Employing techniques of early French impressionistic style, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet is often viewed as an early feminist film. Romantic Madame Beudet is married to a dull, insensitive oaf. She dreams of taking lovers and of killing the husband off, but her plans to do him in are ironically twisted in the end.

Dancer, ethnographer, philosopher, and “visual poet” Maya Deren began making films in the early 1940s—psychodramas in which the filmmaker navigates a path through anxiety-laden psychodramas. In her first and most famous work, a woman (Deren) dreams within dreams about suicide and about inanimate objects that assume threatening aspects.

This early, experimental work by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, Golden Eighties) is a complex portrait of a New York City welfare hotel that melds structured, minimalist views with the intimacy of silent poetry. Photographed by cinematographer Babette Mangolte, the film explores empty passageways with a detached gaze, hinting at the lives of the off-screen inhabitants.