Un Salon Des Refusés: 10 Films Difficult to Pick Up

"The films listed below—in anti-chronological order, the natural direction of memory—all belong to what, in the nineteenth century, the French termed a salon des refusés. What they have in common is that they have all been refused—by the public, by critics, in one instance by the director himself. Deemed irrelevant, embarrassing, ideologically suspect, unworthy of their creators, they have all been mercilessly expunged from the history of the cinema. There is, however, something else which they have in common. Jean Cocteau writes somewhere of having chanced to notice, in the pages of a mail-order catalogue, a peculiarly shaped item which was categorized only and tantalizingly as 'an object difficult to pick up.' Each of these films is just such an object."
—Gilbert Adair, in *10 Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists* (2007), edited by Richard T. Kelly