The collection opens with Len Lye's modernist abstraction ‘Tusalava’, which, heavily influenced by Maori and Aboriginal art, shares an interest in ‘primitive’ cultures that was typical of the Modernist movement of the time. It was almost refused a certificate by the puzzled British Board of Censors who suspected that the dancing abstract shapes might be about sex. Lye's own explanation was that it showed the beginnings of organic life. ‘Crossing the Great Sagrada’, is a lowbrow spoof on travel find out more...

At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. But back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young girl who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena. She departs with her assistant to rehearse in Sils Maria; a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal is to take find out more...

A sexually voracious former child star moves into a sleazy Hollywood motel whilst searching for film work. The place is run by a lecherous proprietress and inhabited by various oddballs, all of whom have designs on our hero, Joe. Luckily for everybody he's none too fussy. Low budget Warhol romp. find out more...

Vincent Minelli directs this biopic that, unusually for Hollywood, doesn't subsume the subject's achievements in a fictionalised life-story, explaining one not in terms of the other, but fully celebrating both. Douglas is superb as the artist living on the edge. Not just for art aficionados.

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It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

The companion film to Flesh, but now the Dallesandro character has become a down and out junkie on New York's Lower East Side and, rather than his desirable virility, his impotence becomes the central subject of the film. Typical Warhol material. find out more...

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko, played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine, who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern post-war Ginza district. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. A profoundly moving masterpiece. find out more...