Věra Chytilová’s classic of surrealist cinema is the most adventurous and anarchic Czech film of the 1960s. Two young women, both named Marie, revolt against a degenerate, decayed and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. A riotous, punk-poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative.

Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Buñuel’s surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of non sequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Buñuel throughout his career – from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.

Buñuel’s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’ 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings.

"Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it." The Liberated Film Club continues its monthly fixture, featuring a special guest introducing an unknown short and feature. We're thrilled to welcome Chinese-British novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo as our special guest for this second instalment.

Věra Chytilová’s classic of surrealist cinema is the most adventurous and anarchic Czech film of the 1960s. Two young women, both named Marie, revolt against a degenerate, decayed and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. A riotous, punk-poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative.

Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honoured his ambition to crash through the surface of ordinary life and find a larger spiritual meaning: to heal modern art's secular fragmentation by infusing it with metaphysical dimension. Coinciding with our season on the Russian auteur's close friend, Sergei Parajanov.