Jean Vigo’s first fiction film—an anarchic, disorienting vision of life in a French boarding school—was banned for anti-French sentiment and reissued in 1945 after the liberation. Drawn from Vigo’s own childhood experiences, the film focuses on four schoolboys who, fed up by the petty restrictions imposed on them, organize a revolt. One of the great subversive works of the cinema, it is an eloquent parable of freedom versus authority.

The final collaboration between Buñuel and artist Salvador Dali, this remarkable work was banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink-bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown. A Surrealist exposé of the social institutions that stifle human passion, the film features Gaston Modot as a sort of Surrealist "everyman" who attempts to liberate himself from every morality: he kicks a dog, strikes a blind man, slaps the mother of his beloved, and flings a burning Christmas tree out a window. The film concludes with its most scandalous sequence, in which a group of depraved men—all of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to Jesus—emerge from the debauchery of The 120 Days of Sodom.