There’s a dreaminess to childhood rebellion, the moments when children viscerally understand that the adults don’t know what they are doing. Some of the most memorable moments in European arthouse films of the 20th century capture this phenomenon for the purpose of critiquing authoritarianism and the adult world order in all its arbitrary, unjust, cruel ugliness. The aesthetics of these moments shift the viewer into a fantastical space, making powerful use of the dream, the subconscious, the whimsical, and the irrational to show the flaws in the system, the ruptures in what we take to be true simply because we’re gotten used to perceiving reality in the accepted way. In these films, explanations are provisional, and may at any moment be upended.