Dreamscapes on Celluloid: 5 Movies that Exist on the Edge of My Imagination

What exists beyond the traditional confines of narrative? 3 Act Structure is great and all, but sometimes I want something a bit more ephemeral, with the suggestion of a narrative but that’s much more concerned with a suggestion of story rather than concretely portraying one. In other words, I'm always drawn to movies where my mind is forced to fill in the blanks, crafting my own movie in my head as I watched the images flash on screen. Here’s 5 surreal movies that live rent free in the daydreaming corner of my brain:

Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! (1967)

The McCabe & Mrs. Miller of spaghetti westerns, this in many ways feels like the antithesis of the genre, with genre archetypes slipping in and out of a surreal, nihilistic dream world. The “hero” is a (frequently bare chested) Mexican thief rather than a gunslinger sporting a ten-gallon hat, and the villains are a posse of gay cowboys led by a flamboyant rancher. Enshrouded in hazy skies and dusty nights, this is a western that also just so happens to be set in a horror movie, culminating in a final set piece that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic morality plays. El Topo is terrific of course, but this is the best acid western ever made for my money.

The Magic Blade (1976)

This felt fitting as the second entry on this list, because if Django Kill seems to actively trying to reject western genre conventions, The Magic Blade adopts these trappings and melds them with the wuxia genre to create something uniquely singular. Opening in a windswept ghost town, a mysterious black clad swordsman (Ti Lung) enters and finds himself tossed into a world of magical assassins, conniving businessmen, and fantastical sword fights. There’s some critique of capitalism buried in this flick, but how stream-of-consciousness the film feels! Evil grandmas, conniving seductresses, and poisoned drinks are all par for the course here, and while you can nitpick how little of it makes logical sense, it’s all so imaginative that trying to parse a logical through line is a futile effort.

Alphaville (1965)

I miss the old Godard, straight from the ‘Go Godard. While he has made some great films since the 60s (First Name Carmen, Tout Va Bien), nothing he’s done since that decade has approached the fusion of formal inventiveness and playful provocation of genre tropes of his French New Wave glory days. Breathless and Band of Outsiders get a lot more attention as metatextual crime works, but Alphaville is his masterpiece. Despite the high concept pulp sci-fi premise, I love how the film utilizes (then) modern day Paris to double as a futuristic metropolis. The cold and imposing modernist architecture add to the sense of alienation as agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) struggles to make sense of the technocratic society he has found himself in. He’s very much an out of place character in this world, a two-fisted, hard boiled investigator out of a tattered detective novel thrown into a sleek, soulless modern world. The film takes on an interesting yet external layer of subtext when you consider Godard’s progression as an artist himself. The entire film is a thesis on the consequences of a society built only on logic without any recognition of art and love. Meanwhile, Godard’s work since then has become increasingly clinical and alienating, as if his work is now being made by Alpha 60 itself. Life imitating art I suppose. 

Branded to Kill (1967)

There’s a cliché in Hollywood screenwriting circles that every other unproduced script is about hitmen. Ironically, the Japanese studio Nikkatsu churned out hitman movies by the dozens in the 60s, quickly saturating the market with them to the point that many of them, while enjoyable, are pretty indistinguishable. Enter insane auteur Seijun Suzki in 1967 to craft not only the peak of the genre, but also the movie that killed his career for nearly a decade. When the “3rd best” hitman in Japan (Jo Shishido) botches a kill, he finds himself a target for assassination by other hitmen in his organization. Despite being so simple on paper, the plot is nearly incoherent, with cuts on action seemingly existing outside any recognizable semblance of time and space. The stark black and white cinematography would suggest a heavy noir influence, but the film transcends that to achieve something resembling a black comedy. Suzuki’s well known for his impish, perverted sense of humor, which hit its first peak here and continued throughout much of this 80s work and on. Bizarre elements like a butterfly killing succubus and the hero’s literal fetish for boiling rice might seem jarring at first, but once you surrender yourself to Suzuki’s madness, you’ll realize absurd nihilism has never been so fun.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

A sublime cocktail of bossa nova and colorful cinematography, this is yet another one of Eurosleaze king Jess Franco’s explorations of love between women amidst a domineering world of men. When Linda (Ewa Stromberg) begins having dreams of the vampire Nadine (Soldedad Miranda) seducing her and feeding on her blood, she slips into a psychedelic whirlpool of lust and murder when she sees the woman in real life and the two begin a passionate love affair. Filmed on the shores of Istanbul, the location lends the story a sense of fantasy, as if the glimmering beaches of Nadine’s world exist outside the drab dungeons and seedy nightclubs that Linda finds herself back in whenever she’s not with Nadine. Add in a trippy space age pop/psychedelic soundtrack and Franco’s liberal use of crosscutting and even the audience begins to question how much of this is real or just part of Linda’s fantasies. Admittedly, much of Franco’s work is very male-gazey and while I couldn’t say his work is objectively feminist, there’s something to be said by how much the story is Linda’s and Nadine’s. Linda’s husband and the obligatory Van Helsing stand in are portrayed as either ineffectual or violently possessive. Franco himself turns up as a sadistic torturer of women. The love between the women is viewed as something that must be destroyed, perhaps even more than the vampirism that Nadine might inflict. As the film approaches its melancholy end, there’s a sense of ambiguity toward whether Nadine was really the monster and if Linda was really “saved”.