So this was on the new S&S great movies list at #16, and I’d never even heard of it, so it was maybe the most surprising new movie to me. Turns out it’s a short film of only 15 minutes, which made watching it a no-brainer.

It’s a surrealist film, so don’t come here if you’re looking for a straightforward narrative. But this isn’t pure imagery, and even if scenes aren’t totally literal, they do add up into a character portrait of a woman disintegrating, which seems much more modern than 1940 (although I guess Charlotte Perkins Gilman is from the 19th century, so okay).

But while it’s not just imagery, there is some great imagery here. There are recurring items (a phone, a knife, a key, a flower, a mirror), there are actions that recur and double up on themselves in a time loop style, there’s a disorienting stairway, there’s great use of shadow, there’s double-exposure special effects that I didn’t know you could do without a green screen. It’s reminiscent of Un Chien Andalou if Buñuel weren’t such an edgelord. Or maybe a better comparison is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil in some ways.

This appearing on the 2022 list out of nowhere is going to be griped about by some as yet more political correctness (or I guess “wokeism” is now the sneer of choice), given that it has a female director in Maya Deren. But this was made in 1943, and it’s mind-blowing by 1943 standards — to me, the question isn’t why it made the list now, it’s why it never made the list before now. The critics that put it on the list in 2022 have it right, and the critics who neglected it in the past are the ones who should be questioned.