When people refer to Los Angeles, most of the time they refer to downtown L.A., a central urban area populated by skyscrapers. Los Angeles County, on the other hand, is the 4,083 square mile region in Southern California which incorporates 88 official cities and 76 unincorporated communities, making it one of the most diverse areas in the world.

Areas such as the San Fernando Valley, South Central, Hollywood, Malibu, and Pasadena all fall under the blanket of Los Angeles County. As disparate as all these communities may be, Angelinos share many commonalities: the complex and often overcrowded freeway system, smog, constant construction, dry desert weather, and a thriving car culture, to name a few.

Los Angeles is also home to Hollywood, one of the biggest filmmaking capitals in the world. People from all over the world flock to L.A. with the hopes of “making it” in the movie industry. However, not all films shot in L.A. truly depict what it’s like to live in L.A.

The following films not only take place in the city of dreams, but offer some sort of commentary or history about life within this expansive, crime filled, smog-ridden, movie making desert city by the beach.

1. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Billy Wilder’s classic film dramatically depicts the tragic lives of the artists Hollywood has rejected. Set in Hollywood, where the movie industry is of central concern for the characters, the film highlights the characters’ desire to work within a business that doesn’t have room for them.

A struggling screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), labors away at screenplays that aren’t selling. With rent on his studio apartment behind by three months and his car threatened of getting repossessed, he is desperately in need of a job. He stumbles into the driveway of an enormous dilapidated mansion on Sunset Boulevard, home to aging glamor queen of the 1920s, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), and her live-in servant Max (Erich von Stroheim).

Upon discovering Gillis is a writer, Norma takes him on as a ghost writer to her epic “come-back” film story idea. Gillis becomes prisoner to the lonely and delusional Norma, who cannot come to terms with her faded celebrity.

Both characters have been cast out of the Hollywood industry: Norma because of her age and her inability to keep up with the changes of modern Hollywood; Gillis because his story ideas don’t seem to adhere to the unstable demands of Hollywood’s production companies.

This film’s focus is Hollywood and ways in which artists are affected by the superficial and changeable nature of the movie business. Artists like Norma or Joe Gillis crumble in this place that values novelty and youth.

2. Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)

This innovative film is recognized as one of the first mainstream movies to depict teenage angst. Set in the Los Angeles suburbs, Ray’s sensitive story depicts three middle-class teenagers and their chaotic emotional turmoil.

A teenage misfit, Jim Stark (James Dean), is new to a suburban L.A. town. He is brought into the local police station for being drunk and disorderly while his parents are out at a party. Upset at his parents’ constant arguing as well as the feeling that his father is being emasculated by his mother, Jim has no one to connect with. He meets Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo), both also frustrated and upset at their unaffectionate and absent parents.

The three become confidants after a teenage punk is killed racing Jim to the edge of a bluff in a game of “chicken.” On the run from a group of punks who believe Jim snitched to the police, the three friends hide out in an abandoned mansion in the Hollywood hills.

Unlike many films made during the 50s, this film ventures out of the studio. We see authentic locations in Los Angeles. L.A.’s Griffith Observatory, overlooking the L.A. grid, is featured twice in the film as an important spot for the three friends.

The exteriors of the high school that Jim, Judy, and Plato attend is Santa Monica High School, the real life alumni of which include: Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, and Robert Downey, Jr. Interestingly, the abandoned mansion where the friends hide out is the Getty Mansion, a property once owned by oil-tycoon and art collector J. Paul Getty, and where Sunset Boulevard was also shot.

As well as featuring recognizable sites around L.A., the film also shows the suburban neighborhoods with white picket fences to illustrate the sunny veneer beneath which these teenagers are facing their emotional anguish.

3. The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

Kent Mackenzie’s film offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Native Americans living in the historic Bunker Hill district during the early 1960s. Shot with documentary-style realism, the film examines the everyday lives of Native American friends within the bustling city of downtown L.A.

The film follows a group of Native American friends, playing themselves, as they wander the streets of downtown Los Angeles one night, drinking and socializing. Mackenzie mixes unscripted voice-over interviews with improvised scenes of the friends hanging out at bars and dancing on “Hill X,” overlooking the city.

The Bunker Hill district in downtown L.A. was originally designed with Victorian style houses in the mid-19th century as a neighborhood for the well-to-do.

In the face of urban growth, wealthier residents began leaving, in lieu of the suburbs of Pasadena or the Westside. In post-war years, Bunker Hill became a slum area, housing people in poverty- like L.A.’s Native American and Latino population. Today the neighborhood is home to high-rises and cultural spaces, such as the MOCA, the Broad Art Museum, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

This film expertly mixes pseud-documentary social commentary with modern realist filmmaking, discussing the displacement of Native Americans from their indigenous lands, as well as addressing the ambitions of the poverty-stricken youth hoping for better lives for themselves in Los Angeles.

4. The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Altman’s version of the 1953 Raymond Chandler novel sets Philip Marlowe in 1970s Los Angeles. Although the story deviates from the book, the film provides a fantastic, somewhat comic re-interpretation of the hardboiled detective genre. Altman establishes the classic private investigator character in Los Angeles’ scenic, modern setting, updating and satirizing the genre at the same time.

Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is feeding his fussy cat when his old friend Terry Lennox (played by baseball player Jim Bouton) asks for a ride to Tijuana. Marlowe agrees. Upon his return, Marlowe is confronted by two police detectives asking about the whereabouts of Lennox, accused of murdering his wife, Sylvia Lennox.

Refusing to provide any information, Marlowe is jailed by the police for three days. He learns soon thereafter that Lennox apparently committed suicide in Mexico, which provide the police with a satisfactory completion of their case. They quickly free Marlowe. However, Marlowe is suspicious of this news and starts investigating, soon becoming entangled in a larger scheme.

This “neo-noir” crime film places a suited, chain-smoking 1950s-eque private investigator within the relaxed, hippie-filled L.A. of the 1970s.

Elements of the city’s modernity are everywhere: Marlowe’s apartment in the Hollywood hills is full of stoner, hippie neighbors; Marlowe is asked to search for Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden), alcoholic writer, whom he discovers at a private detox clinic (Detox clinic? Did someone say L.A.?); Marlowe’s catch phrase, “It’s okay with me,” typifying his relaxed yet sardonic attitude.

The classic detective genre is satirized by Altman’s film, which immerses the loyal Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles’ decadence of the 1970s.

5. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Polanski’s classic film, consistently ranked as one of the best films ever made, tells the story of private investigator, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who becomes caught in a whirlwind mystery of corruption and murder as he investigates the actions and then death of Hollis Mulwray, chief engineer for L.A.’s Department of Water and Power.

Gittes is approached by a woman who identifies herself as Mrs. Mulwray, who hires him to investigate her husband. A scandal breaks out when he takes photos of Mr. Mulwray in the arms of another woman.

The real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) confronts Gittes, explaining that he was tricked. Soon thereafter, Mr. Mulwray ends up dead by drowning in an apparent murder. Gittes quickly begins to uncover the sordid facts of Los Angeles’ stolen water supply, as well as the dirty details of Mrs. Mulwray’s personal life.

The film is based on true Los Angeles history in regards to the misconduct of Southern California’s water supply, led by civil engineer William Mulholland. In the early 1910-1920s, large amounts of water was diverted from the Owens Valley into Los Angeles in an effort to expand L.A.’s population. This caused a major drought and agricultural problem in the Owen’s Valley, resulting in a violent conflict between local famers and L.A. water officials.

A neo-noir, this film portrays Los Angeles as a dark place filled with shady dealings. It is a place where corruption thrives and informed people are virtually powerless to stop it.

6. The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)

Penelope Spheeris’ rockumentary documents the L.A. punk scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The film mixes concert footage from a variety of punk bands (such as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Fear) with interviews with the bands, club owners, record owners, and locals analyzing the punk scene.

This film is the first part of a trilogy of documentaries examining the emergence of various rock music coming from Los Angeles in the 1980s through 1990s. It acts as a time capsule of the budding hardcore punk scene in Los Angeles as it records the wild performers and audience members. During the time, hardcore punk did not receive much coverage in magazines or on the radio, perhaps due to its controversial, rebellious content.

This makes the film all the more valuable, since it captures the raw moments on stage and in the mosh pit, which were not widely seen in film before this time. It attempts to understand the nature of punk music and the punk lifestyle that manifested during this period in Southern California.

7. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

This neo-noir, set in 2019, captures a gritty, dystopian side of L.A. With this futuristic action thriller, Ridley Scott envisions what Los Angeles may become in the no-so-distant future.

The story occurs during a time when bioidentical artificial intelligence, called “replicants,” are being put to use on off-planet colonies. Replicants are banned from coming to Earth, but a handful have escaped and are hiding out in L.A.– possibly to contact their powerful manufacturer, the Tyrell Corporation, and attempt to extend their four year lifespan. Ex-police agent and “Blade Runner” Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is given the job to track down and “retire” the replicants.

The production design, lighting, and cinematography is highly stylized in this film, and all come together nicely to give Los Angeles a sleek, yet decaying feel. The L.A. skyline is crowded with neon signs, smoke stacks, and giant skyscrapers, making it feel as though the characters are living within an industrial wasteland.

There are remnants of the old fashioned, Art Deco-esque architecture authentic to Los Angeles, which in the film seems to be crumbling beneath the high tech expansion in this futuristic city. Smoke and shadows mysteriously engulf the characters in this world where human and robot are indistinguishable.

8. Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

This bizarre cult film uses the landscape of downtown Los Angeles as the framework of the film’s unusual story. One part sci-fi, one part action, one part dark comedy, Repo Man utilizes downtown L.A.’s concrete jungle as the backdrop to the film’s rough, delinquent characters.

Emilo Estevez plays Otto, a young punk feeling his way through the world, looking for sex, work, and purpose. He becomes involved with a kooky group of Repo men, led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who take Otto under their collective wing. Meanwhile, government agents seek a mysterious Chevy Malibu, apparently carrying radioactive alien material. The film erupts into chaotic absurdity when the repo agency confronts the government, a rival repo group, and the radioactive Malibu worth $20,000.

Robby Müller’s fantastic cinematography frequently makes use of long shots, placing the characters within the landscape of L.A. Barren concrete streets, telephone poles, highway bridges, and neon lights surround the characters at all times.

Müller shoots half of the film with the characters inside their stolen or repossessed cars, creating the appropriate atmosphere of L.A.’s vagabond car culture. Although the film’s story is eccentric and sometimes uneven, the depiction of Los Angeles’ raw 1980s punk scene feels no less authentic.

Youth is a pivotal point in one’s life. It’s when we start making our own decisions about ourselves and emerge into adulthood. As puberty takes over, our bodies mature, and our interest in sex begins to dominate. First sexual experiences usually occur, and with these experiences, a journey of self discovery.

The films in this list explore the diverse thoughts, feelings, complications, and awkwardness that accompany first sexual experiences in youth. Some of these films are controversial in their explorations and depict issues such as obsession, incest, and rape. Unfortunately, not all first times are enjoyable or romantic.

Regardless of the controversial aspects, these films share a certain truth behind first sexual encounters during youth, including themes of blossoming into adulthood, and realizing that sex is nothing to fool around with.

1. Summer with Monika (1953, Ingmar Bergman)

This early Bergman film depicts the tragic story of two teenage, starry-eyed lovers and their passionate, yet tormented relationship. Sensual and passionate, the film was controversal because of the nudity and bold depiction of youthful sexuality.

Nineteen-year-old Harry (Lars Ekborg) and seventeen-year-old Monika (Harriet Andersson) both work in stockrooms and meet one spring day in the local cafeteria. Enamored with one another, they start dating and expressing themselves physically. Monika comes from a poor, troubled family and frustrated with her drunken father, leaves home and rushes to Harry.

The two romantics decide to run away together. Harry steals his father’s boat and they leave their mundane city lives and responsibilities to spend the summer on a nearby island.

Their erotic summer is short-lived, however, once Monika realizes she’s pregnant and the two lovers struggle to sustain their lifestyle away from civilization. What starts as a fanciful summer of pleasure and adventure, erodes into a cold autumn in which the two must face up to reality and deal with the consequences of their actions.

2. Crazed Fruit (1956, Kō Nakahira)

This Japanese New Wave film explores one teenager’s first experiences with love and sex in the midst of pressure from his older brother and his raunchy friends. The story details the complications that arise when the boy’s brother falls for the same young woman.

Two teenage brothers, Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) and Natsuhisa (Yûjirô Ishihara), are on their way to their parents’ vacation home in a lovely Japanese beach town. As they reach the train station, Haru passes by a beautiful young woman, Eri (Mie Kitahara), and is immediately struck. He meets Eri again while sailing near the beach with his brother.

Again, his heart skips a beat. Haru discovers Eri lives nearby and begins to see her regularly. Haru becomes devoted to Eri, whose mysterious nature intrigues Natsuhisa. Natsuhisa begins to fall for Eri, pitting brother against brother.

Through the use of younger actors and a modern style, the film creates a realism that captures the essence of youthful desire and blind passion.

3. Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes)

Cassavetes’ gritty, modern, improvised film of two brothers and their younger sister captures New York’s jazz night life in the late 50’s, while exploring the issues of romance, sex, and racial relationships.

The African-American siblings– Hugh (Hugh Hurd), Ben (Ben Carruthers), and their 20 year old sister Lelia (Lelia Goldoni)– are all artists and live within the jazz and beatnick scene happening in New York City. Both brothers are jazz musicians: Hugh, a struggling singer who travels around the states with his mannager, and Ben, a trumpet player who goes out most nights with his two pals, on the prowl for women to spend the night with. Lelia is a writer, who hangs around literary circles seeking to meet similar intellectuals.

At one social gathering, Lelia falls for a handsome young buck, Tony (Anthony Ray). She follows him to his flat and loses her virginity to him. Aferwards, she feels lost, having had her romantic expectations shattered by the physcial discomfort and lack of intimacy between the two of them; “I never thought it would be so awful,” are Lelia’s first words following their intercourse. To make matters worse, when Tony meets Hugh, who is considerably darker in skin color than Lelia, he is noticably upset, spoiling his relationship with Lelia.

Cassavetes, the master of filmic improvisation, sheds light not only on the diversity amongst social circles and racial relations, but also on the uncertainties and fragile emotions of youth, particularly on the part of Lelia as well as Ben, who by the end of the film finds himself questioning his bachelor lifestyle.

4. Masculin Féminin (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard’s New Wave film for the “Coca-Cola generation” surveys sexuality and relationships among a group of young 20-somethings. Shot without a formal script and told in loose chapters, the film is truly an exploration of life in 1960s France amongst the youth.

The film mainly follows Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a young revolutionary, and his love affair with aspiring pop singer Madeleine (Chantal Goya). Using documentary style interviews of the actors, the film discusses issues of love, sex, and politics.

Using a cinéma vérité style, young actors, and realistic dialogue, the film captures an intimate, naturalistic overview of French youth during the political and sexual revolution of the 1960s.

5. The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)

Peter Bogdanovich’s first critically acclaimed film, The Last Picture Show illustrates the lives of a group of teenagers coming of age in a small Texas town during the early 1950s.

The film follows teenagers and best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) in their last year of high school in this deteriorating Texas town.

Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), a pretty young debutante is dating Duane, but has her sights set on Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette) and after a naked swimming party, decides to lose her virginity to Duane in order to win over Bobby, who doesn’t like having sex with virgins. Meanwhile, Sonny begins an affair with Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman), the morose middle-aged wife of his school’s coach.

The teenagers explore their budding sexuality while learning the nuances of relationships amidst this tiny, decaying town.

6. Murmur of the Heart (1971, Louis Malle)

Louis Malle’s 1971 film (which apparently is a somewhat autobiographical account of his youth) delineates the story of a fourteen year old boy from an upper middle class French family, experiencing sex for the first time under the wing of his older brothers and vivacious Italian mother.

Laurent (Benoît Ferreux) is the youngest of three teenage brothers. He is an obedient youngster, a dedicated student, and loving son to his caring mother, Clara (Lea Massari). His two rowdy brothers like to horseplay around the house as well as entertain young women. They eventually take Laurent to a brothel in order to devirginize him, which launches him on further sexual escapades while he’s at a health spa with his mother.

Malle instills this coming of age story with a tender, light-hearted tone amdist heavy issues that are dealt with in relation to sex, such as molestation and oedipal impulses.

7. U.S. Go Home (1994, Claire Denis)

This hour long film produced as a television movie tells the story of a French teenage girl in the mid-1950s on the mission to lose her virginity. With a dynamite rhythm and blues soundtrack and a realistic storytelling style–not to mention an appearance by the salty Vincent Gallo—the film stylishly portrays the desires and attitudes of youth.

Teenage siblings Martine (Alice Houri) and Alain (Grégoire Colin) live on the outskirts of Paris, near a U.S. Army Base. Desirous of sexual initiation, Martine and her best friend Marlène (Jessica Tharaud) go to a party with Alain in the hopes of getting laid.

Told with a straight-forward, naturalistic style with political undertones, U.S. Go Home captures the basic desires of youth: to experience sex and be treated as an adult.

8. Heavenly Creatures (1994, Peter Jackson)

After Peter Jackson’s “splatter phase” but before his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he directed Heavenly Creatures, a film which chronicles the obsessive relationship between two teenage New Zealand girls. Based on a true story about two young girls who were later convicted for murder, the film allows the viewer to see into the whimsical world the two create for themselves as a means to escape reality.

In a small 1950s New Zealand town, Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) meet at school. They become fast friends as they bond over their strong imaginations and shared feelings of isolation. Both being avid readers and writers, they create a minutely detailed fantasy world together. Their passionate bond begins to cause trouble for them as they withdraw into their private utopia under the disapproving eyes of their parents, particularly Pauline’s.

The characters’ sexual bond comes about through their childish fantasies. However, being that the story takes place in the early 1950s, homosexuality is not at all accepted, and Pauline’s parents begin to worry about her attachment to Juliet. The girls therefore take refuge in their dreams together, building an unhealthy intimacy which eventually turns destructive.

A landscape has the ability to shape us. It has the power to influence our behaviors, our emotions, and our memories. A place (the right place) can inspire awe. It can motivate its inhabitant to explore and get lost within it. It can also inspire a fear of the unknown and uncontrollable, reminding us that we are still at the mercy of the forces of nature.

The following films highlight the landscape as an influential aspect to the stories they tell and/or the characters within them. Whether the landscape is a character with which the other characters must interact (or fight against) or an inspiring force from which the characters draw their emotions or memories, these films use the land as a integral part of the stories they tell.

1. The Seventh Seal (1957, Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman’s existential masterpiece in which a disillusioned knight and his squire comes back from the Crusades to find the plague raging throughout Europe uses the landscape of the Swedish beaches and countryside as a telling backdrop for the characters and their dilemmas.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), weary from their travels abroad, stop and rest in a gloomy beach. Block is approached by a cloaked figure, the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot), who tells him that his time is up. Instead of resigning to his fate, Block challenges Death to a match of chess- as long as he’s in the game, he can live.

Block and Jöns travel through the lovely Swedish countryside en route to Block’s castle, meeting a colorful couple of actors, Jof (Nils Poppe), his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their infant son Mikael. The coming of the bubonic plague remains an imminent threat to their travels. The villages they stop in are ravaged by death- the villagers believing it is God’s punishment for their sins.

Faced with Death, Block questions his faith in God. He calls his time fighting in the Crusades a waste and searches for the knowledge (rather than faith) that supports a meaningful existence.

During the opening scene on the beach where Block first challenges Death to a chess match, the photography is dark; Block and Death are almost silhouettes against the great chasm of emptiness that is the ocean. The landscape in this scene mimics Block’s position in the film, “at the edge of life [facing] darkness.” Block reaches out in the darkness for God, but God is silent.

In contrast with the landscape surrounding Block’s stark inner turmoil, the land in which Jof, Mia, and their son Mikael inhabit is lush: the essence of spring and life blossoming. Within this landscape Jof has his own spiritual visions. However, instead of Death, he sees a bright scene of the Virgin Mary taking the infant Child for a walk. In Bergman’s film, the landscape reflects his characters’ spiritual conflicts or harmony.

2. Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais)

Alain Resnais’ visually luscious and complex film, Last Year in Marienbad uses the location of a château in the French country-side as the lynchpin of the relationship between two people who meet there on holiday. The labyrinthine castle through which the couple wander adds to the haunting, dream-like tone that casts a spell on the audience.

An unnamed man and woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) meet one night in a lavish castle/hotel, where the man asserts that the two of them met and had an affair one year prior. The woman, who is seemingly attached to another man in the hotel, denies the first man’s claims and appears to have no recollection of him.

Within the Rococo architecture, winding hallways full of mirrors, and perfectly geometric garden landscape, the man and woman explore the truth behind their history together. The landscape is a catalyst for their memories and/or fantasies. Through the use of bewildering fluctuations in time, Resnais leaves it ambiguous as to the true nature and history of their relationship, making for a surreal, hypnotic piece of art.

3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean)

In this acclaimed classic, the landscape of the Arabian desert serves both as an obstacle to be overcome as well as a magestic inspiration for the British-born T.E. Lawrence. In contrast with the small country of England, the vast Arabian desert stretches out to what seems like infinity for the adventurous young lieutenant.

It’s the First World War, and the nonconformist Lieutenant Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) is stationed in Cairo. Bored of the paperwork he is forced to do indoors, Lawrence gladly rises to the challenge of meeting with Arabic diplomat and British ally Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and helps lead an Arab uprising against the Turks.

Lawrence traverses the enormous, sweltering desert, overpowered by its majesty. His love of the desert begins as a lust for adventure and desire to explore the unknown. As he gets further into the desert, however, Lawrence sees the destructive reality of the land and is exposed to the violence of war.

Shot in the magnificent 70mm photography by cinematographer F.A. Young, with the masterful direction of David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia remains an astonishing cinematic masterpiece.

4. Knife in the Water (1962, Roman Polanski)

In Roman Polanski’s first feature length film, the majority of the action takes place on a sailboat in the middle of a lake. His tense drama is amplified by the claustrophobic nature of the boat and the emptiness of the surrounding body of water.

As a couple, Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), are on their way to a local lake to go sailing, they pick up a young man (Zygmunt Malanowicz) hitchhiking. Once they arrive to the lake, Andrezej invites the young man to come sailing with them. Aboard the boat, the tensions between the two men build, as the hitchhiker’s large pocketknife becomes significant.

The spacious emptiness of the surrounding lake further confines the three characters within their small sailboat. Polanski makes great use of the landscape to isolate the characters from society, highlighting their subtle tensions that eventually erupt.

5. Red Desert (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Antonioni’s atmospheric classic uses the industrial landscape of a factory-filled, polluted Italian city to illuminate the main character’s feelings of anxiety and alienation. Using color photography for the first time in his career, as well as an unnerving sound design built around almost imperceivable high pitched tonal screeches, Antonioni creates a toxic modern world in which his protagonist Giuliana suffers a nervous breakdown.

Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a chemical plant manager and mother of their young son, suffers from anxiety and nervousness, having recently returned from a mental hospital. Amidst the cold, noxious landscape of their industiral surroundings, she shares her inner turmoil with her husband’s co-worker, Corrado (Richard Harris).

The backdrop of the film is key in perpetuating Giuliana’s neuroses. The starkness of the drab factories, boats, and apartments mixed with the distressing sound design makes for a superbly unsettling tone. Antoinoni disturbs his audience with the city’s atmosphere, putting us within the tense world of Giuliana.

6. I Am Cuba (1964, Mikhail Kalatozov)

This Soviet film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov tells four short stories about the lives of Cuban people after the Cuban Revolution and the overthrowing of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The varied landscape of Cuba is presented with long, awe-inspiring tracking shots and wide-angle lenses that capture people within their environments.

Narrated by “the voice of Cuba,” these four stories capture the struggles and dilemmas of typical working class people of Cuba. Set within the fancy tourist attractions of downtown as well as the poor run-down neighborhoods and simple farms, the film displays for its audience a diverse assortment of areas in Cuba, representative of the unfair working conditions, rampant corruption, and unbalanced wealth distribution.

Using the gorgeous cinematography of Sergey Urusevsky, I Am Cuba illustrates the hardworking people of Cuba within the full spectrum of their environment, whether that be the fun, modern city of Havana, the beautiful sunkissed countryside, or the impoverished slums and guerilla warfare.

7. Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)

This Japanese historical drama/horror depicts the barbaric life of two women during a civil war in Japan during the 14th Century. The tall reeds surrounding their hut add an atmospheric element of mystery and foreboding.

During a Medieval Japanese civil war, an older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) kill soldiers and sell their belongings for food as they await the return of the older woman’s son. Hachi (Kei Satō), a neighbor and friend, returns one night and informs them the son was killed by a group of farmers. The younger woman (and now widow), begins an affair with Hachi, to the disapproval of her mother-in-law.

In this film, the landscape heightens the haunting aura surrounding the women. The towering reeds allow them to hide and hunt the solidiers they intend to kill. After killing the men, the women throw their bodies into giant holes dug into the ground. The land therefore, is full of skeletons, which makes the threat of a demon later on in the film seem appropriate within this mass graveyard. The gentle and steady swaying of the reeds amplifies the suspenseful moments.

8. Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

This existential psychological drama of the Japanese New Wave traps its protagonist within the unsteady sand dunes in a remote Japanese village. The sand inundates the inhabitants of a tiny hut at the foot of a dune, forcing their day to day existence to revolve around shoveling sand.

An unnamed schoolteacher and amateur insect collector (Eiji Okada) is vacationing at the beach, searching for a rare species of beetle. After he misses his bus back to Toyko, the local villagers invite him to stay with a young widow (Kyōko Kishida) who lives at the bottom of a sand dune. Because sand from the dune continually seeps down toward the widow’s hut, she spends her nights shoveling sand, which the villagers then collect to sell to construction companies.

The next morning, the villagers refuse to drop the ladder down the sand dune and inform the schoolteacher that he must stay and help the widow with her shoveling duties. Deprived of his only exit, the man desperately tries to escape through all possible means, meanwhile becoming lovers with the widow.

Evoking the myth of Sisyphus, the characters’ eternal battle with the sand keeps them immobile, forever struggling for mere survival. With Toru Takemitsu’s unnerving, minimalist score, Teshigahara masterfully directs Kōbō Abe’s story, creating an earthy, yet philosophical tale in which the landscape acts as a metaphor for existence.

Psychedelia in film is characterized by distortion (both in image and in sound), experimentation in narrative and editing, and sometimes drug-inspired hallucinations. Like the psychoactive drugs which produce heightened sensory perceptions and distortion, psychedelic films present to their audience an unfamiliar and/or dream-like view of reality.

The following films use cinematography, narration, editing, sound design, and music to create worlds of distortion. Whether the film is depicting drug-induced madness or creating an atomsphere of existential confusion, these films somehow experiment with the audience’s sensory perceptions in order to uproot the viewer from reality. These films welcome (or in some cases, force) the audience to interact with a plethora of psychedelic imagery, sounds, and/or narration.

1. Un Chien Andalou (1929) dir. Luis Buñuel

Even though Buñuel’s classic surrealist short film precurses psychedelia, the distorted narrative and dream-like imagery give it a psychedelic presence that influenced many films later on. His film is a perfect example of surrealism, a style of art which utilizes symbolism and the irrationality of the unconcious mind.

Un Chien Andalou was Buñuel’s first film, and was written in conjunction with Salvador Dalí, the prominent surrealist painter. The film opens with a barber slicing open a woman’s eye, as if to suggest to the viewer to symbolically throw off preconcieved notions and to see with new eyes.

The 20 minutes that follow are set to fragments of Wagner’s “Liebestod,” a dramatic piece of opera from Tristan und Isolde, that never quite comes to climax, making the film even more unnerving. Buñuel confuses his viewer by jumping back and forth in time with subtitles that proclaim “Eight years later” or “Sixteen years ago.”

There is no overt plot, but rather an amalgam of surrealistic images. We are presented with distorted religious symbology, such as ants crawling out from a stigmatic hand of the protagonist (a young unnamed man played by Pierre Batcheff), and dream-like scenarios- for instance, the young man dragging a piano topped with a dead donkey carcass and two priests in his pursuit of a young woman (Simone Mareuil).

Such images, surrealistic in nature, create a distorted sense of reality, a quality found in many psychedelic films.

2. The Red Shoes (1948) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic film The Red Shoes incorporates Expressionistic sets and costumes, subjective point of view shots, and passionate performances to tell the story of a young woman, dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), torn between her love for a young man and her love of dance.

The dance sequence performed toward the end of the film captivates the viewer with its mesmerizing, painted landscapes and POV shots which sublty bring Victoria’s subconcious thoughts and fears to the forefront.

Victoria “Vicky” Page is a young talented ballet dancer, eager to join a company. She meets the fierce Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), director of a renown ballet company. After realizing her talent in a small production of Swan Lake, Lermontov casts Vicky in his ballet of The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of a young woman whose red shoes possess her to dance to death.

Vicky then meets the young composer of the ballet, Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and the two fall in love, to the distress of Lermontov. Vicky is soon caught between the two men, forced to choose between the love of her life and her passion for her art.

Powell and Pressburger’s glorious Technicolor illuminates the passions of the film’s characters. The Oscar-winning sets provide an hallucinatory backdrop to the exceptional dance sequence, which brings Vicky’s fiery and tormented emotions to the limelight. The subtle POV shots during this sequence add to the psychological drama, and bring the viewer even further into Vicky’s mind.

A precursor of psychedelic filmmaking, The Red Shoes fuses hallucinatory elements into a mainstream film, which makes it a classic that continues to inspire modern filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma.

3. Daisies (1966) dir. Věra Chytilová

Made during the Czech New Wave film movement by Czechoslovakia’s first female film director, Daisies is a revolutionary experimental film. Without following any real plot, the film is led by two impish young women as they whip up fun for themselves (and cause trouble in the process).

Věra Chytilová turns social mores on their head, as her two heroines, both named Marie (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) frolic through the film without a care. The two Maries laze around in bikinis and lingerie, create drunken mayhem at a nightclub, and destroy a fancy banquet, among other subversive acts.

The film explores different film stocks, spontaneous eruptions into collage, and otherwise consistently plays with the medium of film itself, creating a highly self aware piece of art. Banned upon release, the film depicts a destructive playfulness that Czech authorities apparently found dangerous. There is a political undertone to the film with World War II film stock intercut amongst the characters’ antics. Daisies stirs up the audience with its Puckish protagonists and psychedelic imagry and editing.

4. Point Blank (1967) dir. John Boorman

John Boorman’s neo-noir thriller, Point Blank is an hypnotic film of a man’s thirst for revenge. The pacing, color choices, and atmospheric music, led by Lee Marvin’s deadpan portrayal of Walker, yields a mesmerizing experience for the viewer.

Shot and left for dead on Alcatraz Island, Walker returns to San Francisco to take revenge and claim his half of a crime he helped commit. With the help of the mysterious Yost (Keenan Wynn), Walker sets off on his journey for retribution.

Along the way, he finds that the man who wronged him, Reese (John Vernon) not only stole his money and left him on Alcatraz, but he stole his wife Lynn (Sharon Acker), who is now a depressive, emotionless wreck living in guilt for double crossing Walker. After Lynn overdoses on sleeping , Walker finds Lynn’s sister Chris (Angie Dickinson) who helps him get closer to Reese.

The film’s pacing, which goes from a slow and moody atmosphere to periods of intense violence and action creates a lulling hypnosis which the viewer is then startled from. Color plays a role in the atmospheric tone of the film- for example, Lynn’s silver grey apartment reflects her drab unfeeling character, riddled with guilt.

Walker’s suits change color based on his location, giving him a mysterious chameleon-like quality. The story ends where it begins, on Alcatraz Island, leaving the film ambiguous as to whether the events that occur are a dream, reality, or if Walker is in fact a ghost.

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) dir. Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece is an awe-inspiring, brilliant piece of art. The film’s stunning visuals combined with the grandeur of the classical music scores and György Ligeti’s haunting, dissonant avant garde music produces a filmic experience like no other. Kubrick’s exploration of the history and future of humankind excites the viewer’s senses as it leads us to confront the great unknown of space and time.

The film opens with the dawn of man as we witness the first protohumans utilizing tools for the first time in history. Through a graphic match cut, the prehuman tool becomes a spacecraft and we are transported to the future as humans have evolved and are now masters of their tools. The space craft is on a mission to investigate a mysterious object recently uncovered on a lunar crater.

A giant black monolith, also discovered on Earth by the protohumans earlier in the film, looms in this crater. We are to rediscover this black monolith again in the film. Next, we are on the Discovery One, a spaceship headed for Jupiter. Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea), Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and three other astronauts, in a state of cyrogenic slumber, are on a secret mission guided by the ship’s talking computer, HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain).

At this point, man loses control of his tools, as the computer’s intelligence superceeds that of the astronauts. Pitted against HAL, Bowman manages to take control of the ship and continues on the mission alone, traversing the wild unknown.

The film’s Beyond the Infinite sequence with its streaks of light in space and Ligeti’s dissonant chorus produce an intensely psychedelic experience. 2001’s enigmatic ending leaves the viewer spellbound and speechless. Kubrick exquisitely captures man’s existential journey into uncharted territory.

6. Easy Rider (1969) dir. Dennis Hopper

One of the America’s first counterculture films, Easy Rider captures the lifestyle of the hippie movement and how it interacts with the mainstream. Director Dennis Hopper and producer Peter Fonda also star in this pop culture hit as two hippie motorcyclists traveling through the American Southwest into the deep South. The film is not only historic in its depiction of the counterculture, but also in its realistic drug scenes (the actors actually injested the drugs their characters are shown using).

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) sell cocaine to a dealer and use their earnings to fund their roadtrip to New Orleans for the upcoming Mardi Gras celebration. Along the way, the two pick up a hitchhiker who lead them to a commune, filled with young hippies practicing free love and shared living.

Continuing on their journey, the two are arrested in a local town for “parading without a permit.” There, Wyatt and Billy meet George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), a drunkard lawyer in jail. George helps them out of jail and the three of them resume their pilgramage to Mardi Gras. The three are confronted with the ignorant, “square” communities in the South, who see the trio’s presence as a threat.

The film does an amazing job capturing the sociopolitical climate of the time. We see firsthand how feared the hippies were to mainstream culture, and how the counterculture was driven by a yearning for freedom. The scenes depicting drug use, especially the cemetary sequence in which Wyatt and Billy drop acid with two prostitutes, Karen (Karen Black) and Mary (Toni Basil), give the film an intense and disorienting component.

The unscripted LSD scene involves jump cuts, displaced, fear-filled and remorseful dialogue, and a mix of distorted imagery, such as the use of a fish-eye lense and close-ups of the sun. The psychedelic scenes mixed with the documentary style realism gives the film a palpable sense of the time.

7. Zabriskie Point (1970) dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

One part documentary-like realism, one part fanciful psychedelic desert trip, Antonioni’s American film offers its audience various aspects of life during the height of the counterculture. Although not critically well received, Antonioni’s cult classic remains a milestone of psychedelic filmmaking with its beautiful desert landscapes, hypnotic fantasy sequences, and a tailor made soundtrack from artists such as The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.

The plot is pieced around two young adults, Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin), who meet in Death Valley. The film opens at a students’ protest meeting, where Mark is in attendance, with the overarching question of what makes a revolutionary. We follow Mark as he watches his friends in this group get tear-gassed, beaten, and one student shot by the police in a protest.

A police officer is shot and Mark is their suspect after he runs from the scene. He steals a small plane at a local airport and flies to the desert. Meanwhile, Daria is driving through a ghost town on her way to Pheonix to meet her corporate boss (and perhaps also her lover), Lee (Rod Taylor). Mark spots Daria’s car in the sky and flies down to meet her. The two cavort through the desert together before facing the dim realities that lie before them in civilization.

Antonioni’s film captures the recklessness of youth in this film that explores revolution and America’s counterculture. The dream-like scenes (including a sensual desert love scene that erupts into an orgy of sand covered bodies) transport this film from realism into earthy psychedelia.

8. The Devils (1971) dir. Ken Russell

Ken Russell’s controversial 1971 film incorporates sexually explicit hallucinatory sequences into this story based on the supposed demonic possessions in that took place in 17th Century Loudon, France.

An order of Ursuline nuns begin to exhibit wild, uncontrolled behavior thought to be led by Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a proud priest, who has recently gained political control of Loudon. Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the sexually repressed hunchback Mother Superior of the convent becomes infatuated with Grandier, and her striking sexual fantasies haunt her guilty conscious.

Once word of Grandier’s secret marriage to another woman reaches Jeanne, she collapses into fits of hysteria and claims to have been possessed by the Devil through Grandier. Other nuns in the convent also claim to be possessed and the convent explodes into a frenzy of sexual outbursts and bizarre public exorcisms.

Russell boldly depicts the effects of sexual oppression mixed with religious mania. The censored scenes of the “demonic possessions” include a psychedelic orgy of naked nuns “raping” a statue of Christ and Sister Jeanne masturbating with a human bone. The uncut version of The Devils is a mind blowing, audacious exploration of ecstasy (both religious and sexual).