Here's a regard for some movies that are by repute, coverage, availability or simply running across them, trying to find them, or in their own right, special experiences. It's not so much about being great, although they mostly are, and significant in movie history in one way or another, as being more obscure, peculiar, special -- incomparable in other ways. What's common to all of these is that at some point in their history they were very difficult to see. While that may have changed with digital archiving and the Internet making even rarities more available, they are also still less widely known or renowned. But these also have to do with my experience of them, how hearing about them, hunting them, or encountering them made them special for me.

Maedchen in Uniform (1931)



Made by a cooperative for 55,000 Reichsmarks (apprx. $13,000 then), with a female director and all-female cast, this German film's girls' school context is paradoxically covertly erotic and openly lesbian. There is play and tension about the social context and authoritarianism at the time of the rise of fascism in the Weimar Republic, and the film itself was eventually suppressed by Goebbels, but not widely shown again until 1977 on German TV. Janus Films re-released a 35mm version in the U.S. in 1978, limited to such places as the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco, from which also came a VHS release with English subtitles. That was the way to find it, as I did, until releases in 1994 in the U.S. and 2000 in the UK. A Criterion Collection edition was released in 2021. But to think just lesbian or even erotic material would be controversial, see the next entry.

Zero for Conduct [Zéro de conduite] (1933)



Jean Vigo's 48 minute movie about boys' boarding school was banned in France until 1945. The objection? As a response to rigid education, Vigo gives a rebellion in form, and the movie becomes a surreal expression of the anarchy of childhood generally, beautiful in that trenchant, piquant French way, if more particularly not the reactionary one. Because of it's running time that makes if neither quite a short nor a feature, it's difficult to find even revival cinema exhibitions of this movie, so video and now digital versions of that, and home or non-cinema viewings are more likely. But you can still get the effect, and why this was such a big influence, for example, for Francois Truffaut (see 400 Blows) or Lindsay Anderson (see If . . .).

La Jetée (1962)



Though it has much wider renown, now, and even with, like Zéro de conduite above, an odd running time it can be found more easily even on line, as a milestone of movie history it's still not thought of in quite the same way as major feature-length productions. And Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, despite the tribute intended, had rather the opposite effect, tending to obscure the original for many who wouldn't venture on paths to find it (this is like the remake problem for another item on this list, see Bedazzled below). Chris Marker's even more independent production -- a kind of suis generis path neither really movie maker, journalist or documentarist, nor artist, and thus not an "indie" movie maker -- made him also similar to writers like Maruice Blachot, neither strictly literal nor figurative, fact nor fiction, but in the recit manner, playing with the way the account works between and for all that. See comments here.

Film (1965)



I first saw this at the San Francisco Cinematheque in 1992. Also, see above, due to its length as much as anything about Samuel Beckett or coming from art lines other than cinema, this was difficult to catch before it was available on video tape or digitally. I had only read about it before. Beckett's only foray into movies became a collaboration with Buster Keaton. If you understand the fondness Beckett had for Keaton and the other silent film era comedians -- Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy -- you'll have an easier time with all Beckett's work, not trying to figure it out so much as get the tone. Here, the economy of the gesture, the ironic humor and the grandness as philosophical subject (from George Berkeley's consideration that to be is to perceive and be perceived) detract no less from the matter, as psychologically and cognitively or phenomenologically -- see Roger Caillois -- pertinent as it is overlooked or ignored, which is also built into it. As a point of view, I can't see everything because it doesn't include myself in it. I can't be the absolute gaze, because I'm also caught as another object of perception. And then there's the extension of this with, as Dziga Vertov referred to it, the prosthetic eye of the camera. See comments here, which also include links to where you can see this and others on line.

Bedazzled (1967)



This may be the most un-rare bird on the list, but it's had a whole history of getting overlooked or upstaged. The very fame of Dudley Moore, his U.S. film career, left Peter Cook obscured, especially to Americans. An early video release in the 80s was all it had for a while so that it was virtually unavailable by the late 80s. I first saw the movie on broadcast TV, recorded it to tape, and even participated in its dissemenation in San Francisco, further details of which I reserve on legal advice. Then came the "remake" in 2000 (see comments), which now bumps the original out of Internet searches. Not only is it the matter of this best work of Cook and Moore, who were a team with their own show even after the sketch revue Beyond the Fringe launched what everyone since knows as British humor (also the satire movement in the 60s) -- John Cleese called Cook the funniest man alive when he still was and he was a huge influence on Monty Python -- but the movie was also directed by Stanley Donen, of Singin' in the Rain fame. See comments here.

Black Lizard (1968)



From a play by Yukio Mishima, who is also in the movie, featuring one of his favorite performers, Akihiro Maruyama. I can't tell too much about that story because it will give away one of the great twists about the movie, which isn't even really in the plot. It has all the fun of 60s Japanese spy movies, but with some stronger if not darker currents. DVDs are rare or bootleg. And this gives me another excuse to quote it:

Our counterfeit love is destined to take on the form of true love.

Killer of Sheep (1978)



Charles Burnett made this movie in 1972 and 73, and submitted it as a masters thesis at UCLA in 1977. Though it was shown at museums and film festivals, it did not get a wide release because of rights to the music Burnett used (see also the next entry). After a restoration by UCLA and licensing of music rights, it had a release in 2007 and a DVD version. I first saw it in 2008. See comments here.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
See comments here.



This is technically the rarest of the list because you're not supposed to see it at all. It's suppressed. Who could ban movies before the petty autocrats and facists took over? Corporations! In this case Mattel and Richard Carpenter and A&M Records. Todd Haynes made this movie with Barbie dolls -- or what he claimed were off-brand versions -- about Karen Carpenter's anorexia, like a home movie playing as an educational film. It wasn't the Barbies that got him, but the use of the music without getting the rights, and when Carpenter won a lawsuit, the movie was withdrawn from any official exhibit. Of course this made it possibly more famous, on the underground and bootleg circuit, and on line, where you can now find it.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)



I first saw this in 1992 at San Francisco's Red Vic, a collective independent theater, so the kind of place to see movies in revival or that don't get wide distribution. See comments here.

Marquis (1989)



This may be my favorite experience of a rarity, most of all because of what it is in its own right, but also because I didn't know about it before I saw it, didn't find out about it and seek it out, wasn't on the lookout. I saw it at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1990. Film festivals are rare bird aviaries because most of the movies don't get major distribution. This has had other exhibitions mostly at revival houses. The work of artist Roland Topor (see also La planète sauvage) and Belgian director Henri Xhonneux, it tells the story of the Marquis de Sade with animal head masks, stop motion and even a penis puppet, with an angle similar to suggestions of Maurice Blachot or Jean Genet that Sade's prodigous writing was literally jerk-off material. The cross of quaintness with savagery -- well, Sadism -- is a nimble perversion of both.