Eating is taboo, and relieving oneself is performed on a toilet at a communal table in Luis Buñuel's Le fantôme de la liberté. The farce strings together events from #Buñuel's life (who was 74 by the time he made this film), with dreams remembered by both Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière.

“Madrid was filled with the stench of – pardon my language – food. It was indecent.”

– le professeur des gendarmes

The title references the opening sentence from Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848): “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”. What follows is a wonderful, free-flowing pastiche performed by a sublime cast.

Miroslava Safránková plays Hans Christian Andersen's doomed little mermaid – Malá morská víla in Czech – who falls in love with a mortal and gives up her beautiful voice to be with him. Sadly, the mortal, a prince, doesn't recognize his mute saviour and doesn't return his love.

“The other day I got caught in some fishermen's net. Of course, I had to drown them. I couldn't allow them to touch me, could I?”

– the little mermaid

The wonderful soundtrack is by Zdeněk Liška who also composed music for Ikarie XB 1 (Jindřich Polák, 1963) and Spalovač mrtvol (Juraj Herz, 1969).

Amsterdam schoolchildren recite the words from a reading board while the traditional teaching method's pictures are interspersed with news photos of then-current events and children's drawings.

“Aaaaap” “Nooot” “Miiieees”

This short, and life, is haunting and violent; schools should be safe for all. Even if only to escape in a book.

Filmmaker, photographer and honorary surrealist Jean Painlevé made science films that verge on experimental art cinema. With custom-built camera setups, he explored the world above and below the water surface, and with that exposed human traits.

 

It's almost impossible to select one film from a filmography as vast as #Painlevé's. In honour of C.V. #Raman, lets go with his Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides.

 

It's on Ubu, in case you wonder.

A mucky, nihilistic #punk adaptation of the Billy the Kid saga foreshadowing Alex Cox's Straight to Hell by 15 years.

– All right, Billy. All right. You still haven't answered my question. What do you want to do?

– Nothin'.

“Now this is a real good one Loyd, you want me to get in a business I can't even pronounce the name of? Poly-whatcha-doodle-all-day?”

– Frank

“Every woman has her most vulnerable point. For some, it's the nape of the neck, the waist, the hands. For Claire, in that position, in that light, it was her knee.”

– Jerome

In this political satire criticising Czechoslovakia's “normalisation” period, a journalist learns about bank employee Bedrich Hroch, who – while attempting to determine how much #gold the local #zoo's hippopotamus' needs for a tooth replacement – is swallowed by the animal.

 

With the man happily residing inside the creature, his journalist friend hatches a plan to use the “talking hippo” for political means .