wokelstein's "Best Avant-Garde, Surreal, and Transgressive Films"

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This is my list for people looking for a film that’s a little off the "beaten path" or for college students who have just gotten their own Netflix account. Or something like that. These are movies that really piss people off or take them out of their comfort zone. They’re adventures.

It’s a condensation of my (currently) 427-item "Four Star List": (accessible here: http://www.listsofbests.com/list/41135-i-viddied-it-on-the-screen-s-four-star-cinema?page=1), so everything on here appears on there. If there’s a great "avant-garde, surreal, or transgressive" film that you think should be on here either I haven’t seen it, I didn’t really like it enough, or I didn’t really think of it as either avant-gard, surreal, or transgressive. This isn’t the very best of the four-star list, but it’s certainly all the coolest stuff. The four-star list without these films wouldn’t really have much flavor.

Virtually anything on the four star list by David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Luis Bunuel, Charlie Kaufman, Larry Clark, or Harmony Korine appears on here. I also included Fellini’s trippy 8 1/2 and its counterpart Juliet of the Spirits and some of Gus Van Sant’s "experimental" films including the 1998 shot-by-shot Psycho remake. Thought that Welles’ Shakespeare films and The Trial were hallucinatory enough to make the cut here also. Virtually anything with an NC-17 rating on the Four Star list is here as well.

Debated specifically about Birth (Jim Emerson pointed out it’s an homage to Bunuel’s An Andulasian Dog which I actually didn’t like enough to include here), Strange Days which has the Rape Scene which I think really takes you down a rabbit hole you likely haven’t gone down before. Where the Wild Things Are and Wizard of Oz are "children’s films" I guess, so we don’t recognize how weird they really are. Fantasia was hippified during it’s re-release in the 60s. Just made sense to me to put Night of the Living Dead here.

I left off anything that I thought was not physically (not emotionally or intellectually) accessible. There are a few shorts here that I know can be viewed on Youtube, in case you don’t recognize some of these titles or can’t find them for rental.

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