The first Surrealist filmmaker. The first female French filmmaker. The first female-French-Surrealist filmmaker. Add to this the fact that "Germaine Dulac" was an ardent feminist (some say lesbian, too), and we've got quite a title. Like her Hollywood contemporary Dorothy Arzner, Dulac upheld each pa
It's a strange world that casts decor as its main character. This is the world of the Brothers Quay, in which all kinds of incomprehensible objects and machines hold the stage while human characters remain at their mercy. Disjointed, dreamy, labyrinthine, and oblique, this is a theater of the unconsc
David Lynch has been charged with making incomprehensible films. In fact, they make perfect sense, but not necessarily to us. An exemplary scene in "Fire Walk with Me" (1992) shows this: Two investigators are to receive their assignment from a very odd-looking woman named Lil. What they receive from
A razor blade slicing across a woman's eye -- this spine-chilling image is indelibly burned into the brain of anyone who has ever seen "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. This short film -- which also features a man poking at a severed hand and ants emerging from a hole in a m