The Telephone Book

Nelson Lyon's 1971 American film follows a young woman who decides to find the man behind an obscene phone call she received. Alice works through every name in the New York directory and meets figures who grow steadily stranger along the way. The film comes out of the New York underground scene of the seventies; performers from the Warhol circle and the sexual revolution rhetoric of the period are inside it. The black and white photography turns into animation at the end, the film's most cited passage. The humour is crude and deliberately uncomfortable. The story is scattered and parts of it have dated. Who it's for: viewers interested in American underground cinema and cult productions of the seventies. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding sexual content, or wanting an orderly story.