I've chosen two films that I feel are unjustly neglected – they're both early films by directors who went on to fame, both feature ghostly landscapes ruined by apocalyptic flooding, and both are heavily stylised, slow exercises in imagination and visual aesthetic but don't suffer losses in terms of plot and narrative. Yet the films come from very different places in every sense, and have very different feels, perspectives and concerns.

The Element of Crime (1984) was the first feature film by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, now one of the most prominent and established figures in European cinema. Von Trier is famous now for his ascetic, morally complex and satirical films such as Breaking the Waves, the Idiots, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, but his less well-known early films were a very different story. Every frame of The Element of Crime oozes maximalism, from the astonishing three-dimensional panning shots through scenes of bizarre, intricately detailed post-apocalyptic anarchy to the well-lit beads of sweat on our hero's forehead. Essentially a postmodern film noir, it tells the story of Fisher, a retired policeman who goes in search of a serial killer using the method invented by his elderly and deranged mentor, Osborne, which requires him to retrace the killer's steps and enter his mindset. Long before Sin City and the ubiquitous tinting of modern Hollywood fantasies, the film very compellingly employs a palette of almost exclusively amber hues, adding to the claustrophobic, dream-like atmosphere and resulting in what must be one of the best-looking films ever made in Europe – but the story alone will have you gripped from start to finish.

Angel's Egg (Tenshi no Tamago - 1985) is an early effort by the Japanese anime director Mamoru Oshii, who became famous in 1995 for bringing a new level of artistry to the anime medium with Ghost in the Shell. OK, yes, Angel's Egg is an anime film – so many film fans remain sceptical about anime, either because "it's cartoons" or more understandably because of the perceived clichés: giant robots, teenage superheroes who duel constantly and talk too loudly, cheesy music, unlikely hair colours and space-based pornography. All of those things are out there in abundance, but anime is a rich collection of many different genres and operates on all kinds of levels between high and very low art, and none of those clichés appear in Angel's Egg (alright, maybe the unlikely hair colours. But they're fun). Oshii's admitted stylistic influence from Eastern European directors of the mid 20th-century is apparent in this slow, deliberate film with very little dialogue. Visually and imaginatively however, the film is startling, and this is the work of Oshii's collaborator, the artist Yoshitaka Amano, whose eerie, surreal watercolour visions have earned him employment in many areas of manga and anime, including the Final Fantasy games. The film, which has an excellent orchestral score, is to be experienced primarily as a feast for the eyes, ears and imagination, but far from being an aesthetic slide-show, the story, about a pale young girl with a large egg wandering an abandoned gothic city and the arrival of a mysterious warrior, though simple, is coherent enough to always engage the curiosity without surrendering to abstraction, and supplies an interesting finishing twist.

These two rare films are firm favourites of mine, and I urge you to come and see how great they look when projected onto a big screen! Hope to see you there!

Adam Harper (Magdalen FilmSoc Committee)