La jetée (The Jetty / The Pier)
Chris Marker 1962 France (1st time; DVD)
A post-WWIII prisoner, haunted by a woman's face from his childhood, is sent back in time as an adult to bring help to the present.
Quietly devastating short, a montage of still photographs narrated in a haunting voice-over, which cumulates to an emotional climax of lost youth; probably a film to see when one is young, this essay on memory as a mental image is a convincingly realised concept.

Sans soleil (Sunless)
Chris Marker 1982 France (1st time; DVD)
A woman narrates, and reminsces on, letters she received from a cameraman who travelled the world.
Primarily an account of Tokyo, with subtle diversions into the contrasts between the cultures of Japan and Africa, two extremes of humanity's survival, this is an original, subjective and personal take on the world as a kind of alienated planet to itself. As it develops from documentary to science-fiction fantasy, the narration becomes more abstract, more philosophical, and the images more beautiful and profound, evolving into a film similar to Herzog's Fata Morgana.

L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
Alain Resnais 1960 France/Italy 1st time; DVD
At a vast hotel of decorated corridors and anonymous mirrors, a man tries to convince a woman they've met a year previously…but did they, and was it Marienbad or Frederiksbad?
Another of those films strictly for cinema buffs; the director clearly loves the medium (which New Wave child didn't?) and here he presents the whole proceedings as a completely intrinsic, insular world, detached from any kind of external society or politics. The protagonist, the only character with any kind of life or awareness of his own existence, acts as a kind of self-reflexive justification for the narrative's convolution, which determines what we see and how it is edited. The entire thing floats by like a fever dream, preoccupied with its own form, its own convention, wherein character names matter little, and distinguishing time and space is futile.

Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World's Memory)
Alain Resnais 1956 France (1st time; DVD)
An account of the national museum in Paris, a library of text and resource.
Obsessive evocation of knowledge and history as the defining factors for a future truth, that of happiness; Resnais is clearly a fan of Welles.