"When, in the 1970s, I began to search for films made by women that would reflect feminist engagement with cinema at the time, Jeanne Dielman appeared as the perfect answer to a feminist cinephile’s dream. Akerman conjured up a world and a rhythm of life that had never appeared on the screen before, and did so with an extraordinary and radical beauty, political intelligence and mastery of both storytelling and filmmaking."

"This still feels like one of the most radical books I’ve ever read. It’s considered to be the first existential novel. It’s the memoir of a nameless retired civil servant in Saint Petersburg who’s staging a protest against rational thought and says things like “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.”"

"Chaplin’s great satire on the American fantasy of infinite progress. For a movie about the plight of the dispossessed, it is overflowing with hilarity. Perhaps my favorite visual gag in any movie: a flag falls off the back of a passing truck. Chaplin picks it up and waves it exuberantly at the driver—just as a mob of protest marchers come up the street behind him, causing the police to mistake the Little Tramp for a radical leader."

"Brenda Chamberlain’s A Rope of Vines. I used to follow her ghost around. She was a writer and painter from Bangor in Wales. I’ve lived in some of her former homes and grew up in the village where she ran a radical printing press in the 1930s. This book is about her time living in Greece and has a particularly disturbing opening paragraph that sets the troubled tone for the rest of her book, and her life for that matter."

"I love this movie and its revisionist style and its radical politics, but most importantly there is no more punk-rock move in cinema history than having the opening credits be the checks that you’re writing to the cast and crew. Godard—the rich-kid film nerd to end all rich-kid film nerds—gets the machinations of the motion picture “industry” better than any of us. Contempt is masterful, Weekend is a lark, Tout va bien burns everything to the ground."

"Uh . . . 1946. How is this movie possible? All the steam, the fades, the technical effects that would be passé today were then revolutionary. And that is exactly what Cocteau was. Revolutionary. All the little smart creations: chandeliers held by arms through walls, the mirror’s powers, the pearls magnetically drawn to the hand, their flying at the end. Nineteen forty-six! Loving this film is probably a radical statement of sexual identity. I know that. Whatever. Nineteen forty-six. Yes, that is correct."

"Frank Zappa's glorious Straight label gave us Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the GTO's and this absurdly eclectic 1969 album by sardonic folk-blues-comedy-rock-cabaret belter Judy Henske and hubby Jerry Yester of the New Christy Minstrels and the Modern Folk Quartet. No two tracks sound like the same band (or even singer), thanks to Henske's radical versatility and Yester playing ten different instruments; but unlike the Turtles' equally perversely wide-ranging The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands, no track sounds much like anyone else either. "

"This book isn’t strictly just a book – it’s a play that became a political movement that became a world-wide phenomenon. Just say the title The Vagina Monologues and, even now, twenty years after Eve Ensler first performed her ground-breaking show, the words feel radical…I’m so interested to see which monologues we all like best, and which ones still shock us. Has the world moved on in twenty years, or are there still aspects of women’s sexuality we can’t talk about, through our own fears or because others try to stop us? Do we think art can change the world?"