High up in the Himalayas, Christian nuns attempt to found a school and hospital in a Raja's former palace. The palace, decorated with ancient erotic murals and run by the attractive Englishman Mr Dean, becomes an increasingly impossible to resist source of secular lust for the chaste Sisters.

“Do you think it's a good thing to let her feel important?”

– Sister Clodagh

With Jack Cardiff's sweeping cinematography and #Technicolor splendour, Black Narcissus establishes a stark contrast between the Sisters dour piety, the luminance of the Himalayan landscape, and the spellbinding pull of worldly desire. The bewitching #lipstick scene, set in a dimly lit space, works as well as it does precisely because of the scene's photography. That red smear, like blood pulsating from a fresh wound, becomes a deeply unsettling, vulgar gesture.

A lot of #soccer there's not, in Wim Wenders' Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. What we do have happens almost right at the start. After a foul, the titular goalkeeper Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is removed from the match. Frustrated he leaves and finds himself roaming the streets of #Vienna where he picks up boxoffice girl Gloria (Erika Pluhar). In the morning he kills her and travels to the countryside, waiting for the police to arrest him.

“Ich werde mich entschlossen verirren.”

– Peter Handke

Die Angst is an early, perfect example of Junger Deutscher Film (”New German Cinema”). Its cinematic thanks to Robby Müller's observant eye and Peter Handke's precise language, both describing scenes and performers as if observed through a fourth wall.

 

A very slow burning road movie, a Taxi Driver in reverse if you will, that doesn't suffer the neurotic showmanship of its Hollywood counterpart.

Great Highland #bagpipes, or a' phìob mhòr as they're called in Scottish Gaelic, are traditionally played on the battlefield. Peter Watkins' Culloden moves the senseless bloodshed from 1960s Vietnam to the Scottish Highlands of 1746.

“And wherever he went, he took with him his music, his poetry, his language and his children… thus within a century of Culloden, the English and the Scottish lowlanders had made secure forever their religion, their commerce, their culture, their ruling dynasty.”

– narrator

The most clearly it's seen in the men's eyes. That stare we recognise all too well from the many images that reached the west in the 60s, ever before and after.

In typical Western fashion the credits for William Klein's Festival panafricain d'Alger focusses on the French and American participants. After Algeria regained its independence in 1962, it became Africa's – and the #AfricanDiaspora's – centre for postcolonial and liberation moments.

“À bas le colonialisme ! À bas l'imperialisme !”

The 12-day Festival panafricain attracted 5000 people from all over the African continent, as well as liberation fighters from the United States.

Slobodan Ćirković aka Roko was (or is? I cannot find a lot of information online) a Serbian hypnotist capable of making people painlessly self-inflict torment. In Vlatko Gilić's short and rather disturbing Moć, Roko initiates a large group of men to thread a needle and slowly, going from him to the next to the other, connect the one thread through their bodies until all of them are stitched into one.

 

Strangely homoerotic and determinately violent, Moć feels deeply rooted in the #Serbia​n psyche. There's beauty and an unflinching élan-vital under the skin, a tenderness that comes with great, unmentionable #pain, love and death.

What would you do if someone sends you a mysterious jade mask that, according to the ill-fated now-dead previous owner, causes terrifying nightmares? Well, you put it on, now! In the name of science Dr Allan Barnes (Paul Stevens) does exactly that and transports him and us – wearing our own Magic Mystic Masks – to a hallucinatory dreamworld with Zardoz-styled floating skulls and their robed devotees.

“Put the mask on, now!”

– recurring on-screen prompt

Julian Roffman's The Mask is an extremely watchable psychotronic affair. The 3D effects during the nightmarish Andreas Vesalius-inspired sequences are well implemented and yes, there's stuff flying at you for all the right reasons. Not quite #WilliamCastle gimmicky, but made with lots of love for the potential of 3D.

Where the Boys Are is chock-full of characters whose names appear to be straight space-travel-lifted from various #JohnWaters' movies: Tuggle Carpenter! TV Thompson! Lola Fandango! Dr. Raunch for Chrissakes!

“The boys come to soak up the sun, and a few carloads of beer. The girls come, very simply, because this is where the boys are.”

– narrator

We follow four female midwestern college students on #SpringBreak in Fort Lauderdale. Their objective is boys boys boys (and an even tan) and nothing, including being too young to drink, can stop them. This was one of the first post-Hayes Hollywood movies to address teenage sex yet despite all the innuendo (“What's your shoe size?” “13.” “Get in the car!”), it's all pretty clean. But without these girls, there wouldn't be any Dawn Davenport. And that would've ruined everybody's Christmas.

Both anticapitalist and pre-Stanley space odyssey. Based on Stanislaw Lem's Obłok Magellana [The Magellanic Cloud] (1955).

Barbara wakes up believing a fireman entered her bedroom through the window. Her father reassures her there's nothing, just a children's story. Years later, the adult Barbara (Caroline Loeb), grown up, withdrawn, living with her father (Dionys Mascolo), tutor, half brother (Pascal Greggory), and a persistent longing for her fireman, sparks a scheme that forces the fire brigade to come to their house and climb through her window once again.

“It's you.”

Flammes has a strange, stilted quality to it which reminds me, not in the least because of the presence of Geoffrey Carey as the restless American who travels with his own firefighter suit, of Raúl Ruiz's staged cinematic language. As in Ruiz's The Territory (1981), the characters drift in and out of space, and as in its half brother Der Stand der Dinge (Wim Wenders, 1982) we're left with wonderfully lingering performers who seem detached from, yet devoted to, their raison d'être.