As the 30-40-something audience filed out, they were verbalizing their intense hatred for the film and the fact that they felt it to be the most boring and hateful film ever made. The film runs 159 minutes – not a marathon by any stretch – but the audience squirmed through it with all the patient composure of a dental appointment. I have never seen a movie so bitterly resented by an audience.

In the long run, I think because Kubrick’s film (the Blow-Up of the ‘90s), devoid as it is of shit and fart jokes, explosions and silicone tits, simply doesn’t indulge an audience with their minds wide shut. Yet, it made me feel positively atavistic about my love of long films. If an audience can’t handle Eyes, how can I recommend the really long films I like, films like Jacques Rivette’s incredible Celine and Julie Go Boating, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (the best film ever made about the ‘70s and a film that would give a ‘90s audience a nervous breakdown), Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig or Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (I better not even mention how much I loved Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-1/2 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz.)

Feeling guilty, I decided to go short, with some of the best short films I could get my hands on. My criterion for "short" was any film under an hour; luckily, there are a lot of wonderful short films available on video.

"To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere’s invention, French television producers gave 40 of the world’s best filmmakers – or at least those brave enough to take the challenge – the chance to use the Lumiere’s Cinematographe and produce a short film with the following rules: no synchronous sound, only 52 seconds of film can be used, and only three takes could be made...."

"Although director Jean Vigo only completed four films when he died in 1934 at the age of 29, his films have had an enormous impact on generations of filmmakers who have tried to combine the disparate elements of stark reality and surreal fantasy as seamless as Vigo...."

"La Jetée was conceived, photographed and directed by Chris Marker, a French documentary filmmaker who had worked with Alain Resnais, and whose work is distinguished by a personal essay style in remarkable films such as Letter From Siberia and Sans Soleil. La Jetée is unique in Marker’s filmography in that it is his only fiction film..."

"The most famous 20 minutes of the avant garde and just maybe the most notorious short film in the history of cinema. It’s first scene is certainly the most shocking and disturbing ever filmed – I have seen people recoil in sheer terror from it – but such was the initial plan of the films’ architects, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Surrealism had its arrows aimed squarely at the middle class it saw as poisoning society..."

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