As I write, I’m listening to a new edition of the Robert Fripp and Brian Eno album No Pussyfooting, a landmark ambient music recording. The version of The Heavenly Music Corporation currently playing is at half speed — which means it’s taking twice as long to unfold as this improvised piece for guitar, tape decks, and effects took to create in the first place, back in September 1972.

Why the half speed version? Well, this is music that merits attention, the layers of sound accreting like smears of colour in a Rothko painting. And it’s not like it belongs to the blues or any other kind of tradition where its slower pace marks it out as different: this was and is music that owes nothing to the musical mainstream, as different from the music that came before it as it is from the ambient music that followed in its wake, much of which seems airbrushed by comparison.

I don’t have the patience for experimental film that I have with music. But I appreciate it when a filmmaker stretches what’s done with the toolkit they have in order to create a different mood — at least if it’s in the service of narrative, which is what fundamentally keeps me watching a screen.

Case in point: Coppola’s The Conversation. An amazing film, even the thought of which haunts me. Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert asked to record a conversation between two people. He puts incredible and ingenious effort into doing so as the two talk in a park. And spends the film trying to decipher the noises he’s recorded and turn them into recognisable speech. The longer he spends doing so, the more the rest of his life falls apart. His obsession destroys him, until he’s left at the end of the film in the ruins of his apartment. It’s the film’s sound design that holds it together, a semi-abstract soundscape that like Fripp & Eno’s work rewards the attention its given, capturing Hackman’s disintegration with heartbreaking precision.

Then there’s Mishima. A few people walked out of this fascinating film when I saw it as a student. Co-written and directed by Paul Schrader, it tells the story of the Japanese writer and political figure of the title. It does so episodically, with each chapter becoming more abstracted from cinematic rules for reality, and entering the space of the stories its protagonist writes. I’m not sure it’s a film I like, but I certainly appreciated what it was aiming to do, and enjoyed the Philip Glass score. Now, all these years later, it’s a film I want to see again.

Then we come onto a rarity. At any rate, I know only two other people who’ve seen it, and that’s because I was with them when we watched it together. Encounter at Ravensgate is a bizarre Australian film concerning UFOs and other Forteana that left the three of us dazed when we left at the end, unable to speak for a good twenty minutes. I couldn’t tell you for sure what made it so potent, and the one scene I remember is when a UFO zoomed over two cars that were in a chase, and swapped the music that was playing in the respective vehicles. Simple, but brilliantly effective.

There are so many films to talk about at this point. David Lynch’s work I generally like, though his seeming lack of interest in story has lost me as a committed viewer. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant manages to be both literal and poetic as it renders the day a school shooting takes place with eerie mundanity. Lynne Ramsay conjures beauty from the overlooked in Ratcatcher, and integrates music and image together beautifully with a corkscrewing story in Morvern Callar.

Much of the time in these pieces I concentrate on narrative. But that’s only one aspect of a film, and by playing with all the other parts in new ways, you can create something as unique and unexpected as the films that have surprised and delighted you. How you get to the places these films have reached is by thinking about image and texture and sound and tempo, and what it would be like to combine those elements in ways that you’ve not come across before and speak to the heart of your story.