this dance, she wears a mask and cloak, scuttling towards the camera from a sitting position, using incantatory hand gestures. It’s powerful stuff, even now - on the comments thread underneath this video you’ll find people' “freaking out” (their words) watching it in 2015!

Heavy Metal Parking Lot (Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, 1986) 17 mins

The legend of Heavy Metal Parking Lot had reached me long before I ever saw it: held up as a classic document of rock history, Nirvana are supposed to have loved it so much they kept a VHS copy in their tour bus.

Consisting of a series of interviews with Judas Priest fans outside a Maryland concert venue, part of the film’s appeal is doubtless that many of the stoned, half-dressed, mullet-afflicted interviewees are as hilarious as any of the characters from Spinal Tap. But more than that, there’s a sort of high-spirited good-naturedness to it all that is very appealing.

Cops (Buster Keaton and Edward Cline, 1922) 18 mins

Given that it would be possible to fill this page - almost! - with nothing but Buster Keaton shorts, it shows real restraint on my part I think that this is only the second I’ve posted. Naturally I’d recommend the whole film, but it’s really the final third that’s so spectacular - when Buster, in a clapped-out old horse and cart piled high with junk inadvertently joins and bombs (!) the annual policeman’s parade setting the scene for one of the finest and most surreal chases in cinema history.

Vincent (Tim Burton, 1982) 5 mins

This early stop-motion animation by Tim Burton concerns a 7-year-old boy called Vincent who desperately wants to be just like his idol, Vincent Price. Unlike most boys his age, Vincent would rather stay indoors than play out in the sunshine; his favourite author is Edgar Allan Poe; and his ghoulish daydreams involve wax museums and zombie dogs.

As well as looking forward to Burton’s later work on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, in content and aesthetics it’s a fascinating compendium of influences from B-movies to Edward Lear to illustrator Edward Gorey. (Oh and you should recognise the voice on the soundtrack…)

7:35 de la Mañana (Nacho Vigalondo, 2003) 7 mins

This fun film replays as a hostage situation a scenario we’re (over)familiar with from endless romcoms and musicals: the shy guy who arranges an elaborate surprise for his beloved, the girl he’s watched quietly from afar, finally declaring his feelings by bursting into song. We’re kept guessing, but the guy here is just ever-so-slightly seedy and unhinged-looking (those sideburns!) that we’re worried from the start, and that’s before we realise that the café regulars he leads in his serenade have been co-opted by force…

From the director of Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial.

Science Friction (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959) 10 mins

A graduate of Black Mountain College, Stan VanDerBeek began working in animation on a CBS children's show in the 1950s. He used the editing equipment after hours to complete his own films, cajoling the night watchman to let him in even after he lost the job. The collage films, like this one, were designed and created at home using clippings from magazines; conceived in the spirit of the Dadaist and Surrealist work of Max Ernst, they are though wilder, more informal, and satirical in intent, taking aim at “the rockets, scientists, and competitive mania" of the period. And yes, in case you’re wondering, they are a declared influence on the Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam.

Por primera vez (Octavio Cortázar, 1967) 10 mins

Revolutionary Cuba’s mobile cinemas were based on the Soviet model; beginning in 1961, and under the auspices of the Cuban Film Institute, the units took projection equipment to the most remote parts of the country in an effort to entertain the population, and raise their overall cultural level.

This enchanging short records the visit, in April 1967, of one such mobile cinema to a rural farming community, capturing the emotions of the locals encountering film - specifically Chaplin’s Modern Times - for the very first time.

Balance (Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein, 1989) 7 mins

On a platform floating somewhere in space, a group of men - identical save for the numbers on their back - must work together to stop the platform from tipping. A strange box turns up out of nowhere disrupting the tedium but also the cohesion of the group: each man wants to individually inspect and enjoy the box but when he does so, he upsets the balance of the platform and puts them collectively all at risk.

Produced in Germany in 1989, this film has been subject to any number of readings but like all the best bits of art, while resonant, resists any definitive interpretation.

Strop (Věra Chytilová, 1962) 40 mins

Marta has dropped out of med school to model. This film, from Dasies director Vera Chytilová, traces a day in her life, describing the boredom and objectification she endures from an explicitly feminist standpoint. Marta is above all a body to be critiqued, admired, envied, desired, or dismissed by other people. Her voice is barely heard, it is always others speaking - giving orders, making judgements, offering remarks. Happily the film has her break out of this situation; when we see her last, in a lovely open-ended epilogue, she’s on a train out - where we don’t know - but out.

Maze King (Hakhyun Kim, 2013) 7 mins

“We cannot stay here any longer. We must leave tomorrow morning.” So begins this unsettling black-and-white line-drawn animation whose odd assortment of characters - a clown, a little girl, a transvestite, a dog, and a soldier - are given to varied but always inscrutable pronouncements, and where the overall feeling is suffocating dread, as in a nightmare. Its director is from South Korea; this is his graduation film from the renowned Graduate School of Film and New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Likeness (Rodrigo Prieto, 2013) 6 mins

This short is a collaboration between director Rodrigo Prieto and his 19-year-old daughter Ximena, who suffered from anorexia as a young teenager. In it, Elle Fanning navigates a house party packed with stick-thin models and debauched fashionistas - images inspired by pages Ximena ripped from fashion magazines. Elle finally makes it to the sanctuary of the brightly-lit bathroom; as she reapplies mascara, her face in the mirror becomes a hideously cracked and distorted mask - a disturbing visualisation of her inner self-loathing.

Gasman (Lynne Ramsay, 1998) 14 mins

Made a year before Lynne Ramsay’s stunning debut feature Ratcatcher, and like that film set in Glasgow in the 1970s, this short follows a young girl, Lynne, who attends a Christmas party with her dad, where she discovers he’s been living a double life. As ever with Ramsay, it’s beautifully shot and properly nuanced - over its 14-minute running time, our protagonist experiences happiness, disappointment, suspicion and finally anger. Not just a film about family, it also stars two of Ramsay’s own clan - her brother and niece - in the leads.

Feelings (Todd Solondz, 1984) 2 mins

If you knew nothing at all about this film before sitting down to watch it, and didn’t recognise the actor in the lead, could you really be in any doubt at all by the end who made it? This is Todd Solondz’ very first film, made back in his student days, and it could be no-one else’s. Shot in grainy black-and-white, starring the director and featuring his own halting, tone-deaf rendition of the title song on the soundtrack, it follows the last desperate moments of a love-sick, nerdish young man on a bleak beach.

The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith, 1976) 12 mins

Smith’s intentions for this film, he says, were to draw attention “to the power of the word and how it operates in voiceovers, documentaries, and captions in newspaper photographs” to direct your gaze and shape your understanding of the images they’re paired with.

On a less highfalutin level, it is also a portrait of street life in East London; residents of Hackney, like myself, may be curious to know that the Odeon cinema featured is long-demolished, and Steele’s just opposite is now Scooterden, on the corner of Dalston Kingsland and Stamford Road.

Actua I (Philippe Garrel, 1968) 6 mins

Long thought lost, the print of this film was rediscovered in 2014 and subsequently restored by the Cinémathèque Française. Conceived as kind of revolutionary newsreel and made at the height of the May ‘68 protests, it’s weave of 16mm and 35mm footage, some shot by Garrel, some captured by the protestors themselves. As a street-level document of the events, it’s the best I’ve seen.

Glucose (Jeron Braxton, 2017) 13 mins

In their official statement, the Sundance jury which awarded this film the prize for best short animation called it “dense, trippy and serious” - which about covers it. The title references the sugar trade which brought so many African slaves to America, and the film is intended as a meditation on race and identity in the US today. In its design and narrative, it referenes video game and internet culture, taking us on a disorienting journey through the dream of a video game character who’s just been KO’d, in an animation style drawing on low-poly and glitch-art aesthetics.

Lampa (Roman Polanski, 1959) 7 mins

So Roman Polanski’s no-one’s flavour of the month/year/last-half-century just now, but I couldn’t un-love this creepy early short of his even if I wanted to. The title refers to the oil lamp by which a toymaker works in his shop, a doll hospital, full of decrepit dolls and doll-parts. Surely the only thing creepier, if it existed, would be a clown hospital? See for yourself what happens after he goes home…

God’s Angry Man (Werner Herzog, 1980) 44 mins

Tele-evangelist Dr Gene Scott is the subject of this little-seen documentary by Werner Herzog; as becomes clear, he is another of the director’s mad dreamers - kin to Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo et al. Most of the film is taken up with scenes of him live on the air: introducing the house gospel band, rifling through the pledges that were just called in, and making extraordinary, hectoring, demands for money. But the film is at pains to present him in a nuanced manner, not just as a crackpot: in off-air interviews with Herzog he confesses to feeling tired and lonely, and we believe him (although I was suspicious about his claim to have no personal possessions - if you Google, you discover he died in 2005 a rich man).

A Night at the Garden (Marshall Curry, 2017) 7 mins

If you’ve read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America you’ll have heard of the pro-Nazi ‘German-American Bund’, but you may not have seen them - that’s until you watch this. In 1939 the Bund organised a 20,000-strong rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Footage from this event existed as clips, dispersed in different archives; for this film, Marshall Curry collected them up, and edited them together, without commentary. It needs none.

There’s a fascinating Q&A with the director here.

Atman (Toshio Matsumoto, 1975) 11 mins

In this experimental short a figure seated outdoors wearing a hannya demon mask from the Noh theatre is circled by the camera in a succession of jump cuts and crash zooms. The weird otherworldliness is amplified by a soundtrack of electronic noises and images (from an infra-red camera) that are predominantly lime green and raspberry pink, occasionally bleaching to white. In case you’re tempted to try and decipher it at all, Atman is a Sanskrit word meaning "essence, breath, soul."

Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (George Lucas, 1967) 15 mins

Given the huge cultural influence of Star Wars, this early student film by George Lucas - the first of his cinematic futurescapes - makes for a fascinating watch. There are no heroes, no princesses: the future here is one of featureless white-walled compounds, surveillance cameras and the white-uniformed army of operators who control this technology. The year is 2187, and THX 1138 is attempting an escape…

Les statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953) 29 mins

Beginning with the quote “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture,” this essay film pairs images of African statues in European museums with a meditation on art history, and the ways and spaces in which African cultures have been consumed by white civilisation. One of the few French anti-colonial films of the period, it was banned by the French government until 1995.

Tomorrow's Sun (Nagisa Oshima, 1959) 6 mins

This one’s a bit of an oddity - and be warned, there are no subtitles. So far as I can tell, it’s a “fake” trailer created for Shochiku by Nagisa Oshima - he of In the Realm of the Senses and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Here is a vibrantly-coloured, widescreen, postwar Japan complete with gangsters, singing cowboys, and dancing girls - an expert spoof of the films so popular in the country at the time, and a world away from Oshima’s later experimental work.

De Düva (George Coe, 1968) 14 mins

I spent many long evenings this winter at the BFI’s Bergman retrospective, so when I stumbled across this, I was more than ready to find it funny. Over-long maybe, but actually it is funny. Shot in the requisite glossy black and white, it mashes up plot-lines and characters from various Bergman classics. Listen carefully: the whole thing is performed in a spoof-Swedish, rendered faithfully into English subtitles.

The Big Shave (Martin Scorsese, 1967) 5 mins

Conceived during a period of deep depression, in which Scorsese apparently had trouble shaving, this short turns a mundane act into an unsettling metaphor for the Vietnam War. It begins innocently enough: a wistful jazz number (‘I Can’t Get Started’) plays on the soundtrack as a young man steps into a pristine white bathroom and starts to shave. He shaves his face to a perfect smoothness, but doesn’t stop there…

Are You the Favourite Person of Anybody? (Miguel Arteta, 2005) 4 mins

What if the people with clipboards who accost you on the streets weren’t canvassing for your vote or asking for money - those normal, everyday-awkward conversations; what if their question hit harder and deeper, asking, in effect, “Are you loved?” That’s the premise of this short film, scripted by and starring Miranda July. She and its director were in the last stages of a romance as they shot the film, and had broken up by the time it was finished. Says Arteta: “This little short is like a rear-view mirror that survived a fabulous, painful crash.”

Claes Oldenburg: Sort of a commercial for an icebag (Michel Hugo, 1971) 15 mins

Dressed in a lurid red-striped shirt, sometimes accessorised with a pair of bright pink rubber gloves, Claes Oldenburg discusses the genesis of his ‘ice bag’ sculptures. The artist squeezed all kinds of items - from tomatoes to lox to fake plastic breasts - before alighting on the ice bag, a perfect combination of soft and hard. Reproduced at many times the original size, and in the precise shade of ‘cooked crab’, the sculpture is fitted with a motor, allowing it to twist and untwist, inflate and deflate. Oldenburg’s tone throughout is deadly serious - or is he only teasing when he says an ice bag would look especially nice atop St Peter’s in Rome, or especially fetching in the snow?

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, 1998) 15 mins

This experimental short borrows scenes from the wholesome Andy Hardy series of teen comedies of the 30s and 40s, and compiles and re-edits them into something quite nightmarish. Arnold pulls the scenes apart frame by frame, going back over and over certain, apparently inconsequential, sequences and extending them so that every detail is noticeable. In the process, he creates (or discovers?) a new narrative of sexual desire between Andy and his mother, and turns a Judy Garland musical number into a stuttery loop of freakish warbles and coos.

The Smithsons on Housing (BS Johnson, 1970) 29 mins

Alison and Peter Smithson were part-way through the construction of Robin Hood Gardens when they were interviewed for this film. Speaking direct to camera, they lay out the theories that underpin their great patrician modernist outlook, and explain how they came to design the estate. This would be pretty dry, only their presentation makes it all weirdly compelling: she in a silver leather jumpsuit, he in a spangly silver tie, their delivery is strangulated upper-crust deadpan. Neither smiles or speaks to the other. And both are obsessed, really obsessed, with vandalism - rightly, as it turns out, given that neglect of Robin Hood Gardens became one of the reasons it was eventually knocked down. You might find you agree with them on cars and supermarkets, though.

House: After 5 Years of Living (Ray and Charles Eames, 1955) 11 mins

This film takes you inside the Eames’ iconic Case Study No. 8 house in Los Angeles five years after they moved in. It offers no coherent sense of the house’s interior - the dimensions of the different rooms, and how they interlock. Instead, the focus is on small details of the building itself, its facade and interior fittings, but mainly on the wonderful bits and bobs the Eameses collected on their travels - textiles, toys, pottery, carpets, combs, corn-ears.

Pauline (Céline Sciamma, 2010) 7 mins

Between her debut Water Lillies in 2007, and her follow-up, Tomboy, in 2011, director Céline Sciamma made this short, one of a collection of films commissioned by the French government on the subject of young people discovering their bi- or homo-sexuality.

It takes the form of a long monologue to camera, caught in a single static shot, for most of the duration. Sciamma’s regular collaborator (and star of the Dardennes’ most recent film, The Unknown Girl) Adèle Haenel appears briefly, very briefly, at the end.

Katatsumori (Naomi Kawase, 1994) 39 mins

This wonderfully tender film captures moments from the daily life of the director and her elderly grandma, the woman who raised her. Kawase’s camera focuses in close-up on the older woman’s face as she eats and gardens; speaking to the camera, she grumbles a little, reproaches Kawase for skipping the breakfasts she so lovingly prepares, reminisces about her as a little girl, and expresses pride at the woman she’s grown up to be. The affection between them is palpable.

Les résultats du féminisme (Alice Guy Blaché, 1906) 7 mins

Alice Guy Blaché was a key figure of cinema’s early years, the first woman director, and the first woman to establish and preside over her own film studio. Between 1896 and 1920, first in France and then in the US she wrote, directed, and/or produced more than 1,000 films.

This fun silent comedy imagines what life might be like under feminist rule; needless to say, while women thrive in men’s roles, men can’t tolerate the swap. The film presents us with a series of vignettes of life under the new order: the men labour in domestic servitude, ironing, sewing, looking after the children, while the women supervise, carouse… and carry shotguns! Some of the best scenes show men fending off the amorous advances of newly-assertive women.

Hen, His Wife (Igor Kovalyov, 1990) 12 mins

Shades of Eraserhead in this celebrated film by Russian animator Igor Kovalyov. A grotesque blue man and a grotesque plus-sized hen share a quiet home-life with a grotesque oversized maggot with a human head – offspring or pet, we’re not sure. Then a visitor shows up and is surprised when the hen opens the door. He marches through the kitchen and whispers to the man, who reacts as if it’s the first time he’s heard that his wife is a hen. The stranger leaves, but his revelation jolts the couple out of their tranquil coexistence: the man has some kind of breakdown, and the hen leaves.

This was Kovalyov’s penultimate film before he moved to the States to direct Rugrats for Klasky Csupo.

Six and a Half (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2008) 5 mins

Shot in colour on Super 16mm, you’d never guess this film is by the same director as black-and-white Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) – although in its way, it is quite dark.

A mash-up of Amirpour's own childhood memories of getting stitches and of catching and dissecting frogs, it should, she says, be understood as a “parable about childhood feelings of domination, pain and revenge.”

Monster (Jennifer Kent, 2005) 10 mins

Director Jennifer Kent has called this short “baby Badadook” and it does indeed offer a fascinating glimpse of the early origins of her 2014 feature film.

The set-up’s identical: a single mum must protect her son from a monster that invades their home through a seemingly innocent toy - in the feature, a pop-up book, here a malevolent-looking soft-toy. In both feature and short, it’s hinted at but never clear whether the monster is in some way conjured up or comprised of the mother’s negative or complicated feelings about her son; in this way, both films play out at the boundary between supernatural and psychological horror.

When the Kid was a Kid (Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, 2011) 17 mins

A bunch of kids in a block of flats in Tehran entertain themselves by play-acting their parents throwing a party. Among them is Taha, a young boy who comes as his mother, having raided her bedroom at home for a dress, wig, and high-heels. The film quietly observes the kids’ interactions, and offers a glimpse into Taha’s home life - long hours by himself while his mum works late.

Needle, the short film Ghazvinizadeh made after this one, won the Cinéfondation’s prize for Best Student Film at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It's available to watch here.

Muscle Beach (Joseph Strick and Irving Lerner, 1948) 9 mins

This classic short captures the emerging body-building subculture at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach. Set to an upbeat ‘talking blues’, the film presents footage of the gymnasts, acrobats and bodybuilders who came to work out on the open-air gym, as well as the crowds of spectators who came to see them perform. By this time, Muscle Beach was attracting as many as 10,000 sun worshipers on a July weekend and maps across the US were starting to print ‘Muscle Beach’ in larger type than ‘Santa Monica’. The city weren’t pleased. In 1958 the gym was demolished overnight.

L’Amour existe (Maurice Pialat, 1960) 21 mins

Despite the title, this is a ragingly angry film - angry at the encroachment of housing on the historic woodlands surrounding Paris; at the shoddy new prison-like high-rise developments and the people who believed the hype, took up the offer of a free car, and moved in; at the unplanned urbanisation which strands suburbanites far from green spaces and cultural venues; at the awful commutes which bookend the working day; at the smallness of mind which the suburbs promote and make physical; at the poor opportunities for social advancement offered the mainly working-class inhabitants of suburbia.

That the director is personally invested in the subject, may explain the tone: Pialat grew up in Courbevoie, a dead-end satellite town on the Paris outskirts.

Schwechater (Peter Kubelka, 1958) 1 min

In fairness to Schwechater, Peter Kubelka was at the start of his career when they hired him to make a commercial - so the commission will not have looked as odd then as it does in hindsight. If you look very closely, you can just make out someone drinking a beer - but you do have to look closely.

For many years now a towering figure in experimental cinema, Kubelka is associated above all with the ‘structural’ film movement: films which explore the material nature of film as a medium, that are constructed using a predetermined system, and which, by suggesting perceptual puzzles at play, call attention to the film-viewing process.

Needless to say, Kubelka did not deliver the film Schwechater anticipated; they sued, he fled to Sweden. He knew full well, he says, this would be their reaction, but felt morally justified “because I gave them something that was much better than what they really wanted.”

Ottica Zero (Maja Borg, 2007) 13 mins

This strange film, a documentary (I think), introduces us to two people who are thinking deeply about how we might live differently, and better, as a society - and who are living out their ideas in the here and now.

One, a former actress, is living as a wandering mystic; it’s been five years, when we meet her, since she’s used money. The other, a 91-year-old futurist and industrial designer, based in a futuristic self-designed compound, has devoted his life to imagining and elaborating an alternative social design concept, The Venus Project. In his vision, money is replaced with a resource-based economy.

That the film’s status is so uncertain is down, in part, to its avant-garde stylings, and to the copious vintage sci-fi footage it employs. But mainly, it’s that these two real-life people are so fantastical - the one almost implausibly beautiful, the other shown lounging at home in vintage futuristic interiors straight out of Kubrick’s 2001.

So I googled, I couldn’t resist. There’s more here.

The High Sign (Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, 1921) 21 mins

Ejected from a passing train, Keaton lands in a new town and sets about finding work at a local shooting gallery. Having convinced his boss he’s an expert marksman, he is recruited by him into a secret society, The Blinking Buzzards, who use the premises as a front. His first assignment is to murder a man who owes the gang money; as it turns out, this same man has already hired sharpshooting Keaton as his bodyguard. So the dilemma becomes: how to murder and to protect the same person (whilst also evading the cops)?

The acrobatics of the final scene, involving trap-doors, and hidden revolving walls, are astounding.

Stille Nacht I: Dramolet (Brothers Quay, 1988) 1 min

A battered-looking doll looks on as a sea of iron filings overwhelms the chairs, floor, picture frames and walls of the room next door.

On the back of their work on Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ video, MTV commissioned this micro-short from the Brothers Quay, to be played as an ‘Art Break’ between music videos. The cryptic reference at the start – to R.W. in Herisau – refers to Robert Waiser, Swiss writer of miniature dramas, or ‘dramolets’.

Small Deaths (Lynne Ramsay, 1996) 11 mins

Ramsay’s graduation film is divided into three parts, each following a different character named Anne-Marie, each illustrating a different kind of ‘death’, either literal or figurative. In the first, little Anne-Marie – aware of the tensions between her parents – worries if her dad is leaving for work, or leaving for good; in the second, two slightly older girls are witness to the callous games of some neighbourhood children; in the third, a teenage girl is the target of a morbid practical joke by her boyfriend and his mates.

Set on and around a Glasgow housing estate, the film belongs to the realm of British social realism, but feels fresh in tone and presentation: fragmented, oblique in approach to subject, arrestingly shot.

Franz Kafka’s The Country Doctor (Yamamura Koji, 2007) 21 mins

A country doctor narrates a night-time call he paid to a sick patient, transported to his bedside by a team of supernatural horses summoned by a mysterious groom.

Yamamura translates the oddities and distortions of the doctor’s narrative into a visual style of undulating surrealist images: the doctor’s head, for instance, is sometimes grotesquely large, as if seen through a fish-eye lens, while the foreground and borders of the images are often bubbly and unstable. Still more disorienting, a portion of the doctor’s monologue is spoken by a pair of sketchy little black characters apparently derived from the traditional Japanese kyogen form of comic theatre.

Visite à Picasso (Paul Haesaerts, 1949) 20 mins

Predating Henri-Georges Clouzot’s more famous full-length documentary Le mystère Picasso by six years, this short film visits the artist in his studio in Vallauris. Picasso is shown rearranging canvases, presenting a series of plaster sculptures to camera, and finally painting directly onto large sheets of glass while the camera films from the other side.

By then in his late-60s, this is Picasso as we think of him: white-haired, solid, wearing a black beret and workmen’s clothes. We watch as he executes some of his most famous motifs – dove, bull, faun, nude – with sure, fluid brush-strokes, a café-au-lait bowl, repurposed as a paint pot, held nonchalantly in the other hand.

Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (Bruce Conner, 1976) 5 mins

Achingly, unsettlingly beautiful, this film’s sepia-tinted dreamscape is woven from snippets of found footage taken from films of the 40s and 50s. A white rabbit, a little girl in striped socks bouncing a ball, a feather borne aloft by the hot air of a radiator, rain on the surface of a pond: the images are gentle, enigmatic. They follow on from each other without obvious association, separated by instants of black - like a blink, or a breath in music - and set to an evocative soundtrack of bird calls and electronic noises.

Snow Canon (Mati Diop, 2011) 33 mins

Vanina’s parents have gone off to a funeral, leaving her alone in the family chalet in the French Alps. Her only communications with the outside world are by text and by Skype with a friend, Eloïse, who is enjoying a sun- and fun-soaked holiday elsewhere. Then the babysitter Mary Jane arrives: Vanina is by turns petulant and curious about the alluring older stranger. Outside and around them, the landscape is rocky, cold and forbidding, but inside the chalet the pair create a private, sensual world which tips occasionally into the dream-like and exotic.

In an interview about the film, director Mati Diop said she hoped people would take away from it “a special feeling or mood, one that you remember like a melody for days, weeks or forever.”

Spectator (Frans Zwartjes, 1970) 10 min

This nightmarish short from Dutch experimental filmmaker Frans Zwartjes takes as its subject cinema’s relation to voyeurism. In a confined space, a man observes a partially-clothed woman with a pair of binoculars. But there are two “spectators” here: a thrusting, intrusive camera – all abrupt close-ups and sudden zooms – also prowls around and clings to the woman.

The Cry of Jazz (Edward Bland,1959) 35 mins

The Parkwood Jazz Club – a young, mixed-race group of jazz fans – meet in a living-room decorated with modern furniture, abstract art and African carvings. After the formal session is adjourned, a smaller group stay on to answer the questions of a new member. Natalie has been told by a young white guy, Bruce, that rock ’n’ roll is jazz: Alex, one of the black men, puts him straight in an articulate three-part argument considering the origins, history and future of jazz.

While these scenes have the clunky feel of a 50s educational film, they are balanced out by documentary sections showing life in Chicago’s black neighbourhoods and electric performance footage of Sun Ra illustrating Alex’s argument. The film’s unabashed critique of white racism is like nothing else I’ve seen from this date, and caused uproar in its day.

A Girl’s Own Story (Jane Campion, 1983) 27 mins

In its thematics and surrealist touches, this early student short presages much of Jane Campion’s later work. Set in the pre-feminist Australian suburbia of the 1960s, its story of adolescent female sexuality centres on three friends – Pam, Stella and Gloria – who attend a strict Catholic school. Just as the country at large is caught between conservative social norms and new sexual freedoms (symbolised by the Beatles), so the girls themselves are negotiating the terrain between childhood and adult impulses: Stella and Pam practice kissing in a bedroom surrounded by the paraphernalia of childhood (tellingly, their Barbie dolls are naked and arranged in sexually provocative poses).

The subject matter here’s pretty dark, but there’s a strain of humour operating throughout: the film is bookended, for instance, by musical numbers and there’s also a bizarre recurring motif involving electric heaters – an overt, borderline-ridiculous, metaphor for the emotional isolation and lack of human warmth experienced by the girls.

Soft Fiction (Chick Strand, 1979) 57 mins

This film is structured around five candid interviews with different women. Each encounter is presented differently – in one segment the interviewee speaks straight-to-camera in tight close-up, while in another a woman reads aloud from a letter, and in still another the subject is shown cooking breakfast in the nude while her voice fills the soundtrack.

As implied by the film’s title, many of the interviews touch on women’s erotic experience – whether fantasies or actual encounters – but range more widely to include responses to artworks, drug addiction, and traumatic wartime memories. Interspersed throughout are short non-narrative scenes, some near abstract, for instance: the sunlight filtered through a straw hat, a woman walking in a garden, a woman dancing.

Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) 21 mins

In the Jardin du Luxembourg Patrick meets Charlotte, chats her up, invites her out. When she leaves he meets Véronique – who only the audience know is Charlotte’s flatmate – and the same happens. Getting ready for their dates back at home the girls discuss their different Patricks, not realising the object of their affection is one and the same.

Deliciously and terribly dated all at once, this film is enjoyable for its glimpses of a still-cobbled Quartier Latin, the 50s beatnik fashions – elfin haircuts, dark sunglasses, and slashed-neck Breton t-shirts – and the playfulness and pop-cultural references that are such a feature of A bout de souffle, made just a year later. For modern tastes, though, the problem is Patrick himself: the film ridicules him as an irrepressible ‘player’, but today you’d wonder at anyone falling for such an insufferable twerp.

Please Say Something (David OReilly, 2009) 10 mins

David OReilly has said he intended this film as a deconstruction of the cat and mouse genre of cartoons. His cat and mouse are a romantic couple; just like Tom and Jerry, their relationship is one of dependence and cruelty – although the cruelty here's not physical, more a sort of not-seeing of the other person that can creep into any long-term relationship.

The film is relatable and, ultimately, moving – this despite the fact the animation itself is pretty crude: the characters have big heads and spindly little legs, as if drawn by a child, and the landscapes they move through are flat and garishly coloured. Wrote the director, "My central idea in constructing the world of the film was to prove that something totally artificial and unreal could still communicate emotion and hold cinematic truth." Read the full essay here.

The Art of Mirrors (Derek Jarman, 1973) 6 mins

This dreamlike film begins on a close-up of flames, but for most of its length the 'action' consists just of three costumed and masked figures who pose or move in slow motion, sometimes holding up a round hand-mirror which reflects light back into the camera in blinding flashes. This strange, slow-mo pageant is interrupted at points by mysterious images of blood-red pyramids.

Note: this film is silent, or should be – watch on mute.

Autobiographical Scene Number 6882 (Ruben Östlund, 2005) 9 mins

On Midsummer’s Eve a group of friends are walking across a bridge. Chatting away, they begin to speculate about the height of the bridge, which leads one of them, Martin, to boast he’ll jump off into the river below. As he begins to strip off, several women in the group plead for him to reconsider. Wanting to appear the strong man, but just as clearly very afraid, he’s finally ready to go when a man passing on a scooter warns the group that a Norwegian died attempting a similar jump two years’ earlier. Martin gets dressed, and the moment appears to be over – or is it?

Shot entirely in widescreen from a cool distance – which somehow only adds to the tension – this riveting short looks ahead to the same director’s later Force Majeure in its critique of the fragile male psyche.

Cineblatz (Jeff Keen, 1967) 2 mins

This frenzied collage of pop-cultural detritus proceeds at extreme high-speed, close to the limit of what the eye can take in. Objects collide, fragment, explode: glossy magazines are cut up and reconfigured, newspaper cuttings defaced with animated scribbles, plastic toys melted or dismembered. There are superheroes, shiny catalogue models, dolls, TV sets, lipsticks, an electric chair – nothing stays still very long, and it's all set to a soundtrack of radio static.

Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr Leonard Cohen (Donald Brittain and Don Owen, 1966) 44 mins

Hang on in there through the excruciating – and improbable – first three minutes featuring Cohen’s “stand-up” routine: there’s so much to treasure in what comes after. For instance: home movies of him as a little boy, a visit with his middle-aged mum, a glimpse of Marianne in the photos pinned above his desk. In a rotating wardrobe of skinny ties, black trench, and a favoured black leather jacket, Cohen looks the part – and appears to be living it too: strolling the city streets, hanging out in bistros, waking up in cheap hotel rooms, writing in the bath…

The voice-over’s hilariousl too: “Cohen gets around… He picks up a prize, pushes a book, or travels to public appearances with other poets.”

La Souriante Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1922) 32 mins

A keen reader, Madame Beudet finds reality – a genteel but cloistered existence in a dreary provincial town – matches up poorly to her favourite romantic poetry. She is unhappily married to a boorish older man with terrible teeth. He enthusiastically takes up a friend’s offer of spare opera tickets; she doesn’t fancy it. He counts his money; she plays piano. He moves the flower vase; she moves it back. The smile says it all: enigmatic, inward-looking, she smiles it each time she retreats into herself in the face of some new outrage of his.

Told from Madame’s point-of-view throughout and inset with scenes of her interiority – dreams, imaginings, fantasies and thoughts – this short is generally credited as the first feminist film.

Removed (Naomi Uman, 1999) 7 mins

For this film, director Naomi Uman took a 16mm German porn film and erased the female porn star's body using a combination of beauty product (nail polish) and domestic cleaning agent (household bleach). Her attack resulted in a series of animated white 'holes' which writhe orgasmically under the touch or the gaze of a series of leering men.

"The centre of attention of all straight porn is women’s bodies," explained the director. "I wanted to experiment with the idea of focusing all eyes on an animated hole: the ultimate distillation of the role of the female in porn."

A Day with the Boys (Clu Gulager, 1969) 18 mins

This haunting story is told without dialogue, in a series of stunning sun-bleached images which dissolve and bleed into one another, freeze-frame and turn into paintings. The cinematographer is László Kovács, who shot Easy Rider the same year.

A pack of boys meet up for a day in the country: they play hide n’ seek, slide down hills on pieces of cardboard, chase birds, pick up snakes. All innocent enough, but there are warning signs: a soundtrack which grows increasingly menacing, and onscreen title cards that note the passage of time, as if counting down to some cataclysmic event. Towards the end of the day the boys venture into the city, where they persuade a businessman to join them.

Crystal World (Pia Borg, 2013) 11 mins

The jungle near a West African diamond mine has become the epicentre of a pocket of crystallisation, the result of particles of “anti-time” colliding with particles of time. Trees metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles choke on diamonds. Men lurch through the undergrowth with feet becoming explosions of quartz, sticking to the floor. Most are fleeing the area, but Edward Sanders is travelling into the jungle in search of his former lover.

This film takes inspiration from J.G.Ballard’s dystopian sci-fi novel The Crystal World, but in this version – a mixture of live-action and stop-motion – the crystal growth is invading scenes from the iconic 1955 film The Night of the Hunter.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972) 52 mins

A complement to his celebrated 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, this BBC documentary follows Reyner Banham on a tour of Los Angeles, a city often derided by critics of architecture and urbanism, but which he loves with “a passion that goes beyond sense or reason”. Maybe it helped that, as a visiting architecture professor at USC, he was given some pretty fancy digs: his base is Greene & Greene's Gamble House in Pasadena.

The tour is unconventional: beginning on the street where the Watts riots kicked off, stops include the rusting rails of the old Pacific Electric Railway, the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice and – most memorably – the parking lot of a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint where, tucking into a pineapple sundae in the back seat, he quizzes painter Ed Ruscha about what public buildings a visitor should see. The answer: gas stations (of course).

A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931) 11 mins

Early ‘city symphonies’ of New York, like Manhatta (1921) and Skyscraper Symphony (1929), presented the city as a modernist abstraction or, in a sequence of dynamic urban scenes, as the great metropolis of the machine age. This one’s a bit different.

For one, it documents not Manhattan, but New York’s northernmost borough, the Bronx, where the buildings are tenements, not skyscrapers. The view is street-level, not from a skyscraper looking down, or from the base of a skyscraper looking up: people, and the unheroic – street cleaning, greengrocers, kids playing – are the focus. And then there’s the sly social commentary, particularly the sardonic use of intertitles. ‘The Bronx does business…’ reads one, immediately followed by shots of shops displaying ‘LOST OUR LEASE’ and ‘FIRE SALE, BELOW COST’ signs.

Manoman (Simon Cartwright, 2015) 10 mins

In an attempt to tap into his masculinity, meek-mannered Glen attends a primal scream therapy session. There, surrounded by wailing men, he finds himself unable to join in. But when another member of the class pushes Glen too far, he does finally let something out, something from deep within and that knows no limits: a living embodiment of his id.

The film is a mixture of puppetry and digital animation: in post-production the faces of the rod puppets were manipulated to add animated eye movement, expressions and lip sync. All the screaming and singing was recorded in one session, a kind of primal therapy in itself, according to the director: “We got about twenty guys into the recording studio, gave them all beers, and asked them first to sing their hearts out and then to scream until they could scream no more […] the atmosphere afterwards was incredible. People were saying they felt refreshed by the experience.”

Emergency Calls (Hannes Vartiainen and Pekka Veikkolainen, 2013) 15 mins

An unplanned home birth, a shipwreck, a traffic accident, an incidence of domestic violence, and a school shooting.

This arresting film, thick with dread, takes the recordings of real-life emergency telephone calls and radio traffic, and illustrates them with abstract or semi-abstract visuals, and with actors lip-synching to the soundtrack.

Kitchen Sink (Alison Maclean, 1989) 12 mins

After washing up, a woman cleaning her sink comes across a dark hair protruding from the plughole; she pulls on it, and gradually pulls out a small hairy creature which becomes the object of her repulsed, yet fascinated desire.

Perhaps it’s that I had my kitchen sink unblocked recently at home, and that clumps of my long hair were implicated in causing the blockage, but this domestic horror grabbed me from the first. “It's a dark little fable about fear and desire,” says its director, “about a woman who re-fashions a monster into a man, and finds herself falling for her creation. In some sense I see it as a Pygmalion-type story, with the genders reversed."

Pamon (Kazushige Toma, 2014) 10 mins

Things have been getting a bit dark round here of late, so in an effort to lighten up, here’s a charming psychedelic Japanese stop-motion animation.

In a candy-coloured landscape of lush towelling pastures and pink polka-dotted trees live the Pamon – lanky yellow creatures with big feet, big hands and big hair who communicate by feeling each other’s chest hair. Rather than a story per se, the film offers small vignettes of Pamon daily life – a hunting expedition, a Pamon family at home, two courting Pamons – plus some business with a magic spanner, and a rousing dance number.

You can see more by this director on his website, here.

Patriotism (Yukio Mishima, 1966) 27 mins

This short, the only film directed by playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima, is – as you’d expect – a bit of a shocker. In an uneasy foreshadowing of Mishima's own suicide, it tells the story of a naval officer and his wife who make love and then commit seppuku for the sake of the emperor. In the role of the naval officer is Mishima himself.

The film is black-and-white and dialogue-free, narrated through hand-written intertitles placed at the start and between 'chapters'. The sets are Noh-like, severe and minimalist, with blazing white walls whose whiteness is relieved only by violent splashes of black – spurts of blood – at the film’s climax.

On his death, Mishima’s widow ordered that all prints of Patriotism be burned, but she spared the negative; decades later, after her death, the film re-emerged. You can read more about the film here.

Unicorn (Grace Nayoon Rhee, 2012) 1 min

Short but definitely not sweet, this nightmarish film is a mix of stop-motion and live action. I’ve not been able to find much about the director: she’s an animation graduate from Hongik University, South Korea, and from the experimental animation MFA at CalArts. See more of her work, here.

Chambre Jaune (Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2002) 8 mins

A peeping tom. Two attractive female neighbours, possibly lovers. An intruder with black leather gloves and an old-school razor. A music box.

From the directing team behind Amer (2009), The Strange Color of your Body's Tears (2014) and Let The Corpses Tan (2017), this early short plays as giallo as S&M fantasy. Stylistically, it's a tour-de-force, melding the saturated colour scheme of Dario Argento or Mario Bava with the freeze-frames and hushed voiceover of Chris Marker.

The Image (Michael Armstrong, 1967) 14 mins

An artist is painting a portrait of a man who looks just like David Bowie when suddenly Bowie himself appears as the physical manifestation of the man on the canvas, first outside the studio window, then downstairs inside the building. The artist keeps killing the apparition – hitting him on the head, choking him, stabbing him – but still he comes back...

I’m endorsing this one more as a curiosity than as an excellent film per se: released the same year as Bowie’s first album, it marks the icon’s first big screen appearance. Apparently he watched the finished film at a fleapit cinema in London, and reported back to its director how it confused moviegoers expecting to see porn: “He thought it was hilarious,” Armstrong said.

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926) 37 mins

This dazzling experimental silent film was one of Pauline Kael’s favourites. The story’s pure melodrama – two sisters move to Paris from the country where they are drawn into a tragic love triangle – it’s the execution that’s so extraordinary.

Unusually for the time, there are no intertitles, so the plot is communicated entirely with imagery. All unnecessary exposition is trimmed away; we open in medias res right in the thick of an axe murder conveyed in startling, near-abstract montage. Thereafter Kirsanoff deploys all kind of dissolves, fades, irises, fast motion, blurred or out-of-focus shots and super-impositions, as well as some evocative on-location shooting in the run-down working-class district of the film’s title.

10 Minutes Older (Herz Frank, 1978) 10 mins

The premise is simple: ten minutes go by in the lives of a group of toddlers as they watch a puppet show, of which we’re shown nothing. Instead, all we see are the kids’ faces in close-up, as storms of emotions sweep over them. One of the most famous shorts of all time, in 2002 fifteen world-famous directors – including Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, and Bernardo Bertolucci – were invited to create their own versions for the portmanteau film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet / The Cello.

Works of Calder (Herbert Matter, 1950) 20 mins

This portrait of the sculptor Alexander Calder in his Connecticut studio is the work of pioneering graphic designer Herbert Matter. Matter’s works were particularly innovative in their use of photomontage, a technique he carried over usefully into this film, superimposing shots of the natural landscape near the studio with others of Calder’s sculptures in motion.

The footage of the middle-aged Calder at work – sometimes with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth – is precious. The soundtrack, whose rhythmically composed sequences are intended to suggest a parallel between familiar forms and movements in nature and the movements of Calder's mobiles, is by John Cage.