Possession was completely overwrought but it had accessible themes of grief and relationship disintegration, so it wasn’t utterly strange as such…and everyone in it was …in it, right in the madness! . For straight out strangeness I couldn’t really go past Eraserhead, the thing about that is you are with a sane observer with Henry who constantly has a wtf? atmosphere about him which i think greatly enhances that question for the viewer. I have watched it quite a few times and I love every fascinating bit of it. I really wouldn’t bother watching Possession again. Even though I do love it, and all Zulawski’s work.
megg, that was fast. and i agree with you on both.
possession is a bit much, but i like that, rather than pacing and mystery sometimes you just got to lose all control and show it all. reminds me a little of black swan. everybody has been saying how crazy and out of control it is. i think that yes, it is out of control, but in order to be that it is obviously the work of someone who had so much control and influence that everything was planned and organised.
however, from what i ve heard, lynch can be quite the opposite ha ha. i love lynch, even though some of his later works have not be all to good. you seen his little documentary thing on the internet? but yes, erasurehead. and the ‘thing’ in swaddling clothes. oh, and the girl behind the radiator.
you seen the tetsuo films? very much lynch eske. but i see lynch as a slightly more personally flamboyant version of werner herzog?
Possession
Diabel
On the Silver Globe
Szmanka
All hail the wonderfully weird Zulawski.
Also strange:
City of Pirates Raul Ruiz
Singapore Sling Nikos Nikolaidis
Werckmeister Harmonies Bela Tarr
Go, Go, Second Time Virgin Kôji Wakamatsu
Age of the Earth Glauber Rocha
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders Jaromil Jireš
Videodrome David Cronenberg
Songs from the Second Floor Roy Andersson
Begotten E. Elias Merhige
Visitor Q Takasi Miike
The House Sarunas Bartas
Can you pick one HOL?
videodrome – seen and yes
werckmeister harmonies – i ve seen the bela tarr speciall dvd where there were 2 films on there and i m not sure which one it is, but the opening shot, a long slow shot of a coal mine with the carriages of coal moving away, stunningly beautiful
visitor q – miike takeshi or takeshi miike and yes
the rest i shall now paruse the interwebs and locate
just thought of 2 more
bill douglas – mein ein folk/my way home
takeshi kitano – glory to the filmmaker
Megg: What do you mean? Pick THE strangest? Not sure I could.
Eraserhead. And I couldn’t stop watching. The Chicken Dance is like stuff out of your worst nightmares or a really bad acid trip.
Pick any Zulawski.
Tarr films are unusual in terms of structure but not that strange in terms of content, so I don’t know if I’d call them strange.
I’ll go with L’age dor.
I agree!! Eraserhead is indeed very strange
three votes for Eraserhead!
Yeah HOL wondered if you had one as the op asks for the strangest, but …sometimes it’s too hard to choose
Of the ones I posted up above, Begotten is definitely the strangest since it’s experimental as hell with a ton of very freaky imagery, right from the get-go.
But they’re all excellent films.
probably Skidoo.
it just forces you to ask how and why it got made.
Oh, and Troll 2.
The Baby Of Macon.
Am I strange because I don’t find any of Zulawski or Greenaway’s films all that strange? It may be that they are not normal, but since they make absolute perfect sense to me I don’t find them strange at all, whereas I do find horrible romantic comedies or all-too-common hyper-violent action films to be extremely befuddling. Shuji Terayama is another filmmaker whose films make perfect sense and yet are not normal in any way. Lopushansky’s Visitor of a Museum, as well.
It’s hard for me to recall the names of the strangest films I’ve seen – usually they’re not very good, and so I try to forget them. Chytilova’s Fruit of Paradise is one example, Solovyov’s Black Rose Is an Emblem of Sorrow, Red Rose Is an Emblem of Love is another. Yet I feel like there are others who I just completely, and thankfully, forgot, and I don’t know that I want to revisit them. There are some films, like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, that I found bad and not that weird, so that’s certainly not on this list. Havetta’s Celebration in the Botanical Garden may be weirder, but since it’s so amazing I won’t include it, either.
Memories of Matsuko is so tonally and aesthetically inconsistent that it’s weird, but it’s not that weird. This is difficult. I don’t think I’d benefit by answering the question. Instead, ‘Which films are fantastic by virtue of their divergent approaches?’ seems more fruitful.
Zulawski makes perfect sense to me but I still find his films strange—gloriously, wonderfully strange.
Alvin and the Chipmonks befuddles me.
Exactly! I guess maybe ‘strange’ has some sort of connotation of ‘otherness’ to me that doesn’t represent my feelings for Zulawski. Also, I tend to think of things that are internally inconsistent, whether it’s an apparent contradiction or harsh contrast in tones or whether it’s general chaos, because even if I feel like it’s ‘otherly’, as in far outside of me, if it is internally consistent then it merely seems like a divergent but understandable approach. Thus, this ‘otherness’ is compounded when it makes sense neither immediately to me or even within itself. If one thing within the film relates to anything else within the film as little as the film itself relates to a ‘normal’ film then I feel like it compounds the strangeness infinitely. Zulawski’s films are extremely internally consistent, with camera and acting styles carried throughout the entire work which other films would only use in select moments of digression. That inconsistency is to me more strange than the strangeness of the style therein. David Lynch’s films are strange to me, because he is of often ridiculously inconsistent. Tarantino, too. Pastiche is strange.
Alvin and the Chipmonks definitely makes sense to me, though. Even if it’s internally consistent, I could never understand why it would exist to begin with.
Oh, and Celine and Julie Go Boating.
Themroc
what about la bete by Walerian Borowczyk?
the holy mountain must be the strangest movie experience 4 me i don’t know if earthlings were in that film everyone seemed so strange
lost Highway is my favorite “strange movie”
Easy. The Room.
@HOL I’d forgotten about Begotten, just put it back in my queue :) gotta see that
The Roomoften pops up at the local as an 11pm special
This is an easy one: Pretty Woman. Perhaps the single most harmful movie ever made. A prostitute (Julia Roberts) who seems without a problem in the world, other than making the rent, meets an attractive yet aloof tycoon (RIchard Gere) and they both fill their various physiological voids and needs, all the while falling in love. But the harmful part is that the film tries to play it straight and not as a pure fantasy (which would have at least gave it some wiggle room). Films that try to be “strange” have sense enough to be honest about what they are. It’s the disguised garbage such as this (PW) that hit me as truly strange and more important, fraudulent. How this film portrays women and gets away with it, is despicable.
^ I agree. PW’s portrayal of everything is pretty revolting.
The Baby Of Macon isn’t the strangest film I’ve seen, but its up there. One has to turn towards animation as well.
The strangest film I’ve ever seen? Hard to say really; I was already heavily into Lynch and Cronenberg when I was teenager, and between the two of them my concept of cinematic normality has been completely warped.
Maybe Takashi Shimizu’s film Marebito might qualify. Not the greatest film ever made, but certainly a strange one. A cursory glance of the Wikipedia synopsis gives a hint to how weird the film actually is…
“The film is about a man named Masuoka, played by Shinya Tsukamoto, who carries a camera everywhere he goes. He becomes obsessed with the idea of fear when he sees a frightened man shove a knife in his eye to commit suicide. Wishing to understand the fear that the dead man must have felt before his death, Masuoka descends into a labyrinthine underground area beneath the city, where he sees human-like creatures that walk on their hands and knees and whimper like dogs. While searching the series of tunnels and passages, Masuoka encounters a homeless underground inhabitant who warns him about the Deros. He then meets the ghost of Kuroki, the man who killed himself, and learns more about the underworld. After hours of searching, Masuoka discovers a mountain range with a village built by the underground dwellers. He finds a naked girl (played by Tomomi Miyashita) chained to the wall. He takes her back to his apartment and notices she doesn’t eat, drink, or speak.”
The full synopsis is much longer – I only posted the first paragraph to avoid spoilers – but the rest of the plot is even more bizarre.
tvanalogue
i doubt this post will be a grandeur form of entry, and nor am i the type of person who consistently writes on forums, seeing as i m a member of one. this one to be precise.
i simply want to know what is the strangest film you ve seen and why you think so. I am a movie graduate and fanatic, i also make video, more art based but what the hell, whos got the budget these days.
now theres loads and loads of ones i could suggest eg. return to oz with jacko / liquid sky / tetsuo / and anything by kenneth anger, but the one that i m going to say is the possibly the single most strange film i ever did see would have to be that there possession, dir by Andrzej Zulawski and with sam neil and the incredible Isabelle Adjani.
now i don t know why that one does it for me, i would have been -1 of age at that time and by the time i saw it, around 15, it didn t scare me, nor horrify me, it just creeped me out permanently. i think the slight eastern block style of landscape plus and all cast european bar mr neil i found somewhat disturbing, maybe it was because i d played doom for the first time, who knows.
but i get inspiration from these films and i d like to know what you, the good public, have to say on this matter. and if i get no replies then thats fine, but whatever you do, no matter what happens, DON T TURN OFF THE LIGHTS!!!!! muwahahahahaha
hugs
(p.s. i also thing that one by trier – antichrist – was a bit of a rip off of this)