Scattered said:
Enjoy prententious movies:
Wages of Fear, I Stand Alone (another horribly brutal movie), Eyes without a Face, Ikiru, Solaris (NOT the remake), Dogville, Tetsuo the Iron Man, 3 Iron, The Beautiful Country, Last Life in the Universe, Spring Summer Winter Fall Spring
Other great pretentious movies...
Aguirre the Wrath of God - Simply the best.
Signs of Life (Not pretentious in the classical sense but also directed by Herzog. If you want a great film about spontaneous madness, get this...if you live in one of the few cities outside of Germany that carries it in a video store). This film i would simply describe as achingly beautiful if you like wallowing in torment and pain vicariously.
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise - Zany, wacky, profound...oh, and a tad pretentious.
A lot of Kryztof Kieslowski's films. The Ten Commandments set that he did...and Blue/White/Red...with the exception of a very few...great, great filmmaking.
The Seventh Sign (Probably the most pretentious of pretentious outside of Jean Cocteau and Jean Luc Godard (with the exception of Breathless, which was awesome, if for no other reason than Jean Seaburg walks around looking droolingly sexy)). Anyway, if there's something more pretentious than the protagonist playing chess with death, i don't know what it is. But still, a great movie in spite of it's "high art" schtick.
Any of the Dogma '95 films or whatever that little clique is that Lars Von Trier belongs to. Great movies...but yes, a little on the pretentious side.
Sleuth. The only english film in here...and it isn't so much pretentious as it is high brow. Michael Caine and Lawrence Olivier are the only two in the whole movie and most of the action takes place in one house, where the two play mind games against each other. You simply have to rent this.
Naked. Okay. The second english language film. But it had to be mentioned. More powerful before the turn of the millenium, but worth a watch nonetheless.
If you happen to be a masochist and are looking for strictly pretentious with flirtations of awful, may i suggest anything by either Michaelangelo Antonioni, Frederico Fellini or Peter Greenaway...and may i also suggest you bring a pillow. You'll thank me later.
s.