Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Vanishing Self

A run of 1960s–70s modernist art cinema where identity comes undone — people simply vanish, faces are remade, memory bleeds into hostile landscape — that rewards being watched in a stretch, each film deepening the last's dread.

This is deep film-school and Criterion canon, not crowd favorites: slow, hypnotic, and demanding, several of them genuinely unsettling — save them for an attentive, unhurried night rather than casual company.

  • Woman in the Dunes (1964)
  • Pitfall (1962)
  • The Face of Another (1966)
  • L'Avventura (1960)
  • Hour of the Wolf (1968)
  • The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)
  • Solaris (1972)
  • Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
  • Black Girl (1966)
  • La Jetée (1962) — The Left Bank companion to Hiroshima Mon Amour you never got to — Marker's ruined-Paris photo-film where a man is undone by a single remembered image, memory bleeding across time exactly as this thread promises.
  • The Man Who Sleeps (1974) — If the withdrawal in L'Avventura and the dread of Woman in the Dunes landed, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down — a Paris student who simply refuses the world and dissolves into second-person voice, the vanishing self at its most literal.
  • The Saragossa Manuscript (1966) — The overlooked Wojciech Has labyrinth that rhymes with his Hourglass Sanatorium already in this run — a hypnotic nest of stories-within-stories where selves and centuries fold into each other, demanding the same unhurried night.
  • Night and Fog (1956) — The half-hour Resnais that seeds Hiroshima Mon Amour's whole method — calm tracking shots over emptied camps where memory bleeds into hostile landscape and the vanished are everywhere and nowhere; devastating, and the one to steel yourself for.
  • The Stranger (2025) — If L'Avventura and Hiroshima Mon Amour landed, this is the recent film to pull down next — Ozon's chilly, monochrome Camus gives you Meursault as a self already vanished, drifting affectless through sun, murder, and a hostile Algerian glare, the same modernist estrangement from one's own identity these films circle.